Introduction

For MSPs, making sales is a major warfare, forcing them to struggle hard for recurring revenue. Either they can’t sell enough, or don’t attract the right customers. And to top it all off, they are unaware of their pricing strategies. 

As an MSP, the fundamental understanding of your process, systems, and standards needs to be clear. Once you have this in place, selling to your customers and providing them valuable services will be easier.

For you to not fall into unfamiliar situations, we bring to you 5 mistakes that you must avoid to make more sales. 

MSP sales mistakes to avoid

1. Struggling MSP vs thriving organization

Why do you think your customers might want to buy from you, considering they have 1000s of other options at a lesser price? 

As an MSP, you must have answers to this question before pitching to your customers. Because you have 1000s of competitors who are providing the same services as yours and you need to make your brand stand out. 

But the process to highlight your offerings must differ from the monotony. Avoid giving answers like you have a great team of experienced people, technology, client focused, etc. 

Rather suggest them options along with your services that will help their business grow. The more you showcase your strengths, the more you sound rhetoric. But when you flip the coin, and show how they can grow using your services, they will show extra attention. 

2. Marketing: an activity for tomorrow

IT service providers consider marketing as baggage. Neither do they implement the marketing techniques nor do they leverage from the in-demand technology. MSPs are so busy selling their services they forget how important it is to market. 

After all, how can you close deals if you don’t let the world know about your services?

Marketing may sound tricky, but MSPs must master it. It's not rocket science that you need an extra degree to market, all you need is some quirkiness, efficiency, and consistency. 

If you keep marketing for the last, you might end up having below expected results. 

3. Website without focusing on customer pain points

When a customer lands on your website, what is that one thing or a statement that would intrigue the customer to explore your services? 

How efficient you are from your competitors is an answer that would immediately take the customer off your platform. 

You must try to showcase the customer’s pain points. Research well on the common difficulties your customers face and create content for your website stating how your services can help them overcome the difficulty. 

As it’s already said, the more you flaunt your services, the more disinterested they’d be. Flip the coin, make them realize that you know their problems, and you’re here to help!

4. Being sales interested than sales focused

Most of the MSPs are sales interested, they want recurring revenue and customers, but cannot sell. And there are 3 major reasons to this,

No dedicated resource to improve MRR

How can you improve certain areas of your business if you do not have a dedicated resource for it? An MSPs expertise is IT management, similarly, a salesperson’s expertise is to sell. If you do both, either you might not find the time that the activity needs, or may not give your 100 percent. 

To get consistent results, get a sales expert onboard who can add to the recurring revenue, thus making your brand sales focused. 

FTAs vs MRR goal

FTA stands for First Time Appointments while MRR stands for Monthly Recurring revenue. And while you always keep a track and goal of your MRR, FTA is equally important. Because when you set your MRR, you must also calculate the number of FTAs that are required. 

To calculate the FTAs, the factors you must consider are,

• The average deal size you are targeting. This helps you to analyse the number of clients you need to achieve the revenue target. 
•  Sales close ratio determines the number of FTAs required, which also helps you analyse the number of leads that you need to generate weekly. 

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Accountability of the sales journey

Now that you have your dedicated resource and the calculator to your FTA and MRR goal, is it not essential to also keep track of its progress? 

Yes. you must have an accountability system in place. Conduct a sales meeting with your team, if you’re the one still handling all your sales aspects, then sit and analyse the numbers. 

Improve on areas that seem feeble and get your team working on aspects you think will help increase your MRR and FTAs. 

5. Lack of defined sales process

The more we researched about MSPs, the more we realised how disorganized and clumsy the sales processes are. 

Would you say a NO for the fact that most of the MSPs spend their time dealing with data manually? You keep track of your major accounts through Word and Excel, in fact, you send all your proposals using PDFs. How efficient are they to you, can you track, can you make changes, can you centralize the process? 

On the other hand, there are MSPs who use multiple applications for all their processes, like a CRM that doesn't have a proposal or a quote builder. You then use a proposal builder that’s not integrated with your CRM. And this way you lose on tracking the crucial information and let the opportunities slip by your hands. 

The only way to come out of this hassle is to open yourselves to learn. Most MSPs are so busy every day that they don’t have time to learn, and that’s the major problem of not moving to a better sales process. 

Zomentum was built to bridge this gap between the MSPs and the multiple tools. The only motive for the application is to help you make your sales process efficient. Zomentum has a CRM, proposal and quote builder, sales assessment tool, and analytics all in one place. 

You can maintain the details of your customer base in the CRM as per the deal progress and can move them into different channels easily. You can create proposals from the existing templates, edit them, send them, track them, E-Sign them, all from one place. And what you do in the system can be easily tracked and reported. 

Of course, MSPs have to invest time to learn more about Zomentum, and if you are willing to learn today, your sales process will be foolproof in the next few months. 

If you wish to learn more about Zomentum in the shortest possible way, get a demo with us. 

Conclusion

If you expect different results from your actions, the same strategies will not take you far. Don’t just add or remove technical services or hire a sales expert, rather, 

1. Focus on changing how you package your service offerings.
2. Raise your prices and be valued.
3. Get help from fellow MSPs or channel partners who have already implemented what you wish to do.
4. Start today. Otherwise, there’s nothing that will ever change.