A figure that gets thrown around often when talking about sales follow up is 12. But 12 what? A novice in the MSP sales world may think this simply refers to 12 outgoing phone calls, but there are several reasons why this isn’t a smart approach.
It’s definitely true that as a MSP, it’s vital to reach out to your prospects regularly. Persistence is key. However, it’s also important to be sure that you aren’t becoming a nuisance. This can cheapen the value of your time to engage in a MSP sales discussion, and by extension, cheapen your offerings. We’re then left with the question: What’s the appropriate balance?
The Two-Touch Approach
A great rule of thumb is to vary your outreach and use a two touch approach each time you do reach out to a prospect. For example, if you place an outgoing MSP sales call and wind up speaking with the gatekeeper, make sure you send a follow-up email. Set a reminder for yourself to send a LinkedIn connection request to the same prospect the following day. Already, you’ve initiated 3 sales ‘touches’ without an inundation of phone calls.
Don’t Forget Your Value Proposition
Another important aspect of MSP sales outreach is your value proposition. You’re not going to sell your MSP services if you falter when explaining their usefulness – specifically how what you offer solves a specific problem for your prospect and ultimately makes their life easier. A great way to accomplish this is by inviting prospects to engage in a more interactive way, such as participating in a MSP webinar that covers exactly how you solve the pain points your ideal potential client tends to experience. Even if something comes up and they’re not available to attend, you can still email them a recording of your presentation (of course, do this for all registrants, regardless of their attendance) – Now you’re up to 5 touches.
Summary
The above can easily be accomplished in just a few weeks’ time. Scheduling additional phone and email follow up will easily place you at the 12 touch mark within a months’ time. At this point, you’ll have a solid idea of whether or not the prospect is truly a sales-ready opportunity, or if you need to back off a bit and simply keep them in your nurturing campaign so your company and what value you provide to your clients stay top of mind. When the time comes for budget review or a crisis needs to be handled, your company is likely to cross the mind of the party in need.
Making sure your outreach is both consistent and varied can be a challenge, since of course, you want to follow this process for a myriad of leads simultaneously. Using a sales playbook with reporting functionality – a sales enablement tool offered in the Mindmatrix platform – will help keep your sales process on track.
Megan Cramer is a Marketing and Sales Enablement Consultant at Mindmatrix, providing strategic consultation on marketing and sales best practices, assisting with technical needs, and interfacing with leaders in our organization to help develop new processes and program additions to best serve our clients.