Is Your MSP Business Missing Out on Growth? Lead Generation is The Answer

MSPs is a lucrative business and the opportunities with this business are immense. All you need to have all the resources right for good business growth in the local market. After working with more than 600+MSPs in the United States, Australia and Canada, one thing we know for sure is the market is big enough to get good business. It’s just you need good leads to start with and then nurture them further to close business with them.

Many MSPs that we have worked with in the past, or still working with - have one problem in common. They tried everything but it seems like nothing is working for them. To mitigate this situation, we pitch them an email marketing program which has results and ROI guarantee.

Various ways for good sales funnel

In order to have good growth in your MSP, you need to have a good sales funnel. You get to talk to a lot of businesses, but there are some types of businesses who are tired with their current IT situation and need some expert to look into the problem. You can do many things to identify these prospects like:

●       Cold Calling

●       Direct Mail

●       LinkedIn Reach Outs

●       Networking

●       EXPOs

●       Email Marketing

Cold Calling: Cold Calling is a technique which is very old but still used by many MSPs to connect with prospects. The good thing is that you get many prospects who show interest, but then very few convert into proposal/onsite or a business opportunity. You can do this by hiring a part time employee and asking him/her to call on a list, which you have to either purchase or ask them to mine themselves. This involves a lot of effort and energy and hence MSPs go with agencies doing the cold calling. This is a better way of spreading the word as MSP. Also, this process involves a person making at least 50-60 calls a day and then getting some connection and telling them about your services in 1 minute and then expecting that he might come back to you or show up on the scheduled call. Many MSPs across the world have seen some success with this method, but then you need to give an honest effort in this process. The investment is around $1500/month to $3500/month, depending on the package you select.

Direct Mail: Direct Mail is a technique which is used by almost every MSP. This is a more direct approach where you are delivering the leaflet/brochure to their physical location and expect them to call you for your services. For this, you need information on the businesses and their physical addresses as well. This involves the procurement process and then once you have all the information then you can start delivering those brochures to these offices. We have seen MSPs keeping this process in a mix with some other techniques in parallel as they see this as an additional touchpoint which you can have as a process in your outbound approach. This method has some cost, which depends on the local shipping rates. This required printing of collateral and then shipping it to the physical addresses of offices.

LinkedIn Outreach: LinkedIn Reach outs is now adopted by many MSPs in a marketing mix where they would like to connect with the business owners and then pitch them about their MSP services. There are now many tools which are there in the market which offer automated prospect scraping based on your parameters and then you can create an email sequence which will go to the inbox of the prospects. This looks like a great process, but has very less response rates. LinkedIn reach outs are good for building up your network and then sending some information, but getting B2B appointments over LinkedIn is very rare. Lot of business owners are not reading such InMails. This is fairly a simple process with $500-$1000/month investment.

Local Networking: Networking is for SMB MSPowners. This practice is a very good practice where you can attend the local chamber of commerce events and network with local business people and then talk about your services, and discuss the tech advancements and see if they would like to talk about their IT infrastructure. This is also a very good technique for lead generation and getting some business out of it.

EXPOs: This is a heavy investment option, where you showcase your capabilities via booth and then expect business people to appear at your booth and hear about your services and then sign up with you. This is a much more expensive option where you spend somewhere around $10000 to $20000for 2 days for showcasing your capabilities. The only advantage is that you getto meet a lot of businesses in a short duration of time.

Email Marketing: This is far most the best approach for MSPs of any size. You can either do it yourself or hire an agency to do it. The problem with “do it yourself” is that you do not possess the expertise to run the campaign and hence when you do such a campaign, you would end up getting frustrated. Now, think about hiring an agency for this, who possess relevant experience in this industry and can produce a good amount of leads, what this will give us - a quality pipeline of leads which has potential to get a possible business conversion. The only disadvantage is time, you need to have patience in this type of model, as prospects do take some time to react to a cold email and tell them about their situation. But when they reply, they are the most qualified leads. This method has investment around $500 to $750/monthand it has highest returns across all the outreach methods which we have enlisted here.

Recommended Outreach Strategy for MSPs

Out of all the outreach methods, we recommend keeping email marketing as a primary outreach method and then mixing it up withany one of 2 or 3 of them. Email marketing can get you the list, which you can have your person to call on, or reach out on LinkedIn or do the Direct Mail campaign. With less budget, this is a far more effective method in outbound campaigns for local businesses. We have seen that MSPs are excited about the qualified leads which actually lead to onsite or proposal.

You can have agencies and have them work in your local territory and see if they can run a campaign. Out of 10 MSPs, 8 of the mare running email marketing campaigns in their individual capacity or using agencies, but email marketing is a win for every MSP who would like to see potential growth.

If we have to rate the various outreach channels for a MSP - then email marketing is certainly at #1.