How Managed Service Providers Attract the Right Clients

A lot of managed service providers find it very difficult to attract the right clients in a scalable, predictable way.

Sure every MSP has one or two “home run” caliber clients that make up a large percentage of the company’s overall revenue. But most managed services firms have a bear of a time making it past one-hit-wonder status.

This blog post will address the challenge of attracting the right clients at scale.

How Can We Attract the Right Managed Services Clients Within a Small Geographic Area?

That’s an awesome question that we hear about all the time in the MSP community – regardless of location.

Most managed service providers are fairly small companies. Most are locally focused. Some are regional. Some grow into national companies.

But a lot of times, managed service providers just focus on a small geographic area.

A lot of the approach to attracting the right clients comes down to building a buyer persona for each category of the ideal clients you want to attract.

If, for example, you want to attract CFOs of a financial services company, directors of sales of media companies, or accounting firms, whatever it is, by studying who your best clients are and looking at prospective clients that are very similar, and building out these buyer personas, you’re going to get a clue about what makes these folks tick.

How Managed Service Providers Can Find the Common Ground

And if they’re all clustered in the same geographic area, you should start to see similarities around things like

• What’s keeping them up at 2 o’clock in the morning
• What they’re worried about
• What can get them promoted
• What can get them fired
• Where they hang out online
• Where they hang out offline

And this should inform your content strategy.

So there’s a good chance that if you’re trying to attract potential clients in a certain geographic area, a lot of what you’re talking about in your blogs, videos, podcasts, and social media updates needs to take that geographic qualification element into account. It’s extremely important.

Check Your Ego at the Door

Also, many people don’t realize that you shouldn’t just be talking about technology issues.

Chances are the ideal clients you want to attract care about things that are much more diverse than just the platforms, systems, and technologies you work with.

And there’s a pretty good chance that if you want to catch their attention, in a way that attracts those strangers to your website, you may have to go a little bit broader and write about issues that have a little broader application to their broader business interests, not just the platforms and technologies that you work with.

What have you done to consistently attract the best managed services clients? In the comments box below, let us know what’s worked best and what hasn’t.

And if you're serious about attracting and retaining the best managed services clients, especially if you also support SaaS or IaaS, enroll now in our free 7-day eCourse: Go-to-Market Strategy 101 for B2B SaaS Startups and Scaleups.