There are all kinds of ideas on how to cold call. Some of it comes down to personal preference and what feels comfortable to you, but it should primarily be based on performance and results; after all, most people find any cold calling uncomfortable – you can’t let that stop you!

The following script works. I first heard it from my friend Andrew Morgan, but I had always practiced something similar to, if a little less refined than, this myself. I’ve broken it down below to illustrate the specific steps of the call. These steps are critical; the specific language you use at each step is less so. It goes like this:

1. Get their attention

Use an opening line that will get them to pay attention to you. Just using their name is enough:

“Jim – Mike Cooch with Everon here.”

2. Lower their defenses

Humor is often a great way to get them to lower their defenses and be more receptive to your conversation.

“This is a sales call; I’m sure you’re excited.”

Or you may have something local going on that you could reference:

“I’m glad I caught you at your desk; most people are at home mourning that Patriots’ loss last night!”

Just find something that fits your personal style and gets them relaxed a bit.

3. Set an up-front contract

An up- front contract is a way of laying down some ground rules/commitments that make your prospect more comfortable and will give you a better chance of success.

At this stage of the prospecting call, an example would be: “Look, I know I’ve caught you off guard and I know you are busy. If I promise not to take more than 3 minutes of your time, could I ask you a few quick questions to see if it makes sense for us to continue speaking with each other?”

4. Ask questions that demonstrate your knowledge of their world and challenges

An example at this stage in a prospecting call is to say something along the lines of:

“Typically when speaking with other (Their title)’s in your industry, I find that they face the following challenges:

Challenge 1

Challenge 2

Challenge 3

Do any of these challenges resonate with you?”

This type of question is an opportunity for you to establish credibility and demonstrate your knowledge, while giving the prospect the opportunity to “raise their hand” by acknowledging a challenge.

5. Respect the up-front contract you made!

When you’ve used up your initial time say “Mr. Prospect, I’ve used up my three minutes, but it seems like we have something to talk about. Do you have a little more time to continue now?”

This shows that you do respect their time and keep your word.

6. Lower their guard even more and demonstrate proof of your capabilities at the same time

At some point, the prospect will most likely ask something along the lines of “How are you suggesting that you’ll help me solve my problems?”, to which you should reply with something along the lines of:

“Well, Mr. Prospect, I’m not sure that I can. But here is what we did for a similar company in your situation.”

By doing so, you keep yourself from going into a pitch about how you can make their world perfect without even knowing the details of their problems – a common salesperson affliction!

7. Set another up front contract

“Mr. Prospect, I think the best way for us to proceed is to meet and spend some time discussing your specific business needs. If I promise to keep it to 45 minutes, can I come to your office next week to meet with you?”

8. Set the appointment, if that is your objective.

Again, it’s the process behind this cold call that is most important, not the specific language you use. The entire call structure is designed to get a conversation and establish credibility with the prospect.

There are many other cold call script structures, and many of them will work for you. Experiment with several and use what works best for you. Just stay away from anything that is overly gimmicky, and keep in mind that the cold call is just the first step in an often long managed services sales cycle, so do everything you can to leave a good impression and establish yourself as a trusted resource.

Good luck!

MRC

We built our managed services business for three years doing essentially nothing but cold calling. We had no money, we had no marketing people, and we didn’t have any of the ideas I’m about to share with you – all we had was time and a desire to get off the ground. So we picked up the phone and started dialing.

It’s not sexy.

It’s not easy.

But it works.

To this day, our salespeople make 50+ sales calls each and every day. I think this will always be the case.

You’ve got to learn to love the phone!

Have realistic cold calling expectations.

The reason most people dislike cold calling is because they have the wrong expectations. If you think that every call you make is going to result in someone being glad to hear from you, then you will of course be sadly disappointed.

However, if you understand that for every 50 calls or so you are likely to get one good appointment that may lead to business, then you will be able to find success.

50 calls for every appointment may not sound like a great ratio to you, but considering you can make 50 calls in one day, it’s not that bad. The way to improve that ratio is to “warm up” the calls you make, and every one of the additional techniques we cover will help you do so.

In my next several posts, I’ll share our lessons about how to make cold calling work for you.

MRC

Sell the prospect on the opportunity, the company, and your culture.

Sell the prospects? Aren’t they looking for a job from me?  I am the managed service provider after all.

Two good questions and a huge reason companies often fail to attract top talent. The interview is just as much about you selling your company, culture, and team as it is about vetting candidates.

I am not talking about a long sales pitch.  What I am suggesting is that you have a process by which to introduce the opportunity you are hiring for.

