MSP Sales Reps have a hard job. Maybe you know this from having worn the sales hat, from hearing peer horror stories or because ignoring cold calls is your part-time job.
Fortunately, doing sales the right way is not impossible! Lots of businesses have figured it out and the fact that you're researching potential mistakes shows how proactive you are about nailing sales.
If you address the following five danger zones you'll reduce the risk of failure immensely.
(In full transparency, Simple Selling has made some of these mistakes along the way!
Many MSP Presidents have a technical background, not a business development one, and so they minimize interactions with sales and just "trust" that the maverick is doing the right thing all the time.
On the flip side, if they have sales experience, they assume the sales playbook is the same it used to be.
In either case, this is a terrible way to approaching the coaching part of your job.
Presidents don't meet often enough to review pipeline; don't know what questions to ask sales people; don't know which advice to give on cold-calls; or even if they do know how to do all these things, they don't do it because they are wearing so many hats in their company.
Sorry, but most prospects worth pursuing are not ready for a meeting with your MSP. The cold-call rarely lands at precisely the moment they have pain. However, because the sales person is solely compensated on "meetings booked," he throws everything at the prospect and ends up leaving a bad impression because you only credit meetings booked.
Sorry, but if your go-to answer to what makes you unique is "our people" or "our core values" or "years of experience" then your prospect can't differentiate you from the rest. If your questions are things like, "when is your contract up?" or "how many devices do you have?" then you are not introducing anything of value to your prospects.
Nowadays successful sales people must approach multiple stakeholders, on multiple channels (phone, email, LinkedIn), and follow up multiple times just to get an answer. They need to be organized, disciplined and have a systematic process to ensure no prospects fall through and to be able to identify areas of weakness to iterate on.
Here's how we know that most sales people lack the right tools and/or processes.
In short, most tools create friction for sales people, which ends with the person burning out and leaving for a different sales gig.
Most sales people I've met who work for MSPs do more than sales. They are also helping with marketing, helping with hiring, helping with so many different things and it's just not their main priority.
No. Sales people need more than 40 hours a week to do their job effectively. More than 40 hours per week to get it all done.
