The MSP University Live Training series is going great this year, and we have got some phenomenally engaging, informative presenters with us sharing dynamite educational content every single week.  This week, for example, our guest was John Black, who is the Director of Marketing with MSP Telemarketing in Texas.  His live session was titled How To Avoid The Top 5 Telemarketing Mistakes, and it is a real eye opener. 

John shared a particular statistic from his years of experience in telemarketing and phone sales:  90% of the market (the people you call on) will tell you they are happy with what they have.  In this case, it’s IT support.  And in this case, when we call them and they tell us that they’re happy with their current provider, we usually thank them for their time and hang up the phone.  I’m sure many of you that have conducted cold calling campaigns in the past have found something similar.  Trying to find someone who is not "happy" can seem a little bit like looking for that “needle in a haystack”. 

Establishing an effective appointment-setting and telemarketing process is a key component of a successful direct marketing campaign.  While it's possible to just pick up the phone and start "dialing for dollars", making calls without preparation or strategy will yield poor results.  

To start your successful direct marketing campaign, you'll need 3 essential tools to maximize your success:

Compelling marketing collateral:  These are the actual items that get mailed in advance of your telemarketing.  These pieces of collateral should be visually pleasing and emotionally-charged that focus on your target market's pain points and show you as the solution to their needs.

Distribution strategy: The timing and frequency of the distribution of your marketing collateral is extremely important.  Schedule your distribution to inform your prospects about your services at specific points of time, rather than trying to inform them about all of your services at once.  The more frequently your name and message appears before your prospects, the more likely they are to accept your call when you attempt to set an appointment.

Please join our good friend Arlin Sorensen, CEO and founder of Heartland Technology Solutions and HTG peer groups, who will be hosting a live meeting on March 24th for Microsoft as part of the 5W25 series on four plans to provide a well rounded look at life and business.

The plans he will discuss are:

- Business plan
- Leadership plan
- Life plan
- Legacy plan

Joining for the live meeting will be our other good friends Jamison West from JWCS and Brad Schow from Compudyne.  The event is code WES36PAL and it will be held at 9:00 AM Pacific that day. The session is titled Four Plans That Can Change Everything and that is exactly the potential outcome from the session.

If you learn to use these plans, you can change the result of your life and business. Without planning, you leave things up to chance and quite honestly have far less opportunity to achieve your dreams or succeed.

Before any successful sales engagement can begin, there are many important pieces of information that can be gathered before any client interaction takes place.  The preparation phase is the first step in the seven step sales process and requires a client-centric mentality. Strategic preparation; when conducted properly, will allow the Sales Professional to gather the necessary information to conduct a valuable Warm Up (Step 2 of the Seven Step Sales Process) and instill a sense of professionalism during the first client appointment and increase the chances of building customer rapport.

There are numerous methodologies in the area of strategic preparation. Keeping prospects’ challenges and issues in mind, instead of the solutions that the Sales Professional is interested in selling is the first paradigm shift that needs occur and is the underlying foundation for successful strategic preparation. This shift in approach and mentality will set the stage for searching for valuable information that can be used to bond with prospects and connect proposed solutions to more specific pain points that they may find valuable.

MSP University is assisting several of our partners in filling Professional and Managed Services employment vacancies. If you or someone you know qualifies for these positions, please contact us.

New York City
- VP Professional Services 
- Sales Manager
- Account Manager
- Systems Consultant
- Pre-Sales Engineer
- Project Manager

Stamford, CT
- NOC/Service Desk Manager
- Managed Services Account Manager
- Professional Services Account Manager

Irvine, CA
- Sales Engineer
- Account Manager
- Sales Manager

If you are looking for ways to succeed as an MSP, there is plenty advice available to help you in your endeavor.  While it is important to know what you should be doing to position your company for growth, you should also know what mistakes to avoid that can put your business on the fast track to failure.  Here we look at five common mistakes made by Managed Service Providers that limit their opportunities for success.

1. Selling expertise you lack - This can be chalked up to common sense, yet many Managed Service Providers are so eager to bring in new clients they end up making promises they cannot possibly keep. Focus your sales approach on services, solutions and technologies which you have the expertise to support. The latest trend in technology may bring in more clients, however if you cannot integrate that technology into their business, you are selling your clients and yourself short.

According to Webster's, marketing is "the process or technique of promoting, selling and distributing a product or service." The same source defines an expert as "someone with special skill or knowledge representing mastery of a particular subjects." So how do you take these two definitions and apply them to the world of managed services? The answer can seem surprisingly simple, but in actuality can take years upon years of practice and study. I would venture to say that it would apply to anything in life, equally as well as managed services.

Being the Expert

First and foremost we will discuss being an expert. If you are going to claim to be an "expert" at anything, make sure that you can back up the claim with cold hard facts. If you are going to profess to have a mastery of a particular subject, you are best suited to actually know everything there is to know about the subject; past, present and future. This is the part that could take years of hard work and dedication. A sure fire way to completely fail in any marketing campaign is to be perceived as a fraud. Do not make the mistake of claiming something that is false. The ramifications of this could be worse than a failed marketing campaign and could actually have a reverse effect. A basic principle in any type of sales is that consumers buy with trust. If that trust is broken or violated in any way, sales will suffer. More than anything else trust and honesty help make sales.

We are facing real business challenges and problems in today’s economy.  Running a business successfully has always been a challenge, but our current down market has only made it that much tougher to stay ahead and maintain a competitive edge.  We’re being challenged today to find ways to beat out increasingly heavy competition for pieces of a client’s shrinking budget.  Managed Services is being widely adopted in the VAR community, so offering flat rate IT and remote support is no longer a competitive edge in and of itself, and we have to find new ways to differentiate ourselves from the rest of the pack.  Margins may be dwindling, and we’re seeking ways to increase efficiencies and cut our internal costs. 

It’s a tough reality, but it’s becoming necessary for us to face up to the fact that our prospects and clients do not want to buy technology, and do not perceive much value in it.  They may recognize that they need it, but many of them do not understand, or are even afraid of technology.  It’s certainly difficult and discouraging to realize that our target market just doesn’t want; and sometimes even actively dislikes, what we want to sell them…but it’s the actuality that we must come to terms with before we can move forward.