MSPs are increasingly using a wide variety of marketing tactics to engage prospects and attempt to speed up what can be a long and challenging sales cycle. One tactic that we’ve used successfully is holding managed services marketing seminars. Seminars are a great way to engage your prospects in a format that help you sell while also positioning you as a valuable educational resource.

Marketing seminars are live events at which you meet with prospects to:

• Educate – Share useful information about something related to one or more of your services/products
• Sell – Pitch your services/products

I think the most important lesson we learned about using seminars is that you have to be aggressive about getting “butts in seats”! Most people are way too passive in their approach to this – often times quitting after one postcard mailing or round of calls.

You have to keep after it! When we are holding a seminar, we’ll send three pieces of direct mail, make three rounds of phone calls, and do several email blasts if we have their address. That’s how you put butts in seats!

Holding live marketing seminar events can be daunting for first-timers and there are lots of pitfalls to avoid, so we put together a guide to help MSPs plan for and hold successful marketing seminars. Click here for this free guide from MSP Coach. This guide consolidates our experiences along with research we’ve done on seminar marketing best practices.

Good luck!

MRC

A lot.

I’ve always liked Will Smith, but now I love him.

Managed service providers are made up of people.  Every person can learn something or at least be inspired by this video:

Mike

Well it has been three months since I first posted about losing a client do Dell managed services and I wanted to provide an update.

I wish I could tell you that the client has already returned to our service while sharing tales of Dells service follies. This unfortunately has not happened, yet, but I do believe there is a good lesson to share in this story and it is: LONG TERM CONTRACTS

Long term contracts may not seem that revolutionary but i would suggest if you have not moved to a two or three year contract on your services you are missing a big opportunity.

If you look around you will notice that most contracts being presented to prospects these days require a commitment of greater than a year allowing you to lock in the relationship and better predict attrition rates.

One of the easiest ways to do this is to provide hardware with your services. Prospects are use to the idea of a 36 month lease on equipment so when you tell them you will provide all your services and include X hardware if they sign a 3 year deal they don’t think twice about signing up. If you are not providing hardware with your services you need to look at both the Zenith BDR solution as well as the guys over at Chartec that allow you to do so with very little investment on your part.

So how does this all relate to the client Dell managed to coax away from our services? Well, the reality is that they are still our client and will be for the next 17 months. We had signed a 36 month agreement with them on part of our service and they they still look to us to provide this service today.

This is great from a few perspectives:

1. they are still our client and we held on to over $12,000 in revenue
2. the margin on providing a piece of service is often greater than being a complete IT team for a client – which it is in this case
3. when the client is looking for something the new provider, Dell, does not provide or for a second opinion on something that has been recommended they still call me for advice – i spoke with the CEO not more than a week ago and guarantee i will be top of mind if and when they decide to change providers again!

So the silver lining to the Dell managed services story is that we did not actually lose the client, we only lost a piece of the revenue, and I look forward to the post telling you the client has come back to us.

Dust off your contracts and find a compelling way to make them 36 months!

Josh

One of my favorite business and marketing gurus is Dan Kennedy.  He suggests that every business – including MSPs – is at risk of having a “Sales Prevention Department” working within the company, doing everything it can to prevent you from actually doing business with more customers.

Does your managed services business have a Sales Prevention Department?  I think we all do in one degree or another, and it would be smart for every MSP to take a look at their sales and service processes to find where you are slipping up.

I have a few examples from other industries recently that might illustrate some opportunities to improve at your business:

1. Call centers that don’t pick up the phone! Everon is in the process of selecting a new call center to help us with a new service we are rolling out, and I have contacted about 15 to get quotes.  At least half don’t even pick up their own phone!  Of the half that do, at least half again didn’t call me back when I asked them to.  Are you kidding me?!  The Sales Prevention Department strikes again!
2. Salespeople that call you “Big guy” in the first 30 seconds of speaking with them. I’m not kidding.  I called a company recently with every intention of buying from them, but was absolutely rejected by the completely clueless salesperson I had to deal with.  He called me “Big guy” in the first 30 seconds of our conversation.  I was so turned off by this and other things that I bought from someone else.
3. Gatekeepers that take too much pride in their work. Again, I was contacting a fellow small business with 100% intention on buying from them, and called the owner to introduce myself.  He is a grad of the Babson MBA program, as am I, and I wanted to make a personal connection.  The gatekeeper took so much pride in her work that she refused to connect me to him.  I guarantee you the owner would fire her if he knew she was pursuing her role with such fervor.
4. Employees that rob from the company till. I’m not referring to outright theft here, but the kind of robbery that I think has a much larger impact on our economy – salespeople that don’t sell because of their own personal fears or biases.  I happen to be a water snob and entered a gift shop at the airport to buy some bottled water.  The clerk saw me looking at the choices and pointed me to the cheapest bottled water because “buying the expensive water is such a ripoff”.  I then grabbed the most expensive bottle and proceeded to buy hit while he looked at me like a fool.  This same scenario is happening in every company in America; salespeople unwilling to sell the most expensive option because of their own personal biases – robbing from the profits of the business.

All of these are examples of the Sales Prevention Department at work.  I’ve recently been made aware of a few examples at Everon and Kutenda, and I’m doing my best to exterminate them!  Take a hard look at your business and you are sure to find some as well.

Let me know if you find some good ones that are worth sharing!

MRC

The best teachers are able to boil down sometimes difficult concepts into simple, easily understood “nuggets” of wisdom for the rest of us to understand.

Dan Kennedy, famous entrepreneur and marketing guru, boiled down the fundamentals of advertising and marketing into just five points that I think every managed service provider could benefit from when marketing their MSP business.

Here they are:

1. Construct a relevant, irresistible offer
2. Require immediate action
3. Present it to the right prospect
4. In a way that the prospect must pay attention
5. Then establish safety for the buyer

According to Dan, if you succeed at doing these five things, you’ll succeed in any market.  If you fail at these five things, you’ll most likely fail in any market.

Now, it’s easy to look at this list and think, “Duh”, and then go about your merry way.  But I’d encourage you to stop and take a hard look at your current marketing to see if you are really doing each of these five things.  In most cases, I believe that you’ll find that you are not.

I’m taking a look at our marketing right now and I see TONS of room for improvement.  Might bet is that you’ll find the same.

MRC