Have You Stuck With Your Business Growth Plans?

A colleague of mine who writes for MSPmentor, Stuart Crawford from Ulistic, a Williamsville, New York-based managed IT services consulting business, uses a statement in his marketing materials that I think is really important for cloud services providers (CSPs) to consider:

“Only 1 in 100 IT firms think marketing first, but 100 out of 100 want more leads.”

While we are throwing catch phrases around, my personal favorite is this:

“If you keep doing what you have always done, you will keep getting what you always get.”

I would like to invite you to think about your current quarter, and perhaps the commitment that you may have made to yourself at the beginning of the year to grow your business. Where are you? Q1 is half over. What does your sales pipeline look like this year?

I will wager there are a high percentage of CSP owners who had planned to try something new this year, and who have already diverted their attention away from their business growth plans to fight fires.

I encourage you to revisit the plans you made for 2015. If growing your sales was at the top of your list for this year, and you haven’t yet started working on that goal, or you made a beginning and then dropped the ball on it while you diverted your attention elsewhere, take a moment today to commit to your plan again.

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Find an hour today and consider the following:

If it takes 100 outbound touches to connect with one potential qualified lead, and if one out of ten of those qualified leads becomes a prospect, and one out of five of those prospects gets a quote, and one out of three of THOSE quoted prospects close, how many new touches do you have to make this year to sign the number of new clients you want to add to your roster?

Sounds like a complicated math problem, but it’s really an uncomplicated sales problem. You’ll get out of your pipeline only what you put in to it.  It’s not too late.  If your focus this year moved from proactive business growth back to reactive problem solving, you can put your sales hat back on right now and start over. As a small business owner you will never leave the office with your work 100 percent complete. You might not have an office to go to if your pipeline stays 100 percent empty.

Carrie Simpson is founder and CEO of Managed Sales Pros.