Summer Prospecting Strategy for MSPs
Your summer prospecting strategy doesn’t need to be complicated. It’s much better when it isn’t. The more complex your prospecting strategy, the less likely it is that you (trying to do a hundred things, not neglect your kids, take a holiday or leave early on Fridays) will complete the tasks you need to, in the order you need to, in the time frame you need to. Those three factors make up the entirety of a displacement nurture strategy, and skipping them means you’re likely going to wonder in October why you lost some great opportunities to your competitors. If you’re fortunate enough to have a sales rep or sales team at this point in your growth, they’re also trying to balance enjoying their first mask-free summer with keep their motivation high in a traditionally frustrating sales period.
Every year, I write a post reminding people that if they stop prospecting for three months, they decimate their pipeline for the next nine. When your pipeline slows down, it impacts your business for years, not months. Every call not made is a follow up action not scheduled. Every follow up action skipped when you ignore your prospecting schedule in favor of something more “fun” or something more “urgent” is an opportunity you’ve handed to a competitor.
Why Is Summer Prospecting So Frustrating?
Your summer prospecting strategy need not be frustrating. Your summer prospecting strategy can create some meaningful interactions and form the basis of great relationships when managed correctly. Starting a new prospecting campaign in the summer can be challenging, but it’s only frustrating if you’re focused on outcomes over process. Process wins deals. Great outcomes are the result of great process.
Steps To Create A Summer Prospecting Strategy for MSPs:
- Create realistic Daily/Weekly/Monthly Targets for sales activities.
- Schedule time on your calendar for your sales activities, treat this time as you would an important client meeting – don’t push or skip it.
- Create a follow up structure and cadence that is easy to manage, and adhere to; then stay disciplined.
- Eliminate as many steps as possible, automate anything that doesn’t require personalization.
- Follow Up and Follow Through
- Use your summer passions to your advantage – your prospects may prefer sitting outside on a patio or playing a round of golf, too!
Let’s break these tasks down:
Create a Realistic Sales Plan
Keep it simple. If you currently do an hour a day of prospecting, you’re not going to prospect MORE during the summer if you have traditionally struggled to focus on prospecting. Consider creating a simple schedule. Note: this is a schedule for a business owner who spends some of their week prospecting, not a schedule for a full time sales executive!
Monday:
Make 10 cold outbound calls to potential prospects – find them by searching Linkedin, and ideally, find people connected to clients you support who are already happy and enthusiastic referral sources. Leave detailed voicemails if you can’t reach your target. Make sure to qualify the lead by talking to anyone who answers the phone (how many computers do they have?) so you don’t spend precious summer prospecting time chasing companies that aren’t a good fit for your business.
Tuesday:
Reconnect with former clients, follow up on bids you lost, and prospects who’ve ghosted you. Set aside one hour minimum to work on re-engaging previously interested prospects. Remember, a lot can change in two years!
Wednesday:
Create content – write a blog post, shoot a short video, create simple graphics to accompany them – update all your social profiles with fresh content and tag people in your community to encourage engagement. Is anyone you don’t know reading/commenting on your posts? Make sure to connect with them and add them to next week’s call sheet!
Thursday:
Follow Up Day. No new calls, just follow up activities. Mix up the time you do this so you’re not always calling every company at the exact same time. Try calling in the morning some days and in the afternoon on others.
Friday:
Find or create an out of office opportunity to network – golf, socializing at a common summer hangout in your city. Make it a goal to hand out five business cards (and get five back) somewhere that isn’t in your office. Tracie Orisko networks at the pool, I network at the airport lounge. Even better, find some referral partners and meet up on Fridays to exchange information and enjoy some patio time!
Schedule Time On Your Calendar
If you’re intending to focus on a summer prospecting strategy, it’s best to begin slowly and work up to a manageable place. If you don’t do anything now, half an hour a day is a good start. Gradually turn those thirty minute blocks into sixty minute blocks. Find things you can move off of your plate, then add another 30 minutes until you’ve reached the point where you’re making at least 200 calls every week, and doing all the actions required to support your new summer prospecting strategy!
