You don’t need more leads. You need a sales process.

One of the things that I often hear on my sales assessment calls is, "If I just had more leads, my company would grow. We’ve got our process down. We just need leads."

In a world of instant gratification, it’s an understandable thought. But the days of the primo-leads being delivered to the sales team on pink index cards are long gone. That’s not necessarily a bad thing though.

There is a way to construct your MSP sales pipeline in such a way that through proven success you create a natural attraction, where the leads come to you. Furthermore, you’ll have the systems in place to capitalize on them and close business at a significantly higher rate than before. We’ll talk about that soon enough, but first let’s look at the problem.

The folks who say, "I just need leads" are often on their fourth or their fifth iteration of some marketing or sales initiative which just isn’t working for them. Often this is a case of “putting the cart before the horse”. Without a sales process in place to pinpoint, filter, and properly address new prospects, you will not achieve the desired result.

It’s not that you, as an MSP, aren't providing value, in fact most MSP owners I meet are grinding away, day in and day out, to provide the most value for their clients possible.

It is this inclination to serve the customer, no matter what, that can get Managed Service Providers into some sticky situations. They say, “yes we can” to everything, and end up trying to be the right fit for everybody.

When you truly understand who exactly will benefit the most from your offerings, it’s far easier to cut through the noise of the other 480,000 search results on Google, and speak just to them - in a language that resonates.

“But Brian, I want to scale my business. I’m building an empire here! I can’t focus solely on medical device manufacturers in Raleigh-Durham!”

Here's the thing: If your Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) hasn't hit seven figures yet and you're casting your marketing net wide to 'small businesses, medium enterprises, and large corporations across multiple regions,' chances are your empire-building dreams aren't panning out as expected.

Have you taken a long hard look at your ideal customer profile? Once you’ve taken over that market - THEN it’s time to scale up your business. 

Here’s a few things to consider:

• Where does your team have the most expertise?

• Are you sensing any trends in organic clientele?

• Do you have strategic partnerships which focus in specific fields?

• Does your location have any influence on customer types?

Maybe you aren’t confident about your ICP at the moment and that’s ok. In upcoming posts we’ll explore some of the Feel-Good MSP sales strategies to improve lead generation, starting with the proper development of your ideal customer profile (ICP), so stay tuned.