Transcript
Welcome to another episode of Tech It To The Bank. My name is Stephanie Hammond. I am the head nerd at Enable that's responsible for all things sales and marketing related. The goal of these individual coaching videos is to provide bite-sized sales, bite-sized marketing advice and guidance for MSPs so that you can immediately incorporate them into your MSP that will hopefully pay off with either new leads or new signed contract clients at the end of the day. We are continuing our multi-part training series focused on helping MSPs develop a marketing operating system for their MSP. I'm once again being joined by MSP industry marketing experts, Mark Coatman, Dave Sutton from Wingman. Many of the MSPs that we work with on a daily basis, they continue to struggle with their marketing. They're struggling with prospecting. They're struggling with, you know, finding new quality leads for their MSP, struggling with their sales process so they can convert those leads into new signed contracts for their business. So very excited to be able to continue this video series with Dave and Mark and focusing on how we can help MSPs improve their marketing and sales know-how and how to improve their overall outcomes and success of their marketing and sales activities. So continuing on in today's episode, we're continuing our deep dive into each of the eight different puzzle pieces. I'm going to bring our little puzzle deck back up for everyone. So we are continuing that deep dive into the eight different jigsaw puzzle pieces that MSPs really need to focus on to help them gain real success and real traction when it comes to their marketing efforts. Today we're going to be talking about the fourth puzzle piece that's needed for MSP marketing success, and that's all about how to be engaging. How can MSPs leverage, you know, different marketing campaigns, different outbound, you know, activities to generate warm leads, build a solid pipeline of quality prospects. We talked about implementing more passive types of marketing campaigns like drip campaigns in our Be Nurturing episode, but here we're talking about kind of taking charge and focus on developing and implementing a more proactive type of marketing campaign to help MSPs build their pipeline of prospects that they can engage with. So when we talk about be engaging, gentlemen, you know, we're talking about, again, taking the lead, outbound, where do MSPs start with that? If they don't have an audience today, how do they start building an outbound marketing campaign? So I'll begin this, Stephanie, I'm sure, you know, Dave will follow on after me. I think the first thing I want to talk about is the fact that be engaging works on a couple of different levels. This is about engaging with a new audience, but also it's about, and we'll talk about this as the session goes on, about actually being engaging, being interesting, you know, as well. So it works on a couple of different levels, but the place to start is funnily enough at the beginning. And at the very start of this series, we talked about the concepts of business foundations, marketing foundations, and really understanding what it is that you're wanting. Where are you going to be finding the sort of ideal customers for your business? And they may be ideal for all sorts of reasons. You may just like and enjoy working with a particular market segment. They might be the right type of fit for the sort of infrastructure you set up. They might be the right market vertical and so on. So having a really clear understanding, and we won't repeat all that again, but going back to that first episode of where you're heading as a business is the first place to start. But then the next level of detail comes in. You need to understand that there is indeed a big enough pool of potential prospects and audience for you to go and be engaging with. And Dave and I have seen examples where we've had MSPs come to us. There's one specific one that sticks in my mind, looking to target design agencies, for example, and I think it was sort of in the Midlands here in the UK. And the exercise that I'm now going to recommend that anybody goes through as they get started with this is to go have a look in the various tools that are available. And there's all sorts of different paid for and free tools out there to check that the audience you're about to go and attempt to engage with is big enough because there's no point in actually focusing real hard on an audience of, I don't know, there's only 20 businesses out there that would ever employ your services, which is fine if you're really, really niche and you're known and you're in demand. But typically, that's probably not a good place to start. So I think using the tools that are out there, making sure that the audience is indeed big enough. And if it's not, then maybe add a second one to it to give yourself a fair shot at doing some of this outbound work. So this is about filling the top of the funnel. So assuming that you then sized your market correctly and you do understand that, yes, indeed, there is there is enough of a potential marketplace for you. Where do you go about acquiring the relevant contact data for you to actually go and start working on this? And I think there are a few places you can go buy data, be wary of it. It won't always be 100 percent just because of the nature of the beast. I wouldn't be surprised if pretty much everybody watching this session has also got data lying around in their business. It will be in spreadsheets. It will be as a result of going to a trade show. It will be as a result of their aging CRM or whatever it may be. So you've probably got a few hundred names lying around without even trying. So don't reinvent wheels. Start there and maybe try and clean it up a little bit. And that would be a good starting point. But then the final thing I'll throw into this, this pool of data and something that Dave and I love, this concept. And we're speaking with real experience here. We don't only do this for MSPs. We're doing it for ourself in this sort of quieter summer months, which aren't really quiet at all. But the concept of building the Dream 100 and the Dream 100 came from, originates from a guy called Chet Atkins, a famous author. And