Can't attend our Washington DC Boot Camp with NEW HEALTHCARE IT TRACK in person? Join us from your PC!

Are you interested in:

• Increasing net profits?
• Developing effective marketing strategies?
• Understanding current and future health care IT investments?
• Pricing and positioning Managed Services on value to maximize revenue?
• Learning sales techniques that dramatically improve sales success?
• Understanding the health care IT sales process, including customer pain points?
• Discovering the most effective ways to create and deliver Managed Services Agreements
• Creating rock-solid project plans and using them to effectively manage your projects to come in on time and within budget
• Training your Sales Engineers in a clear step-by-step process that walks them through effective discovery, solution design and proposal creation
• Understanding what you need to know before you outsource
• Understanding market drivers and hurdles to healthcare IT investments?

Then join us as we stream our IT Solutions and Managed Services Sales & Marketing and Service Delivery Boot Camp directly to you on September 1st - 3rd, 2010!

Managed Services Providers are in a unique position where they not only provide certain services to clients but also benefit by applying the same techniques within their own businesses. Clients who utilize Managed Services count on their provider to offer a full range of services from security and data backup to managing their website.  Successful businesses understand that having an online presence is necessary to remain competitive.  Managed Services Providers must not only know how to promote their own businesses on the web but also provide the same services to the clients with whom they have achieved Trusted Advisor status - true business partners that entrust them with numerous facets of their business for improvement. 

Despite the fact that millions of people use the Internet daily to find products, services, news stories or other tidbits of information, many of these users do not know exactly what happens when you enter information into a search engine.  The same applies to business owners and managers who may not have to time or interest to learn how visitors get to their website.  This is where knowledge in search engine optimization (SEO) comes in handy.  But before you tackle SEO, there are other important factors to consider.  Before you can reap the most rewards from your website, you must first know a few things about the people that are visiting your site and the people you want to visit your site.  After all, if the wrong people are getting to your website, neither party benefits.  Ask the following three questions before you focus on SEO:

 
Each business model has different strategies to increase sales, which in turn improve the bottom line.  Obviously Managed Services Providers work in a very specific market, therefore strategies to increase sales will also be specific to that market. It always makes sense to heed the advice of your peers within the industry when they discuss what strategies work well for them in increasing sales.  By consulting with your peers and paying close attention to what is happening within the industry you are more likely to pick up helpful tips that will improve your sales results.  Here are a few industry tips on how you can boost sales as a Managed Services provider.

Keep it personal - In an industry that is focused on technology it is often easy to overlook the importance of building and maintaining strong personal relationships. Because of the fact that most everyone (including the busy business owner) spends more time communicating via email or in other less personal ways, the importance of face-to-face or even telephone conversations can be overlooked.  If your business transactions are so streamlined that little or no direct contact is needed, there is no opportunity to establish a personal relationship with your client.  When a personal relationship is lacking there are often issues, concerns, questions or other problems that end up being unresolved, which can lead to your client seeking another provider who will address their needs on a more personal level.  Conversely, once a good personal relationship has been established, the lines of communication are open and both parties can build a close strategic partnership, leading to improved client satisfaction, retention and increased opportunity for the provider. 

MSP University is proud to announce our newest strategic partnership with CoreConnex, whose Corelytics Financial Dashboard receives data from a company's financial accounting systems and provides a secure, hosted platform to display financial performance, key indicators and forecasts. When utilized by an IT Solution or Managed Services organization, the Corelytics Financial Dashboard empowers the organizations' leadership with information to calculate their true cost of service delivery for each of their lines of business, along with margins and profitability. See my previous posts here and here regarding the importance of calculating the profitability of every one of a provider's deliverables, including service desk.

Read the Press Release here

We feel this partnership will provide MSP University members with the business intelligence, benchmarking metrics and financial management tools necessary to run their practices by the numbers and improve their net profits.

Click here to find out how to attend our next 3-Day Boot Camp Sept. 1st-3rd in Washington DC with NEW HEALTHCARE IT TRACK ABSOLUTELY FREE (a $2,995 value)!

The Presentation is the fourth step of the 7 Step Sales Process.  This step focuses on the Presentation of the solution to the potential prospect and usually occurs during the second visit with the prospect. The Second Appointment should occur with all decision makers present and no later than 7 days from the date of the first appointment. Before presenting the solution to the prospect, the Sales Professional should try to reduce any tension in the room as quickly as possible with a few minutes of “Warm Up during this second visit, since the prospect will be anticipating a pricing discussion. Successful execution of the Presentation can help the prospect understand how their specific business issues and pain points will be addressed through the proposed solution and can prevent most objections. 

During the Presentation phase of the 7 Step Sales Process, the Sales Professional should follow a basic three step process when presenting the proposed solution. The three fundamental parts to any presentation of a solution should be:

Among others, small business owners share two common concerns when it comes to the day-to-day running of their businesses.? These include not having enough time devoted to growing the business and dealing with a much smaller budget than that of a large corporation.? Managed services providers must acknowledge these concerns and offer solutions that SMBs can envision working for their businesses.? Some business owners will be open to new suggestions and technologies while others might prove to be a bit more resistant to change.? In order to truly deliver quality service you must be able to pinpoint what services will benefit the company and then successfully sell these services to the client.?

Cloud computing services are a hot topic of discussion right now as this technology is changing the way companies are doing business.? To sell these services to SMBs you must be able to explain how cloud computing will benefit the client in a way they can understand.? While some business owners will want to know the how's and why's of cloud computing, the majority will be interested only in how these services will impact their business, specifically how their business will benefit from cloud computing services.? Instead of making this a separate sales pitch, your sales staff should be trained on how to present cloud computing benefits combined with managed services as the best solution for their business needs where appropriate.?

Are you looking for new ways to generate interest in your products and services?

Have you considered starting a newsletter for clients and prospects, or currently produce one and need compelling content to drive visitors to your website or organization?

Would you like your website to host a continually growing library of articles of interest for your clients and prospects, increasing its value as a marketing resource and improving its positioning in web searches?

If you said yes to any of these questions, you are going to love MSP University's FREE Article Library!

The purpose of our free article library is to help attract your target audience to you by making available articles of interest to them which can be posted on your website, linked to in electronic communications such as email and newsletters, and referenced in blogs and social media sites.

Each one of the articles in our continually growing library is

It’s A Wrap!
 
We’d like to thank our gracious host CompTIA and all of our San Antonio Boot Camp attendees and the thousands of you that joined us virtually through our live streaming sessions – it has been our distinct pleasure to provide you best practices in CEO Operations, Marketing, Sales and Service Delivery, deliver informative Expert Panels on Marketing, The Cloud, Service Delivery and Healthcare IT and introduce you to valuable Sponsor relationships that can help you take your business to the next level.

We started day 4 of our Boot Camp with a presentation from HP, with highlights of the $10 Billion healthcare IT market, after which we conducted our Healthcare IT Expert Panel with Ron Pennell from Foothills IT, Chris Mertens from HP and Gregg Hammersmith from gloStream.

Due to scheduling challenges, we did not get a chance to conduct our CEO and Sales Professional Showdown, so for now,