You should be able to go through the following with prospects:

• Company history
• Why it is an exciting rewarding place to work
• What the prospect will be part of in the bigger picture
• What your company’s values are
• What your hiring criteria is

Doing this serves two purposes. One it gets the prospects excited to win the chance to work for a company that can articulate things at this level. Two it gives them insight into what you are looking for and you will quickly be able to tell who doesn’t get it as the process continues.

We use a group interview process to make this pitch to candidates and I highly recommend it.

I am able to put 8 prospects in a room and within two hours send half to two thirds home. Getting the process down takes some getting used to but once you have a process for the group interview it is an invaluable time saver. Think about how many times you have had a candidate get through a phone screen and within 10 minutes of meeting them in person you know they will never work at your company? The problem is that you feel obligated to go through the motions of interviewing them and even if you speed through everything it is still a waste of an hour of your time. Get comfortable with group interviews and use them to your advantage.

The group interview process has many other benefits as well:

• See how candidates interact in a team setting – your team works as a team after all
• See how candidates work to get their thought heard by the group
• Give group activates for them to work on – who leads, who doesn’t contribute
• Ask the group who the best candidate in the room is based on their understanding of the job – you will be surprised how much wisdom there can be in group mentality.

D0 a deeper dive into the candidates’ fit.

Once you have sent the unlikely prospects home it is time to conduct an abbreviated individual interview to really assess the candidate’s potential.

In this process you should have a shared language by which to rate people with the members of your team. An example of this is as follows:

Rate each candidate A, B, or C in each of the following categories:

• Cultural Fit
• People Skills
• Critical Thinking
• Tech Skills

In order for this to work your team has to have a shared understanding of each of these categories (they should look familiar at this point) and what they mean to the company.

By doing this you can assure that each member of the team is evaluating the candidates on the criteria that will make them successful in their roll.

Get started.

If you start to use this process in your hiring you will bring a new level of clarity to what you are looking for and it will cut time and money out of the process of hiring.

This is going to take some getting used to and you will have to create and document some new hiring processes but they will be worth their weight in gold once you start to use them.

Josh

Hiring is a process.

I think the most important thing to understand is that it is a process, not an event. You need to know that hiring takes time and plan ahead. If you wait until there is a burning need to hire before you start the process you will surely fall back into the old ways of just taking the best of what you can find.  Engineers are usually looking to get a job right away so it can be hard to keep a pipeline full of candidates.

On the flip side of this is when you lose an engineer because you are not quite ready and they get another offer, they will often come back to you when the time is right if you sell the opportunity well.

The most important part of the managed services hiring process to realize is that if you will need an engineer to start working for you the first of a particular month, you must start this process with enough lead time for success.

Cast a net for candidates

There is an unlimited number of places to post your employment ads. The key to success is testing a few of them out and measuring your success. We have some of our greatest success in these areas:

• Craig’s list – sounds too easy but we have great success here
• Internal referrals – A players like to work with other A players, they tend to stick together
• Career Changers – colleges, certification programs, people looking to get their foot in the door and bring a wealth of other experience to the table (possibly service related)
• Competition – there are a lot of big companies putting reps through extensive service and technology training that you can take advantage by luring them away

Go through what you have caught and determine what to keep.
If you have cast your net properly you will have a lot of resumes to go through, even if you have written your job post to try and weed out the people that do not fit.

You should have someone (HR if you have them) review each resume for characteristics you are looking for. Have the list of what you are looking for in a candidate and check off as many of them that can be identified from the resume and cover letter.

Do not screen resumes for tech skills only and I would even argue on the first screen you should not rule out anyone due to a lack of tech skills as long as they have some tech background or training.

Once the resume screens are done a phone screen should be completed.

The HR person can do this phone screen for you again as long as you have clearly outlined what to look for:

• Phone Personality – we work on the phones in this business so you cannot be a dud
• People Skills – were they able to keep the conversation going, did they have good questions, were they articulate
• Salary Range – why do you want to talk to someone that wants twice what you can afford to pay for the position? I worked with a hiring manager that would talk to everyone and tried to create positions for good people that didn’t fit the particular role he was hiring for. Sure he hired some great people but his budget was way out of whack and the roles that needed to be filled suffered.

Once you have these screens completed you are ready to move on to the next phase.

In my next post, I’ll talk about the interview process and how to “sell” your company to strong candidates.

Josh

5.  They love to learn

In the managed services business, it is impossible for anyone to know everything about everything, even though there are people you will run into that think they know everything. Great service reps do not need to know everything about technology or about how to provide great customer service.

Great service people are able to instill confidence in people that their problems are in good hands and will be resolved even if they have no clue how to fix the problem at that very moment. Even my most senior techs see problems each week that they have never dealt with before.

Using their critical thinking ability and their people skills they are able to provide a great experience to the customer while learning what it takes to address the situation.

