No more Mr. Nice Guy. If you’re a managed service provider targeting small and mid-market customers that have small IT staffs, here are two rather timely pieces of advice that I picked up at the Ingram Micro Seismic Partner Conference.
The first piece of advice comes from Paul C. Dippell, founder and CEO of Service Leadership: When trying to score business with small and mid-market companies that have dedicated IT managers — DON’T schedule the meeting with the IT managers. Instead, bypass the internal IT managers entirely and go directly to the budget owners, decision makers and business owners.
The reasoning: Why try to be warm and friendly with an IT staff that you may ultimately help to dismantle?
The second piece of advice comes from a conversation I had with Mike Jones, CEO of ETG, and Gary Wiseman, president and CTO of masterIT: If you do score a meeting with a business executive or budget owner, insist that the company’s internal IT team is NOT invited to the meeting.
In fact, hold the initial executive business meeting at your own office — where you’re on friendly ground. Now, you’ll be able to discuss customer needs and your value proposition without the customer’s IT managers attempting to sabotage the conversation.
In some ways, the advice sounds a little harsh. I’ve covered corporate IT issues and CIO perspectives since around 1992, so I don’t want to sound like I don’t see the value of internal IT resources. But Dippell, Jones and Wiseman make a compelling case for getting more aggressive, and hosting the initial customer conversation on your home turf — without inviting internal IT to the game.
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Posted In: Master MSPs | Sales
Tags: ETG CEO Mike Jones | Managed services sales strategies | masterIT | MasterIT Gary Wiseman | Mid-market Managed Services | Paul Dippell | Service Leadership
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While I agree that there may be a time for this, I do not think that these should be hard-fast rules. There were plenty of other presenters that made the point that the IT-Managers in many of these organizations had their “hair on fire” and would welcome you in the door… even help you get meetings with the CEO-CIO-CTO. You just needed to present the case that you were there to help the IT-Manager be more efficient by taking on the responsibility of dealing with the day-to-day management tasks that distract his attention from driving the business forward.
Once you hat that “in,” you could then work little by little to gain the trust and contacts to eventually take more and more of the pie.
I’ve attended many conferences over quite a large array of topics and this year’s Seismic Partner Conference was BY FAR the best event I’ve attended. Yes, the presenters were great (I guess I’d even lump Joe’s talk in this category), but the hallway and lunch conversations were exceptional! If you have a chance to attend next year, GO! You won’t regret it.
Joe, I agree, these are good suggestions that should be plugged into the formula to some degree, but Charon makes a compelling point.
I see no reason why one couldn’t gauge the best way to proceed within the profiling/qualification process. If you are asking great questions and being a good listener then you should be able to identify whether the client’s headache is a a staff/personality issue, a staff/process issue, or a staff/resource issue. If the first, great advice to throw the opening pitch of the ball game on home turf, otherwise I go with Charon’s technique.
Charon79m, Erik: No doubt, one size does not fit all. But certainly, the customer qualification process was a big theme at the event.
We are approaching managed services with a very opportunistic outlook. Every customer can benefit from managed services in one way or another. Some may buy into an entirely outsourced IT model while others may only want to leverage monitoring and alert notification. In any case, we come to the table with solutions that best meet the customers needs.
We do, however, try to reach a C-Level before we reach an IT Manager. Our value proposition is not a technical proposition, it is a business proposition. If we can reach a C-Level, explain the ROI and lower TCO that comes from leveraging a managed service provider we almost always win. If we are pushed down to an IT Manager or Director of IT we typically have to fall back on portions of managed services like helpdesk only or monitoring and alert notification.
Doug: Congrats. I noticed you delivered a daily double today, posting a comment here and on TheVARguy.com. Thanks for your readership and perspective. I truly appreciate it.
-jp