The simple reason you don’t get more sales appointments

Most of the MSP owners I meet want more new clients.

When they’re sitting in front of qualified prospects, they typically have no problem closing the deal. The issue is getting in front of the right people, at the right time.

Maybe you have the same challenge.

I’m going to address this in a mini series of three articles:

• Today: How to get more leads and prospects
• Next week: Automated relationship building to move people through your funnel
• Final article: Passive and active ways to generate sales appointments

The main reason you don’t have more leads and prospects is simply because you haven’t done enough consistent activity to generate them.

There’s plenty of business out there – PLENTY – you’ve just got to do some of the right work to scoop it up.

Here’s an example outside of IT support. One of my personal projects right now is to do a lot more residential property development. It’s one of my core strategies for building three generational wealth for my family.

So I’m always looking for the right size land plots to build on. I live in Milton Keynes, one of the fastest growing areas of the UK. And I’m keen to build on my doorstep, as I believe having to regularly drive a long way to a project dulls the passion for it.

Trouble is, everyone I speak to who’s in property round here, says stuff like:

• “There are no deals to be had round here”
• “There are too many people in property in Milton Keynes”
• “The days of great deals are long gone”

They’re totally, utterly wrong of course. I don’t just believe that; I KNOW it.

Because over the last few months I have used the same marketing skills that I used to grow and sell my marketing agency – and that I’m using to help my IT support clients – to generate an abundance of leads, prospects and potential deals.

I’ve dedicated at least an hour a day to lead generation activity. There’s not a day now where I don’t switch on my phone and there are messages waiting for me, from people I really want to speak to. And critically, who are very keen to speak to me.

The hard way to generate leads and prospects is to cold call. It sends shivers down my spine at the thought of intelligent people literally wasting their life cold calling people.

Instead, you should be looking to put a highly compelling message in front of the right people, at the right time. In a way which makes them want to start a relationship with you. It’ll be a light relationship; but nonetheless it’ll be a relationship.

That relationship can then be leveraged down the line to generate highly valuable sales appointments.

The way to do this, then, is to build your own marketing database. A list of people that you are constantly building, so that it can feed your sales funnel for years to come.

You get people to choose to opt-in to your marketing, by choosing to give you their contact details and permission to market to them.

That then gives you weeks, months, years for them to get to know you. You can see how this will make them a very high quality prospect at the point they are ready to talk to someone about IT support.

(Side note – the classic text on this is Permission Marketing by Seth Godin).

There are 3 areas you need to get right.

You don’t want massive numbers of people going into the top of your funnel. You want quality, not quantity.

And that means spending money on quality traffic. Google pay per click; Facebook adverts; and LinkedIn adverts.

Sure, there are cheaper and free ways to generate traffic. But none are as quick as paying to access the huge qualified databases those three have to offer.

When you are putting a message in front of people, don’t promote your business. Instead promote something you are giving away, like a white paper (I prefer to call them reports, or guides).

It’s known as an ethical bribe. You bribe potential leads to give you their contact details, in return for the thing you are giving way.

Someone swapping their contact details in return for a free guide is a core principle of effective data capture. It’s used by thousands of businesses. Yours should be one of them.

People willingly give their contact details to access what you have to give. Typically this is done through your website, on a special data capture page, or through an opt-in box.

And you use technology to manage this process. It’s all handled for you by a CRM and an autoresponder.

There’s a lot of detail to get right here; but it’s the core principle of how to automate much of the donkey work of your marketing.

Once you have someone’s contact details and permission to contact them, you do just that.

You send an email to this new database of leads that you are building. Ideally you send an email every week. And no, that’s not too much, so long as you ensure the content is educational, relevant and focused on them, not you.

You see, these people don’t care about you. They don’t care about your business. They only care about themselves.

Your job in this follow-up is to educate and entertain them, until the exact moment they are ready to talk to people about IT support for their business.

That’s the point they move from being a lead to being a prospect.

I’ll explore this in more detail next week, in an article called Automated relationship building to move people through your funnel.

As always, if you have any questions please pop them in the Facebook comments below. Or email me directly hello@itsupportmarketing.co.uk