I’m very pleased to announce that Bob Andrews has joined Managed Sales Pros, Inc. as Director of Business Development, Managed Services.

bob

Bob joins us with ten years of proven and progressive managed services sales and support experience.   We first met Bob when he was the Director of Business Development for Solid Networks in California.  He became one of Managed Sales Pros first clients, and continued to watch the growth of our company through his most recent position with SOS Networks.

Tracie, Ashley, and I have really enjoyed building our company.  We’ve done a lot of things right, and we’ve learned a great deal about managed services as we’ve gone.  One thing became very clear to us this year — while we have learned as much as we could from our clients, from the many industry sites and publications we review and contribute to, and through attending as many events as possible, all of our experience with managed services sales was highly theoretical.  Cold calling is cold calling; it’s true.  We built our first campaigns using our extensive experience with cold call sales prospecting in other industries.  We took best practices from all industries and used trial and error with as many clients as would have us, and we won some and we lost some. We likely could continue on this path indefinitely experiencing moderate levels of growth and success. However, we wanted to add something to the mix that frankly, none of our executive team had:  actual, proven managed services sales experience from cold call to close.   We’ve hired Bob to help us create programs that result in better, stronger, leads that convert into sales.  That’s our number one goal this year.  We’re not focusing on “number of appointments” anymore.  We’re focusing on creating deep, valuable, predictable sales pipelines for our MSP clients.  We couldn’t do that without bringing in someone who’s already done it successfully for multiple MSPs and VARs.

Bob’s role will be two-fold.  First, he’ll be working with our MSP clients to identify challenges with market penetration and lead conversion,  and he’ll coach our team (and theirs, if required) to create better first conversations and stronger first sales appointments.    He will be creating new strategies for outbound prospecting to increase “stickiness” and “top of mind” for our clients.  He will continue to deepen our relationships and support our joint programs with MSP marketing partners like Ulistic, Equilibrium, Vertical Axion, KLA Group, Plan27 and Tridigital.  He will create better engagements for our clients with companies who have 50 or more seats and he will build  programs that convert the smaller 20-50 seat leads into sales opportunities faster.

His second area of focus will be to continue to grow our MSP client base.   You’ll begin to see Bob at events soon.  I know you’ll miss my late-night karaoke stylings, but my empire isn’t going to build itself.  You can connect with Bob on LinkedIn here:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/bob-andrews-a01bb77

What other changes can you expect from Managed Sales Pros this year?

  1.  Annual agreements.  We’ve gone two years without them — and of course, we’ll still offer you an out — who wants a client who doesn’t want to be with you?  Nobody.  Anyhow, my bank feels really strongly about this one, so don’t blame me; blame the truly archaic and risk averse Canadian banking system.  The good news?  Now that we have several years of data beneath our belts, we have been able to identify patterns, and the data tells a powerful and exciting story:  over 500% ROI on most programs, but it takes  from 12-18 months to begin to realize those results.  Give us a year.  We’ll bring you better appointments, higher conversion rates, and more MRR.  Current clients?  You’re grandfathered in for the next quarter.
  2. We’ve launched our new Business Builder program through the partners we mentioned earlier.    In a nutshell:  we nurture your Top 100 prospect list, and handle any inbound leads your marketing partners send our way.  We tested in several markets prior to launch, and we’re very pleased with the results.  Learn more about that program (and all our programs) here:  https://www.managedsalespros.com/services/
  3. New Reporting For Our MSP Clients.  We changed out our calling platform in Q1, and in Q2 we’re changing our CRM.  What does this means to our clients?  Useful, visually appealing dashboards that you can customize are on their way.  Thanks for your patience while we evaluated our options.
  4.  Super secret squirrel new offering.  Look for the announcement in May 2016.

Until next time, Happy Selling!