Do you find yourself being successful in a sense of getting opportunities all the way to the closing point but falling short on closing the deal? You have been through cold calling, going through all of the steps from a discovery call to an onsite assessment, but get to the point where proposals just sit there. Sound familiar? You are not alone.

Robin: I’m a salesperson, so I’ve been in sales carrying a quota. Well, now I run a business, but for awhile it was almost equal. Even still today, I’m still in sales. The most important step when following up is having a CRM or what we call MAP (Marketing Automation Platform). I am telling you, get your follow up process automated. You need to be organized so there is a systematic approach to following up with your prospects. This will keep you from burning them (and you) out.

There are two areas you can be an expert in and gain major credibility. There are salespeople who have expertise on a product, meaning they know everything about their product. Then the other area is the knowledge of their customer, meaning they understand who they are selling to and what they want. Really good salespeople, know both. They know their product or service really well, but they also know their customer even better. So, they understand their customer’s needs and wants. They know their customer at such a level where they know what they want before the customer even asks for it. If I go to my clients (and I’ve had this on multiple occasions) and ask them, are there any hot news or trends we should be writing an article about that you guys would want to put on your blog? And it’s like looking at a forest full of owls. They don’t even know. They’ll come up with something if I force them, but they don’t even know what to ask for. And so, I have to know my customers and their business and what’s going on. I have to know that deep enough where I don’t even have to ask them. I just know what to write.

You want near immediate cleaning and qualification, which can happen with the next step. This is really an immediate phone follow up for all web leads. When a web lead, someone’s on your website and they opt in, you want to call them like right away, immediately. If it is an offline lead then you want to follow up within 24 hours. Example, you are at a trade show event and you meet somebody and they give you their card, you want to call them the next day.

Let’s look at some of the ways people mess this up. One way is they just do a poor job of explaining the necessity of managed IT. 15 to 20 years ago, everybody did block hours projects and cyber threats weren’t what they are. But with the regulatory compliance and the threats that are out there, every single business owner running a business, even a small one with two or three people, needs somebody looking over their shoulder, making sure they are secure, making sure nobody is getting into their email and spoofing their email to customers or employees. Over and over again, we hear people getting in and spoofing emails and they get a secretary to move money out of one account into another account, all through email. Or they get in and they hack it. As the business owner is logging into their bank account, they’re grabbing their credentials and stuff is happening.

A topic that comes up a lot is raising prices. This is something I have been very actively taking on in my market and with my existing customers. The cost of services and providing MSP services is going up. The cost of everything is going up. And, if you don’t raise prices, you’re going to start seeing your bottom-line net profits erode very quickly with that.

Toward the end of 2021, we started cleaning our list with a phone call. Our previous way of cleaning a list didn’t give us reliable information. We were also spending our marketing dollars on many companies too small to be able to afford our services. Our phone calls didn’t take long, about 30 seconds. We would talk to the business, find out the correct company contact, and find out how many computers the business had. We would let them know we would send out a letter and when to expect the package. Our marketing list began to grow with bigger companies and correct information. We immediately saw an increase in sales after implementing this process, and we were seeing 3X the results we had previously gotten from sending the exact same number of letters. We attributed these results to knowing the correct contact to send the letter to and having a list filled with companies that fit as a sweet-spot prospect. By the end of 2021, we had accomplished great things. Since joining TMT, we have grown our MRR to $100,156. We also learned an important lesson in 2021, which caused us to lose the sale of a $6,000-a-month prospect. We didn’t have enough credibility or authority in our marketing materials; this would become a main objective for 2022.

We don’t typically start promoting webinars until about five days before and it is mostly digital because if you promote it sooner, you’ll get registrations but show up rate is low because people register and then they forget and they don’t show up. Now you can always do a mailing with a QR code with a CTA to go enroll, get instant access to, we could call it a digital workshop or a virtual event, you can use it like something like that. Right? And so, with webinars though, if you’re doing digital marketing, email, social media, you can even do some calls and stuff like that. You know, five days out right now.

Early on, we had zero marketing and did not have a clue on how to market. Converting clients was our very first. Once we did that, then we were no longer struggling to pay bills and had all our money at the first of every month. That was when things got much simpler. Our next step was finding what other low hanging fruit can we get, and the low hanging fruit was what else can we sell our clients? Can we sell them phone systems? Can we sell them email hosting? And then when we had sold them everything we could think of, that is when we shifted our focus to get new clients.