Top Takeaways from the PIVOT2GROW Webinar Series. Available Free On-Demand

The world has changed in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic – and so has the MSP business.

Today's MSPs are facing uncertainties on multiple fronts. How can you best serve and retain your current clients? What adjustments do you need to make to the way that you do business to gain an edge over the competition? Should you adjust both your security stack and your strategy to account for changes like an increase in remote work? Where will you mine for new prospects? How can you make connections without live events?

These concerns are really all about the same question: How can you pivot your MSP to answer the needs of today’s clients, prosper in a down economy, and (most importantly) grow? ID Agent and Marketopia recently hosted the weeklong virtual event PIVOT2GROW to answer that question.

More than a dozen experts in MSP marketing and sales came together for a virtual event that featured two daily sessions focused on how to pivot an MSP to thrive in today’s tumultuous business landscape and be perfectly positioned to take advantage of tomorrow's growth opportunities. Here are their 10 best tips to help you PIVOT2GROW.

1. Create 3 basic business strategies: immediate, short, and long term

In order to keep your business moving forward and poised for success, you need plans in place that delineate your immediate, short-term, and long-term goals and needs. Those plans must be written down, but they don’t have to be written in stone. They’ll be living documents that evolve to ensure that you’re staying relevant and true to your vision of what you want your business to be. You started your business with a dream, are you fulfilling it? (see tip 5)

Creating these strategies will put you in control of how you’re investing your capital, and that includes your time (see tip 2). It’s essential to keep an eye on the plans that you’ve made in order to effectively analyze the market and find new opportunities. Revisit these documents at least quarterly to note your progress and adjust them as needed to plan, invest, and ultimately achieve your goals.

2. Prioritize your investment in the future of your business

Part of creating your plan is delineating how you’ll invest your capital. Don’t panic because the news or the economy looks bad and retrench – fear is not your friend. By investing in the future of your business when times are tough, you’re not just shoring up your foundation to assure your survival, you’re showing your partners and clients that you have confidence in your expertise and plan to continue being a leader (see tip 8).

Investing in the future of your business doesn’t necessarily mean buying things either. Investing in your business also includes investing in intangibles that can have a big impact on your reputation and future success like continuing education, outsourcing non-tech work like accounting, expanding your marketing, increasing your event sponsorships, seeking out or providing mentoring, and other seeds that you can plant that will ultimately contribute to business growth (see tip 7).

3. Get serious about content marketing and take advantage of vendor content

Content marketing is a win-win proposition. Content creates educated customers, and educated customers are the ones that say “yes.” Content establishes thought leadership, making you a trustworthy authority in your profession (see tip 7). Content connects with both clients and colleagues, helping you stay top-of-mind when they’re looking to make a purchase or invite speakers to a conference - and that’s how new opportunities can fall into your lap. Investing in quality content and promoting that content is a powerful investment in the future of your business. (see tip 2)

Content marketing is not as complicated as MSPs may think. Even if you don’t enjoy research or writing, you can still make content marketing a cornerstone of your strategy and boost your thought leadership profile by aggregating or curating content provided by other sources. Take advantage of free resources like vendor supplied blogs, newsletters, infographics, white papers, and eBooks. Many vendors provide huge amounts of free content that you can quickly repackage for your own use. (see tip 2).

4. Do more marketing than sales to seed the garden for new prospects

Part of creating your plan is delineating how you’ll invest your capital. Don’t panic because the news or the economy looks bad and retrench – fear is not your friend. By investing in the future of your business when times are tough, you’re not just shoring up your foundation to assure your survival, you’re showing your partners and clients that you have confidence in your expertise and plan to continue being a leader (see tip 8).

Investing in the future of your business doesn’t necessarily mean buying things either. Investing in your business also includes investing in intangibles that can have a big impact on your reputation and future success like continuing education, outsourcing non-tech work like accounting, expanding your marketing, increasing your event sponsorships, seeking out or providing mentoring, and other seeds that you can plant that will ultimately contribute to business growth (see tip 7).

5. Ask what would my business look like if I was starting it right now?

If you were starting your business today, what would that look like? What would you be selling, and how would you be selling it? How would you find customers? How would you staff your business? What would your immediate, short-term and long-term goals look like (see tip 1)? List them out to focus more closely on what you really want your business to be. Reinvent yourself - instead of selling prospects on your business as a vendor of IT products, sell prospects on the idea of your business as their IT department. Investing in the future of your business doesn’t necessarily mean buying things either. Investing in your business also includes investing in intangibles that can have a big impact on your reputation and future success like continuing education, outsourcing non-tech work like accounting, expanding your marketing, increasing your event sponsorships, seeking out or providing mentoring, and other seeds that you can plant that will ultimately contribute to business growth (see tip 7).

Don’t be afraid to talk to your staffers, your clients, your vendors, your competition, and your mentors, to get real feedback on what you’re doing right and what you’re doing wrong. Listen carefully and ignore any hurt feelings or anger that you may feel in the name of making real progress. You may even want to gather some of those folks into an advisory board to help you guide your business. Take stock of your current assets. Not just cash – your staff, client lists, prospects, contacts, vendors, reputation, ideals, intellectual property, and other intangibles are an essential part of your business and therefore count as assets.

6. Do your homework: Getting to know your connections makes sales

As one of our experts memorably said, “Don’t just say you know me, show me you know me.” Before you reach out to a new prospect, do your homework. Take the time to look at their social media profiles, visit their websites, read articles that they’ve written, look through blogs that they’ve contributed to. Find out what you may have in common, like membership in a professional organization or fandom of a sport (see tip 9). Use those commonalities to establish a rapport. Remember that in any email you send, the subject line is what gets someone to open it, so be sure to include your CTA. But the first line or two is what will get your target to read the rest, so be sure to use the knowledge that you gained from doing your research to pique their interest.