he talked about this concept of just simply list the 100 companies that you would like to do business with. Some of them you may not stand a chance or certainly overnight, but put them down anyway. And I would recommend everybody does this because it means you can jump out of bed each morning and you know exactly where you are going to go and play, who the sorts of people are and specific people in this case that you're going to try and start to engage with. Now, it doesn't mean you can go sell to them tomorrow, but it means you know who they are and you might know or be able to identify three or four or five people within that business you can start to get to know. And we'll talk about that as this session goes on. But the Dream 100, we're building a Dream 500 right now. And it's a very therapeutic exercise that helps you to understand those businesses you really do feel that you could add some value to versus those who you just think, you know what, from experience, there isn't going to be a good fit. And that is just as valuable to know all those that you don't want to go and do business with. So that's where I'd start. Wonderful. All right. So we're working on defining our ICP, our ideal client profile. We're working on identifying our target market. We are, you know, focusing on building that Dream 100. And I talk about that a lot as well. We actually read that book, The Ultimate Sales Machine, in part of my MSP Sales and Marketing book club a couple of months ago. So I love the whole concept of it. I just want to kind of caution that if you're hearing Dream 100 and you're an MSP going well, I don't know, I don't have a hundred companies in my area. It could be the Dream 25. It could be the Dream 40. So I just kind of want to, because that came up in my book club saying I don't have a hundred in my territory, in my area stuff. And I'm like, OK, Dream 20, like just pick a number. But the whole concept of those are the types of customers that you would love to have as clients someday. And I love what you say. You know where you're going when you wake up in the morning. If you don't know anything that you're doing, at least if you know you have your Dream 100, you know those are the ones that you're targeting. So all that being said, what are the best types of marketing campaigns, outbound activities that MSP should be really focusing on to, you know, try and get some of these Dream 100 clients that you're talking about? That's where you want to build a cadence. And I think we touched upon this briefly with in one of the previous puzzle pieces, but that was kind of more of nurturing the inbound leads. But the same principles can apply to building a cadence of activity, starting with the less intimate and building to the more intimate of engagements. In fact, I was reflecting with our team just today on a series of clearly very automated LinkedIn messages that I've received personally, funnily enough, from some kind of quasi-MSP trying to sell me cloud services. And it made reference to, oh, you're a local company, so are we. And the message series went on over about five messages. And there was an incredibly tenuous link because they're the other side of the UK to where we are. So his message played on local and it just wasn't relevant at all. So when you think about the audience that you're targeting, think about what's relevant to them, what are their business pains, what do they care about, and create that sort of golden thread message first of whether it's an industry niche or it's similar businesses, perhaps, you know, white collar services that are likely to have similar pains. Try and find something of a lookalike between the audience you're reaching out to, because only then will you be able to craft a message that feels relevant to them and will resonate through your marketing engagement. So now to the kind of tactics. That's the sort of strategy of we've got an audience, we know where they are, we know what they care about, what their priorities are, and we have some success stories to be able to tell. As we explored in our Be Heard piece, you know, those success stories that people will resonate with. So you have all of that strategy. Now you need the tactics of that cadence of events where, as I say, start with less intimate. So things like email or telemarketing allow you to reach an audience en masse. Particularly email is probably the quickest way to reach the largest number of people. And turn up the heat on the relevance of that message by bringing in the stories you can tell and the problems you can solve to make the email cut through more. You know, average return, good return on an email campaign would be one percent. You know, they're talking very, very small here. And but you can turn one percent into five percent if you're engaging a slightly narrower, more focused audience that you know a bit more about. And therefore, you're able to make some better educated assumptions about their business and the solutions you can offer them. But that's not going to work in standalone. So, you know, one email is not a campaign. You know, maybe four emails is not a campaign. That's just a tactic as part of a multitude of things, a multitude of touch points that you should be operating to get more intimate as time goes on. So when you send out those emails, you know, initially you're warming people up. You're making sure that data you've sourced is valid and it works and the emails deliver. You can see opens and clicks. And then from the clicks, particularly, you know, telemarketing is not many MSPs forte unless you you're lucky enough to have an agency in situ or you have internal resources dedicated to that. Chances are owner manager, you're needing to do the sales. So you don't want to be spending hours and hours on the phone, you know, every day, every week, because that's what cold, broad outreach takes. So invest your time most sensibly in following up with the folks that have clicked and or opened your email. So you're creating an excuse for the phone call because you're following up on something you've already sent them. You know about their business. You've made some educated assumptions. You just now want to ask them questions to qualify them a bit further to make sure