I am not saying that they can spend all day tinkering with technology or reading articles to formulate a plan. They are adept at using the team and the resources available to them in order to learn in the most efficient way possible how to resolve the issue.

They must also be able to lean the technology need to do their job while being great service people.

Great service engineers love to learn!

6. They are enjoyable for you and your team to work with

I am not suggesting you ever hire someone because you like them. In fact, if you hire someone based on the fact that you like them they will almost always disappoint you because you have not factored in the other critical components of making the decision.

I am saying that after you know someone has all the characteristics and values you are looking for you should stop and think about how they will mesh with the team. In fact when hiring service engineers weather you like them or not is less important to how the team will enjoy working with them.

One of the biggest determinants of an employee’s longevity at your company is the perception that they have friends amongst their coworkers. If they are not enjoyable for you and your team to work with, they don’t belong on the team no matter how good they are at what they do.

Make sure you find people with all six of these characteristics

Hiring can be time consuming and it is often tempting to settle for the best of what we have seen. Just get someone into the role because we are buried is the mentality I often seen take over when decisions are being made.

You do not have to pick the candidate who is the lesser of the evils. You can run your process again and again until you find the right fit. Even though it will take more time and possible feel like more pain it will save you aggravation and money in the long run.

Josh

3. They love to help people

A critical characteristic of a great service person is that they love to help people.

Nothing makes a true service person feel more rewarded than going above and beyond to help someone. Not because their job requirements demand it or because their boss told them to do so but because they are intrinsically motivated to help. If a person does not intuitively, almost as if they cannot help it, have the desire to help others then they are not the type of service person you are looking for.

These are the candidates that show up early for an interview, offer to help you clean up after the interview is over, ask if you need them to do anything for you, and never forget to send a thank you note to wrap things up.

Great service people are always looking for ways to help people even if it is not on a conscious level.

Because of this you can look for the signs of even setup situations where they have a chance to offer their assistance to you during the interview process to see how they react.

4. They love to solve problems (critical thinking)

Let’s face it, the majority of what we spend our day doing in this industry is dealing with and solving people’s problems for them.
* A computer problem
* A business problem that technology can address
* Network problems

And any people problems your clients may present during interactions with your team.

Great service people pride themselves critical thinking ability and being creative in the way they solve problems. They are not just looking to solve tech problems either even though they do love doing so they are just as challenged by the people problems presented to them each day.

People problems can be anything ranging from an irrationally angry, stressed out, over worked, nervous, scared, or flustered end user to a business owner who’s financial well being is on the line as their largest customer requests and audit of their information security with the threat of ending the account if not up to par.

In these situations it is easy for a tech to focus in on the technical problem without addressing the people aspect of the issue. I would argue that an engineer that takes a call, fixes a technology issue, and leaves the client with a bad people experience (doesn’t address the anger, anxiety, or root people issue) will cost your MSP business both money and time as you scramble to replace them.

The opposite side of this argument is that a great customer service engineer could take the same call, address the people problem they are hearing, take twice as long to resolve the technical issue but provide such great service that you will have a customer for life!

Now, don’t get me wrong. You can find engineers that have great people skills but it is rare and often those people have such a high perceived value in the marketplace that it is tough to bring them on-board.

It is easier to teach technology skills than to teach people skills, knowing this will save you countless hours in getting your service right.

In my next post, I’ll talk about two more important things to look for when hiring managed services techs. Being able to spot these characteristics early can help you secure the right people for your service team.

Josh

1. They are a cultural fit for your organization

What do we mean by cultural fit?

It means that the people you hire have values that are in alignment with those of your company.

This is the single most important piece of advice I can give you when it comes to hiring at your MSP. If someone looks like a great performer, has all the experience you are looking for, seems like they will bring a ton of value to the table, but they are not in alignment with what you and your organizations value, they will not work out in the long run.

In order to do this you have to stop and define what values your company holds most dear. This should be a list of three to four values max and should be easy to remember even if they have a longer definition to give them some bite. If you have not done this it is almost impossible to hire people that embody these values.

2. They posses people skills first and technology skills second

They are service people with a love of technology

Every person that joins your service team should be a service person that just happens to have a love of technology. If you hire technology people and expect them to learn to deliver great service you are in for an uphill battle.

You need to accept that service people are different from techs.

I can’t tell you how many times I have spoken with the owner or the hiring manager of an organization that tells me they have hired an engineer with the perfect skill set for X. X is any technical trait you can think of. Invariably these hires end up being great with technology but struggle to be part of a team that’s success is based on customer service.

You need to be the first to acknowledge and accept that these skills are different so that this difference becomes a clear distinction for your hiring managers.

I’ll cover more important characteristics to look for in my next posts.

Josh

This is true for cash management as well. The expectations that you set with your client in terms of when and how they must pay need to be established during the sales process or you’ll get off to a bad start with the client.

