A Managed Services Provider (MSP) for IT infrastructure and end-user systems was looking to increase regional brand awareness and generate more high-quality sales appointments for the President of their Company.
Industry: Information Technology (IT) Services providing Computer Support, Troubleshooting, Management, & Technical Repairs
Target Audience: IT Directors, Professional Services, Non-Profit, and Government
Service Provided: Scheduling in-person or over the phone appointments for the President of the Company via a custom Cold Calling strategy
Decision-Makers & Stakeholders: IT Specialists, Facilities or Systems Administrators
The Challenge:
Looking to build a sustainable outbound strategy via cold calling, the client was focused on generating more local sales appointments to increase their sales pipeline. Having a hard time determining their ideal client profiles, the client faced issues with targeting and messaging in their previous cold calling campaigns, run by internal sales staff. It was the client’s goal to receive a minimum of 3 sales meetings per month.
Although the client was targeting local sales appointments in the Santa Fe and Albuquerque regions, they were having a tough time competing with other local and remote MSP IT services across the United States. With such high competition, they needed to make customers more aware of their brand and company benefits.
The client knew constant prospecting was starting to hurt his sales team. They were spending too much time testing different cold calling strategies that didn’t prove valuable and their pipeline took a major hit. They needed a more sustainable way to put appointments on their calendar.
With too broad of a target audience, the client needed help refining their messaging to meet the wants, needs, and business challenges of their respective decision-makers. The scripts needed to properly articulate the client’s security, risk, and management benefits while showing they were a local business that cares deeply about their prospect’s IT issues.
After seeing a negative trend in their sales pipeline, company leadership was stressed about getting more appointments on their calendar as fast as possible. They already had a rough year and needed to ramp up quickly to stay afloat. They were looking for a smooth onboarding and an Account Manager that would help them get started since they had never outsourced before.
The Superhuman Solution:
Collaborating with the client on a series of kickoff calls, SHP was able to analyze vital campaign details, objectives, and implement a custom appointment setting strategy via cold calling for our MSP IT client.
The project, which started in 2019, would focus on prospecting small to medium-sized businesses that held 10-15 employees, 5-45 workstations (computers), and an onsite server. A local radius was determined with a split of 70% Santa Fe leads and 30% Albuquerque IT leads. SHP would also provide a custom Marketing list build of 100 contacts managed monthly for 12 months. These prospects would be called up to 3Xs to reach the predetermined decision-maker.
To build the custom marketing list, SHP examined the preferred industries and worked with the client to better narrow down their ideal client profiles. All marketing lists went through our 3-pronged approach, manually sourcing, checking, and cleansing the contact lists to ensure that all criteria were met with the highest quality data.
Feeling the pressure for sales, the client needed to start generating appointments. To mitigate pressure, SHP started the campaign only accepting in-person sales appointments for the President of the Company, with no warm or neutral appointments being set. Those considered warm or neutral would receive additional sales touches at a later date.
The client’s custom messaging centered around their ability to provide IT Staff at a fraction of the price, offering unlimited IT services for five computers or providing monitoring as a contractor, so their clients can better budget their IT costs each month. While they had some larger clients, they wanted their prospects to know all of their needs would be cared for.
Regularly occurring milestone meetings were scheduled to discuss campaign progression, scheduling needs, and their overall lead scoring results, to make any necessary adjustments for improvement and optimization. SHP and the client also discussed his Service and which industries showed the most potential in their Serviceable Obtainable Market.
The Superhuman Benefits:
From the first Project, the client saw increased campaign results from refining their targeting and messaging around new audience profiles.
While the client mentioned during onboarding they wanted to focus on meeting with larger enterprises, non-profits, or Government prospects, SHP determined an advantage with smaller industry sectors within their Serviceable Obtainable Market.
By outsourcing their appointment setting, the client was able to lower costs associated with internal hiring, training, managing, and the high technology costs needed to improve their prospecting efforts and lead quality. Additionally, their small sales team was facing less burnout from the consistent prospecting tasks needed to succeed in the MSP IT industry.
SHP provided the client with additional sales touches, confirming all scheduled cold call appointments and nurturing leads scored as warm or neutral since the first campaign. The client and their internal sales team spent more time closing deals and building relationships with the knowledge they had gained from SHP’s detailed project research.
With clean data on harder-to-source contacts, real-time campaign reporting, and custom H2H Cold Call Scripts, the client gained higher quality leads, resulting in a stronger, more secure sales pipeline. Additionally, turnover within the company decreased as they were able to lower the stress and pressure from administration tasks put on the internal sales team.
Working with their dedicated Account Manager, the client never lost any control over their campaign – they gained a sales partnership and a greater ability to scale their projects and reach campaign goals. At one point during the campaign, their in-person meetings had to be paused. SHP was able to pause and reschedule meetings effectively and efficiently.
Appointment Setting Results:
The client, engaged with Superhuman Prospecting since 2019, has run 23 campaigns resulting in 60 in-person sales appointments being set for the President of their Company.
- 6943 Dials
- 603 Conversations
- 60 Appointments
Increasing Campaign Results: Project #3
With the entire world rushing to work from home remotely, the demand for MSP IT management and security services surged. Remote employees were starting to connect sensitive company information over their home networks that also serve many random home Internet of Things (IoT) devices. These devices are likely to lack physical security and tend to be rarely or never updated.
Using this information as an advantage, SHP quickly refined the custom contact list to include smaller non-profits, law firms, and accounting firms.
This continuous improvement of their target market profiles, along with refinements in their cold call scripts, helped increase appointments, leading to a 1.20% overall Appointment Setting Rate.
- 3157 Dials
- 267 Conversations
- 38 Appointments