Create An Easy To Manage Cadence And Start With The Tools You Have
You can easily trigger follow up actions in your PSA to support your summer prospecting strategy. You can also use an excel spreadsheet and your outlook calendar. We never recommend buying a new sales tool until you’ve demonstrated that you’ll follow a sales process for at least 90 days. Once you’ve got a great pattern down, and you’re liking the results, it may be time to explore more mature prospecting solutions.
Until then, don’t sign a contract for software, a data platform or add any other recurring expense. If you’re not going to stick to it, there’s no value in buying software that sits idle, or data that goes stale.
Eliminate Wasted Time and Steps
Research is a time suck.
A five minute phone call will tell you more than 20 minutes staring at someone’s LinkedIn profile – besides, that contact may not even be the decision maker.
Stop working without working, and pick up the phone.
You don’t need to set up a perfect email cadence sequence (that doesn’t exist) but it is nice to eliminate some of the work so you can dial faster. If you’re not automating anything in your sales process, spend some time thinking about what takes up the most of your sales time – if you feel like you’ve accomplished a lot, but your numbers don’t reflect it, you’re likely spending too much time on tasks that don’t make an impact.
For many, the biggest time suck is writing elaborate emails that no one reads.
Even if you haven’t automated any part of your prospecting emails, you can easily cut and paste the same message into cold emails and follow up emails instead of writing a new one every time. Can you trigger an activity that schedules a prospect “touch” on your follow up day? That will help keep you organized. Me, I like to use my outlook calendar to schedule things, instead of my CRM – I always use the same text in the same order for the activity ” Follow Up – Client name – Client Company – Phone number” I use a click to dial integration so I can click the phone number right from Outlook.
You can also find creative ways to use Teams to keep all your data together.
New calls in one tab, follow ups in another.
Don’t overthink it, don’t overspend, and don’t burn your sales time.
Summer Prospecting Strategy and Follow Ups
Remember, you have one day for follow up activities – unless the prospect requests a different follow up date.
Keep on top of follow ups.
They’re the most important part of prospecting.
If a prospect wants to be called back mid-August and you decide to skip your follow ups that day, you run the risk that your competitor calls them purely by coincidence. Prospects remember very little about the calls they’ve received, so while it may not be you calling, they may think it is as they recall the conversation they had with that IT company last month…
Losing a deal because you didn’t feel like doing your follow through activities sucks. You also will not remember who you were supposed to call once you’ve got lists of hundreds of callbacks to make! Be meticulous and thorough. Documentation and process matter a great deal for sales success.
Create Great Opportunities To Build New Relationships
Your summer prospecting strategy shouldn’t be filled exclusively with tasks you hate. Reward yourself weekly with time out of the office with new prospects and referral partners! Start with one on one meetings, and progress to group activities. If you have a favorite place to go, host a late afternoon happy hour and invite everyone! We do this regularly, and even if you invite 100 people, you’re never going to have 100% attendance. If no one joins you, you have a nice quiet lunch, if people do join you, you get to network and prospect. Don’t worry about booking space, just arrange to meet people at a bar. The cost to you: some snacks and drinks for anyone joining you. Get a little more advanced and encourage your invitees to bring a prospect of their own! By next summer you could have a full-blown networking event on your hands!
We’re getting ready to onboard new MSPs for August 1, 2022 – if you don’t want to figure out your own prospecting strategy, we’d be happy to do it for you! Schedule some time with us here!
Read Previous Summer Cold Calling Articles Here:
Smarter MSP: Don’t Believe Prospecting is More Difficult in the Summer
Smarter MSP: Hot Tips for Cold Calling in the Summer
Managed Sales Pros: Summer Prospecting Post 2017