that you are a fit for one another. And it's amazing, even in this data paranoid age, people are still willing to share things like generally how many PCs they have in the business. What's their relationship like with their incumbent? How do they view technology? Have they heard about things like AI and what are they doing about cyber threats? What are they doing about compliance? You can build up that picture. You know, you won't achieve all of that in the first phone call. But if you can build up that profile over four or five, six phone calls over a number of weeks and months, you're establishing a profile around the businesses you want to serve. And even better, if that's a Dream 100 style list, you're gathering intelligence with every engagement that you're having with those businesses and identifying potential weak areas that you can then nurture and call them back when they say contract has six months left or we're thinking about moving premises soon or we're launching a new product or requiring another business. You spot those drivers for change within the business that you can then nurture and use that intelligence as part of your follow up. And I sort of made a small quip there to how LinkedIn automation could be done really terribly. But perhaps that's a tactic, again, taking it down a level on the intimacy scale of getting to the point beyond email, beyond calling. You're then connected with the right people because you send out LinkedIn connection requests to those folks in those businesses that you're engaging that have seen your emails, they've had your phone calls, they're then more likely to accept the connection request. And then you can reach out with useful content, invite them to follow your page. Every MSP struggles with followers for their LinkedIn company page. They struggle to get their organic content seen without putting advertising money behind it. So invite them to follow your page, tell them you've got tips that are relevant to their business. So they're encouraged to follow it because you're not trying to sell anything. You're trying to give them advice and guidance. And then consider other perhaps now old fashioned marketing techniques that will allow you to cut through, such as direct mail. I skipped over that as one of the high level, sort of less intimate pieces where you could send out something again if it's focused on their business, it's signposting them to case studies and success stories and another medium that you can follow up with email follow up on the phone. So they're a sort of mixture of things that I would say to cast a net wide to as many prospects as you can find that fit the target demographic with things like email and direct mail that you can do fairly inexpensively to a wider audience and then turn up the heat with the intimacy through follow up phone calls and leveraging LinkedIn to build that personal connection with people as they become aware of your brand and become more familiar with you over time. I'm going to throw something in very, very quickly just to finish off that direct mail piece. And we've seen this working, the concept of a wow box, Stephanie, you know, where nobody receives anything anymore through the mail. It's always such a pleasant surprise. And sure, you could send something, you know, which is which is just paper based. But of course, it costs more. But if you do want to get that cut through and you send somebody a box with some cool things in it, which is relevant to them as well. So you doing this thing in the news, I've sent you this thing as a result. There's an immediate connection. And the chances are someone's going to take a phone call off the back of that if you send them something which is, you know, vaguely valuable. So, oh, there's a pun coming up. I think I'm thinking outside the box by using a box. It is not a bad idea. Sorry. Yeah, I've also heard it called like lumpy mail as well. Like, again, that unexpected. So you're going to get you know, you're going to get you're going to be memorable, right? Because I think for the direct mail piece, you know, we've been in this industry for for many years, you know, it was it was huge back, you know, 21 years ago when I was starting to work with MSPs. And I think it kind of fell out of favor. But when you think about, you know, the amount of emails that we get in a day now and how much mail we actually get, we get very little mail. So sending a wow box, a lumpy piece of mail, that is that's going to be open because they're going to be curious because we don't get that kind of stuff. So I love that kind of line of thinking, especially if it's well-timed. You know, you can leverage sort of that LinkedIn connection and tools like Sales Navigator to, you know, stalk in the nicest possible way those firms, particularly if you've got a golden list of firms that you really want to work with to monitor. Has there been a new hire? Have they had a new CFO that's come in and therefore she's likely to review IT because that's probably part of her purview or they've just won an award or something like that, that you can help them celebrate their successes. So, you know, that that timeliness of that sort of wow piece of mail can then achieve a lot of cut through because you just hit somebody intelligently and then they feel, especially in an age of big automation, AI everywhere, we're all now becoming accustomed to seeing marketing and thinking, oh, that's not personalized. Somebody's just doing something with an AI tool. But seeing that box land that's well-timed, welcoming someone that joined the firm six weeks ago, that's hyper personalized. Somebody's had to spend time and energy thinking about that. And as Mark says, then they're likely to pay more attention to it. Absolutely. So we've talked about telemarketing. We've talked about email. We've talked about direct mail. Any other activities that MSPs could use to, you know, on a on a proactive, outbound basis to try and fill that their pipeline? Yeah, I'll jump in here. There's something we've not. Well, I touched on very briefly. We've not really talked about and I and I do think it's it's underrated and that is the trade show. And I think it's a great way to to fill the top of that funnel. Look, you know, again, coming