Sales and Marketing Working Together

Nailing down the overall success of a MSP marketing campaign is something rather elusive, because success can be defined in several different ways in the marketing world. Very often there is a mix of both marketing and sales processes that spur the conversion of a lead into a customer (it’s definitely a rare unicorn situation when just one marketing message is solely responsible for new business acquisition). Tracking opportunities over time is definitely a sales activity, but concurrently you want to keep using nurturing marketing messaging so that your company stays top of mind with your leads.

Considering the technology industry in general, the sales cycle for MSP/IT services (particularly managed services contracts) tends to be lengthy and sometimes rather involved. Some MSPs and technology salespeople feel the rub due to the length and complexity, because often when you think of successful marketing you’re more prone to think of something tangible and a decision that gets made kind of hastily.

That should shed some light onto the intermingling between marketing and sales, specifically how it tends to play out in the tech world.

Metrics and Analytics – What to consider, how to draw conclusions, and what to really care about

As far as how many emails you need to send, how many click-throughs you’re looking to achieve… It’s a big picture effort. Make sure your messages are formatted following best practices, so your prospects aren’t inundated with material, but the messages are sent frequently enough that you stay top of mind. Don’t overwhelm your recipients with walls of text, as most will navigate away quickly. Keep the ‘meatier’ content available through clicking a Call to Action button. Contacts who click through are telling you through this action that they’re more engaged and interested in learning more.

Consider employing these best practices with any marketing collateral you create:

• Keep the messaging short and sweet
• Create Call to Action buttons to link out to more in depth information such as an e-guide or a certain page on your website
• Use personalization so your recipients feel that the message is specialized for them
• Send your messages from a person, not an entity – This fosters familiarity
• Consider frequency – Try to avoid sending more than one general, educational message per day – Event invitations and reminders, or communication during the sales process (once a lead has converted to a true opportunity) will naturally happen with less ‘breaks’ in between

Another very important thing to remember – Best Practices are guidelines that have proven generally successful – There is no ‘secret sauce’ that guarantees you’ll convert your leads into customers.

Here are a few examples of what you/your team needs to be doing regularly to ensure that your marketing efforts are coalescing and resulting in general brand awareness and engagement, and also pushing influencers and decision makers to consider becoming your customer:

• Keep an eye on prospect activity – Who’s opening emails, clicking links, viewing eguides, visiting the website?
• Outbound phone calls to the folks above
• Follow up those calls with a personal email (you can send through our Outlook plugin for tracking)
• Offer something custom of value – A Lunch and Learn event, hosting a webinar, etc. – You can work with our team following the Campaign Guide to create a campaign that advertises the event or service bundle you’re promoting
• Connect with your prospects on social media – Request personal connections on LinkedIn, and following businesses on all social platforms and engaging with their posts by liking and sharing
• Networking in general – Be active in the Chamber, attend events, consider working with a referral partner (Prospect isn’t a good fit? Pass it along and vice versa.)
• Keeping up with SEO elements – Ensuring that your meta information is up to date and will draw in folks who are searching for solutions that you can provide
• Additional online tools like Google AdWords or paid ads on social

Another big thing to keep abreast of is your list quality. A high quality list is almost guaranteed (almost!) to result in better metrics when you get down to analyzing your open rates and click-through rates.

To learn more about what makes a list qualify as stellar, you can check out this blog: The importance of quality contacts.

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.