MSP Telemarketing Ideas For Faster Conversion
MSP Telemarketing Ideas:
- Plan a local event and use telemarketing to recruit attendees.
- Host webinars and use telemarketing to follow up with all prospects who attend the online event.
- Create rich offers (free hours of support, complimentary training) and use telemarketing to offer them to your prospects as initial opportunities to get to know your business.
- Start intentionally calling your network to ask for referrals.
- Host podcasts and use telemarketing to invite potential prospects to be your guests!
Managed Sales Pros offers MSP Telemarketing for these activities and more – all marketing initiatives are better when you combine them with great calling! You can learn more by scheduling some time with us!
MSP Telemarketing Combined With Other Initiatives
MSP Telemarketing can seem like an uphill battle – with dial-to-conversation rates decreasing, many MSP business owners are hesitant to make the investment in adding MSP telemarketing to their sales stack.
We believe you should try everything – MSP telemarketing included, so don’t ignore this simple to learn and easy to teach method of generating more and BETTER sales leads.
Ultimately you have to talk to a prospect before you can sell them managed IT services, cybersecurity solutions or even hardware – this post is relevant for ITSPs, consultants, VARs and MSSPs, too!
MSP Telemarketing Can Be Frustrating
MSP telemarketing takes a long time to produce wins.
That’s why it gets disregarded by so many impatient business owners.
We want wins.
We want them fast.
With your competitors signing three-year engagements, the odds on you calling a prospect at their exact right window for evaluating a new MSP vendor is almost zero. That’s why we use First Point of Contact lead qualification to make every dial a useful dial.
You’re not just looking for the clients you want to win today. When your MSP telemarketing program is done correctly, following a process, and managed to the correct key performance indicators, your MSP telemarketing program can build you a sales pipeline that will last years, not months.
MSP Telemarketing Requires Patience and Process Adherence
The biggest challenge with sales prospecting for most MSPs is the amount of time it takes to see success. Most of the time you won’t see R.O.I. from cold call prospecting for over a year, and that’s a long time for most companies to wait.
MSP Telemarketing Can Produce up to 1000% ROI over a two-year engagement
Here’s a webinar from Datto partner Jim Turner, where he shares their over 1000% ROI number from their MSP telemarketing campaigns with Managed Sales Pros. We’ve offered discounts to preferred vendors in the past allowing them to take advantage of our MDF programs – check with your vendors to see if they have similar offers at this time. (Here is a recent offering from Microsoft!)
We know that MSP telemarketing programs can and do produce over 1000% R.O.I for companies that stick to it for two years or more. We don’t all have the budget for two years of third-party cold calling services, though – so what should a company with a smaller budget and a shorter timeline for success try?
Well, don’t try an abbreviated cold calling program.
Cold calling works for some small project – events are an excellent example – and we offer small calling packages to cover off these exceptions. You need a lot of volume to find the deals you want.
One Quarter of MSP Telemarketing Is a Waste Of Your Budget
While we don’t make our clients sign long term contracts, we also advise companies to spend their money elsewhere if they aren’t going to partner with us and prospect for a full year. Three months of third-party prospecting with zero follow up afterwards will not be a valuable sales campaign.
If you’re looking for short term MSP telemarketing wins, we suggest trying some of the following ideas:
1. Plan an event
With or without your vendors – a hosted event gives you a reason to call new and current prospects. This purposeful activity allows you to grow your email marketing database, qualify or disqualify leads, and meet prospects face to face in a fun, no-pressure environment.
These shorter MSP telemarketing campaigns are effective for creating pipeline. Remember that once you finish the event you’ll need to nurture your leads, so plan accordingly. You may close a deal from an event, but the real “gold” in events is gathering referrals and building your reputation. We’ve partnered with Huntress, Cisco and dozens of other vendors to create amazing events – find some time to talk about your event here!
Don’t like cold calling?
You’re going to need to build a very aggressive referral network, and that’s still going to take time and process. Need some help planning your next event? Managed Sales Pros can help – just email hello@managedsalespros.com and we’ll help you plan and recruit for your event.
We’ve done hundreds of these events.
