MSP Holistic Marketing Methodology: Survive [Guest Post]

This is a guest post by Dave Sutton, MD at Wingman: Sales and Marketing for MSPs.

Selling without selling is the new art of wooing potential customers. As the famous book, ‘The Go-Giver’, lays out, it is best to give away education and insight to potential customers to eventually win their business.

So how do I go about doing that?

It doesn’t have to be overly complicated. Focus on your target prospect – think about their business, their pain points and their desires. Forget the tech.

1. Produce a single piece of meaty content that contains some commercial insight & advantage. Something of value that people would want to spend time reading – this piece can differ wildly depending on the time of year, current economical climate or the type of target customer you have in mind
   
   
2. ‘Gate that content’ – ensure you place this content behind a form. Make the prospect give you something in exchange for their free access to valuable content. Those details will not only add to the quality of your data marketing list, but provide you with an instant notification & trigger that someone’s interested in what you have to say
   
   
3. Chop it up & drip-feed it out – take snippets of your content and use that to fuel a multi-touch drip-fed campaign of marketing actions, with perhaps weekly emails, blogs and social media posts to tease your prospects into downloading your gated content
   
   
4. Video – if you can, spend time on video. There’s no better way of catching the attention of prospects in social media or even through email than video

Such efforts will place you as the go-to subject matter expert and make your sales follow-ups a damn sight easier. Upon picking up the phone, you’ll be armed with the confidence that you have already given value to this business, they’ll likely know your brand name and who you are, and that they are potentially in need of the service you can offer.

Make sure you follow up!

There’s no point in going to all that marketing effort if you’re not going to follow it up.

Even for technology businesses, the human touch goes an awful long way in cultivating new business. There’s no other way to build a rapport, qualify a prospect, articulate your value and define a next action.

1. Set the call up first – Always notify prospects in your marketing messages that you have the intention of calling them, they can’t be shocked if you told them beforehand that you’re likely to call them in the coming days
   
   
2. Set a script – To ensure you stay on message and to keep you to process, make sure that you write yourself a little script first
   
   
3. Use a CRM – Keep a well structured cadence of activities within your CRM. Set achievable goals of follow-ups and always plan a next action
   
   
4. Ask questions – As much as you’d love them to be asking you questions and for them to tell you how much they need your service, but until they do, be busy asking them questions. Their answers will provide opportunity for you to not only learn about them, but for you to make statements highlighting the value you provide

Fancy a hand?

I work at Wingman, a specialised sales and marketing agency for MSPs, and we’d love to help. If you read 'agency' and got a cold sweat, don't worry, we practice what we preach.

Working intimately with our clients, we spend all day every day supporting technology service businesses with everything from data and content to telemarketing. To date, we've collaborated with more than 35 MSPs and helped take their marketing to the next level.

If you're an MSP and are considering outsourced support for any of your sales or marketing activity, get in touch with Wingman today.