The following are three critical practices to put in place so that your sales process yields the cash management results you desire:

1.  Collect your cash in advance

This is probably the most critical practice to put in place at a managed service provider – collect payment before you do work.

I know many people reading this will object, thinking there isn’t any way they’ll get their clients to pay them in advance. I’m telling you that it can be done, and you must convince yourself of this first.

We invoice for our monthly services in advance of the month for which we are providing services, and we expect the first month’s payment from our clients before we’ll begin any work on their behalf.

When you stand firm to this requirement at the beginning of your relationship with a client, it demonstrates to them that you take timely payment seriously. Good clients won’t have any problem with this; in fact, they’ll respect it. Bad clients will refuse or put up a nasty fight. Walk away. If they give you a hard time now, you’ll spend the rest of your relationship trying to collect late payments from them.

2.  Automate payment on credit card or ACH

The easiest way to avoid any collections issues is to set up automatic payment from your clients.

Your contracts should have automatic payment of the managed services portion of your service as the only payment option for client. If you have it in your contract, about half of your clients will go ahead and pay this way, no questions asked. The other half will ask questions or squawk a bit, of which you’ll convert about another 15-25% after a reasonable conversation. The remaining will never pay by automatic payment either due to administrative challenges within their company or because they are just strongly opposed to doing so. You can show flexibility to that group, as long as they understand and commit to still paying in a timely manner.

In most cases you shouldn’t apply the automatic payment process to project work or break-fix work you do for your clients. This type of work is more variable in nature, and you should invoice your clients to give them the opportunity to review the invoice before payment; doing so avoids disputes.

3.  Structure commission payments to enforce proper client payment

When expecting a specific result from your sales team, you should at all times remember the saying:

“Salespeople do what you pay them to do, not what you tell them to do.”

Keeping in line with that lesson, we must structure our sales compensation system to ensure that we are getting our salespeople to sign up the right clients and establish the right payment expectations. There are two keys levers you can pull:

1. Don’t pay commissions until payment is collected – this will make your salespeople really pay attention to the types of clients they sign

2. Pay bonuses for clients that are signed up on ACH or credit card – your salespeople will suddenly start converting a lot more clients to credit card and ACH

If you follow the recommendations above, you’ll find that you will have a much healthier relationship with your clients because you’ll only sign good clients. The poor-payers will get filtered out over time as a result of your sales process.

You’ll also see your collections report shrinks dramatically, giving you cash to grow your managed services business, and stability to survive.

MRC

To make your people successful, you need to have a team structure in place that clearly delineates each person’s role and how they work together. However, it can get tricky to pick which roles to add to your team and how to delineate responsibilities.

To help, we’ve put together a guide with perspective on who to hire when and how to divide responsibilities in a way that makes your team a cohesive whole.  Click here for this free MSP Coach guide on MSP team structures.

Every MSP is unique and every employee has a unique set of skills and capabilities. Therefore, there is no perfect team structure that every MSP should adopt. Just use our advice in the way that best fits your needs.

MRC

“The customer is always right.”

Why is this one of the most damaging statements ever? Because too many people take that statement and expand it in their minds until they think that they have to do anything and everything for every customer.

Not all customers are created equal!

We’ve all had customers that want everything in the world, but don’t want to pay for it. We’ve also all had customers that won’t actually listen to our advice, then get upset when they haven’t had their problems solved.

These customers are called Killer Customers, and you need to learn to identify them and deal with them appropriately, or they will suck the life out of your business.

This idea – that I could run my business without bowing down to every demand of every customer – was a revelation to me. I first grasped the concept when I read the book Killer Customers: Tell the Good from the Bad–and Dominate Your Competitors . It’s a great book; you should add it to your business library.

The point of the book is that you should get really good at telling the good customers from the killer customers, and then ditch the killer customers so your competition can have them and get bled to death (that may not be how the author would summarize it!).

How to segment

In my experience, the keys to customer segmentation are the following:

1. Know your target customer very well
2. Train your salesforce to find target customers and provide incentive to make sure they don’t sign killer customers

You will not turn a bad prospect into a good customer!!! It doesn’t matter how big the deal is or what the prospect tells you about how the relationship will be after you have signed a deal- it won’t turn into a good customer. You must make sure that you don’t bother bringing the wrong customer into your portfolio of business. The sale won’t stick and neither will the commission – it’s a waste of time for everyone involved.

1. Have a process for continuously reviewing your customers to weed out the killer customers that you accidentally let on board
2. Have enough service offerings to match the various needs of your clients’ desired service levels

Doing any one of these things will help you out a lot, but doing all four will result in increased profits, happy customers, and happy employees – a combination that’s hard to beat.

MRC