Proper Strategies in Your Managed Services Marketing Appointments

April 10, 2018April 5, 2018 Jason Simons computer business marketing, IT appointment setting, IT lead generation, it leads, IT marketing, IT marketing services, it sales, IT sales leads, it services marketing, IT telemarketing, managed services marketing, marketing for it, marketing IT, marketing IT services, MSP Blog, MSP Blogs, MSP Business, msp company, msp marketing, MSP SEO, MSP services, msp websites

Maximizing Outbound Sales

Managed services marketing has an uphill climb ahead of it in terms of outbound sales. If you’re going to maximize your effectiveness in this regard, you’re going to want some strategy to inform your operations. Following are several steps worth communicating with your sales team in regard to making more effective appointments:

Keep your eye on the prize
Ensure value is clearly communicated
Ensure you’re not barking up the wrong tree
Uncover where difficulties impact prospect operations

Keep Your Eye on The Prize

When your managed services marketing team is making appointments, they need to know where they’re going and why. The ultimate goal is converting the client to the products or services your MSP provides, right? If that’s the case, then you need to make appointments conducive to that conversion. Certainly, client proclivities must be taken into account, but you want to avoid making appointments where no value can be communicated. This is especially important during an outbound cold call. Owing to the difficulty of such sales approaches, many salespeople are apt to get drawn away into conversational rabbit trails, which do not lead to a sale; this just wastes time and decreases your overall conversions for the selling period. Ensure salespeople keep their eye on the prize. You may design a “script” with some suggestions for them to use as a means of steering client conversations back toward possible conversion.

Ensure Value is Clearly Communicated

When salespeople call clients, they need to be ready for a discussion on costs. Your MSP needs to show why the products or services you provide are valuable. As an example, if you’re selling backup and data recovery solutions, you might talk about how much average downtime losses are and how much downtime your MSP has been able to save clients. Ultimately, this measure alone should save clients enough money to justify the expense. Technically, downtime can cost as much as $100k an hour for many companies. If your BDR (Backup and Data Recovery) support options are less than that, then technically your client makes money by working with you–albeit collaterally. Crunch the numbers and communicate such value to your potential clients.

Ensure You’re Not Barking Up the Wrong Tree

Your outbound cold-calling will occasionally encounter clients who you have no business trying to sell to. Sometimes, this is because the prospect in question is so exceptionally large that you don’t have the ability to properly serve them. Sometimes, this is because the prospect is so small that the only services that would be valuable to them would cost your MSP more money than it would make if it were to provide them, and sometimes, you’re just talking to a receptionist who has no purchasing capability and isn’t worth wasting a sales pitch on. You need to qualify your prospects beforehand to ensure you don’t waste your time.

Uncover Where Difficulties Impact Prospect Operations

Is there infrastructural pain on the part of your client that your MSP services can act as a salve for? As you’re keeping your eye on the prize during an outbound cold-call, one of the things you should watch for is specific operational areas where something your MSP could solve a substantial problem for your prospective client. This can be: in terms of data organization, in terms of competitive facilitation, in terms of new technology, or it can even be in terms of infrastructural cost reduction via cloud computing solutions. Whatever the case, you’ll provide better value if you can identify points of operational pain and demonstrate how your operation offers realistic, tangible solutions.

Conversion Expansion

A managed services marketing campaign that can determine client pain before providing solutions which assuage it, identify whether a client is properly qualified to pitch your services to, communicate value clearly, and keep an end game in mind is more likely to produce successful conversions. Lastly, keep close numbers on everything; it will help you to see whether or not you’re improving. You can definitely increase your success in outbound cold-call marketing, provided you bring well-thought-out strategies like these to the outbound sales table.