from our own personal experiences, you know, well, last time we were together, it was a trade show. It was at the Empower event. Empowered. These events work for a number of different reasons. Obviously, it's about starting conversations, which is a much, much more preferable term to the concept of lead generation. It's more normal. It's more human. So you're going to have more conversations. You're just going to get noticed in the particular industry you're playing in. And so people will say, you know, well, what trade shows? And this comes right back again to those fundamentals we talked about originally. And, you know, if you are simply playing in your local market, that's OK. That's that's fine. In which case, those sort of generic chamber of commerce type events are fine. In fact, any kind of local events just to put your toe in the water, I suppose. But if you are a little bit more focused on a particular market vertical, then you might need to travel a little bit further afield. And that's OK, providing you're able to offer that coverage. But, you know, go play in that particular industry association. Industry associations, again, are hugely underplayed. I believe being part of one and turning up to those networking events, making yourself known, climbing the ranks, if you like, so that one day you can have the confidence to say, you know, that trade show you are coming up. I see there's some speaker slots. Could I have 15 minutes? And by the way, we will pay the 2000 bucks for the booth or whatever it may be. And that combination, again, speaking from personal experience and seeing some of our clients doing this is perfect, because if you are up on stage, even for 10 minutes and you say something which is worth saying and people connect to it and resonate, rather than you running off, you've got a base, a permanent base for those 24 hours or three days or however long it is where people can come and see you, get the QR code on there at the end. And then suddenly you leave that trade show with having had 30 conversations and they become nurturable. They go into the top of that funnel. And if over time, you know, three or four or five of those start to turn into proposals and to turn into a customer and they're the sorts of accurate numbers we're talking about here, then you've won. But the other thing is, and you should never forget this, you have increased that marketing balance sheet. So even though you may only pick up two sales in six months time, there's 28 other businesses and more who've seen you. And so when you're there at the next year's trade show, perhaps the same events. Ah, timing's right. I saw you guys last time and so on. So timing, luck, preparedness, all the things that we've talked about. A couple of other considerations I just want to throw in there that a lot of MSPs would sort of have. The first one is imposter syndrome. Many MSPs would go, I don't know if we're comfortable enough to be able to focus down and and serve a real market. You know, do we stand to have enough credibility and authority if we were to pick a niche and to focus our marketing in, say, just one vertical? And as long as you've got existing clients in that market and you can build those case studies and success stories, I would say, you know, park that sort of personal view. You know, it's like AI. Everybody's an AI expert now that you hear speaking at events. You know, no one's an expert unless you're a creator, you know, that's actually developed one of these flagship products. Everyone's calling themselves an expert and people will look up to you because you know more than the layman on the street. So guaranteed, if you've served clients in a market, you will know more about technology and how it applies to their organization than most other folks out there. So that gives you the voice to go and speak in that market. And the second consideration I want to throw in is when we think about geographic reach, you know, often people will have geographic limitations of they're in a particular city or metro location and some may have hundreds or thousands of potential businesses. But if you appear to be the same as everybody else, you can increase that why factor that people will come to you if you are the that you've got that cut through as being the expert in any given market. Plus, it allows you to expand that geographic reach beyond your local area because people will care less about where you are if you're a subject matter expert. They'll come to you two or three states over or whatever because you are the go-to people in a particular field. So you can then sort of widen the numbers of increasing that luck of the folks you reach out to at the same time while focusing and narrowing the audience by picking a particular lookalike. It allows you to play both those things off against one another. So just a couple of things I wanted to share there that will be going through most folks' minds. Perfect. Yeah. And I love all like the imposter syndrome, I think is we get in our own heads. And I think sometimes we do have to remember that we do know a lot more than probably the average business person that we are speaking with. So I think that's a great point to kind of end this segment. So thank you, gentlemen, again, for crystallizing for MSPs watching today on what it means to be engaging, the tasks, the activities that MSPs need to be focusing on to help them generate warm leads in a proactive manner so they can build a quality pipeline of great prospects for their business. In our next episode, we're going to be moving on to discuss the fifth jigsaw puzzle piece that makes up an MSPs marketing operating system. And that is, how do you get followed? How do you develop your own personal brand as an MSP business owner that you can build authority in your marketplace? And Dave talked a little bit about that in today's episode. But how do you build that authority? How do you influence potential prospects? Because it is one thing to be found, it's another thing to be heard, but how do you get yourself followed by interested prospects? And that's going to be talking about. So hopefully you can join us in our next installment of building your MSPs marketing operating system on Tech it to the Bank.
