(Part 3: List Cleaning And Prospecting Essentials That Turned This Dead Broke Break-Fix Shop To $3 Million MSP)
Adam Spencer, CEO of 911 IT, sat down with me to discuss how he went from a dead broke break-fix shop to a $3 Million MSP. Today, we are talking about list cleaning and prospecting, and how essential a list is to grow a business.
Robin: How does earning three times more start with a 30 second phone call?
Adam: 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.
Robin: Can you explain your staffing plan?
Adam: We didn’t have any marketing people when we started. We didn’t have money for any marketing people… I was the marketing people. My wife helped me. I would go to work because I was still the technician and trying to run the company. I’d work all day, would come home, take care of the kids, put the kids to bed, and then would stay up for hours until two, or three in the morning and would work on marketing, creating the documents, customizing the things, getting things ready to go out, you know, stuffing the envelopes and then during the day would make those phone calls to follow up with those customers.
Robin: You were making the calls?
Adam: Yes, either me or my wife, Rachel. Then as we started bringing some customers, we said let’s get some help for this because this is working. Once you see something working, then you can start to scale that and say, well, instead of sending out 25 a week, let’s send out 50 a week. Well, to send out 50 a week, you need a bigger list, and you need more resources and more things. And then you scale that up to a hundred and then 150 and 250. And now we’re going to send out 500. So, you can use scale that. The big thing with that labor was when we started, we had no help. As we grew, we got more and more help and the labor cost now some of those are so high because we’re taking that list from 3000 to 6500 so that we can send consistently 500 out every single week. And then once a quarter we’ll resend to those individuals so there is some extra labor in there right now just because we have some extra list cleaners that we’re not always going to need. And so there are some things there as we’re scaling up that that change it a little bit.
Robin: So they’re not all full-time employees, right?
Adam: All of them are full-time but one.
Robin: So you have five full-time, one part-time. What are these five roles that you have?
Adam: Great question. List cleaning has been a big one. We have three list cleaners that will go through and do those phone calls for us so that we can scale up to that, that 6500 contacts in our farm list as fast as possible so we can get things moving. One SDR, will have that. We’re dropping off one of those list cleaners now and moving that to an SDR. So, we’ll have two SDRs and two list cleaners. Then I have kind of an admin floater person who helps me with getting all of the things printed, making sure we’ve got everything ordered because to send out 500 a week, that’s a lot of just kind of behind the scenes making sure we’ve got the products and they’re put together and then I’ve got somebody that just helps. All she does is just help stuff them and drop them off at the post office and then grab new ones for the next week and take them home, stuff them, and then drop them off at the post office the next week.
If we send out 100 letters, for example, we know that’s going to be roughly 200 calls that that person’s going to make because they’re going to make 100 for the first call, and the second call is going to be a little bit less, might be 70 and then call three, might be 50 or 40 calls or whatever, 30 calls. It just averages out to be just about double give or take. So, if we send out 500, we know that’s going to be a thousand phone calls we have to make that week, which is too many for one person. If that’s all they can do, which is 500 phone calls a week, that fills their day.
Robin: Okay, cool. that was a great conversation about list cleaning and prospecting. Right? I know you’re doing more than that. You’re doing newsletters and postcards, more mail, and all those things, and we will continue this next week and talk about how to get past the gatekeeper when calling and how to stay in front of your prospects now that you have a list and calls are going.
Check out Part 1: From Break-Fix To 120 Managed Services and Part 2: 67-Second Plan To Go From Struggling To Profitable.
