4 Steps To Earning New Clients During COVID-19
By Derek Marin, Simple Selling
The best kind of marketing for any business is a referral. Don’t we all need more recommendations these days? A happy client talks and suddenly a stranger calls to sign up!
Well, sure, referrals are fantastic, but the downside is that they’re unpredictable and sometimes the potential clients turn out to be nightmares.
So this article is all about the second-best kind of marketing opportunity: a client success story. Success stories can be predictable (if you’re proactive) and the prospects can be great (if you’re strategic). The stories shouldn’t be fancy or technical, they just need to be inspiring and well promoted.
In this blog, I’ll walk you through a simple recipe for making all this happen.
Document A Remote Work Success Story Now
Right now, during these insane times when toilet paper is like gold, MSPs are the unsung heroes that few are giving enough credit to. I mean, if it weren’t for great IT support companies, thousands, or possibly millions of teleworkers would be unemployed right now.
So now is the time for MSPs to accept that they are essential workers, and most importantly, to be aggressive about collecting and telling heroic stories about themselves.
First things first. Please remove your humility hat and think of a very happy client. You already know what your team accomplished technically, but you need to craft a story and the best way for that is to interview your client.
Send this email to them:
“Dear [Client First Name], I hope you and yours are well and healthy at home. I’m reaching out to see if you would be okay with sharing your perspective on our recent work for you. We’re putting together a few testimonials for our website and hope you’re willing to be one? It would mean a lot to me and our team. Just a short 10-minute Q&A with me over the phone. What do you think?”
Convert The Phone Interview Into A Case-Study
A success story needs three parts: a problem, a hero and a happy ending. You know the technical side of the story, but the world needs to hear the emotional side, your client’s perspective. They will tell you how nervous they were about going remote, how important it was to keep their employees working, how everything has panned out since going remote, etc.
The key to a good interview is to let your client do most of the talking and to record the meeting because they will talk fast and you don’t want to try to keep up with note-taking (though note-taking can help).
If you need help converting the recorded interview into a blog, reach out to us, we’re an MSP business development agency and we can help you convert your interview into a sparkling nice case-study.
Promote The Case-Study On LinkedIn
Once the success story is on your website, it’s time to promote it. Promotion is more important than the story itself. I’ll say it differently. If your website doesn’t generate much traffic, the case-study won’t help you. The only way to get ROI is to put it in front of the right people.
The right place to promote it is LinkedIn. Unlike Facebook, where memes and baby photos are king, LinkedIn is for serious business folks. My agency loves LinkedIn. We use it to set appointments for our MSP clients.
Okay, here are a few tips on how to promote your case-study without spending a dime:
- Share the case study as a personal status update, probably 3 to 7 times over the next 30 days.
- Use an image in your posts, like a photo of your team or your client. Data shows that posts with images drive more views and clicks.
- Do not copy the post over and over; try to vary it up by changing length, using different hashtags, tagging your client or the vendors involved, etc.
Empower Your Sales Team
Your sales representatives need good ice breakers and now you have one. Here’s how I would present it to them. Email the case-study to your reps, ask them to listen to the recorded interview, and finally, direct them to ask any follow-up questions toward the tech team who were involved in the services rendered.
About The Author
Derek Marin is the founder of Simple Selling, a sales and marketing agency for MSPs.