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.

While the business of selling goods and services has been around for thousands of years, it is important to note the history of the sales process. It is thought that the first structured sales process was developed by John Henry Patterson, of National Manufacturing Company (later National Cash Register, or NCR) in Dayton, Ohio. He applied his philosophy on developing "scientific" methods and procedures that led to great efficiency in manufacturing to other aspects of the business such as sales. By the late 20th century, Patterson had developed a huge sales force motivated by sales quotas and complete with territories. Patterson organized and created the first sales training event in 1884, and established the first sales training school in 1893. He taught a very simple sales philpsophy which is still used to this day and is the underlying framework for the seven step sales process:

1. Indentify the client's problems
2. Develop a specific value proposition

Watch Sessions from our just-completed MSP University Boot Camp on demand!

Simply visit http://www.mspu.us/en/boot-camps/live.htm and select the sessions you would like to view!

If you don't already have one, you'll need to create a FREE basic membership to MSP University to log in.

Check out our Agenda Quick Schedule for each of the three days of this amazing Boot Camp:

Click here for our entire 36 page MSP University Boot Camp Program.

Register now to receive:

Can't attend our first Boot Camp of 2010 in person? Join us from your PC!

Join Our First Boot Camp of 2010 Streaming Live!
(Just join MSP University FREE as a Basic Member)

• Increasing net profits
• Developing effective marketing strategies
• Pricing and positioning Managed Services on value to maximize revenue
• Learning sales techniques that dramatically improve sales success
• 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

Then join us as we stream our IT Solutions and Managed Services Sales & Marketing and Service Delivery Boot Camp directly to you on February 3rd-5th, 2010!

Tomorrow - January 27, 2010 at 9:00am PST

Whether you’re considering adding Managed Services to your deliverables, or are a seasoned MSP, there are 8 critical areas your company needs to evaluate, improve and monitor in order to achieve maximum net profitability, scalability and growth capability for your business. In this Microsoft 5W/25 Webcast, I'll reveal the 8 areas to focus on in business improvement and transformation for maximizing your Managed Services practice success.

Takeaways:

• Understand the 8 phases critical to Managed Services practice improvement and success and how they apply to your business
• Learn specific goals necessary to achieve in each area for maximizing net profitability, scalability and growth capabilities
• Identify your strengths and weaknesses in each area and develop a strategy for leveraging your strengths and shoring up your weaknesses

Attendees to this must-attend session will receive an electronic download of MSP University’s “The Guide to a Successful Managed Services Practice” – MSP University’s best-selling book on

Please join us this Friday January 29th @ 9am PST as I host MSP University's State of the Industry Webinar.

Topic:  Smart and Simple Ways to Leveraging Local Connections and Microsoft Giveaways!
 
Are you a Microsoft Partner? Great News!
Microsoft is providing fresh, relevant content AND great giveaways for you to use to drive business through your local marketplace!
 
This is a tremendous opportunity for you to use Microsoft's Giveaways and other resources to gain exposure, build your brand, and most of all - generate leads for your products and services as you interact with local area prospects and customers!

Our special guest will be Bruce Marshall, a Business Development Manager from Microsoft's Local Engagement Team!  Together we'll discuss how to take advantage of this tremendous opportunity made available from Microsoft and MSP University!

Here's your chance to learn more about MSP University's Online Training Portal and how to use it to help your organization increase its efficiencies, effectiveness, sales and profitability. Simply join us for a live tour of our MSP University online training portal and...
 
Get an electronic copy of our newest book just for attending!

The Best NOC and Service Desk Operations BOOK EVER!

We are kicking off our 2010 I.T. Solutions and Managed Services Sales & Marketing and Service Delivery Boot Camp Series!

In 2009 MSP University trained over 500 Solution Providers in our challenging Boot Camps all across the United States.

And in 2010 we are tripling that number with a series of 11 US and International Boot Camps - our biggest live training series yet!

Join us for our inaugural Boot Camp of 2010 in Orange County, CA on February 3rd-5th!

Watch a Boot Camp video clip

Unlike any other event in our industry, these 3-day Boot Camps provide direct, actionable training and tools to help you implement business improvement and transformation strategies the moment you return to your organization.

Click here to find out how to attend our next IT Solutions and Managed Services Sales & Marketing and Service Delivery Boot Camp ABSOLUTELY FREE!

We've expanded our Boot Camps to deliver 3 valuable tracks:

• CEO Operations

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 new FREE Article Library!

So Vlad Mazek of Own Web Now, Karl Palachuk of SMB Books and I have been sharing our thoughts on the industry, its players, events and conferences for several years now on several incarnations of Vlad's Spam Show, Karl's SMB Conference Call and my State of the Industry Webcasts, with each of us delivering content in our own various flavors.

I can say with all candor that of the three shows, Vlad's Spam Show is by far the loosest, no-holds-barred program of them all. If your sensitivities are easily rankled, this is not the show for you. That being said, it is the most fun we have when we're not physically together at an event or conference, and we would like to invite you to Vlad's final Spam Show of 2009.

We'll be recapping 2009 and discussing what the future holds for 2010 with a hot toddy and our Snuggies on.

We've posted our final State of the Industry Webinar of 2009 for viewing in case you missed it live!

Topic: Leveraging More Vendor Dollars and Less Of Your Own

Location: http://www.mspu.us/en/courses/this-months-free-training.htm

It's the end of the year and your sales are less than you desire.  You want to market your business to increase sales, but budgets are tight.  Your sales team just keeps calling the same people.  You need new leads, new opportunities in your pipeline and more closed sales before you fall behind on your projections.
   
Our special guest for this valuable Webcast is our good friend David Russell, MANAGEtoWIN CEO and MSP University Boot Camp Sponsor. Dave has been in the computer industry for 28 years and spent a lot of that time as a partner of Microsoft, Cisco, Intel and other top vendors.  He has built many businesses on "OPM" (other people's money) and it's time you did too.  This is a unique opportunity to learn how to access money from multiple vendors to implement best practice marketing programs that generate powerful new sales and recurring revenue opportunities.