I remember when I was very young and my father was planning on sending mail-outs to advertise his HVAC Business.  I had gone along with him to the office of the Advertising Agent when he was considering what to put on his mail-outs.  He had decided to just list that he offered HVAC Services in certain areas and to list his contact information.  I spoke up and told him that if he was going to advertise that he needed something special to lure people to call.  I mentioned offering a discount “coupon” on the mail-out so people would save it for when they needed some repairs.  He ended up not taking my advice [big surprise] and getting 0% ROI from his mail-out campaign.  Later, he tried it again but this time he made sure to offer some special discount.  This time he drove 10 calls to his office and got 3 services request and landed one long term customer.  How can this principal impact IT marketing when you’re trying to get new customers? (more…)

The pregnant woman in the Success picture has no doubts that her baby is going to come and therefore she is planning for that eventuality.  Now you might be thinking that there is clear evidence that the baby is coming [ i.e. the swollen belly] and therefore it doesn’t take much faith to go out and plan accordingly by buying all the necessary things.  However, we are saying that computer business owners should have that same faith as if there were clear evidence of their coming success and plan IT marketing accordingly.  After all isn’t it a common cliche that says we either plan for success or plan for failure?  

Now to be clear we are not talking about making common sense plans to attain new technology clients, but rather making plans for what you will do when you have those new customers.  How could planing for success possibly make a difference in whether you actually succeed in generating new managed services contracts?  What type of planning are we actually advocating that you adopt in your sales repertoire.

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Blinders have a purpose in horse racing,  you don’t want the horse to get distracted by it’s surroundings and lose sight of the finish line.  In business sometimes having a degree of tunnel vision or a very narrow focus can be beneficial.  However, wearing blinders can be enormously detrimental if you’re a computer business owner that is conducting an IT lead generation campaign.  Having a narrow focus in this situation could cause you to miss several major factors happening around you that might play a serious roll in the outcome of your campaign.  One of the biggest factors that you should be always kept abreast of on the periphery, would be watching the competition.  What they are doing with their IT model and marketing can affect you. (more…)

If you’re a computer business owner then most likely your ideal prospect is someone that already has a specific need in their business.  This could be someone that has become feed up with the response time of their current computer consultant or perhaps is no longer happy with the skill sets of their in-house IT employee.    These type of leads are perfect targets for marketing to because it’s fairly easy to isolate the issue that you can focus your presentation on and then easily close by asking that if you can solve this issue then will they become one of your customers.  At this point for many readers the harmonious music is playing in the background as I am hitting all the perfect notes that you agree with.  However, here is where that music comes to a screeching halt, because while these are the prefect prospects the reality is that they are almost as rare as the dodo birds!  This type of IT services marketing is more like a vulture hanging around on a tree waiting for a prospect’s computer support to die!

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We have all heard the expression that “The Cobbler’s Children’s Have No Shoes” but what exactly does it mean?  It means that while the Cobbler can take of the entire village’s shoe repairs, he is not able to make sure his own kids have shoes.  This expression is often used in today’s society for many professions, but I never thought that it would ever apply to our technology telemarketing services.  Recently I have been focusing most of my attention on SEO and social networking to the exclusion of telemarketing my own services to managed services providers.  However, our close ratio on the social networking leads had been lower than I had expected and I was in a quandary as to where to focus our own marketing efforts on next.  That is when this expression suddenly flashed in my mind and I had an Aha moment.  I decided to start a cold calling campaign to computer consultants since, after all, that is our core competency! (more…)

I had flown out to San Diego to make a few Sales Presentations to prospective computer business owners who had contacted us and expressed some interest in our marketing services.  We called these companies in advance to set up appointments for me to go by and present how we could provide IT lead generation for them and help increase sales.  When I arrived into town I gave each of these computer services companies a confirm call and then started to map out my driving directions.  When I was grabbing breakfast, I got a call back from the first prospect who notified me he was sick and couldn’t meet, strike one.  Then my next contact called me and said he had been called out to a service visit and wasn’t going to be able to make our meeting either, strike two.   Finally, I drove out to take an advance look at the office on the last remaining lead, when I finally found the address it turned out to be an abandoned building, strike three.  This is when I felt exactly  like the guy in the picture to the right…  Life had handed me total failure on this marketing trip.

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An object in motion tends stay in motion unless acted upon by an object of equal or greater force.  I am not a scientist but I have noticed that it takes a lot of energy to get an object up in orbit, like the picture of the space shuttle taking off  to the right.  In addition, once an object gets into orbit it tends to stay there unless something powerful knocks it out of orbit.  I have often commented on how end users current computer support is in ‘orbit’.  If you’re a computer business owner looking at marketing a managed services offer against an entrenched competitor then it’s going to be an uphill battle.  You’re going to need a lot of fuel to blast your technology offer into orbit and knock off your computer services competitors.  If you’re prepared, then you will be able to build enough  momentum on your IT sales leads to break into orbit, but the question is how can you fuel that journey?

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You hear a lot about the magical ‘warm up’ that computer business owners are supposed to begin with in their managed services presentation… where you’re suggested to start at a certain point and then finish with and move on to another portion of the presentation.  While you can’t continue to talk about personal issues with a prospect during the entire meeting, can you really stop getting personal with your prospect at a certain point?  Can you stop listening to your prospect and looking for common ground or looking for things that you can compliment them on at any point in your marketing efforts with suspects?  Conventional wisdom says that you can turn on your charm and charisma and then turn it off again.  However, I am a  iconoclast and question that logic.  I have been going on sales calls with my clients and doing some limited sales training and also learning how computer consultants are currently handling their sales pitches.  Therefore, I have some new information that might change your view point on this issue.

You Can’t Turn Your Charm On and Off

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“Here is the Yellow Pages, Get Started!”  That was the complete training program I received at one company that I worked at many years ago.  Many companies don’t put any importance on training for their employees but spend plenty on IT.  Another company that I was employed at trained their telemarketers by having new hires just sit and listen to all the current telesales reps make cold calls.  Of course, there are some great businesses out there that put a high importance on training programs for their workers.  One good example of this was MBNA America, where I was employed, where they put their telemarketers through and 2 week paid training program.  I was a product of that training program and contribute much of my success to their training.  I am trying to keep the torch burning by putting in place the best training program for telemarketing at our firm.  We take training very seriously and we don’t just train our marketing reps, we brainwash them! (more…)

Every computer business owner dreams of striking a gushing sales and marketing pipeline that pumps out reoccurring IT Sales like clockwork!  In fact that is the reason most tech pros have adopted the managed services model,  so that they could build a nice revenue stream that could be counted on in the future.  Unfortunately, most technology providers are coming up empty handed from their marketing efforts or at least they’re not getting anywhere close to their dreams of becoming millionaires.  The burning question is how can you develop the perfect sales machine that churns out consistent sales every month?  We will consider in this article specifically how a computer consultant could conservatively generate $945,000.00 in reoccurring revenue over a five year period.

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