Improve Your MSP Sales In Just One Month

If your traditional MSP sales performance has been lower than average, believing you can do nothing new and double your revenue in one year is a daydream, not a goal.  How can you create a better sales organization and create a realistic goal for growth?  Richardson & Richardson has partnered with Syncro to help you!

This MSP Sales Makeover Will Teach MSP Business Owners To:

• Gather Perspective Before Setting Goals
• Create a Realistic Sales Growth Plan that Will Work If You Do
• Find Leads, Qualify Leads and Manage Those Leads Efficiently in Your PSA or CRM
• Build Sales Scripts for Cold Outbound, Cold Email, Inbound Sales Discovery, Client Upsells and Referral Collection

Read on to learn more, or sign up right here!

By:  Carrie Richardson, Partner, Richardson & Richardson Consulting

Over ten years, I’ve worked with over 1200 MSP business owners.

I’ve spoken to thousands more.

There have been some uncomfortable conversations around growing MSP sales in one year.   Most MSP sales and marketing initiatives take several months to plan, several more months to execute, and a full year to generate revenue.  If you make the decision to make a change today, you might start reaping the benefits of those changes by this time next year.

This often isn’t the response that a business owner wants to hear.

“Past Performance Does Not Guarantee Future Results!”

How many times have you seen this disclaimer when reviewing any financial service offering?

The spirit of the quote is a warning:

Just because the market was thriving last year doesn’t mean it will continue to do so this year. 

It should give anyone a moment of pause before making a big investment.

All MSP Sales Initiatives Are Investments

Hiring your first salesperson is a big investment.

Hiring an outsourced marketing agency is a big investment.

The warning before making a financial investment is “Don’t assume things won’t change.”

The warning before making a major investment in a sales or marketing resource should be “Don’t assume things WILL change.”

Realistic MSP Sales Goal Setting

I usually get phone calls from entrepreneurs who have made very aggressive sales growth plans in a vacuum.  They decide “this is the year!” and make an ambitious goal to double their annual revenue in 12 months.

That might be realistic if you’re generating $50,000.00 in annual revenue. It is highly unlikely that if you’re generating $500,000.00 in revenue now, and your last two years have not seen more than 10% growth, the odds on you being able to double that number in one year aren’t high.  It’s a bet I wouldn’t take, and one you should consider carefully if someone (especially someone who is trying to sell you something) is telling you it’s possible.

It’s tempting to buy in to the gurus on stage bragging about charging 3x the usual cost per seat.  If you’re struggling to grow your sales at around or below the industry average rate, what makes you think that you can “10x” your revenue by charging three times more than your competitors?  If you’re struggling to compete at an average price, you’re not ready for premium pricing.

If Nothing Changes, Nothing Will Change

The business you have today generated the revenue you have today.  Unless you make a significant change to that business, you’re likely going to generate the same amount of  new business this year that you did last year.

Can you change your MSP sales trajectory?

Absolutely.

Will you change that trajectory quickly?

Maybe.

Do companies change trajectories quickly and maintain their profitability?

Not often.

Don’t Believe The Hype

There are a lot of companies that would like you to believe that growing your business with a third party is as simple as pushing a button.  The truth is, making a big investment in sales and marketing too early can fundamentally and irreparably damage your business.

Simple math can show us the impact of a sales and marketing investment on a small business:

Let’s assume you have $500,000 in ARR.

Best in class margins in the MSP industry are around 22%.

Did you pay yourself an appropriate CEO-level salary last year?

Let’s call that $150,000.

If your salary is included in your year end profits, you’re not generating $100,000 in profit, you’re losing $50,000 in adjusted profit.

This means your MSP has no value to a potential buyer, and it tells you that your business (in this current state) can’t support a major expenditure like the salary of a sales or marketing person, or the rates of a third-party marketing agency.

Pay yourself first. 

An investment in outsourced sales and marketing is a lot like a Las Vegas vacation.

If you’re smart, you only gamble in Las Vegas with an amount of money that you can 100% afford to lose.  It’s called gambling for a reason.  You might walk away from the tables successful.  Most people will break even, or lose an amount of money they’re comfortable losing.  Some will end up in significant debt by the end of their vacation.

