As someone who spends his days, day in and day out, marketing for MSPs, there’s a mistake I see MSPs and other technology-related businesses make time and again that I’d like to shed a little light on. Scalability — that is, your business’ ability to grow without being held back by either its structure, the resources it has available, or both — is a top concern for all organizations. This is particularly true of technology organizations operating in an industry that is getting more competitive with each passing day.
But, it’s essential for you to understand that “growing as quickly as humanly possible” isn’t the endgame here. Far from it. In fact, a number of studies agree that growing too quickly can be just as deadly for even the healthiest organization as failing to grow at all.
In general, scalability is all about pace. It means you’re always operating at peak efficiency, even when you’re being tested constantly by larger operational demands. It means you’re able to adapt to market changes at a moment’s notice, regardless of the shape that evolution happens to take.
The fact of the matter is your MSP marketing plays a much, much larger role in these goals than you probably think it does.
Relationship between MSP marketing and scalability
One of the most critical aspects of using MSP marketing to help scale your business involves getting a better understanding of what drives growth in the first place. By and large, scaling is something that is driven not by your organization, your products, or your services, but by the ways your customers are reacting to those elements.
I’ve written in the past about how you should be selling value instead of services — this is true. But, you will soon arrive at a point where amplifying positive customer feedback is far more effective than amplifying your original core message. Essentially, you want to use your own customers’ responses to that value as a way to create momentum. This is what will give you a true competitive advantage because “satisfaction” is something nobody does quite like you.
As you continue to work toward properly scaling your business, you’ll also want to become far more targeted with your approach. How people interact with your marketing and then with your website is important, yes. But over time, you’ll also want to start qualifying people based on how they’re actually interacting with your product. This is how you do more than just bring new people into the fold. This is how you identify cross-sell and upsell opportunities, which is ultimately how you strengthen sales over the long-term and create not just growth but the sustainable level of growth that you need.
These opportunities are of particular importance to an organization like a managed services provider because your entire business model is already decidedly more unusual than most. It will always be important to create marketing funnels based on new customer acquisition. But, making the most of your existing customers is also of critical importance, and the right marketing campaign is the only way to guarantee this actually happens.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, most experts agree that a fast-growing business will quickly arrive at the point where they cannot sustain that pace on their own. This is particularly true in terms of your MSP marketing, where people often find themselves trapped so firmly in the daily marketing grind that they have less and less time to devote to actually running their business — ironic, given the circumstances.
Scalability doesn’t have to be difficult
As an MSP, you provide products and services that are already more scalable than most. You’re able to be whatever your customers need you to be, whenever they need you to be it, no questions asked. But this is also why the same must be true of your business. Thanks to the break-neck pace at which technology continues to advance, the market you find yourself operating in tomorrow could be dramatically different from the one you’re operating in today, and you need to be able to respond in kind.
With the right marketing campaign on your side, you can be ready for all of this and more.
Scaling your MSP is vitally important, but it’s only possible if your marketing is scalable as well. This is the type of strategic discussion found in the strategy calls I hold each day with MSP business owners from around the country, and it’s a topic I’m intimately familiar with. If you’d like to find out more information about MSP marketing and you’d like to read it right here in Smarter MSP, please leave a comment below, and I’ll make sure to answer it here or in my next article. Or, if you’d just like to sit down and talk with someone about your organization’s needs in a little more detail, don’t hesitate to contact me at Tech Pro Marketing today.
Photo: ChristianChan/Shutterstock.com
