By Michael Brown 1

One of the most repeated mantras in the world of sales is to stop selling if you want to sell more. While this may sound like a paraphrased line from The Art of War, it is in fact actually rock-solid advice – one which MSPs selling cloud-based file sharing services can really benefit from understanding.

First off: no, it does not mean you should get up and fire your sales and marketing team. Rather, the phrase hints at a change in strategy to where you align your messages to your customer’s needs, rather than trying to tell them about all that you have to offer.

As it turns out, a worldwide survey conducted by LogicNow found that most IT service provider needs are poorly aligned with their customer’s.  The survey, which included 1,300 IT departments and 700 MSPs, showed that the communication used by IT service providers in the U.S. does not match with what their clients and prospects are expecting from them.

What went wrong?

Apparently, 71 percent of U.S. IT service providers are interested in introducing their prospects to the full gamut of their services right from the get-go, and this is annoying the latter because…

No one likes being sold to!

If you have ever been to a party where a relative or a friend started trying to rope you into their MLM down-line, you will know why this is so. When you are in sell-only mode, you are focusing on your needs and goals, while forgetting your product or service was designed to solve your prospect’s problem in the first place.

In other words, it is not about what you have to offer, but what your prospects are looking for – and successful businesses have always understood this.

Case in point, the survey finds more IT departments are interested in better email security, web protection and anti-virus, while MSPs are busy focusing on security consultancy, system updates and patching.

Similarly, 78 percent of IT departments want to pay their MSPs with a single invoice, but 45 percent of service providers charge their clients on an ad-hoc basis. Another 53 percent have no plans to change this within the coming year.

Time to change your mindset

Being customer-centric is always a good idea in business. The further you move from a one-size-fits-all marketing approach, the more success you will find in getting prospects to sign up with your services.

Incorporating customer segmentation into your business strategy is the best way to go about achieving this. Here, you essentially break your customer database into smaller groups, each defined by key attributes. You can now tailor your marketing messages to the attributes which define the prospects or clients in each group. This is a time-tested strategy that can greatly affect response and signup rates.

For instance, if you find that 53 percent of your clients have expressed interest in email security, while another 27 percent want better web security, and 20 percent require a more robust anti-virus program, then segregate these customers into their own databases based on these attributes and create separate marketing messages for each of the databases, telling them how your services solves their problems.

Furthermore, insights from your customers can also help you improve your overall service. For example, invoicing your customers once a month/quarter/year makes far more sense than doing so multiple times. At the end of the day, you should ask yourself what you can do to make your customer’s life and work easier. Every minute they spend explaining themselves is a minute they could have invested in securing another client, so respect their time and they will respect you with their business.