Managed Services Sales: 25 Killer Qualifying Questions
Between end of quarter sales activity and the rum-pum-pum-pum of the holidays, Web 2.0 time is at a real premium. So help a blogger out. Here are 25 top of mind, discovery-type questions that I like to use in order to qualify potential sales leads. What about you? What are your favorite customer probes? Let’s go for 50 and help each other get ready for a killer 2011.
My starter list includes:
1. What have you outsourced before?
2. Tell me about your experience – good and bad – with MSPs.
3. If you could change one thing in your current MSP relationship, what would it be?
4. Give me the ‘top five” apps you run your business on.
5. What is the killer “make money or save money” app inside your company?
6. Who is your most important IT vendor?
7. If you could get out of supporting one application, what would it be?
8. What’s in your service catalog?
9. How do you find out when systems go down?
10. Has the CEO ever called you about an outage before you knew about it?
11. Tell me about your last DR test.
12. How do you monitor your stuff?
13. Can I see some of your performance dashboards?
14. How often do you apply security patches and updates?
15. Tell me about the company leadership team? Who supports IT? Who gripes about IT?
16. When do budget? How do you budget? Who approves the budget?
17. Did virtualization “pay off” for you?
18. Are you getting pressure to do something “in the cloud”?
19. Do the lines of business go around IT by purchasing cloud apps?
20. In your opinion, what is the single most important project IT is working on?
21. In the CEO’s opinion, what is the single most important project IT is working on?
22. Does your help desk run 24X7X365?
23. How many times have you been called after hours in the last 30 days?
24. Are you hiring or firing right now?
25. How can we help?
CliffsNotes Version: If I have time for one and only one line of questioning, I will always qualify the opportunity with #1 ‘What have you outsourced before?’ The best prospects have outsourcing experience. They have seen the good, bad and ugly of MSPs. They know what they want and don’t want. I have yakked about it before, let the analysts evangelize trends. I want to sell managed services to active buyers.
Phil LaForge is VP and GM, service providers at Nimsoft. Monthly guest blogs such as this one are part of MSPmentor’s annual platinum sponsorship. Read all of Nimsoft’s guest blogs here.
26. When was the last time you reviewed your service level agreements?
27. Which tech vendor does the single best job of meeting your business needs?
28. What’s the one IT priority that never seems to get addressed around here?
29. Can you (or the person in charge of IT) take a real vacation without worrying about IT?
Awesome Mark. I love your questions. Who’s next?
OK, I’ll bite…
30. If you had to chose three applications that can’t go dark in your business, which ones would they be?
31. What was the single biggest IT disappointment you had this year, and why did you wind up disappointed?
32. Let’s talk cost vs. value. What’s your single biggest IT cost that delivers the least value?
-jp (proving that I’ve never sold anything in this industry…)
Joe…
Always a pleasure to read your stuff. I subscribe to Question based selling. Good Job.
Stuart Crawford
http://www.ulistic.com
Stuart: Thanks for reading. I’d love to take all the credit (I’m good at that) but the author is Nimsoft’s Phil LaForge.
-jp
Thanks Joe. Question #32 is brilliant. Fair notice. Stealing it.
Good list Phil, and contributors. My $.02
33. Are you pushing your service provider on strategic improvements, or is your provider offering them to you?
34. How much does an hour of downtime cost your business?
35. What would happen if you lost your top 1, 2, 3, 4 clients?
36. How are you going to keep their business?
37. Here is how we are different from the other guys.
This list needs to be so much longer. I would like to see what other “power” questions get added to this list.
Stuart
Stuart Selbst Consulting
http://www.stuartselbst.com
38. What types of devices are your employees bringing to work? (i.e., the iPad, iPhone, Android, tablet question…)
39. Do you officially support those devices on your network?
40. What steps are you taking to ensure those devices properly access your network?
-jp
Great content. I would add a couple…
What projects are you not able to get to today? Are they revenue driving?
Is your IT Team able to look around the corner or is the main focus putting out fires?
Does your current IT plan address your business strategic plan? (Growth, Customer Service, etc.)
The big one – Who is involved in your decision process?