Selling isn’t easy. However, if you adopt a systematic approach, support new technologies, and offer best-of-the-class services, you can really accelerate your sales. The following five points provide insights into such things and help you win new customers.

Among my top recommendations:

1. Take sides with a winning idea
2. Sell the idea, they’ll come
3. Show the difference in dollars
4. Share your customer stories and learning from the field
5. Use social media to reach out

1. Take sides with a winning idea
Your website is a basic sales requirement that gives details such as “who you are” and “what you do.” It helps prospects understand your portfolio of services. First create a website, it’s so easy. WordPress helps you create your own website. Next, choose a winning idea or product. It could be about cloud computing, virtualization, a good RMM or helpdesk. If you choose virtualization, contact all the vendors and try to provide the best offers that the market has to give.

2. Sell the idea, they will come
Follow the domain closely and try to establish yourself as a strong cloud/virtualization information company. Add flavor by writing informative blogs on the domain and educate your followers how it can help them. As the time goes by, people will recognize you and start asking advice. Gain the advantage of offering advice and selling to them.

When you have built your expertise in the domain, conduct webinars. Invite a keynote speaker to give some valuable information that helps customers improve their IT performance. Educate your customers on how technology helps them save their time and money. Focus on how you can help them with the technology.

3. Show the difference in dollars
Sell them an idea of parallel evaluation or a test run for a few departments. For example, if you are providing help desk service, offer RMM services free for 30 days. At the end of the month, provide a mock bill for the RMM services. Calculate the cost of inhouse IT staff vs. your mock bill (provided you can deliver services that cost less than inhouse IT). Educate the customer on the dollars that he can save by off-shoring IT and the pros and cons of in-house vs. managed services model.

Here’s a sample calculation: The cost of setting up an operations support team in Florida vs. outsourcing…

Some details about the chart and the calculations…

• Total number of devices to be managed is 500 and the number of operations support personnel required is 5. At an average salary of $55,000 per operations person per year, you would be shelling out $275,000 on salaries for five operations members.
• Workout the price for the managing the 500 devices. If you are charging $30 dollar per device on an average for 500 devices per year, it costs $180,000. A win-win for sides. Moreover, if you have multi-year contracts the difference becomes high when you include salary increments every year.

Also, get a user satisfaction survey. If the user experience improves, it’s great. It’s good even if people say there is no change. You can take the credit of having implemented an efficient system that costs less, without impacting the user experience. Reduced bill and improved services are a win-win for both you and your customer.

4. Share your customer stories and learning from the field
Share your customer stories that help other customers to improve their IT performance. However, be cautious that you never disclose the name of a customer to other customer.

Keep in touch with your customers via newsletters or monthly mailers that help them. Avoid using discounts and buy now links in the newsletter and mailers. Include at least 4 or 5 knowledgeable materials such as whitepapers, videos, analyst’s reports, etc. that benefit the customers. Target them month on month and the buy in will happen eventually. To send bulk mailers you can make use of effective email tools. These tools are available for as low as $15 per month.

5. Use social media to reach out
It’s hard to find someone who doesn’t use twitter or Facebook. Setup fan pages and use Twitter to send out relevant messages to your followers. Follow the analysts’ tweets and feeds, and retweet them. Keep the message stream focused to useful info – absolutely no place for “my cat did this” or “checked in at odd places”. Create a profile in the Facebook for you company, and make it interactive and informative. Post whitepapers and videos, and share useful articles that benefit the customers.

Conclusion
Include the above activities in your day to day process. Make sure you are in constant touch with your prospects and keep providing valuable information and tips to improve IT performance and reduce operational expenses. You will start reaping success in a very short period.

Bharani Kumar is the marketing analyst of MSP Solutions at ManageEngine. Read ManageEngine’s well received book “How to Set Up a Managed Services Business.” Monthly guest blogs such as this one are part of MSPmentor’s annual platinum sponsorship.

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We reviewed Marketo’s Definitive Guide to Marketing Metrics and Analytics and found it lived up to its title with 70 pages of detailed advice on how to most effectively gather and measure key marketing metrics.

