At DattoCon in June, I had the distinct pleasure of presenting to a roomful of MSPs about how to make sales and marketing a winning proposition for their organizations. If you were able to attend, I thank you for your attention. If you weren’t able to join us, think of this as a cliff notes version of what was discussed.
As you know, Datto has a wealth of experience providing MSPs with the marketing resources they need to support outreach to targeted clients and prospects via our global partner program. In this post, I outline what you can do to quickly increase sales leads with some basic, yet essential, marketing tactics.
1. Know who you are: It’s crucial you know what differentiates your business from the competition. What do you have to offer that others don’t? Find your niche and target it. Without this first step, lead generation cannot target your ideal customer profile. Without an ideal customer profile, you don’t know who to target and you will find lead generation efforts will lead to low conversion rates.
2. Strategy first: It pays to plan. Determine what your goal is (i.e., break into a new market) for lead generation, then zoom in on who your ideal client is and create an ideal customer profile. This will help you focus and improve the results from your work.
3. Find those customers: Next, you have to figure out how to best reach your audience and captivate them with your message. Explore Google Adwords and LinkedIn campaigns as both can be super easy and effective channels for generating leads. I recommend local or regional events as cost effective ways to target audiences in your ideal customer profile. You can also do something I call “LinkedIn Mining” by simply looking at existing customers, and selecting the “users have also viewed” section of their LinkedIn page.
4. Purchase a lead list or build your own: My recommendation is take the time to build your own list of key targets. Some purchased lead lists can be helpful, but only if you set the right expectations. You can’t expect them to be a silver bullet, and you must manage them closely. Try writing down the names of other businesses on your next service call, find them in Facebook or LinkedIn, and get to know them. It takes time, but you can build your list this way too.
5. To do third-party telemarketing, or not: If you choose to go this route, be clear about what you want to get from the relationship. Set realistic goals, train the people contacting prospects on behalf of your brand and check-in often. You will get what you closely manage.
6. Take Advantage of Marketing Development Funds (MDF): Many vendors provide MDF funding for channel partners, and Datto is no different in this respect. MDF is available to partners based on their partner program tier, and is determined on a first-come, first-served basis. While MDF can be used for many things, we recommend small, local events. Avoid the big venues like football games or cruises, and instead focus on events - like breakfasts - where customer attendee conversions are higher. Our partner team and your sales rep are here to help you make the most of them so please contact us and we’ll make sure your MDF is working to accelerate your sales/marketing efforts.
One word of caution: None of this works unless you take the time to nail down three important things about your brand.
- Who are you to your clients? Or, who do you want to be?
- What differentiates what you do? Why are you better?
- What does your ideal customer profile look like?
So, get your team together and hold a brainstorming session to answer these questions, and then it’s game on. For more resources related to this topic, check out our eBook, Lead Generation Made MSPeasy.
Matt Richards is chief marketing officer at Datto. Read more Datto guest blogs here.
