Adoption as a success factor for MSPs: why your client uses only 20%

Adoption as a success factor for MSPs is not an extra service you sell alongside. It is the only thing your client ROI actually comes from. And yet at most MSPs it is precisely the item that appears last in the project plan and falls first in the discount discussion. This piece is for the MSP owner who senses that migration revenue is about to turn and wonders where the next margin has to come from.

Over the past few years you have taken a good share of your clients to the modern workplace. Microsoft 365 in the middle, a security layer around it, migration executed cleanly. And honestly: nearly all the time went into the migration itself. Into adoption? A communication email, a manual on SharePoint, maybe a button-clicking session. Done.

The problem only shows itself a year later. That same client pays monthly for a licence of which they use around 20% of the possibilities. Microsoft 365 contains 40-plus tools; a digitally immature company touches 5% of them in practice. The client does not know that, you do through the admin dashboard, and one day they notice on the invoice that they are paying for all sorts of things we do not do anyway. That is the moment the conversation stops being about value and starts being about scaling down. And then the mismatch between what the client expected and what you as an MSP actually delivered is suddenly your problem.

Why adoption belongs before the implementation, not after

The reflex at most MSPs is: roll out the technology first, we will sort out adoption afterwards. That is exactly the order that does not work. If you see adoption as something that follows the implementation, you are already too late. Because the ROI you promise a client does not sit in the licence, it sits in the use. No use, no result, no renewal.

What does work is turning the question around. Start with: how is this organisation going to adopt this? If no satisfying answer comes back, you do not need to buy the product and certainly not implement it. In concrete terms that means the communication plan, the behaviour change and the division of roles with the client are in place before a single tenant is touched. You have one first chance to bring the organisation along. Go live in a rush and the announcement email lands in the bin and that adoption never arrives.

From button training to behaviour change

Adoption has become a catch-all term. Everyone explains it differently, and most MSPs fill it in as we give a short instruction at handover. That is the knowledge layer: people know a button exists. Underneath sits a layer many MSPs skip: behaviour. People learning to do something structurally different from how they did it for five years. That is not a two-hour training, that is a programme.

The three layers your client needs

What works is splitting it into three layers. One: knowledge, what the tool can do. Two: application, how do I apply that in my work. Three: behaviour, how do I keep doing that when it is inconvenient. Most implementations stop after layer one. The margin sits in layers two and three, and that is exactly what the client is willing to pay for, provided you do not try to sell it at the end of the project as an optional extra.

In practice you see that layers two and three ask for different people from layer one. A technician who can roll out Teams is not automatically someone who will sit down with an HR manager to discuss why department heads still email attachments instead of working in channels. That is a different conversation, with different skills, and it happens on the client floor, not in your NOC.

What you as an MSP owner have to set up differently

A few choices that make the difference. Do not put adoption in a separate team flown in after sales. Give your sellers a target on usage, not only on revenue. Tell me the incentive and I will give you the result: as long as you reward sales on the size of the enterprise licence agreement and not on the degree of adoption, shelfware stays on the shelf and the client stays under 20%. That is not a sales problem, that is a KPI problem inside your own company.

Then the honest question: do you want to become the adoption party yourself, or not? Traditionally most MSPs come out of technical management. Functional management, communication plans, behaviour change, that is not natural DNA. That does not mean you should not do it, it means you have to choose. Either you build out an adoption practice with your own people and method, or you partner with a specialised adoption vendor and sell their approach as part of your service. What does not work is doing a bit of it on the side. That falls over in the first busy week.

And then the question the business model runs aground on: should a client pay separately for adoption? Practice shows that clients acknowledge the importance and close their wallet at the same moment. That is the poet in New York who does not sell his collection to the fan who says it changed their life. If you put adoption in as a separate line after the deal is closed, you will not get there. If you put it in the proposition from minute one and communicate the price of the licence including adoption, it is no longer a discussion.

Measuring what your client actually does

The last building block most MSPs miss: a dashboard that shows monthly how usage is developing. Not one report at handover, but an ongoing measurement of which functionality is touched by which department. That is not technically complicated, all the data sits in Microsoft Graph. What is complicated: turning it into a conversation with the client where you say concretely your finance department does not use Planner, there is an hour a week per employee in this. That is the conversation in which adoption stops being a soft term and turns into a number the director steers on. And it is also the conversation in which you as an MSP are no longer a commodity, but the party showing the client where their own investment is getting stuck.

The MSPs that keep margin over the coming years are not the MSPs with the sharpest purchasing at Microsoft. They are the ones who take their clients from 20% to 60% usage and can demonstrate that usage on a dashboard refreshed every month. Technology is no longer the answer to everything, and that realisation is slowly entering the market right now. Whoever chooses now where they want to be strong in adoption, and where they partner, will be in a fundamentally different place in two years from whoever keeps leaning on migration revenue.