MSPs are always looking for the key to success, the elements that will set them apart from their competitors.

While it doesn’t give away all the answers, Kaseya's annual Managed Service Provider Global Pricing Survey might be able to provide some help. With insight from nearly 700 MSPs across the globe, the survey reveals three key habits of high-growth MSPs that helped set them apart from the rest of the market.

1. Higher Priced Services

The first clear trend among high-growth MSPs is a simple one: they're more expensive, says Ray Wright, Kaseya product marketing manager who helped facilitate the survey.

For the most frequently offered managed services offerings, MSPs with more than 10 percent growth tended to charge higher monthly fees. For example, MSPs with more than 10 percent growth were 5 percentage points more likely to charge more than $101 per user per month than the average.

2. New Pricing Model

Unfortunately, high growth isn't quite as easy as raising prices, Wright said. In the older pricing model, VARs could simply add a percentage of margin on top of their services as a fixed fee or price per desktop. However, Wright said the survey showed that higher growth MSPs have discarded that practice. Instead, MSPs are able to raise their prices by pricing based on value.

The best way for MSPs to determine that value, Wright said, is by putting themselves in the customer's shoes. Is the client looking for assurance that a broken product will be fixed, or a certain type of outcome, or a certain service level? Answering those questions are how they are able to charge a higher price based on value, Wright said.

"Whatever it is, whatever the value is to the customer, they figure out how they contribute to that value and demonstrate how they make a difference on that value," Wright said. 

According to the survey, more MSPs are beginning to adopt value-based pricing. In 2014, 59 percent of MSPs said they used value-based pricing, up from 26 percent the year before.

3. Bundled Services

In order to help deliver that value, Wright said higher growth MSPs tended to offer more services in a bundled fashion. The bundles tended to be based on the size and type of customer, he said, and can include a combination of patch management, monitoring, security and more. Those MSPs who bundled their portfolios tended to offer higher value services and grow faster, he said. In order to successfully bundle services, Wright said successful MSPs usually had to standardize their services.

In addition to bundling, Kaseya CMO Loren Jarett said the survey found higher growth MSPs offered more advanced services in much higher levels. Those advanced services could include guaranteed service levels, mobility services, BYOD, cloud management and more, she said.

"That's a very interesting component of offerings of higher growth MSPs," Jarett said. "Thinking about doing that probably gives an ability to raise prices."