It was once a wartime strategy to stealthily poison your enemies water supply at it’s source and thereby defeat your adversaries without having to fire a shot.  Later this term was used for another type of battle that was fought with words instead of weapons and that was debating.  You could proverbial poison the well of ideas of your opponent by making false claims or ad hominem attacks about them and turning everybody away from their beliefs.  This is exactly what has happened to the concept of using outsourced telemarketing to help grow a computer business.  Some IT companies have tried telemarketing and failed so they are spreading vitriolic poison around the industry.  The real issue to consider is if the isolated experiences of these people should cause every other technology firm to rule out using telemarketing for IT marketing.  Another question that’s worth considering is what might be the root cause of  those failures that have caused so much consternation?

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There is a Fork in there road for many computer consultants that are in the process of marketing their business.  There are really two basic ways of packaging your services and offering them to the public, but they are both extremely different from one another.  The first concept is to have more of a boutique computer company that only plans on having a very few select customers and therefore charges the highest price possible.  The other style is to try to reach the mass market by signing up as many clients as humanly possible.  The problem arises when a technology firm is trying to reach the mass market but doing so with the highest price possible.  The two methods can’t be more incompatible and therefore not realizing the difference can destroy your chances of successful IT marketing. (more…)

Crashing airplanes in the process of learning to fly would be a very dangerous and costly proposition.  In fact, real planes are so expensive  that most people would never even attempt to fly one without quite a bit of class room training along with spending plenty of time in the air with an experienced pilot.  Not only does this just make particle sense it is also a legal requirement before a pilot can get a license to fly.  Unfortunately, there isn’t a similar requirement for managed services providers to get certified by a marketing expert before risking precious capital and time trying to learn IT services marketing on their own.

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Have you ever gone shopping for something you really wanted only to find all the shelves empty.  Then you go from one store to the next and at each store you find all the shelves empty.  This can be very frustrating and end up wasting a lot of time, however many computer business owners go in pursuit of an IT marketing compensation plan commonly called having ’skin in the game’ that doesn’t really exist.  This concept would be very attractive for the consultants because it means they only pay if and when a marketing techniques produces results.  I have tried to pitch this idea to a few advertisers like the local radio station and newspaper but for some strange reason when I suggested that I only pay when a sale closes they looked at me like I was crazy!  Why can’t this model be found in the market place but more importantly why keep searching for it? (more…)

One look at the picture to the right should make you cringe as slash and burn or clear cutting a forest is wasteful and destructive  to the environment.  Slash and burn sales techniques also make me cringe as they are wasteful to capital and labor…  What are slash and burn sales techniques?  This is where sales leads that come in to a computer business from different marketing avenues are run through a process where they are checked to see if they have an immediate need or immediate budget.  No matter what the prospects situation happens to be, if they don’t meet the strigent requirements of the managed services firm, then they are cast aside.  Many times the prospect is never even called back and informed they were not a fit for the slash and burn computer business.

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It is legend that IBM used to literally take every one in their computer consulting firm to marketing meetings.  Of course in the beginning this IT firm was not that large; but they wanted to put on an impression of being a much larger technology firm.

So how many people should you take on your sales calls to managed services prospects? (more…)

The 300 pound Elephant in the room on every marketing call you make to pitch managed services is, the learning curve.

Every company that you meet with already has something in place to handle their technology.  Whether they have another computer consultant in place or not.

As we have stated, every company usually has a very high threshold for pain when it comes to dealing with problems that arises from their vendors especially IT Providers. (more…)

We just received word from one of the Top Managed Services Providers on  MSP Mentor’s Top 100 list that they had closed their first SALE from a lead that was generated from MSP Telemarketing ’s marketing campaign. (more…)

The Top MSP Customer Concerns

There are thousands of Top Ten List on the internet but this is the first MSP customer centric top ten list that focuses on the 10 things that managed services marketing prospects are most concerned with when evaluating which computer consultant they should choose or switch to.
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When you’re marketing your managed services concept you can’t just focus on the presentation. You need to focus on the deliverables / business model as well.

Managed services marketing providers who want to remain state-of-the-art in their data back up offerings should add software from Acronis to their software ‘toolbox’. (more…)