With the start of a new year, many MSPs are looking for new ways to grow their business. Truth be told, there’s no secret weapon out there that can help you grow your business. However, honing-in on your sales strategy is a great starting point. It can be a time-consuming and challenging process, but to achieve your sales goals, it’s important to have a solid sales prospecting plan in place.
Recently Barracuda MSP hosted a webinar with Kendra Lee, president of KLA group, where she provided the following four steps on how to build a sales prospecting plan to achieve your goals. Here are some of the highlights:
Set prospecting goals
Setting specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) prospecting goals is crucial to achieving your sales objectives. Determine the number of prospects you want to reach out to, the response rate you hope to achieve, and the number of meetings or sales you expect to close.
Identify who to target first
Before you start prospecting, it’s important to define your ideal customer profile. This means identifying the characteristics of the customers who are most likely to buy your services. Once you have identified these, you will want to go after your top prospect accounts and top clients first. These will likely be more competitive to get access to, so it may take more sales and prospecting efforts to gain access and close.
Don’t go at it alone
You should get a percentage of leads from your salespeople, a percentage from marketing, and 20 percent of your leads should come from referrals and alliance partner relationships. Be sure to give everyone a quota per month to aim for.
Fill the quota gap
By this step, we know how much our goal is, who we’re going to target, and who is going to help us – the difference between who can help us and what we gave them as a quota (based on what our goal is) is our quota gap. There are various channels available for sales prospecting, including email, social media, cold calling, and networking. Each channel has its pros and cons. Engage marketing, such as webinars, planned campaigns, and social posts, are great ways to help fill that gap.
Building a sales prospecting plan requires a clear understanding of your ideal customer profile, looking at your available prospecting channels, setting specific goals, and tracking your results. Watch the replay of Kendra’s webinar, How to Build a Prospecting Plan to Achieve Your Goals, to learn about how to build a successful prospecting plan.
Photo: Andrii Yalanskyi / Shutterstock
