Inbound marketing should not be neglected when it comes to your installed base

There’s certainly lots of “hoopla” around inbound (aka digital) marketing and how it is potentially the answer to our lead gen woes – arguably most valuable to a recurring revenue business where low Cost of Customer acquisition (COC) is so important to profitability. Oh, BTW, I am guilty as charged re: that hoopla. With that said, 99% of what I see inbound marketing focused on is focused on acquiring new customer leads. That’s great! Who doesn’t want new customers especially when that new customer means high margin recurring revenue cloud services for a Cloud Solutions Provider or Managed Services Provider. How about your installed base of dozens, hundreds or even thousands of customers? Are you really effectively marketing to them? How are you doing that today - tech visits, mailers etc? Why not implement the benefits of inbound marketing to your current customers? Sell $1,000 in MRR to 50 customers = $50,000 MRR!!!!!

I’ve often heard “I hired a sale rep, it didn’t work out, six months, $30,000 lost and no sales” I then ask “Why didn't it work?” The response is often, “He/she was the wrong person or he/she didn’t work hard enough or he/she didn’t know how to sell our value prop, etc.” I then start asking questions around “What did you do, from the day he/she walked in the door, to manage that person to success?” The common response “I don’t have the time” or “I don’t know how to do that”. As the IT Solutions Provider (ITSP) owner/president, if you are going to bring on board a sales rep (any sales function) you must commit to the fact that “you are equally responsible for the success of that sales rep as he/she is”. Here is my ITSP sales management 101,

I was chatting with a VC friend of mine the other day. STOP! Yes, of all the VC's I know this one is actually a good guy! OK, back to the conversation. He knows the IT Solutions Provider space quite well and the differences between a VAR vs. MSP vs. CSP etc. and he has his fair share of opinions on what the right business model needs to be to achieve a good valuation and what those valuations can be. He's now interested in the this space as a potential investment area and he's had his research assistant look at and some typical IT Solutions Providers out there. He told me that both he and his assistant would go to some websites of these ITSP's and they could not for the life of them understand what they did, what their business models were and what value they provided to their clients. He went on to say a few other things that I thought were interesting to hear - 
"they all look the same to me and by the same i mean that they sell technology to the world" and "they don't seem to care what their clients and prospects see on their website". Lastly he said "don't they know we are in a digital world today and showing the world that you are a digital company via your website is mandatory?".

Yes football season is right around the corner!

There are profound changes awaiting MSPs as they move to the cloud, regardless of the business model (Cloud Service Broker, Integrator, Hoster or Aggregator). It’s no wonder that many MSPs are wary of this transformation. It’s fraught with complexity and risk.

Remember my MSP 101 blog walking through why and how the MSP model came about? A large reason why was the fact that the end customer (the 25 person law firm as an example) needed more smart tech staff/brains to help with the ever increasingly complex technology they were utilizing to run their business. It made no financial sense for the law firm to have all these smart and expensive staff on their payroll so they outsourced to an MSP that had economies of scale. Remember?

What the hell is this guy talking about? Just think about it.....Let's start with how managed IT services came about. Fifteen or so years ago managed IT services really started to happen. Why?

"Treat every end of month like it's the end of the quarter, every end of quarter like it's the end of the year and every end of year like it's the end of your life"

Wow! That's a blast from the past. I can't tell you how many times I've heard those words and also shouted them out while trying to grow a start-up to go public and even more so after we went public. I still here it but only 1/2 as much - with one of my two set of clients,

Say what? Yes, that's not a typo. Is marketing and selling Business2Business becoming more Educator2Persona? B2B is where a business has a widget well designed (hopefully) for the needs of another business and the marketing and sales goes something like this - go find the target business, find the decision maker, influencers, evaluators etc, sell your value proposition, go through a sales process and you'll get some percentage of those deals - so a business selling to a business.

 The cloud has provided the ultimate platform for any entrepreneur anywhere in the world to build something cool - their baby. And as entrepreneurs by our very nature we are optimistic. If you're an entrepreneur and you're not optimistic, that's a different conversation, you have a problem day one.

There – I said it – the IT sales rep as we know it will become extinct over time. Let me be a bit more specific here... I am referring to the expensive, bag carrying, face-to-face outside direct sales rep. Overtime they will go the way of the dinosaur - actually it's already happening.