The Difference Between MSP Marketing and Sales

If you don’t know the difference between MSP marketing and sales, you’re not closing many deals.

Many managed services providers think marketing and sales activities are all the same and that all marketing activities will result in sales. You need both MSP marketing activities and a sales process in order to grow your business.

Effective marketing will help you generate more leads for your managed services business – but if you don’t have a sales process in place it won’t matter if you generate thousands of leads every week! The only way to turn your marketing leads into clients is to become successful at sales.

What is MSP Marketing?

Marketing activities are things you do before you reach the sales appointment. MSP Marketing helps you identify possible suspects for future clients and lets your prospects know your business exists and how you can help them. These marketing activities are meant to help you reach your target customer and interest prospects enough to contact you in some way, whether the contact is through a web form, a phone call, or downloading your marketing collateral. MSP Marketing is used for lead generation and includes a variety of activities, such as:

• Your website
• Email marketing
• Direct mail campaigns
• Events and speaking engagements
• Telemarketing

What is the Sales Engagement?

Sales activities are all engagements that require actual interaction with your prospects, generally on a one-to-one level. Your marketing activities provide the leads and your sales activities attempt to close the deal and turn the prospect into a client. You can market all day, every day to prospects, but if you don’t have a way to guide those prospects into your sales engagement, you’re not going to convert your leads into actual, paying clients. Typical sales engagements include:

• Cold calls
• One-on-one meetings
• Follow up calls behind a marketing campaign
• Network audits or consultations
• Live networking events

Create an MSP Marketing and Sales Plan

As you begin your marketing activities or work with TRIdigital for access to a complete IT marketing department, remember you will also need a sales process in place. Sending your mailing list emails, blogging, creating whitepapers, or even having the best website in the world will not help you if you aren’t prepared to talk to interested prospects and show them exactly why they need to engage your services to solve their technology challenges.

Start sending your leads through your sales process and you will close more deals.