The importance of starting the conversation

I don't think I've ever thought about giving a State of the Union speech before.
That really put a lot of pressure on me, but I like it. I think the most important thing is how we help people. In the last calendar year - I've looked in our CRM system - I've had formal contact and conversations with 320 different MSPs around the world. And that's not surprising. Typically, the people who start these types of businesses are IT professionals. That's what they know, that's what they love and that's what they've been trained for. So why should they know anything about marketing and sales? You can't be an expert in everything. Our philosophy revolves around how to start a conversation as an MSP. I firmly believe that people in our industry will buy from someone for years. And for me, MSPs sell trust first and IT second. When a potential client trusts you with the keys to their kingdom and the ability to control and operate a company's IT and infrastructure, that's a big deal.

You have to have that trust. For me, the sales process starts with talking to people.

I think if you go on this journey and maybe you're, let's say, a technician in another company and you think, okay, I can do this better. I can do this on my own. I see an opportunity. And it's very, very tempting to go out and buy that stack, you know, invest a lot in the technology and then, you know, open the doors and say, 'Okay, come on, let's go.' But that's not how life works.

If you're going to embark on a journey like that, I think it's much better to start with a plan and get your first one, two or three customers than to do what most people like to do, which is get their hands dirty with technology and figure out how to do all this stuff. Because there's no point in making this huge investment if you then say, 'I don't know how to get my first customer.' So spend your time thinking about it first. That might mean opening your address book.

It may mean searching your LinkedIn network. It may mean meeting a few people for dinner to see if they're interested in becoming your first test customer. Maybe there are three or four people in my circle that it could work with, then buy the technology and deploy it. But start with that. Forget the mass mailings, forget the social media. When you're starting out, you need to be face-to-face and ask those questions and invite people to those lunches.

That's a good question. I think it's very easy to forget to inform your existing customers. So I would look at it from two sides. The first is perhaps a bit more obvious. The second is less obvious. I hope it's valuable to people.

The first is, and this is what we do for people, is we keep them informed monthly or maybe quarterly, whichever suits best. Newsletters, email newsletters or honestly, depending on how many customers you have, when was the last time you got something in the mail? Quite rarely. So it's a good idea to print out the newsletter and send it out, provided it contains something of interest, because it actually gets noticed. It might get more attention than an email newsletter. But I think the content of the newsletter has to appeal to customers and tell them about the company, its activities and the people who work there. It could be a summary of technology news that you know might be useful to them. There's a whole range of things you can put in there. And I think that's something you should do if you want to keep going.

Like I said, you have to educate yourself, but you also have to just stay in touch.
That's a very obvious answer, I think. The less obvious answer, and this is something that I've tried to practice for many, many years, and it only works if everyone in the company does it, is those moments of ad hoc communication, and that goes for the technicians on the helpdesk as well, and some people might laugh at me and say that's never going to happen, but it can happen, and I've seen it work. You know someone is starting a certain project, and as a technician you grab all the possible content that's out there because it's part of your job. You want to be up to date. When was the last time you thought, 'Oh, this might be interesting for that client over there,' and grabbed a link and wrote an email saying, 'I saw this and thought of you'? When was the last time someone did that?

And when you get something like that, it means the world. It's personal, the person was thinking of you. And for me, the best way to do that is to use a tool like Feedly. I think Olaf, you and I are old enough to know what an RSS feed is.
They are still around. They're connected to every blog feed out there. It's one of those underrated things. So use a tool like Feedly, create a series of feeds and go through them for 10 minutes every morning before you start your day. And when you see something interesting, send it to a client. And that stays in your memory.
So this could be an interesting idea for others too.