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Sales & Marketing


Managed Services: Branding All Day, Every Day

  • Written by Joe Panettieri 1
  • December 4, 2008

Amy Katz (MSPmentor's co-founder) and I spent Wednesday visiting a range of companies across Southern California. We were particularly impressed when we visited inhouseIT, ranked No. 8 in last year's MSPmentor 100 list. The executive team's secret sauce: Sales processes, branding and projecting a professional business image.

inhouseIT managed service provider
Amy Katz (MSPmentor’s co-founder) and I spent Wednesday visiting a range of companies across Southern California. We were particularly impressed when we visited inhouseIT, ranked No. 8 in last year’s MSPmentor 100 list. The executive team’s secret sauce: Sales processes, branding and projecting a professional business image.

During our one-hour inhouseIT visit, we noted a few key trends:

  • Branding: inhouseIT has six company mobiles that are branded like the photographed car above. Notice the consistent color sheme, the short-and-memorable URL and the fantastic tagline: “Your Technology Department.” The company doesn’t get bogged down in technology jargon that only another MSP would understand. Instead, they are marketing 24×7 — through their auto fleet — to small business customers.
  • Professional Offices: inhouseIT’s offices have a trendy, fun layout. Yes, there’s an Xbox 360 and LCD screens in the office kitchen. But this isn’t a dot-com company waiting to burst. Work areas all have the same,  consistent, Gen-X trendy furniture and most of the employee workstations have three LCD screens to help employees multitask as they help customers. When you walk around the offices, you feel as if you’re in a min-EDS command center, built for modern-day SMB managed services.
  • Professional Attire: This is a big pet peeve of mine. Fact is, many VARs and IT consultants don’t dress for success. We’ve all seen resellers dress down at conferences and even at customer visits. In stark contrast, everyone at inhouseIT dresses as if they work for a major accounting or consulting firm. But business attire — rather than street clothes — appears to be standard operating proceedure at inhouseIT.

I’ll post some more observations from our business trip later today.

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

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

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9 comments

  1. Avatar Frankie Says December 5, 2008 @ 2:26 am
    Reply

    Does anybody know how much it costs to “paint” a car with such advertisements? How long does the image last/hold up?

  2. Avatar Mike Cooch December 5, 2008 @ 3:24 am
    Reply

    The last time I looked you could get it done for around $1000. Do a search for “car wrapping” and you’ll find some vendors. How long it lasts depends on a variety of factors. In Southern California, it probably lasts a long time. In Boston, it would look like hell in a few months!

    Congrats to the folks at inhouseIT – well done!

    Mike Cooch
    http://www.everonit.com
    http://www.smbitpros.com

  3. Avatar StuFinancesTech December 5, 2008 @ 12:39 pm
    Reply

    Mike’s right. A wrap is what you want for that. I know a guy that can create one for you if needed.

    Stu
    http://www.southernlendingsolutions.com

  4. Avatar Joe Panettieri December 5, 2008 @ 5:52 pm
    Reply

    My parents are in the real estate industry (not so fun right now). But wraps have been the big trend on realtor cars for years. If you need references, go into a few local realtor offices for wrap info.

  5. Avatar TechPro57 December 5, 2008 @ 8:52 pm
    Reply

    Frankie, it’s actually vinyl that sticks to the vehicle’s paint.

    Can cost up to several thousand $$s if very sophisticated and completely “wraps” the vehicle (depends on vehicle and size too).

    Interestingly (or not), I needed to remove a complete vinyl wrap job from a van recently. All it took was a hair dryer to get a section started and then slowly peeling it off. Took just a couple of hours and the paint job was totally un-affected.

  6. Avatar Chad Gniffke December 7, 2008 @ 4:03 am
    Reply

    Great to seem my old firm of 8.5 years getting some shout-outs. inhouseIT is an amazing place and going from 6 to 80 employees while I was there was a fun ride. Great job on the writeup Joe.

  7. Avatar Joe Panettieri December 7, 2008 @ 2:23 pm
    Reply

    Chad: inhouseIT certainly made a positive impression during our visit. We talked “business” for more than an hour, rather than tech stuff.

  8. Avatar Luke January 6, 2011 @ 4:53 am
    Reply

    I did their marketing for many many years including the fun car designs. They were a fun company to work for, always willing to explore things outside the box. And like mentioned above, the focus was never on tech stuff as much as it was on helping clients and talking in lingo they would understand.

    As for the wraps, I’ve designed a few of them now and it’s a fun process. The guys who install the vinyl are amazing and very patient. As for removal most recommend that you take it off within three years or it will start to really grab hold.

    Great way to advertise.
    http://www.crossgrain.com/posts/16-inhouseit-honda-elements

  9. Avatar Joe Panettieri January 6, 2011 @ 1:37 pm
    Reply

    Luke: I always enjoy it when old conversations become new again. Do you have any videos showing how the wraps are applied, etc.? I’d love to learn more and do a follow-up article.
    -jp

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