For the past several years I often thought that marketing was the most crucial component to success as a managed services provider. For the record I am not totally changing my point of view on the importance of MSP marketing and having a consistent and repeatable MSP marketing process in place, allowing for stratospheric success as a managed services provider.

What I am realizing is how important MSP sales and running a sales organization actually is. I often preach at the Ulistic managed services training events around the country that today’s fast growing MSPs are:

Marketing corporations focused on conducting sales operations providing IT Services.

My biggest mistake while in the early days of running my MSP was that we put IT services first, sales came next and then came marketing. This was the wrong thinking. When we realized that our company was first a marketing company, we had sales operations figured out and then finally services were the end piece.

Without great marketing we never got the leads. That is important. Without an awesome sales operations process in place we never did get the service work and then finally our excellence in service work would often lead to new opportunities, however the marketing – sales – service model never ended, it just repeated itself.

Back to sales. How many of you are conducting daily sales operations? I mean getting up in the morning with a focus on doing something to drive sales forward. Executing your 12 steps sales process and doing the work for generating opportunities. It is the sales professionals responsibility to drive their own opportunities and a great sales professional will do that.

Poor sales professionals will rely on the company to generate sales opportunities. If you have someone waiting for the company to bring leads or for the company to give them sales slicks, you have a problem and this person must go, today!

Who do you have on your team, Sales Professionals or Sales Guys? Do you have a sales professional who is accountable or a sales guy who hides everything he or she does? Do you have a sales guy who updates ConnectWise or Autotask daily or do you have a sales guy who fights you for basic information saying “Don’t worry, I have it under control”.

Here is the million dollar question, is the sales person you have currently working in your organization actually selling anything or is the last thing they ever sold was themselves when you hired them?

Are you stuck generating sales opportunities? If so, we need to talk!

Ulistic provides MSP sales consulting and coaching for managed service providers who need help to conduct sales operations. Our MSP sales consulting team lays out the correct way to run a sales organization and inject a repeatable sales process into your organization. Ulistic will also help manage your sales team.

Call Stuart Crawford, your MSP coach. The Ulistic team understands what it takes to run MSP sales, we did just that. $5M of MSP sales in Calgary, Canada successfully sold! What more do you need?