Many managed services providers have a haphazard approach to growing their revenue – which can become a huge problem and obstacle to scaling the MSP business predictably and profitably.
More often than not, managed service providers struggle with this because they haven’t yet nailed product/market fit – the combination of what product and pricing are the perfect fit for your ideal buyer persona.
We talked about this issue at length during the Inbound Revenue Acceleration Webinar for Managed Services & IT Consulting. This post excerpts a short segment from the webinar.
Question: How Can We Be Consistent With Growing Our Managed Services Revenue and Keep the Growth Moving?
Now let’s turn our attention to the “Close” phase of the sales cycle, where we take our leads and nurture them into clients.
Focus on SMART Goals to Grow Managed Service Revenue
In order to be consistent with growing managed services revenue, and keep the growth moving, everything before you build your personas needs to start with SMART goals.
The SMART acronym stands for
- Specific
- Measurable
- Attainable
- Relevant
- Time-bound
Specific means that we can’t just dream of more sales opportunities and dream of more clients. We have to have a specific number in mind.
Measurable means that we have the platform, the technology, in place to understand which marketing activities led to which revenue outcomes. We call that “closed loop marketing,” and it typically requires a CRM (customer relationship management) system that can talk to the marketing platform you’re using to manage all of this.
Attainable means that we look at what we’ve done in the past look at the resources we’re putting into this and have reason to believe that the goal is reachable.
Relevant means that the goal is overall relevant to what the company is trying to accomplish.
And time-bound means that there must be a deadline, a hard date, that’s attached to it that you’re tracking in your platform for analyzing and measuring all of this, that you put on the calendar and hold yourself accountable to with interim deadlines.
Know Which Interim Sales Funnel Metrics to Measure
And if you’ve built your sales funnel correctly, there are lots of interim steps that you can look at.
You have visitors and leads.
A percentage of leads are marketing qualified leads (MQLs).
A percentage of marketing-qualified leads become sales-ready and get passed on to your sales team.
A certain percentage of sales-ready leads become qualified opportunities.
And a certain percentage of those opportunities become clients – hopefully, if you did your buyer persona research the right way, they’re profitable, desirable clients because you intercepted them early enough in the process that you taught them how to evaluate what it is that you do to make much more informed decision. And you use that education as leverage to build up trusted advisor status.
What have you found most important to scalable, predictable managed services revenue growth? Share your take in the comments below.
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