No Tire-Kickers! How MSPs Can Find Serious Buyers.

You are sitting in a sales meeting with a business prospect, and things were looking great…until now.

They came to you for the usual reasons: They’re tired of break/fix and worried about security. You listened, put together a proactive plan, and came back to outline the steps. As you walk through the proposal, you see them nodding in agreement, confirming this is exactly what they wanted.

Until you get to the cost.

In the blink of an eye, they’ve forgotten their pain and the consequenes of inaction. Now these problems don’t seem so urgent, and when they get back to you with a decision weeks later, they explain they’ve “decided to wait until [insert vague future goal here].”

Sound familiar?

We know businesses don’t always make good decisions when it comes to IT. Many of them avoid serious issues despite the risks. I once knew an engineer that answered a distress call about hardware failure and discovered the company was running on a completely unsecured WiFi network. They weren’t even using a password!

SMBs need you – and they know it – so why don’t more of them invest in your solutions?

Maybe they are skeptical about whether managed services will result in cost reductions, or they feel a security breach is unlikely to happen to them (famous last words). Or maybe they have too many other critical tasks begging for attention, ones that are easier to understand and act upon.

Regardless of the reasons, three things are clear:

We cannot sell managed services without educating the customer.
Educating customers takes a lot of time.
Your sales people cannot afford to waste time on unqualified prospects.

Organizations Make Predictable Mistakes

When your team visits potential buyers to conduct assessments, they probably see many of the same mistakes again and again.

We’ve heard the stories: Clients wrongly assume their vendor app agreements cover end-to-end security, or have sloppy documentation and unsupported hardware. Sometimes management has no active security policy and doesn’t provide training or on-boarding to new employees.

How many hours a week do your sales people spend talking to people about these issues?

Imagine how much more effective would they be talking to qualified prospects that have done the research on your website and demonstrated a clear interest in buying, based on your analytics.

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Helping Companies Assess Risks With Your Blog

We already know businesses face similar IT challenges. We also know Sales spends too much time to educating them without even knowing if they have any serious interest in using your services. A sustained inbound marketing campaign can help solve these problems.

Blogging about how to identify common problems will accomplish several things for your organization.

Your content can attract people who are in the “research phase” of buying a solution, bringing them to your virtual doorstep.

Sales can help new prospects without wasting time copying and pasting the same information over and over.

Marketing will qualify customers by watching how they interact with your content.

Qualifying Leads With Marketing Analytics

As businesses dig deeper into the knowledge base on your website, Marketing can observe them at each stage of the “buyer’s journey” by monitoring which posts they’ve read, what calls-to-action they’ve clicked, and which the forms they’ve filled out.

All of these metrics can be used to track individual leads, giving your team the intelligence they need to nuture them.

These capabilities don’t come with just any CMS, of course. Your company will need to invest in a marketing automation and analytics platform like HubSpot to get the insights you need. These tools aren’t cheap, but they can make a big impact on your sales productivity, boosting your closing ratio while focusing more on people who are more likely to make a purchase.

Your clients don’t want to buy managed services any more than you want to buy an inbound marketing solution, but in a competitive market – success depends on communication and trust.

When you pitch your next customer, you can walk into the meeting with clear insights into their needs and interests, and use this intelligence to build a long and mutually beneficial partnership. Is there a better way to set your company up for success?