Over the course of the next few blogs, we’ll be introducing a few ways for your MSP to stay ahead of the curve. Our theme for the month of July is Innovation, so what better way to immerse ourselves in innovation than to take it piece by piece, department by department, revealing what we see MSPs missing on a day to day basis and what we think they’ll need to do to remain relevant for years to come.

Our CEO, Alex Rogers, has tracked the path of technology over the course of his lifetime, has spurred the birth and blossoming of the MSP, and is now looking toward the future of where the MSP is headed. We encourage you to join us on that journey throughout the month of July by reading this series, attending our Academy on July 24 and 25 and staying engaged with CharTec.

We’re getting started with marketing because after all, what good is your business unless you have leads in your funnel?

  1. Market to latent needs: The vast majority of marketing programs out there that are designed for our industry focus on getting one type of lead, an active lead – someone that has a problem that needs to be solved right now. Perhaps their network is down, like 1% of the population at any given point in time, or perhaps they hate their IT guy, like 20% of the population. Either way, what about the other 79% of the population? Successful MSPs of the future will focus on identifying problems for these individuals that they didn’t even realize they had rather than focusing on the glaring problem staring them right in the face. In utilizing this method, MSPs will give themselves more opportunities for the sale, channeling more businesses rather than just the ones that are in need of a technology change right now.
  2. Utilize technology to your advantage: You work in IT, right? So it would be safe to say that you at least enjoy the idea of using technology to improve your life. Why wouldn’t you use it to improve your business as well? So many MSPs pride themselves on being the wave of the future, yet are still stuck in the Stone Age when it comes to marketing. Don’t be that guy! Be ahead of the cutting edge. What is coming after the age of video, mobile, and content marketing? Help drive that future forward. If you aren’t quite ready to be that much of a trailblazer, at least get with the times: start a blog, utilize social media effectively, start creating and posting videos, track landing pages with effective metrics, use your web and email analytics for something.
  3. Market smarter: Don’t just purchase a list, run the leads through a mail campaign or track and wait for the 1-2% to respond to your outbound efforts. Flip marketing on its head. Go after the people that showed an inkling of interest in your marketing material and actually follow-up, with a deeper email campaign, a different white paper, a specialized phone call, or even a creative mailer.  Successful MSPs of the future will treat people that have interacted with their websites or emails 7 times differently than those that you have only heard from once. Yes, this means that you will have to put in more work and effort in your content development and outreach efforts. Yes, I know that this is time consuming, but I would rather you take the time now and begin to market using smarter techniques and take advantage before the laggards decide to catch up someday.