We’ll even help you find a vendor sponsor to share the cost of it! Events are priced individually, based on the amount of recruitment required. Events are a great, no-commitment way to try out working with Managed Sales Pros. Learn more about it by emailing us at hello@managedsalespros.com
2. Host webinars.
Having a reason to call takes a lot of the “cold” out of cold calling, and while webinars have huge no-show rates, they allow you to create opt-in contact databases for your marketing initiatives. Managed Sales Pros now offers a managed webinar solution – we can build your webinar, host it, and recruit attendess, then follow up with them. Webinars are priced individually and include list purchase (or cleaning your list), recruitment, development of the webinar, hosting the webinar and following up with registered prospects to secure sales appointments. Looking for some ideas on what kinds of events to plan? Check out this webinar on SmarterMSP!
3. Create An E-book or Other Online Resource
Create well-produced content on relevant topics that you can offer at no-cost to the prospects you are calling. There are so many ways to track how a prospect is interacting with your content. You can tailor your follow ups specifically to what your prospect is interested in. For example, if your calls direct your prospects to a content library and they continue to view security-focused articles, a follow up call hyper-focused on security increases your chances of moving the relationship forward. Managed Sales Pros can help you create your content, then track and follow up on your leads for you!
See some examples of e-books on MSP Telemarketing that Carrie Simpson wrote and co-promoted:
Datto: Cold Calling Made MSPEasy
Barracuda: The Ultimate Guide to MSP Cold Calling
The vendor-shared e-books are still generating hundreds of downloads – leads – every month. Find groups that can help you co-promote and co-author valuable content. I was very lucky to work with both Datto and Barracuda, who had brilliant marketing teams. I provided the content, they created and hosted the books – both turned out beautifully, and they’re both still free and relevant – so check out the best practices outlined in them if you’re trying to get better at MSP telemarketing!
4. Start Proactively Calling Your Network
Your best referrals will come from happy clients, so first and foremost your goal should be to ensure the satisfaction of your current client base so you can confidently ask them for referrals! Our security evangelism campaigns are a great way to determine your current level of client happiness, then create a managed referral collection process that leads to more testimonials, more case studies, and more opportunities to meet the people in their networks! We ask for the referrals. Then we ask for referalls from those referrals. No more cold calls – lots of warm calls – which leads to faster sales conversions!
Looking for more free ideas to grow your MSP faster?
Check out Carrie’s post; “1o Free Things You can Do Right Now to Grow Your MSP.”
While you could work with any cold calling company, let our clients tell you why they chose Managed Sales Pros!
At Dattocon 2018, Carrie Simpson was able to catch up with Managed Sales Pros MSP telemarketing client, Daniel Johnson of Machine Logic.
Daniel shared some tips for MSPs who are considering a potential engagement with a third party sales development firm like Managed Sales Pros.
Three Important Factors in Choosing an Outsourced Partner For MSP Telemarketing:
- Find a good fit for your business. Not every vendor will be a partner. Once you understand what you want from a vendor, find a company that matches the way that you like to work.
- Decide what you are great at and what you want to focus on. Then find partners that help relieve you of the tasks that you aren’t great at or don’t want to be doing. You run your business, and let your partners support you in being the best you can be.
- Give your partnership time to work, but don’t sign multi-year marketing agency agreements. If it hasn’t worked in a year, it’s not going to.
The MSP ASK! Sales Prospecting Process Works for MSP Telemarketing
Successful sales prospecting (cold calling, sales development, telemarketing, whatever you wish to call it) requires a process that ensures that you’re gathering all the data you need to create a solid sales pipeline, and isn’t about one-and-done calling.
Our strategy includes attempting to learn one new piece of information about every prospect on every call.
Your strategy should, too!
After we learn about your prospects, we manage that information, and collect even more using our MSP ASK! process that ensures we are growing the client database, identifying contract end dates, learning about competitors and qualifying opportunities.
If you’re only focused on sales appointments, you’re going to miss out on the long term benefits of sales prospecting, which include a predictable pipeline for years to come.
Learn More About MSP Telemarketing Before You Invest In Outsourcing
If you’re going to use cold calling as part of your sales strategy, we’d love to chat with you about our services – we can do the calling for you, we can teach you or your team how to cold call, and we can help you build a better cold calling process. Call or email us to learn more about how we’re helping companies just like yours win more business more often! You can also fill out our contact form for a call back.
If you’re looking for a small block of calling time to “try out” MSP telemarketing with Managed Sales Pros, we’d be happy to help you create one of the smaller programs described above!
Happy Selling,
Carrie Richardson, nee Carrie Simpson
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