I love marketing, literally love it.
Marketing has not only paid my mortgage over the years, it paid OFF my mortgage by letting me build up a business to become a very sellable entity.
It's allowed me to acquire buy-to-let property, try my hand (unsuccessfully, sadly) at property developing, and get involved in other people's business ventures.
I say this not to boast at all because my "success" is modest by most standards. In fact I consider my work/life balance and relationship with my 9-year-old daughter to be a greater marker of personal success.
I'm just trying to show you the sheer, life changing power of marketing
You see, when you get marketing right, it allows you to find people who could one day buy your MSP services. It allows you to get those people to choose to start a conversation with you, to join your audience, and to be educated / entertained by you.
But there does come a point where, if you want to sell them support services, then you have to move them from being someone you talk to mostly online through platforms like LinkedIn, to being more of an offline prospect. And the single most powerful tool to do that is the phone.
Using the phone effectively and systematically is one of the things I talk about at my free MSP marketing lunches, because it is so powerful.
In the healthcare marketing business I sold in 2016, we had 12,000 prospects, which we emailed twice a week. So that's 24,000 emails a week going out. And we used a CRM (Infusionsoft) to track every single click from every single person on that list.
I then had a team of three telesales people sitting, looking at that list, using their brains, figuring out, "Who haven't we spoken to for a few months?" And then calling those people.
That was all they did five days a week. And that was how we generated a million pounds a year worth of revenue in that business. Because we were seeing who the prospects were; who was active, and then we were phoning them up.
More often than not, we couldn't get hold of that person. Gatekeepers can be quite effective! When we did get hold of them, we attempted to have a relationship-building chat.
At least once a day or once every other day, we would have a quality conversation with someone and we were able to move them on to the next step (which in that company was either going to an event or having a meeting with a field salesperson).
If I bought an MSP tomorrow, I would do exactly the same thing
I would build an audience of people who were willing to listen to me. These audience would be the decision makers and influencers in the businesses and organisations I wanted to work with.
I would educate and entertain those people using good marketing, building up a light relationship with them. And building up my business's profile.
But ultimately what would make me money would be having a telephone person, looking at all of the marketing activity, picking up the phone and making outbound calls to these people.
I know that this is a very hard thing to do within an MSP. If you don't already have this kind of function set up, it's not easy to get started.
Telephone people are the hardest people to hire - and this certainly isn't the kind of job that you would want to do yourself! Most of us started the business so we didn't have to do this kind of thing!
At my free MSP marketing lunches, I show you a case study of how to put this kind of system in place for your business
In fact, I've got a clever suggestion for you to get a very specific person into your business making proactive phone calls from your office. They'll work part-time hours and glad of that work. And they'll be a pleasure to work with as well.
I also have a telesales script that I will show you. Well, I say it's a script. It's more a series of guidelines for what people should say. Because the best telephone people are not telesales zombies, mindlessly following a script. They're clever, relationship-building people who know that the phone is just a tool.
A tool to transition someone from being in an audience on LinkedIn or in an email list, to being someone that can sit and have a 20 minute phone call with whoever does the selling in your business . And we all know that once you get that phone call, your chances of generating a proper meeting are higher.
In November I'm visiting these 6 areas. Putting on a free MSP marketing lunch between 12noon and 3pm:
- Manchester: 2 places left
- London Euston: 3 places left
- Leeds: 2 places left
- Southampton: 4 places left
- Chelmsford: 3 places left
- Bristol: 4 places left
To claim one of the free places, you just click this link here, and fill in the form. Your lunch is completely free. I tell you on the web page why i can afford to do this.
