Empower Your Business with Powered Services

Selling complex solutions is hard. It’s even more difficult when your potential customers aren’t very familiar with the nuances and details of what you have to offer. It transforms a pitch about benefits and haggling over pricing into an impromptu educational session.

But MSPs consistently face this as they try to win new business from law firms and nonprofits and medical practices and other businesses that don’t live and breathe IT on a daily basis. When MSPs are talking about something relatively positive for the client, this can be an easier sale; outsourcing resource-intensive tasks to experts, improving functionality and saving money while you’re at it sounds great!

However, many of the services MSPs provide force organizations to contemplate things they’d rather not think about. Malware, data theft, phishing … these are not pleasant topics for businesses, which would rather focus on their core operations. Yet adequately defending IT systems from these malicious attacks is now par for the course.

Another scenario no one wants to spend much time on is business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR). This demands organizations grapple with the idea that their mission-critical systems could be completely wiped out, significantly disrupting their operations. We’re no longer talking preventative care. This is about how to stand up again after you’ve been knocked down.

We All Have Our Core Competencies

We’re generally best at the tasks we spend the most time on. Your customers practice law or medicine, or design buildings or install HVAC systems. They might also know how to fix a photocopier, stock the breakroom or design a business card, but these are seldom their strengths.

That’s why they look to an MSP to handle their IT needs. They know it’s not their core competency, and it’s worth it to pay someone else to manage those things. This frees the business up to focus on the things they do best.

For MSPs, sales and marketing are a necessary evil to land new customers, but they most likely are not the strongest part of their repertoire. However, to effectively market and sell complex services like BCDR, you must do much more than book a meeting or draft a contract. You must raise awareness, generate demand and convince potential customers that your solution is the right fit.

Ingredients of a Full Go-to-Market Program

Effectively taking your solutions to market requires an array of items that map to every stage of the customer journey:

• What to say: Sales teams need a set of talking points, value propositions and rebuttals to common objections. These should be specific to