How to build a quality audience of prospects for your MSP Marketing

Welcome to the third article in our three pillars of MSP sales and marketing series. In the first two articles we took a look at what a marketing audience was, and how to create the demographic for your audience. Now, in this third article to finish off the audience segment, we are going to take a look at how you build a quality audience of prospects.

There’s no point in having an audience if you don’t know anything about them. It’s important to explore the distinction between the raw data and a qualified audience. 

To recap previous articles, you should now be in a position where you are ready to start building your very own marketing audience. You will have conducted your research to figure out who is the best fit, identified the organisations and the people within those firms that you need to reach out to in your activity, and you will have built or acquired a list of the best possible contacts and organisations that fit your target demographic.  

Sales in any industry requires intelligence, but none more so than in the MSP space where you are regularly selling to people who already have an established relationship or a contract in place. The more you know about your prospects the more intelligently and focused you can sell. This is achieved by profiling relevant information such as; contract end dates, a business road map, operational priorities, understanding their relationship with their incumbent, learning about their pains, identifying the number of IT seats they have, as well as other information such as their needs, goals and challenges – all of these can help shape your cadence, timing and overall approach using targeted marketing messages to win over prospects and build a rapport.  

The question we are often asked is, “how do I go about acquiring this information?”

There is no silver bullet or magic formula at work here. It is often a case of simply asking. Here at Wingman we have a team of people that can gather such intelligence for you but if you are doing the work yourself it’s about picking up the phone. Don’t be afraid to pick up the phone and ask those direct questions. Even in this digital age of paranoia around data security, when approached in the right way people are often willing to provide information. 

This part of the process is where a great deal of rapport can be built, providing you with information and intelligence that can be used later on in the sales cycle. More important than anything at this stage is recording the information you gather and planning having a plan to track and act on that data, scheduling call backs, follow ups and putting into the diary contract end dates etc.  If an opportunity exists to make a call back make sure its diarised, the reason for the call noted and that the call is made when scheduled.  

Consistency not persistency is the key. 

Thank you for reading these articles. We hope that this series is of interest to you and, if you are an MSP looking to grow, please get in touch with our expert team to see how we can help you.