When it comes to growing your MSP business, one of the best ways to ensure growth is through sales. This may seem like a no brainer, but there are several methods to grow your business through sales that are not so obvious. While there are many options to choose from, it’s important to keep in mind that there isn’t a ‘one size fits all’ approach when it comes to applying these techniques...there is some experimentation involved. Today, we’ll be providing you with various tips for improving and growing your sales engine.
1. Get Technical Staff Involved with MSP Sales
Who better to get involved with talking to your prospects, than members of your team who are already well-versed in all things surrounding your product? Although many technical staff members may be less than enthused about speaking to prospects, encourage them in their ability by providing them with proper sales training. They already know the technology, so focus on the sales training so they’re comfortable speaking with both warm and cold prospects.
2. Best Practices for Tracking Growth in MSP Sales
There’s no point in growing sales, if you aren’t able to track it. Monitoring sales progress goes beyond seeing whether or not your company is moving in the right direction - it can also be used as an incentive. Depending on what works for your business, you can create goals for certain periods of time; whether it be daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, etc. It’s all about rewarding those who work hardest, in the best way you see fit.
One of the most important investments you can make in tracking sales growth is in a Customer Resource Management, or CRM, tool. Investments can sound scary, but an investment in a CRM is a decision you will NOT regret. As sales grow, there is a chain reaction that causes an influx of data. Without proper management, this data can become overwhelming and a headache instead of a useful source of information. Having a CRM is an excellent way to organize data which can allow your business to learn from your successes and failures, allowing you to ultimately benefit from the results.
3. Develop an MSP Sales Process
When developing your sales process, it really comes down to what works best for your reps. A typical process goes something like this:
- Lead generation/prospecting
- This is the time spent looking and receiving potential customers for your business.
- Initial contact
- This step revolves around the first opportunity to speak with your new contact, whether that be a cold call or via email.
- Technical presentation
- This step is a great chance to rope in your technical staff to give some expertise to your prospects that have questions about your product.
- Close
- The best step: finally making (or not making) the sale.
These individual steps are imperative to the process, but how you approach each one ultimately depends on your business and the individual strengths your team members have.
In conclusion, sales is by far the most effective way to ensure growth for your MSP business. When designing a sales process for your practice, it’s imperative that you experiment with different options to find the right fit. These processes are not uniform and can vary drastically from business to business, even rep to rep. It’s crucial that you let the specifics of your business determine the foundation of your sales configuration and operation. Most importantly, set goals to achieve and track your growth that occurs along the way.
Bonus - Join Us: We hope that you have found this article helpful. Looking for more sales tips? We’re hosting a webinar with MSP sales superstars on July 27th, Selling BDR Made MSPeasy. Reserve your seat here.
Bryan Hauptman is senior VP of global sales at Datto Inc. Read more Datto bogs here.