When you’re hunting for a job and you’ve got a big interview, you’d always want to do research into what that company is about in order to knock the interview out of the park and get the job. Why would that be any different when you’re hunting for a new client? Do your homework and lean on any connections that you may discover to show your prospect that they’re important and you’ve taken the time to learn about them before coming at them with a sales pitch. Use this technique to connect and stay connected with all your other contacts too, because you never know who knows who and how those connections can pay off for you. Today’s Systems Administrator is tomorrow’s CISO.

7. Your success is built on 3 things: your mindset, your skillset, and your toolset

The three most important elements of your success are your mindset, skillset, and toolset. Everything that you do to build your business and grow yourself should fall into one of those three categories. These are the things that make up your business’s foundation and enable you to achieve your immediate, short-term and long-term goals (see tip 1). Only when you have all 3 of those things working in concert can you really grow and set yourself up for success. Investing in the future of your business doesn’t necessarily mean buying things either. Investing in your business also includes investing in intangibles that can have a big impact on your reputation and future success like continuing education, outsourcing non-tech work like accounting, expanding your marketing, increasing your event sponsorships, seeking out or providing mentoring, and other seeds that you can plant that will ultimately contribute to business growth (see tip 7).

It’s just as important to tend to your mindset as it is to your skillset. Read books, and blogs, and websites that are relevant to your business, but also that feed your mind. Everyone likes to think that “always on” sales is the only way to succeed, but that’s not true. By reading, listening, learning and connecting with the world around you outside of your business as well as inside of it, you add unexpected things to your toolset. (see tip 6) Talk to your contacts about things other than business and keep in touch with contacts that aren’t in a position to buy right now (see tip 6), because they’ll be your conduits to future business.

8. Win new business and nurture long tail prospects by providing thought leadership

Thought leadership has great value, and there are several ways that you can put yourself in a position where you will be considered a thought leader. Content marketing is a huge part of thought leadership (see tip 3). By creating or promoting content that showcases your in-depth knowledge, you boost your profile. Video content is highly shareable on social media, and a great way to connect with prospects or get them to look to you for future advice. Webinars and event panels are another effective way to establish thought leadership as well as promote your business.

Thought leadership is a win-win for every MSP. Demonstrating that you're a thought leader who is confident that you can fulfill your prospect’s need by providing helpful advice, straightforward pricing and real solutions to the problems that your prospect is trying to solve is the way to close a deal with a high-quality prospect. 74% of deals are awarded to the first seller to provide both value and insight to solve the problem, so by positioning your MSP as a savvy, ahead of the curve, thought leader in the Channel, you set yourself up to notch more wins. (see tip 3)

9. Maximize on social media and use every resource it offers, especially LinkedIn

Don’t just fill in your LinkedIn profile, customize it to instantly give someone looking at it a snapshot of what you and your business are all about. Use a beautiful landscape of your city, or a picture of awards you’ve won in your header. Make sure that your “About” tells a professional story that also shows off your personality, then follow it up with a short, punchy explanation of your expertise and your personality. Use your personal LinkedIn to share articles and videos that establish thought leadership (see tip 8). Update your headline to include the problem that you solve for your customers instead of generic industry terms.

Use LinkedIn to trace prospects through Sales Navigator and farm prospects from past sales as they move around. Reverse engineer your successes to find new prospects. Use LinkedIn for business prospecting and communications, and Facebook and Twitter for event promotions and fun content to show that you’re multidimensional and not stodgy. Cast a wide net for connections and connect with everyone that you work with, regardless of their current position– you never know when that person might move on, giving you an in to pitch them (see tip 7).

10. The playing field has been levelled and now is the time for reinvention

Don’t be afraid to take this opportunity to reinvent your business. Are you validating being average? Do you need to commit to change in order to prosper now? Have the ways that you’ve been doing things really been effective? Are you really serving your needs and accomplishing your goals? (see tip 5). You can’t just change your business’s name to change your business – you have to change your focus by understanding the problems that your business solves.

Now is the time to invest in your business in order to drive it forward as quickly as possible while taking advantage of opportunities that won’t come around again (see tip 2). Real leaders invest in people and technology that enable their businesses to grow in hard times. Instead of cutting staff, invest in talent. Focus on the process and what needs to happen now in order to find the right path. And start doing it now. Don’t wait until everything is “ready” for you to make changes or pursue a new strategy - waiting 90 or 120 days will make you miss out on possibilities and opportunities. Sometimes you just have to jump in with both feet.

Conclusion

MSPs that have a robust marketing strategy and a well-maintained sales pipeline based on demonstrated confidence in your business and thought leadership will do well in any economy. If you aren’t devoting a solid chunk of your time to marketing, you’re not really marketing, and if you are not marketing, you won’t succeed. Utilize all of the resources that are at your disposal from vendor-provided content to social media contacts and position yourself as a thought leader. Make marketing a priority for both your time and money, because failure to invest in marketing is failure to invest in your future.

Growing your business successfully involves more than just growing your sales. Don’t rely on scare tactics or technical audits that disparage other companies to build yours up. Rely on a reputation that’s built from thought leadership, consistency in messaging, a reputation for honest dealings, clear pricing, and personalized service. Don’t just glean everything that you can from your customers because it cannibalizes your future growth to harvest without replanting. Instead, reimagine your business, reposition yourself, revive your dreams, and move forward into a world where your MSP can thrive.