MSPs can encounter obstacles when selling managed IT services to potential customers. No matter how good your services are, it’s important to provide clear responses to all objections. Even if you have a super-skilled team that helps your clients solve their issues in a matter of minutes—and you offer super-secure and fast managed software—there will still be prospects that will be hesitant and ask potentially difficult questions.
However, if a potential client has reservations about what your company provides, keep in mind that in most cases these fears emanate from their negative experiences in the past and have no connection to what you offer.
In this article, we’re going to review how to sell managed services, talk about the most common objections that potential clients may have, and how to overcome them.
1. Your services are too costly.
If your prospects have never dealt with IT companies before, they may not know all the specifics of an MSP business and they may not understand what they’ll pay for as a customer. If this is the case, ask your potential clients how much money they would lose if critical data were unavailable for an hour, two hours, or longer. This will help them grasp the value of your services.
If your prospects already understand the value of IT services and compare your offer with others by the price, keep in mind that there will always be other companies in the space that will charge their customers less than you do. A unique selling proposition may help you to cope with cost objections. If you offer something that no one else does, and if you give a guarantee for your services or provide a unique technology, then higher prices are easily justifiable. Your services may cost more because no one else offers the same level of service.
One more advantage of managed IT services that you can explain is cost predictability. When you pay a technician to fix your hardware or software every time it fails, the costs can be itemized, random, and may be very high. With an IT company that looks after your IT infrastructure, you will always know how much you spend per month.
(You might also want to read about managed service provider pricing models.)
2. We already have an IT company we work with.
This objection may be harder to deal with, but don’t let it stop you from explaining what you can offer.
If a company has someone to take care of their IT infrastructure and they are looking for alternatives, it means their current provider isn’t working out.
Your task at this point is to find out what they aren’t providing or doing to take care of the company’s needs.
Ask why they’ve decided to look for somebody else, and what exactly they don’t like about their current provider. If you manage to highlight their pain points, offer them a solution and explain how your company can make things easier for them.
3. I’m uncomfortable entrusting my sensitive data to a third party.
You should have the right infrastructure to respond to this objection. You should use managed software that will greatly reduce the possibility of staff gaining access to client data.
Cloudberry Managed Backup Service allows you to encrypt your clients’ data on-the-fly with algorithms such as AES-256 and AES-192. Moreover, the encryption password is unrestorable, and no one (except for your client) will be able to access the encrypted data.
Apart from the software you offer, you can also share your other clients’ testimonials or even provide contacts for a reference. Nothing helps to sell services better than praise from satisfied customers.
Alexander Negrash is director of marketing at CloudBerry Lab. Read more CloudBerry Lab blogs here.
