CoreConnex | Business Systems for IT Service Companies

Many VARs, MSPs and IT service firms know at some point they need to market their services, but often ask themselves, “What should marketing be doing for our business?”  While the common thought might be something nebulous like “building awareness” or perhaps “generating leads”, the truth is many companies like yours struggle to get this right.

I’ve always liked Peter Drucker’s quote, “There is only one valid definition of a business purpose: to create a customer.” We are all in the business of creating and retaining customers. From that outcome springs our ability to drive profitability, growth, competitiveness, and the other goals of our business.

Marketing’s goal is to facilitate the process of creating customers - Your Clients. Think of the natural frictions that come into play in acquiring new clients: they don’t know about you, and if they do know about you, they might not believe your service or product is right for them, and if they feel the service is right they might not trust you to deliver it - and so on. Customers don’t fall from the sky under the force of gravity - in fact the natural forces are in most cases against them coming into your orbit. Marketing is about changing their trajectory, and if they become a client, perhaps more importantly it’s about profitability.

There are numerous “points of friction” in your client acquisition process. If you’re a normal small business these points won’t be in all places at once - and certainly you don’t have the time and resources to address all these points at once. What you need to do is determine where your client creation factory is stuck and apply your efforts there. There are three key stages you should consider;

• Prospects Pipeline - do you have enough high quality leads? Do you have a definition of a qualified lead - a company who needs your services? You know the math - 1 in X leads is actually qualified, and only a few of those qualified leads will become clients. Work the math backwards; how many new clients do you need next year? How’s your pipeline of leads to drive this? If your hunch is “not enough” this is the place to start.
• Client Acquisition - if you feel that you’ve really got enough good leads in your CRM system (let’s hope you have some system in place) but somehow they aren’t turning into profitable clients, then this could be the place to focus in on. Why are your qualified leads not turning into clients? Don’t fool yourself - take a hard look and if you are indeed dealing with qualified leads, then something about what you are communicating (or not communicating) to them is causing them not to sign on with you. This is where your marketing should be focused.
• Client Optimization - OK, you have more than enough clients. Word of mouth and referrals are more than you have time to follow up on. You’re king of the mountain. Except for one thing; you’re not as profitable as you’d like to be. If you have more clients than you need, then you should really look at optimizing your current client portfolio to be more profitable. Or possibly you need to look at developing market verticals within your client-base. In either case, your marketing should be focused on targeting your profitability relating to your client base. You can read more about the client portfolio concept in another one of the CoreConnex blog series.

In the next three blog posts I’ll cover proven marketing strategies and tactics for each of these very normal stages in your client acquisition and optimization processes. Every business has cycles when they are out of balance with one or the other. The role of marketing is to invest your resources in an ROI-smart way to get you into that most important of all business functions: Creating new - and profitable - clients.

Your homework between now and then is to think carefully about this. Take a good hard look at your business goals and current situation. Then ask yourself: if you were to focus on only one of the three stages described above, which should it be?