Thanks for continuing to join us through our eight week series on pitching different points of entry to win more managed services business. This week we are pitching the marketing department.
Now, we’re aware that marketing likely doesn’t make the IT spend. However, here’s something you need to understand – marketing answers their phones. Sales and Marketing are your two highest potentials for getting a real live person on the phone in any organization. If you are floundering trying to get an audience with the President or the Controller, and you want the business, you have to find another way in. Sales, as we discussed last week, is simple because you have something they want. Referrals. Marketing is a different animal — while responsible for helping the company drive revenue, their role is to create interest, not close specific deals. So how, you ask, can you sell a non-marketing service to the marketing department?
The short answer is you can’t. You need to sell them a marketing tool. Or at least have one to pitch to them. Assuming you are reselling several SaaS productivity tools already, you need to choose another for your arsenal. For example:
- Blacklist monitoring
- Marketing automation
- Landing page generators
- Cloud based Contact Centers
- Contact Management
We don’t shill for any particular service over others, but there are literally thousands to look at it. Start exploring your options and choose the ones that make the most sense to you. As you move your current and future clients towards the cloud, the odds are you will do it one application at a time, and marketing doors are always open. Your partners will teach you how to sell and support their solutions. Don’t try to be everything to everyone – pick a few solutions that dovetail nicely into the services you already offer.
Once you engage with the marketing department — and our post today refers to both over and under 20 seat organizations — you can easily ask to discuss other solutions with other team members You won’t win a managed contract from marketing, but you’ll win the opportunity to be championed in through marketing. Even if you don’t sell a marketing solution to this company (hint, that’s not your end game, eye on the prize) you can nurture this relationship and meet the members of the team you CAN sell a managed contract to.
If you are picking up on anything through this series, I hope it is that cold calling is all about starting relationships, and creating conversations that turn cold calls into warmer calls into warm leads into hot opportunities. You aren’t going to win them all. You aren’t going to win more than ten percent of them, statistically. The difference between a warm introduction and a cold all is a ten percent conversion versus a one percent conversion. While you may be reading this thinking “I’m not going to start selling 30/month marketing apps”, think about the difference that extra nine percent will make to your MRR long term. If you call 100 companies absolutely cold – meaning you have no reference to any shared contacts, groups, organizations, associations or friends – you will likely get a meeting with ONE person. Of the ten meetings you get, you’ll likely close one to three, depending on the level of qualification and where they are in their buying cycle. If you call 100 people where you can reference your relationship with their Director of Marketing, you will likely get to meet with TEN of them.
So if you can close one deal for every thousand cold calls (that’s the math…break it into manageable goals or it seems very daunting!) the law of numbers dictates you should be able to close ten deals for every thousand warm calls. The more people you make contact with in an organization, the more warm leads you have to pursue. Add marketing tools to your cloud services practice and it can pay off with managed services contracts long term.
As always, thanks for reading, and Happy Selling! Like what you read? Sign up for our newsletter by filling our our contact form here!