3 Tips to Help MSPs Close More Business

For managed service providers, a steady stream of new clients is essential to grow their revenue stream beyond services to current customers. Bringing on new clients consumes a lot of resources, so MSPs need to be sure the business they’re bringing is a good fit for them, and vice versa. To accomplish this, it all begins with sales prospecting. During the sales prospecting stage of customer acquisition, there are a few techniques MSPs should keep in mind to ensure they’re chasing the right leads.

Below are three tips to help MSPs master sales prospecting:

1. Cold Calling: While no one enjoys dialing through an extensive list of names and numbers, cold calling is essential to get connected with the right clients. Setting aside time to regularly make calls helps sales teams stay accountable. Learn as much as you can on each call and apply a grade of A, B, C or D to contacts as you go through your list. Contacts with an ‘A’ grade should be regularly followed up with to build on the relationship and move them along in the sales cycle.

2. Email Campaigns: Emails from your sales team to potential clients shouldn’t always be a hard sell. If it’s your first time reaching out to a contact, introduce yourself, give them some valuable information, and let them be for a few days. Monthly newsletters are also friendly reminders to your contact list about who you are and what you offer. Email campaigns are a great way to warm up your leads, but be sure to keep them limited to one or two per month (especially if you aren’t getting a large number of responses) to avoid alienating your audience.

3. Inbound Content: Inbound content is designed to be educational and relevant to your audience. You can accomplish this via blog posts, social media, email, success stories, etc. Inbound content can be your greatest tool to help tell your MSP’s story. From a sales perspective, you can use this kind of content to respond to needs/concerns a potential client may have. Take a client in the legal vertical, for example, who works on billable hours: If you offer a service that helps eliminate downtime, there’s a valuable story you can tell to a client who can’t afford to lose hours in his or her day. Share helpful content or success stories that communicate how you can meet the need for uptime, all the time.

For MSPs, these prospecting techniques can help streamline the sales cycle and keep the best leads warmed up. The best way to keep your lead lists and prospecting to-do’s organized is to continually measure progress and note milestones in the process. For a deeper dive into metric-driven prospecting, join us for a webinar on all things sales prospecting and cold calling on March 27, 2018. Register here.

Eric Torres is Channel Development Manager, Datto.

This guest blog is part of a Channel Futures sponsorship.