How To Be An Overnight Managed Services Sensation.

Meet Carl Fransen, Carl provides IT Support Calgary businesses rave about.

Ulistic’s Client Number One—Carl Fransen, President of CTECH Consulting Group in Alberta, Canada, joins us to share his “IT Wisdom.” CTECH and Carl have a long pedigree. Ingram Cloud’s Best Cloud Partner Winner for all of Canada, CDN’s Channel Elite Award Winner, Microsoft Partner, and more. (Awards are important because they open new doors for business.)

What Does Carl Want to Share? Actively Market and Engage with Your Prospects.

With Ulistic’s 17-Step Marketing Plan, He Now Gets 6 New Clients a Month.

He’s just like you—An MSP business owner.  However, he’s built his business on the cloud.  He has no servers, a virtual staff, and everything is handled from his 200-square foot office. He uses, Office 365, Azure, and Connect Wise.  His overhead is extremely low.

In the early days, Carl had his struggles.  Seven years ago (before Ulistic) he had zero sales.  He focused on marketing, customer service and building new relationships.  The result? —CTECH has grown tremendously. He’s never been busier.

What Makes You a Marketing Success?

Your Marketing Must Be “Top Notch.”

10 Tips

1. A focus on marketing, customer service, and building relationships. Nurture relationships with your prospects and leads.  Yes, let them know that you can take care of their IT.  Focus on selling yourself, not your IT services.  Treat them like a friend to build trust.  If they trust you, they’ll sign on with you and your business.
2. Meet people face-to-face. Don’t just sit back at your desk and send emails. Get out there and hustle. Make friends.  Pay more than one visit.  Bring them donuts, cookies, a Ulistic “Shock and Awe Box,” and drop off your business cards.  Don’t expect anything right away.  Just make friends.
3. Utilize marketing touch points. Send them your newsletter monthly, hold free seminars, send them e-books, and utilize marketing touch points like these. When they’re ready for new IT services, they’ll contact you instead of someone they don’t know. Marketing is a journey you take your prospects on with you.
4. Don’t be desperate. People can “smell” this a mile away. No hard sells=No stress.
5. There are a lot of opportunities, but only so many hours in the day. You must pick and choose who you talk to, and how long you talk to them.  Choose the most potential prospects and work with them as partners. After talking and getting to know your prospects, you may find the one technology pain point they suffer from and focus on this. When they become a client, make sure you take care of this, and everything else, so you won’t have to go back again and again. If they don’t have to call you, you’re giving them value.  Remember, your clients’ success is your success. They’ll be happy and provide you referrals.
6. Twitter, Facebook or other marketing campaigns alone don’t work. Marketing is an art form, an umbrella-like approach, and it must be multi-touch. It’s not lineal. It’s multi-faceted.
7. Stop thinking tech. Find a full-time staff for this.  Your role is to build your client base. Carl sees himself as a business owner, not a tech expert.  He follows a strategic marketing plan that Stuart Crawford from Ulistic prepared for him.  It was a journey, but one that Carl stuck to, tackled and continues to tackle.  It’s never ending.  The reward? — A continuing stream of new clients.
8. Differentiate yourself. Use the cloud and services like Microsoft Office 365 and Azure as a gateway to becoming your prospects’ provider.  This is called “digital transformation.”  Use this to your advantage to help you set your MSP business against others. Partnering with Microsoft and others will help you do this.  Reduce your stack to a great set of vendors, and partner with them. Focus on a cloud stack. Solution-based marketing is where the money is. (Talk to Stuart about this.)
9. Get out there. You must pick up the phone and call people personally, knock on their doors, network at community or business events—And keep at it!
10. Ulistic will keep you on track. They are the engine, the reason why you must reach out and touch your prospects. However, you’re the one who must sell yourself to clients. Ulistic has the expertise we don’t have—You don’t have. We trust them.  You should too. Create a partnership with Ulistic.

The Future For CTECH

Three Big Things

1. Our Vision: To move ourselves up our solution stack by harvesting our key partners (Ingram and Microsoft). We’ll work with our partners to find unique pain points within verticals and push them out there to grab market share.
2. Our Challenge: Internally, we’ll give $100 to out techs if they do this—Create a SharePoint, Flow Power BI, and powerful stack to help us move up the ladder with this.
3. With these two things in place, we’ll need help. We’ll be filling up offices with our entire powerful stack in just a few days with the licenses we have in place and market this to local MSPs. We give you a complete product you can run yourselves with our partners’ backing, and with Ulistic’s help.

Get the Best ROI on your Marketing Investment.  Create a Partnership with us. Contact Stuart and the experts at Ulistic.  We’ll keep you on track with your marketing, call the team at Ulistic at 416.840.9106 in Canada or 716.799.1999 in the US.