What Is MSP Marketing? 21 Strategies To Drive New Business
Posted by Robin Robins On April 4th, 2017
As a managed services provider, you make IT support accessible to companies of all shapes and sizes. But without effective MSP marketing in place, you miss out on opportunities to acquire monthly recurring revenue and grow your business.
Through working with thousands of MSPs across the U.S., we’ve found many struggle with lead generation and closing the loop with new business. To win more clients, you need a well-executed MSP marketing strategy in place to draw in targeted customers and guide them through the sales process.
Over and over again, I’ve driven home the point that the ONLY real asset in your MSP/IT services business is your list and the RELATIONSHIP you have with it. You cannot produce a crop from scorched earth or with unfertile ground, no matter how good the seed, water, sunshine and tending, but too many business owners ONLY think about communicating with their clients when they suddenly wake up one day desperate for sales – and even then it’s sporadic, random attempts to motivate and persuade their clients to action, akin to a teenage boy clumsily and awkwardly trying to ask a girl for a date.
The best offer is no better than the worst offer if it’s thrown away unopened before your prospect reads it. So here are a few ways to “sneak” past the human spam filter in every office and get your letters opened.
Here’s a tough year-end test to give yourself that may not be a fun exercise to participate in. Get a clean legal pad of paper, a pen, a BIG cup of coffee and camp out in a place AWAY from your PC, phone or any other electronic gadget that might distract you. Get comfy. Then make a list of every improvement, advancement or breakthrough you’ve made or manufactured in your business in the following categories below. Make each of these a header on its own page and go to work trying to fill the pages, using one item per line (no cheating and writing in 48-point type like a five-year-old). Anyone who wants to send me photocopies of the pages they write out that I can publish will get $100 in Robin Bucks you can use in any way you like. 
This is a BIG year for Halloween with no shortage of things to keep you up at night. Random shootings, terrorist attacks, Zika virus, the continual rise of cybercrime, riots over police shootings, the obesity epidemic, little kids getting kidnapped, killed or harmed. Hillary. Trump. Colin Kaepernick. Pick your goblin. Of course, there’s NEVER a shortage of things that will scare the pants off of ya if you think about it. Not a morning goes by where I hug and kiss my kids goodbye and have a fleeting moment of panic over whether or not some nut job is going to target their school for a shooting. I don’t think my parents ever even gave that a moment’s thought—yet my brother, Scott Robins, was shot dead on a Monday morning in his driveway by a neighbor who had lived for 40+ years next door to us in the home we grew up in. No one saw that coming. It makes you realize that so much of what happens is totally, completely out of our control—and THAT scares me more than a brain-sucking zombie apocalypse.
One of the fastest ways to kill your lead generation mojo on any website, e-mail, landing page, etc., is to focus it on YOU and what YOU do, deliver, provide, etc. A really important point to remember about lead generation is this: ALL you need to do is sell the next step — be it to fill in the form, call a number, request a consultation, etc. To that end, there are two things to test out. The first is the provocative question. The second, flagging your prospect. For example, in the book Words That Sell, you’ll learn several provocative questions that are excellent subject-line starters for e-mails, headlines for landing pages and copy for all lead generation campaign openers, sub-headlines and, of course, headlines: 
Last month on the Q&A call, I was told by a member they had implemented one of my campaigns “to the letter” but still had gotten ZERO results. Obviously not a good way to start a call! This fired off a great discussion with Jeff and the team and revealed a need for me to document a process for what you should do if a “tried and true” campaign does NOT work. This will be a LONG article, but a very necessary one that you should highlight and have handy to reference.
By: Robin Robins,
There is no doubt about it: Robin Robins has helped more MSPs and IT services businesses to double – even triple – sales, profits and MRR growth than any other marketing consultant in the IT services industry, period.As a trusted advisor to over 7,000 IT services business owners for over 12 years, Robin knows a thing or two about what it takes to grow sales, recurring revenue streams and a profitable client base for an IT services business.