Imagine that you’ve gone through the entire sales cycle with a managed services prospect and have been given the nod of approval. You are in a celebratory mood as you feel all your marketing efforts are about to pay off.
Then there is a surprise call from the prospect and you are told that a ‘dark horse’ IT bid has come in at the last minute with the exact same services but at a lower price point.
We all know that 9 times out of 10 the other bid is either made up out of whole cloth or it’s not truly apples-to-apples. The question is how can you cautiously navigate between explaining the facts without calling your prospect a Liar?! (more…)
The normal logic to spending money on advertising and planning on getting a good ROI may not apply to IT marketing. With most products or services you pay for an advertising campaign and hope to make enough sales to pay back the money for your add and have some profit left over. Of course, we are talking about sales that are just one time transaction that don’t reoccur every month like a typical managed services agreement would. Therefore they have to go out and advertise all over again every month and hope to make enough sales to cover their marketing cost and make a profit again. I find that many computer business owners think about IT services marketing in much the same way as a typical company. Is this the correct way to look at ROI? 
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? 
Many computer business owners and technical sales people are looking for IT sales that just fall into their laps. In other words they want leads with businesses that have immediate needs and are willing to talk about their pain. However, when they try to increase their leads with a telemarketing campaign they find that most of the contacts they meet with are people that are willing to listen to their marketing presentation; but don’t have an immediate need. Many times the sales people just drop the ball on these technology sales leads and they just fall through the cracks! What might these guys be missing in their IT services marketing techniques that could help get more out of their campaigns?
One of the first mantras I every heard when I got into IT telemarketing was, “Marketing is a numbers game”. This is the simple idea that if you dial enough people that you will find someone that is willing to buy or agree to set an appointment. This concept is often applied to the number of agents making out-bond calls, meaning the more people calling the greater you’re overall success will be. Of course there is great wisdom in those words but does success depend solely on the numbers game principal? In other words, if a computer business owner just has a large number of agents pounding the phone and contacting a large number people each day then would their success be guaranteed?
Most computer consultants don’t want to get appointments with CIO’s or with companies that have IT In-house. They don’t want to sell server management to backup up internal technology staff because they believe these type of opportunities are low margin and won’t generate enough revenue to pay back their investment in IT services marketing. We believe this view is short sighted because while it might be true on the surface, it ignores the long term opportunities. These long term opportunities are what I am referring to here as the ticking time bomb. A recent case study showing the ROI from an IT Lead Generation campaign might help demonstrate this point. Let’s take a look at this and see if it might shed some light on the subject.
How do you know what would be enough IT marketing to finally get enough computer business customers to reach your financial goals. How many types of marketing avenues should you be involved with and how long should you continue those campaigns to get success? In essence we are asking what would you have to do to finally reach critical mass with your business. This is the point where you suddenly find that everything is working where you’re getting a return on all the effort you have put into your company. This would be the point in the illustration where running a business is like pushing a car until you can get the car going fast enough so you can jump in and allow the car to drive you.
That might sound like a strange question, but I came up with it when I was on my soap box preaching to some computer business prospects that they will need a better IT services model to make sure they can close sales, when they conduct their marketing campaign. This is because the average prospect we are able to set appointments with are willing to keep their options open; but are currently satisfied with their tech support. Without a better offer it will be difficult to get them to consider switching. The question that prompted this blog was, “How will we know when we get the lead, if we have a better offer than what the prospect has in-place?” My answer was that you need to be the Apex Predator in your local market, so you never have to ask that question! How can you make sure you’re the Apex predator? 
In 2010 Sling Stone IT, a computer business in San Diego, sought to expand their IT marketing to increase sales for their IT Assist and managed services offerings. Early in that year Sling Stone IT tapped MSP Telemarketing to conduct an outbound B2B calling campaign. Their initial investment for telemarketing was around $5,000.00 and they contracted to get 10 qualified appointments with C-Level decision makers in their local market. We have documented the success of this campaign by showing how long it took to get all the leads they ordered, how many sold contracts they closed and the sales figures. Take a look and notice that their return on investment was over $82,000.00 year-to-date and since this in recurring revenue it’s still going and going and going! 
I know we live in an instant society where we expect everything we desire to come immediately. However, there are some things that we can’t rush and we still have to patiently wait on. Unfortunately one of the things we still have to wait for is a managed services sale to close. There is an average sale cycle ‘delay’ that last, from the beginning of the IT marketing process to the close of an IT sales lead, for about 3 to 4 months. This Lag time requires that the computer business correctly forecast their marketing investment to avoid huge gaps in the sales pipeline. If you want a sale now then you should have started months ago and if you know you will need sales in the next few months then there should be urgency to start your IT services marketing NOW! 
