If your clients are happy, this KPI will be high

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Welcome to Episode 270 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• If your clients are happy, this KPI will be high: Net Revenue Retention (NRR) is a quality score where you measure how well you have done at retaining revenue over the last 12 months and assessing whether it has grown.
• 3 bootstrap marketing ideas for MSPs: Marketing doesn’t have to cost a load of cash. If you have a member of staff with a spare few hours each week, you can invest their time into these low cost or no cost marketing tasks for your MSP.
• Your MSP’s growth priorities for 2025: My special guest, a turnaround expert, tells us how to plan the year ahead with clarity, focus, and fresh momentum. You’ll discover how to organise your priorities, craft a winning growth strategy, and create a story for 2025 that’s really worth celebrating.
• Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Ryan, from an MSP in San Diego, wants to know why it’s so important to fix his website as a matter of priority.

If your clients are happy, this KPI will be high

Your MSP’s bank balance might look great and you might be impressed with your other KPIs. But there’s a hidden one that I bet you $5 you never look at. Yet it could flip things completely. Most MSPs have never heard of this key performance indicator, and yet it’s the ultimate quality check for any recurring revenue business.

In just a few minutes, you’ll find out what this secret KPI is, how to calculate it in under 10 minutes and exactly what score proves that you are running a truly outstanding MSP.

One of the things I love about working in the channel is that every day is a school day and you never ever feel like you have finally learned everything. This, in 2025, is my ninth year working with MSPs and honestly, I feel like I learn so much every single day. And as someone who has a passion, and a need in fact, for constant learning, I do find this exciting and not at all tiring.

In fact, just a few months back I was chatting to an MSP and we were talking about how much progress their business has made over the last couple of years. It’s been actually astonishing. And then he said to me how delighted he was with the performance of his NRR, and that’s N, as in N for November, not MRR, which is M for mother. And of course we know what MRR is. It’s monthly recurring revenue.

What is NRR? It stands for Net Revenue Retention – essentially, which clients that we had last year are still here this year.

It’s a quality score. It’s something that is used a lot by SaaS businesses (subscription as a service businesses) and all subscription businesses typically use it, just not normally MSPs.

But if you are looking for more ways to measure how good a job you’re doing, this could be it. So let me tell you how you’d measure this and what good performance looks like. This will be a great time of year to measure it because you could kind of look back to the end of 2023 or the beginning of 2024 and look at the clients you had then and ask how many of those clients do we still have today? What was the value of their monthly recurring revenue a year ago? And has that grown today? That MSP that I was speaking to has an NRRR of 105%, which means that he’s kept all of his clients over the year, which is not unusual for an MSP, but it’s still nice to measure and know for a fact, and it means that he’s also grown their monthly recurring revenue – got the same clients, they’re spending more.

And I would s