Are You Getting Leads to Talk About Managed IT

…Only to find that what your prospect really wants is a quote – to compare to others.  Price is your only value proposition here, so what do you do?

I was recently working with a small business reseller on the west coast. He had mastered the art of using Google Adwords to attract new business and was getting meetings.

The problem? No sales. His conversion from EDUCATION to SOMETHING was downright frustrating.

So how do you turn a meeting like this into something worth meeting about?

The answer, you need something in your meeting that’s new, exciting, compelling, and urgent. Napoleon Hill, in his book, The Law of Success, tells us that enthusiasm is critical. If you don’t love your value proposition, you’ll probably leave any meeting hungry. But you need more.

While enthusiasm is an essential part of moving people to buy, you also have to understand what they really need. In another section of Hill’s book he shares with us principles of the shirt sales person. The one who presents the shirt he likes assumes the buyer won’t buy a shirt. The seller who understands the real need sells multiple shirts.

But What Does the Small Business Owner Really Need?

Hint; It’s not managed services.

Managed IT offers the client a couple of things, but only one is potentially urgent. And only by identify urgent aspect of that one thing, are you going to differentiate yourself during this sales call. It’s security of course.

There are thousands of choices when it comes to buying basic server and network monitoring. There’s a well known business coach out there telling his clients to find something unique in order to sell more managed IT contracts – he’s right! But what unique thing can you bring to the table, that your buyer really does need, and that really is urgent? It’s security – but not just firewall management. It’s security intelligence – it’s detection/response.

So How Did My Client Start Turning These Deals Around?

Here’s what he did.  First, he learned to present a compelling security message. In his case he simply memorized the message I give in my book, The House & The Cloud.  It’s simple, straight forward, and compelling. As I’ve said before, I still use this message in lunch & learn meetings, and I’m converting more business owners than ever in one single hour with it.

Now, when he would schedule a new prospect meeting from his Adword campaign, he would go in armed with two things. Some basic MSP (Managed Services Provider) materials and his compelling security presentation.

He started his meeting out addressing the reason for their initial call – finding a new managed IT provider. But quickly transitioned to security. It went something like this:

“Here is what we can provide from a managed IT perspective…backup, monitoring, patching, etc…but the truth is, there are hundreds of companies that provide these same services in this city. And it would be hard to figure out who to use – in fact, many of them would do a good job, and prices would be all over the map.  But let’s look at what really matters.”

“Have you considered how secure your data is?”

Using the three questions presented in my book, The House & the Cloud, my client gathered some basic information. All of these companies are moving to the cloud. As they do, their approach to security must chance. And so he asked them.

“What are you trying to protect?”

“What are your relevant threats?”

“How comfortable are you with your ability to detect something is going wrong, and respond to it before it is too late?”

See The House & Cloud book to get the details on how this conversation should go. But from there, my client showed them a model I use to determine risk – The Impact Vs. Likelihood graph.

“This is what you need before you can make any sort of budgetary or technology decision. Without it you’re flying blind.”

He then spent ten minutes taking them through The House, Cloud and Coverage model – the message presented in my book. The point is, there’s one mistake just about every company has made when it comes to securing data, and this model proves it.

The response from his listeners was obvious. They too have been making this mistake. Their security has no detection/response capability built into it – and only a managed program can provide this to a small business client.

An Assessment Was Offered

The assessment does three things.

First, it puts everyone else (his competition) on hold, while he does his assessment.

Second, he now has face time with every decision maker. With his consulting hat on, he can talk to whoever he wants, because, in their eyes, he is no longer selling.

Third, he is building the justification he needs to sell this deal without budget being a concern. If the need is urgent (and it will be in most cases), the client will respond.

If the client does not convert, either you had the wrong audience, didn’t find the right urgencies (ones they care about – like the shirt seller above), or did not present the urgency in the context of their business.

The last deal my client worked on landed him the largest managed services contract he’s ever signed, worth about $20,000/month.

© 2016, David Stelzl