Guest Blogger: Blair Humienny
The holidays are notorious for inflated prices for airtime and ad space, while real estate for social posts is overcrowded. On top of that, people are typically in the shopping and holiday mindset, making getting any message through difficult.
So, do you try to compete? If you’re not doing something tied into the holidays and New Year, it looks out of touch, but you don’t want to waste effort trying to outpace an unwinnable race.
One of your best bets is utilizing a structured, well-thought out campaign. More involved campaigns (events, gift packages, etc.) should have started being planned in late October, but it’s not too late to start a nurturing campaign in November or early December. (If you are going to order branded items, make sure to look at manufacturing/company holiday schedules.) A good nurturing campaign will take into account end-of-year sale opportunities and best delivery, so it’s important you start with an overall goal and plan.
Some high-level tips to keep in mind while starting:
A good thing to look into while deciding whether you have the resources, is your vendor MDF (marketing development funds). If you haven’t done so for the year, see if you have any MDF that won’t roll over into the new year that can be used for hosting a year-end event for current clients. But, be aware, channel partners usually need to follow up on their sales activities, prospects & vendors. Make sure to account for holidays and employees having an extended out-of-office directly following the event.
For deciding on the avenue of outreach you want to take, you can help narrow down your choices by consultant stage. For example…
Let’s focus on prospects (contacts who are close to signing), cross-sell clients and upsell clients. This can be a good opportunity for MSPs to take a more holistic look at what prospects and upsell/cross-sell opportunity clients are doing and what they need.
The last three months of the year tends to be a good time to target businesses who have an in-house IT because companies likely to be trying to spend down their budget. Messaging centered around supplementing your in-house IT team with outsourced managed services may resonate more with businesses facing an end-of-year budget spend. This is also a good time to check end-of-the-year promotions your vendors might be running. Try taking advantage of a Cyber Monday special to help keep your margins at the same percent, as opposed to eating the discounted rates if you were to do a promotion on your own. Concurrently, you can look into helping managed services customers extend their service with similar last-minute renewal pushes.
For clients that you’ve been trying to get to expand their suite of tools or services, this is the perfect time to look into pushing out more messaging around specific products and services, as opposed to general, “What is an MSP?” content. This can be done through educational email drips, and then having your Sales team follow up with contacts that interacted with specific emails.
Getting into the gritty details, you need to figure out the number of touchpoints & avenue of outreach that match what you’re comfortable with, and what best practices suggest. For example…
- Upsell/cross-sell clients and prospects – An email-drip before the holidays announcing a promotion should have 2-3 emails, with a week delay in between, until the third week of December. The same goes for anything involving Cyber Monday. Try to start three weeks out from launch date if you’re planning on promotions. If you’re planning on an event, follow the same plan-of-attack, going back from the event date, but include a landing page on at least two of the emails in the drip to collect information.
If you’re part of the MSP Advantage Program, you know that you can work with our team to fully flesh out a campaign. Your Consultant and Concierge team can help you create an email drip, along with related landing pages and social media posts.
So, using the above tips, we can make the following plan of action.
You can fill in your own plan using the blank version of this flow chart. (Download here)
The most important thing you can do to set yourself apart from competitors is making an actionable follow-up plan for the new year. Don’t just send out holiday cards, write down who you sent them to, even if it’s in a simple Excel file. If you have a CRM, you can use a new field or note, so you can organize them to reference later. If you’re working with MSP Advantage, make a Recipient List of contacts you’ve reached out to, then set reminders in your Sales Playbook to give them a phone call or email follow-up in January. Once the new year rolls around, use your holiday campaign as a reference point for your sales conversation. This will give you something more meaningful to talk about, and remind them about your generosity. The best way to make sure this gets done is to physically assign it to a specific team member.
The year end is hectic; we all know that. But, with planning, you can take advantage of the established industry flow to really escalate your final months.
If you want to learn more about the MSP Advantage and IT Advantage programs, and how they can make preparing for the holidays easier, reach out to our skilled team for a demo today.
Blair Humienny is a client service & marketing specialist at Mindmatrix. She trains customers in Mindmatrix marketing automation and sales enablement software. She also provides ongoing, high-level marketing/sales consultation and analysis to small-to-medium sized B2B companies. She works closely with other team members on various accounts, handling support requests and managing internal projects.