Within the Guide, a new profile emerged: the Revenue Marketer™. Marketo describes them as marketers who, “begin to operate and sound more like sales.” Trademarked by The Pedowitz Group, The Revenue Marketer™ “…knows how their key metrics stack up against their targets, and what they plan to do to improve their results.”

If you don’t classify yourself as a one of these new breed marketers, you’re not alone. 44% of marketers have no idea what profits a 10% increase in their marketing budget would generate (Lenskold Group’s 2010 B2B Lead Generation Marketing ROI Study)

However, we should.

As the Definitive Guide tells us (and as most of us suspected already), to gain more credibility and respect (translation: budget and resources) within our organizations, marketing needs to measure the things that will guide decisions that improve profitability. We need to start speaking the CEO and CFO’s language.

To do so, we first need to understand and develop goals around:

• How many sales we anticipate our marketing program(s) will generate
• How much revenue each sale produces
• What the gross margin percentage is
  

Next we need to design our programs so that we can effectively measure results. With clearly understood goals and well-defined ROI estimates at the outset, we can then track and connect measurements to our pipelines, revenue, and profits. We also can make adjustments to programs with actionable data to improve results, and therefore improve credibility.

To get started, we recommend you download our Marketing Audit Pack. This group of templates includes our Marketing Plan Audit Template, Marketing ROI Template, Sales & Marketing Scorecard and S.W.O.T. Analysis Template, and will help you:

Make well-informed adjustments to your marketing strategy

Understand the true performance of your marketing plan vs. the estimate

Report your status on a weekly basis to raise awareness about your sales and marketing results

Calculate the ROI on your marketing plan

Think about it. Prospects are taking more time to gather information from the wealth of content online, content that marketers produce. This means we are presiding over a much larger share of the revenue cycle than ever before. If you aren’t yet measuring your ROI, it’s time to start. The Revenue Marketer™ is here to stay.

How can you tell if your Online Backup Service might not be fully compliant? Ask these questions.

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Energy drink maker uses mobile campaign to drive awareness of “build-a-thon” contest

From flugtags to x-fighters, Red Bull pumps out wacky marketing events around the world like it’s downed way too much of its homebrew.

From July 7-10, it raised the bar with “Red Bull Creation,” a creativity contest held in a Brooklyn park that pitted 16 teams of the country’s most way-out “hackers, tinkerers and fabricators” in a three-day “build-a-thon.”

The teams were given a theme---“energy in motion”---the night before the competition kicked off, and then had 72 hours to build whatever they’d dreamed up---the weirder, the better.

The event’s mindset is perfectly illustrated by the winning entry from a Minneapolis team called 1.21 Jigawatts. Red Bull described it as a “massive hamster wheel, wired into a mobile network, given its own phone number that received up to 60,000 one-word text messages at a time.” Upon receiving a text message, the wheel would begin rolling and print out a perfect copy of the word on the ground.

Practical, schmactical. 1.21 Jigawatts beat out other entries, including a wheelie-popping shopping cart and a mechanical inchworm named Chillerpillar, on the basis of being “unequivocally awesome.”

Red Bull’s promotional campaign was pretty creative itself. Before the event, it posted ads with QR (quick response) codes on bus shelters all around New York City. Passersby who scanned the code with a mobile device were redirected to a video promoting the event. The campaign seemed to work; on the final day of the event the teams finished their projects onstage before a packed house

Red Bull is no stranger to unique mobile promotions. Last year, it targeted Formula 1 fans with a new racing game built for iPhones and iPod Touchs. This year, it participated in a campaign at 1,400 Canadian convenience stores that delivered instant coupons to shoppers carrying Bluetooth-enabled devices.

--- Bob Pickard

In response to a TechRepublic member question, Jack Wallen reveals a couple of troubleshooting steps he takes when Outlook is muddying the waters of the powerful .pst and .ost files.

When MSPs think about the benefits they provide their SMB clientele, they probably focus on internal efficiencies that can benefit the bottom line. But MSPs need to take a broader look at how their services can aid all aspects of an SMB’s operations. For example, managed contact center services can aid your SMBs clientele in providing high quality customer service, and even in charging a premium for them.

