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 Channel Futures

Sales & Marketing


How to Turn Business Cards Into Revenue

  • Written by Joe Panettieri 1
  • November 14, 2008
I got an email yesterday from a managed service provider located in the Southeastern United States. In it, he wrote:
"Joe we have had three clients pare back their contracts just today due to layoffs. We charge by the machine. What are u hearing?"

Unfortunately, I'm hearing similar stories from across the United States. But I also heard a key story from a managed service provider in Michigan. Here's how he's staying close to customers and driving new revenue opportunities in the bad economy.

I got an email yesterday from a managed service provider located in the Southeastern United States. In it, he wrote:

“Joe we have had three clients pare back their contracts just today due to layoffs. We charge by the machine. What are u hearing?”

Unfortunately, I’m hearing similar stories from across the United States. But I also heard a key story from a managed service provider in Michigan. Here’s how he’s staying close to customers and driving new revenue opportunities in the bad economy.

Last Monday, the Michigan MSP called a weekly meeting with his 15 employees. And he gave every employee the same assignment: They had 24 hours to gather every third-party business card they had in their office Rolodexes, in their cars, in their homes…

By Tuesday, the MSP was busy building a centralized customer target list. It started with a single centralized spreadsheet for all employees to review.

Within a few days, the MSP plans to move the spreadsheet into a CRM (customer relationship management) system. From there, employees will start to identify prime targets for first-time engagements, upselling and cross selling.

Who’s Managing Your Customer List?

The key lesson here: We all attend dozens of business meetings and customer meetings each month. Your employees gather hundreds of business cards.

But what happens to all of that contact information? Who gathers, centralizes and nutures the data? And what additional steps — newsletters, special promos, etc. — can you take to promote your messaging to that mass audience of qualified leads?

Right now, there are likely hundreds or thousands of third-party business cards collecting dust around your office. Go gather than, centralize the information, and nurture the resulting contact list.

MSPmentor is updated multiple times daily. Don’t miss a single post. Subscribe to our Enewsletter, RSS and Twitter feeds.

Tags: Agents Cloud Service Providers MSPs VARs/SIs Sales & Marketing

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8 comments

  1. Avatar John November 14, 2008 @ 9:58 pm
    Reply

    Gathering business cards and creating contact lists seems like a very laborious and expensive way to find prospects.

    I would think that MSPs would be capable and could efficiently attract customers through blogs and online content they create. Use that to get good position in search engines and links from around the web, and have qualified prospects contacting you.

  2. Avatar Joe Panettieri November 14, 2008 @ 10:30 pm
    Reply

    John: Blogs are a great way to develop conversation. We’ve bet our media business on blogs.

    But those business cards are also nuggets of gold. They represent relationships and contacts a business has in place — but has failed to organize and leverage.

    During my annual travels, I collect roughly 1000 business cards. Imagine a company that lets those cards collect dust rather than having an organized method to gather customer lead info from every employee who returns from a sales or business meeting…

  3. Avatar Dominic Monkhouse November 18, 2008 @ 7:56 am
    Reply

    Collecting business cards and building a CRM system? Oh how 1980s! Not knocking getting the whole company galvanized to search out new opportunities or the use of low tech solutions. We are doing just that at the moment – called “4 a day”. We need to find 4 new sales opportunities from existing customers and when we get to 200 we will give the social committee £500. A huge white board on the wall tracks the progress and followed by a daily email update. BUT for some years Google has been the only game in town in terms of opening new relationships with companies needing IT support, more so in a recession. That’s why they (Google) said they are a recession proof business.

  4. Avatar Joe Panettieri November 18, 2008 @ 10:08 am
    Reply

    Dominic: Those are fantastic suggestions but I would debate your claim that Google is “recession proof.” Have you seen their stock this year? It has dropped more than 50 percent this year, according to our SaaS 20 stock index.

    One challenge facing Google is the fact that so many start-up businesses have been using Adwords, but now some of those start-ups are dying in the current economy.

    Google has a great business model, but I will repeat my claim that NO business is fully recession proof.

  5. Avatar jmamon November 18, 2008 @ 8:59 pm
    Reply

    I think things are going to get worse before they get better so ANY function – from business cards to blogging – is worth the effort. Now is not the time to go in a shell – market your company and services fiercely! Everybody sells!

  6. Avatar rseavey November 21, 2008 @ 11:18 am
    Reply

    I agree with jmamon….exploit any angle available to increase your marketing efforts in a slow economy. Google didn’t build my business and I’m certainly not relying on them to find new customers.

  7. Avatar J.J Dudley December 6, 2008 @ 12:49 pm
    Reply

    I am a start-up managed IT company.Wanted to know are there any resources to find experienced managed IT Salespeople or do I have to train individuals myself?

  8. Avatar Joe Panettieri December 6, 2008 @ 1:20 pm
    Reply

    J.J. – The “experienced” folks are hard to find. You can post a free help wanted add in our career center (http://www.mspmentor.net/careers). And you can find educational sales materials not only from our Resource Center (free registration required) but also from MSP University (http://www.mspu.us). Erick Simpson is CIO there, and can offer more info if you visit his site.www.mspu.us

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