When it comes to your MSP, having a clear, considered and targeted sales plan is crucial. You understand the importance of the products and services you offer; you know how they can benefit your clients. But without a good MSP sales plan in place, your offerings will likely go to waste. As the MSP market becomes increasingly saturated, your success hinges on your ability to market, sell and implement your products and services for your clients.
Often, organisations mistake a poor sales record as a direct result of how capable their sales team is, but this is not always the case. Your sales team may be fantastic at closing deals, once they are able to speak directly with the client, but there are a number of contributing factors that go in to creating the opportunity for a conversation.
When building out your MSP sales plan, you can take several steps to ensure your sales staff are supported and able to carry out their roles successfully.
What Makes a Successful MSP Sales Plan?
While there are a whole host of different techniques that can be adopted when creating an MSP sales plan, Salesbuildr have identified some of the key elements:
An outline of the products and services on offer:
Prospective, or even existing, clients aren’t going to invest in the services you provide if they don’t fully understand the added value they bring. Technology and IT solutions can be difficult to understand, even for those working within the field, and your clients shouldn’t have to spend hours trying to get to grips with how your services can help. It is essential you have easy to understand, digestible and informative outlines for each of the products and services you offer.
A clear idea of who you’re selling to:
While casting a wide net can, in theory, present more opportunities, this can be a dangerous approach to your MSP sales. You are far more likely to be successful in a sales situation if you know the customer is interested in the products you provide. By identifying a customer avatar, or a specific demographic, you are able to sell the key features of a product or service you are offering, safe in the knowledge that it can benefit the customer’s business.
Mediums you should use to get their attention:
Different marketing collateral, or content, should serve its own, unique purpose. While white papers or eBooks provide extensive insight into a solution you may provide, or a topic that may be of interest to certain clients, they can be overwhelming. Prospective clients want an understanding of how their business will benefit from your products – that's the bottom line. Therefore, a short and concise – yet informative – blog could be a better choice; providing the client with an overview of the product, insight into its capabilities or features and, most importantly, the value-add it brings for their business.
A focus on outcomes, not commodities:
Your potential clients don’t need to know the ins and outs of each service you provide. They’re not interested in the minute details of how each solution operates, they simple want to know how it’s going to boost productivity, enhance efficiency and save them time and money.
A focus on upselling through gaining insight from current customers:
Your existing customers provide valuable insight on prospective MSP sales opportunities. It’s important to learn from your current MSP sales experience and implement these learnings when moving forward. If you have a variety of customers within a certain field, whose service and solution needs changed over time due to industry-specific factors, this could be an opportunity to upsell and cross-sell to others within the sector.
Use a Quoting Tool to Streamline Your MSP Sales
You can significantly boost productivity, enhance efficiency and streamline processes with a Configure, Price, Quote (CPQ) tool, like Salesbuildr. Salesbuildr is a web-based quoting tool and self-service storefront that deeply integrates with Autotask Professional Services Automation (PSA), as well as many European distributors. It enables your team to create great looking quotes in minutes, while automating large parts of daily workflows. This means that your sales team have more time to focus on forging relationships with your clients, promoting marketing collateral or campaigns and closing on deals. Remove the administrative, time-consuming and burdensome tasks with Salesbuildr.
Introducing Salesbuildr:
With years of experience within the field, Salesbuildr understand the importance of a good MSP sales plan. While we have covered a number of considerations you should have when creating your MSP sales plan, there are many, many more.
To find out how Salesbuildr can help drive profit for your MSP, get in touch with us, today!
