A lack of focus on sales is a common error I see a lot of small MSPs make. Heck, most have no dedicated sales staff or sales plan whatsoever. The standard way of doing business is to wait for the phone to ring and hope for new business. This is a mistake. All great businesses are built with a strong sales attack.
No matter what size your MSP is, at least one person needs to focus their full-time effort on sales. Let’s face it, most of MSP owners avoid sales like the bubonic plague. Ever heard this old IT joke? “What do you call a geek who can sell.” The answer is “A millionaire.” There is lot of truth in this. Geeks who can sell are a rare bird. Bill Gates was one of them and we all know how his story ends. The rest of us aren’t Bill Gates. We would rather tinker with an exchange server than do a sales call. Just thinking about sales makes us feel dirty.
At the end of the day, you have three choices for improving your focus on sales.
- Do it yourself
- Bring on a business partner who excels at it
- Hire a salesperson
If you can afford it, hire best salesperson you can. It’s not going to be cheap to get someone skilled at sales, so don’t go bargain hunting. If you do it yourself, you will need to hire a tech to replace you in the field. Sales must be your full-time focus. It can’t be a here-and-there thing between doing service calls.
If you are small and just getting started, adding a business partner with sales ability makes sense. I have always held the belief that a highly technical individual partnered with skilled salesperson would be business marriage made in heaven. People choose business partners who have the same skill-sets they do. Two technical types seems to be a common pairing. To me, this seems redundant and adds nothing to the business. Partner with someone who excels in areas you stink at. And I don’t mean someone who knows virtualization. That’s just another technical skill you could learn yourself.
Once you have your full-time salesperson in place, you will need to formulate a plan of attack. Identify your ideal customer and how are you going to target them. If you hire a sales professional, set goals for them and hold them accountable to those goals. If you bring on a partner, spell out what each of you are responsible for and meet regularly about your progress toward achieving your business objectives.
I can one hundred percent guarantee you will never grow your MSP exponentially without prioritizing sales. If you are serious about taking your business to the next level, focus on sales.
Paul Barnett is marketing director for VirtualAdministrator, which offers hosted solutions for managed service providers. Read all of Paul’s guest blogs here. Guest blog entries such as this one are contributed on a monthly basis as part of MSPmentor’s 2010 Platinum sponsorship.
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I 100% agree Paul. Having a sales focus is the only thing that will grow your company and it is what allowed my former company to reach the top of the industry.
I’ve observed that there is a “Field of Dreams” mentality in this industry; if you build it, they will come. Automation, Cloud, VoIP, SaaS; if we only had those things then I could land more customers. The truth is that you will only succeed with a functioning sales engine and by having the focus to make that your top priority in your business.
The hardest part about sales is committing to do it day in and day out. If you can do that then you can learn how to implement a functioning sales engine that adds new recurring revenue every month. Don’t believe me? Ask any of the members of TruMethods
Bob Penland
CTO
TruMethods
http://www.trumethods.com
Bob,
You are right on the money. Sales requires a day in and day out commitment.
Before coming to Virtual Administrator, I managed a fifty-plus person sales team. I have to admit, I was stunned by the lack of focus on sales with MSPs and IT Providers. As you stated, there is “Field of Dreams” mentality. Because of this, I can almost guarantee success to those who give the proper focus to sales. You will have the edge.
Paul Barnett
Marketing Director
Virtual Administrator
Many IT service companies forget that they are operating as a for profit business and focus too much on their technologies. At the end of the day every business owner or executive must hammer home driving revenues. Many MSPs have great people and the technologies to support them, however to get the most out of any business there most be a vision at the top to really support sales and their sales people.
Paul you certainly hit the target on this one in regards to MSPs and any other small technology services providers in regards to sales. Those 3 items are the choices and many don’t accept any of them.
I especially like your take on partners. Unless picking others that compensate for lack of business skills rather than mirror them, a partner is not the way to go as this just adds headaches and other no-so-fun tensions as time goes on.
Although the owner of a small business must be involved in sales process development, I don’t buy into them having to be an actual sales person in their company. If sales is not their thing, then the only choice is to bring someone else on board. If you can’t commit to it, don’t bother as it detracts from the owner taking care of things that suit their skills weakening the company further.
Dustin, the truth of the matter is that most small IT services companies forget they are a business altogether and run things as a self made job. Even when they have employees. This is a huge growth and profitability hindrance.
Without a target audience, a system to market to them and a system to sell to them, you can add as many tech applications to a “Field of Dreams” as you want and they still won’t come… because they have no idea the company exists and what it does.
But with increased sales comes great responsibility to have the rest of the business structure in order. Marketing and sales systems drive the top line while other business systems define the bottom line.
George Sierchio
http://consultantscoach.com
George,
I agree with your comment about small business owners not having to be an actual sales person in their company. However, this might be necessary if funds are limited and they are just getting started. I would much rather see the owner focus on sales rather than ignore it.
The long term objective of any business owner should be to run and grow their enterprise and function as its CEO. It is impossible to do this if they are working as an employee for the company by doing all of the sales and/or tech work. The ultimate goal should be to hire people to do these jobs. But sometimes, you have to get your hands dirty first to get to this point.
Paul Barnett
Marketing Director
Virtual Administrator
Paul-
Sorry for the misleading comments. Having started up several businesses I know all too well, and agree with you, that at one point or another a business owner will be wearing all of the hats in the company. Unless, like you mentioned above, there is funding involved to lighten that load very early on or, like we both mentioned before, a partner is already on board that can fill the gaps.
Getting your hands dirty is a must in my book as it’s the only way to be involved from the ground up on building processes to hand off to other people. You end up doing it by yourself or working with someone else with this knowledge already to build each and every process. This is setting the foundation for your business structure. Without it, you can’t successfully hire others to do any jobs within the company.
Personally, I think this is a huge advantage to a company that is internally funded versus one that was externally funded. A lot gets lost when you have the money to move so fast that the business foundation is never made, tested and established.
George Sierchio
http://consultantscoach.com