The Art of Managed Services Sales – From The Olive Garden?
I had dinner last night with a few MSP industry insiders. One of them is a business intelligence expert. She spends her days focused on Google Analytics, lead generation and sales pipelines. Somehow, we started discussing early career moves. She mentioned her early experiences at the Olive Garden restaurant chain. To my surprise, she described how the Olive Garden measures employee performance (i.e., sales) and other daily business metrics. It made me think: If restaurant chains with college employees have mastered the art of the upsell, why haven’t MSPs?
Let me give you a few upsell and sales management examples:
- Freemium: The BI expert told me how freemium actually has a role within the Olive Garden — unlimited bread, salad and pasta all at a fixed cost. Clientele think they’re getting a lot of “free” value for their dollar, but she had never seen someone consume more than three servings of pasta. Translation: Olive Garden’s profit margins were doing just fine, thank you very much, and customers were getting a lot of bang for their buck.
- Sample this, pay for that: Also, she explained how restaurants leave a house bottle of wine on the table for guests to sample. The product placement generated massive upsells for wine and then coffee and dessert.
- Measure Everything: At the end of each evening, restaurant employees were measured on their ability to upsell and cross sell appetizers, drinks and dessert with main courses. Simple financial math revealed which employees knew how to generate the most revenue per customer over the long-haul.
This is really basic stuff, of course. And the strategies are proven. Olive Garden, owned by Darden, has more than 700 restaurants, more than 87,000 employees and $3.3 billion in annual sales. Is it time for MSPs to emulate that cross-selling and up-selling recipe for success?
Note: I’m double-checking to see if my Business Intelligence source is willing to share her name and company affiliation with readers. I wasn’t taking notes during our conversation, though I hope I captured the essence of the discussion. Update, 11:09 a.m. eastern, Jan. 19 2011: The source for the article was Erica Santo, a business intelligence expert at ConnectWise. I received the green light to publish her name a few minutes ago.
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I would love to hear some examples on how MSP are successfully up-selling. What services are most commonly and successfully cross-sold for which services?
I love this article, I always thought the Olive Garden were geniuses for putting the bottle of wine on the table, gets me every time.
Joe,
Thanks for sharing. I would like to address Britt’s comment.
Britt, I would recommend to you to come up with your version of the question “Would you like fries with that”. We have all answered yes to that question in a drive through or at the counter.
Services that I am seeing MSPs up-sell successfully are business continuity, email filtering and encryption and hardware as a service. I literally just had a partner tell me that he has sold 12 new computers this month alone.
I believe that the key to up-selling is showing the business justification of the services. For instance, if you pitch business continuity and they say, what will that do for me and my business? You now have an open forum to tell the customer everything that it can do; they haven’t said no, they are letting you “sell” them on the solution.
Again, Joe, thank you for sharing and I look forward to more great posts.
Stuart
Stuart Selbst Consulting
http://www.stuartselbst.com
Update: The source for the article was Erica Santo, a business intelligence expert at ConnectWise.
[email protected]: The biggest upsell I keep hearing about involves VoIP — handsets, soft phones, hosted VoIP, unified communications apps.
[email protected]: On the HaaS front, I’m starting to hear from MSPs who want to become Google HaaS promoters — forthcoming Chrome OS networks and Android tablets. Watching closely to see if HaaS business models emerge around Google’s OS platforms…
-jp
I was able to make Erica’s session at the ITNation. She had a great understanding and application of data in the sales and marketing areas. It was inspiring like the story above…..Tim Brewer
Tim: She’s sharp. I spend about an hour a day in Google Analytics but I felt like a novice while we were talking. That’s why I switched the topic to Olive Garden… I’m good at following food conversations.
-jp