A case in point: A new survey commissioned by Fonality and conducted by Webtorials shows that on average, customers of SMBs would pay a 20% maximum premium for exceptional service. In contrast, larger companies could only charge a maximum premium of 15%. In addition, 58% of the respondents prefer to do business with an SMB, compared to only 16% who prefer to do business with larger enterprises.

Fonality is a business communications provider, so naturally this survey has a marketing angle, but one that holds promise for MSPs. Unified Communications (UC) and voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) solutions were cited by SMB respondents as important tools to help SMBs achieve greater levels of customer service that would allow them to charge a premium rate. Eighty percent of SMB respondents indicated they were already leveraging VoIP to improve contact center capabilities while reducing operating costs or had plans to integrate the solution within the next 12 months.

Meanwhile, UC, which combines voice, email and chat communications, was either being used, or soon will be, by 64% of those surveyed.

UC, VoIP Can Help SMB Productivity

The survey also shows that SMB users of VoIP and UC-based contact centers surveyed achieved significant productivity gains and cost reduction, with 52% saving 20% or more and almost as many (46%) reporting productivity gains in excess of 10%. Webtorials concluded that smaller budgets and limited skill sets associated with SMBs made them primary candidates to benefit from the greater ROI of cloud-based VoIP and UC services, as opposed to installing and maintaining expensive, complex IT solutions.

MSPs should not focus on the exact figures quoted in the Fonality study, but undoubtedly VoIP and UC services can be of great assistance to SMBs looking to improve customer service and increase profitability. Not many SMBs are equipped to host this type of leading edge technology in-house, making MSPs ideal candidates to enable superior customer service.

Sign up for MSPmentor’s Weekly Enewsletter, Webcasts and Resource Center. Follow us via RSS, Facebook and Twitter. Check out more MSP voices at www.MSPtweet.com. Read our editorial disclosure here.

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Call it a blessing in disguise. Most recent economic reports say SMBs have been slow to make hires. But most IT research indicates that SMBs continue to expand their IT spending. In theory, that means SMBs will increasingly turn to managed services providers (MSPs) and other external folks for IT assistance to fill tactical and strategic gaps.

Indeed, the US SMB tech support market will be worth more than $15 billion in three years, according to a Parks Associates study which says the combined SMB/household tech support market will reach $30 billion, with households accounting for well over 40% of the spend. That still leaves more than half of a very lucrative pie in the hands of SMBs, which by default leaves much of it in the hands of MSPs who serve SMBs lacking in-house tech support capabilities.

Market Underutilized

It should be no great surprise to MSPs with SMB experience that Parks Associates terms this slice of the tech support market “underutilized.” Study data indicates 44% of SMBs experience computer problems, but only 28% of those SMBs use professional support services.

A combination of many MSPs ignoring the potential offered by smaller clients and basic ignorance on the availability of managed services on the part of many SMBs leads to this market not living up to its potential. Of course, this is great news for MSPs who serve the SMB vertical and aren’t shy about trumpeting the advantages their services provide.

Stay Up to Date with Platforms, Channels

The study also finds that long-term growth in the SMB tech support market depends on the ability to add support for new platforms and scale services to provide for multiple channels of support. Parks Associates advises that expanding to include on-site, remote, and depot repair, with proactive maintenance services for multiple devices, is key to growing the market.

In plain terms, don’t expect to achieve long-term growth by finding some new customers for your existing services. That will gain you some initial new clients, but they won’t stick around long if you can’t grow along with their needs.

Game-changers any MSP seeking long-term growth in the SMB tech support market needs to stay abreast of include tablets, smartphones, cloud infrastructure, and integrated cross-channel platforms. Even your small clients are moving away from a siloed IT architecture toward a more holistic model, your support services need to follow suit.

Previously, I wrote an entry on how big box retailers like Office Depot are trying to capitalize on the SMB tech support market. Parks Associates specifically cites how big box retailers, as well as telecommunications companies and the OEMs themselves, are “important” in the space. But when it comes to personal SMB relationships, can anybody really compete with effective MSPs?

Sign up for MSPmentor’s Weekly Enewsletter, Webcasts and Resource Center. Follow us via RSS, Facebook and Twitter. Check out more MSP voices at www.MSPtweet.com. Read our editorial disclosure here.

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