Sales and marketing investments are the same.

You can’t expect that you will pay your sales executive, or your new marketing agency, with the sales generated in first-year efforts.  That investment – if it pays off at all – must be made with money that you do not need to finance any other part of your business – or your own paycheck.

Slow and profitable growth trumps debt-financed risks.

Handing off your MSP sales growth problems sounds so magical! 

“Don’t worry about it!  We’ll do it all for you!  We’ve done it for so many of your competitors! They’ve had incredible results!”

Strip out the fancy sales pitch, and consider what you’re actually purchasing when you hire a third party agency.

If I sat across from you at a table and said “Why don’t you pay me a couple hundred dollars an hour to manage your social media marketing campaigns, and I’ll give you access to offshore talent that I pay six dollars an hour” you’d laugh in my face.  Yet, hundreds of small business owners are doing this every day – spending the equivalent of college tuition on marketing campaigns executed by someone who has about the same amount of marketing expertise as they do.   You’re not hiring the owner of the marketing agency to do your work. You’re hiring whoever they could manage to hire in a talent-crunch economy.

Does hiring in-house sound like a smarter idea? 

Experienced, professional, effective sales executives do not work for businesses that can’t show them historical sales data and a path to success.

A sales executive applying for a role with a small MSP without a sales process (sending ten mailers a week is not a sales process) isn’t a sales executive you would want on your team. You aren’t hiring someone to build a sales process, you’re hiring someone to follow one. In the absence of having a defined process, a sales rep will do the tasks they like doing, not the tasks that need doing.

Your MSP sales and marketing plans need to be grounded in perspective.

Perspective is so important when it comes to deciding how you’re going to grow your sales.

Unrealistic expectations and a lack of perspective lead to wasted budgets, and the wrong choice at a critical time can potentially impact your business so severely that it might not recover.

You Can Do This Yourself 

As the owner of your business, you are uniquely positioned to engage other business owners.  When I call a business owner, they take my call.  When my sales team calls, they get sent to voicemail more often than they get to speak to the decision maker.  There is a big difference between a business owner initiating peer to peer engagement and your entry level sales rep trying to get the attention of the managing partner of a major law firm in your city.

The idea of doing your own sales and marketing may seem overwhelming and complex.

Growing Your Sales Isn’t As Hard As You Think

If you surveyed ten of your most successful peers, you’ll find that they embraced the challenge of learning about sales and marketing, mastered the skills necessary to find and close new clients, created the processes and procedures needed to manage and improve their sales process, and held on to that role through their largest organic growth years.

Over the next month, Carrie Richardson, the founder of Managed Sales Pros and now a partner at Richardson & Richardson Consulting, will be taking MSP business owners through four complimentary sales and marketing training sessions, sponsored by Syncro.

At the end of this series, you will know how to build and refine your own sales and marketing strategy, find leads, make cold calls, create prospecting campaigns, use social media effectively, and use all these skills to both find new opportunities and collect more referrals.

Once you’ve built your sales system, if you can devote 10 hours per week to sales and marketing activities, you can grow your sales without adding any headcount, or making a large financial outlay.

• You won’t need new software.
• Don’t hire a consultant or a coach.
• There’s no need to buy a program.
• Learn how to do the most important sales and marketing tasks.
• Then practice until you do it better than your competitors.
• Measure your sales and marketing results so you can do more of what works, and eliminate the things that don’t.

Will you double your revenue if you take this course and apply everything you’ve learned?

Maybe.

Will you better understand how sales and marketing campaigns work, and the amount of time you need to spend on each activity?

Yes.

Will you be able to grow your sales yourself?

Yes.

Will you have to be responsible for sales and marketing for your business forever?

No!

You Can’t Transmit Something You Don’t Have

Hiring, training and managing a role you don’t understand doesn’t go well for anyone.

This is the most important reason to become your own MSP sales and marketing expert.

Once you’ve considered your options, built your plan, and started to execute consistently, you’ll be ready to document your process, and then you can train it.

When you’ve reached a revenue goal that makes sense, you can begin to explore delegating sales and marketing.

Who knows?  By that time you might even like it enough that you want to keep ownership of it!

I hope you’ll join us in January – learn more and register here: