How to Consistently bring in New Leads for Your MSP: 4 Steps

In order to meet your business goals and continue to grow as a company, your Sales Funnel needs to be constantly replenished, churning a broad pool of names, emails and phone numbers into select number of paying, quality customers.

For that to happen, your MSP company needs to have a set process for continuously bringing in new leads.  This requires a marketing strategy that leverages your industry expertise and knowledge as well as established, proven marketing methods.

When it comes to marketing for your MSP company, start with these 4 simple steps to bring in and attract those new leads.  Most of the time what happens with marketing is that a marketing department will attempt to eat the elephant all at once.  They will dump money into Google Ads, SEO, a new website.  They will pay someone to post on Twitter and LinkedIn and Facebook and who knows where else. 

When it is all said and done, they are left with zero results and zero dollars.

Marketing is not a one-size-fits-all service.  A successful, effective marketing campaign is hyper-focused with clear goals and measurable metrics to ensure you are on the right path.

Once that campaign is operational and fully functional, set a new goal, plan and attack.

So, at this point, when it comes to filling your Sales Funnel, these 4 steps are all you need.

Step #1:  Cyber Security Power Page Creation

Power page, hub page, pillar page, they are all the same.   These are informative, long-form pages.  These are not designed (on the surface) to sell anything, strictly to provide information, to provide an answer to a searcher’s question.

Now these pages can be about any topic of your choosing, whether it be Cloud Services, Microsoft 365, as long as you can provide valuable content to the searcher. We like Cyber Security because that is a hot topic.  Always changing, evolving, cyber security invokes a strong emotional reaction.  And in our experience, these pages generate the most traffic.

Ideally a Power Page contains links to other pages of your website and to external resources on other websites.  This builds your pages authority while also providing further value to the reader.

Keep in mind:  You are the expert in your field.  You can provide valuable information on specific subjects.  Your content should reflect that.

Step #2:  Creating a Cyber Security Lead Magnet

Now your Power (Hub, Pillar) Page is created but you do not want visitors to the page to read and just leave, do you?  No, we need a way to engage.  This is where the MSP Lead Magnet comes in.

A Lead Magnet can be anything that captures some piece of information from a new lead that you can use to later influence them.  For our purposes, we need an email address, maybe a name. 

E-guide downloads, Newsletters, Free Assessments, Surveys; these are all common digital lead magnets. 

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For our Cyber Security example, we have our Cyber Security Power Page built, our website visitor’s interest is piqued, then you hit them with a “Download Your Free Cyber Security Checklist Now” Lead Magnet.

You can be creative here:  Cyber Security Assessment, Cyber Security Quiz, Download this article and read later or again on the plane.  But remember, the website visitor must provide an email in order to receive the Lead Magnet.

Otherwise, that website visitor will download and be on their merry way, never to be follow-ed up with again. 

Step #3:  MSP Marketing Email Nurturing

Great, we have the email address, we have the lead!  However, we have no idea who this person is.  There is no way of knowing if they are interested in IT services.  They could very well be a cyber security enthusiast or a student doing research.

Sure, you can reach out to those leads one by one and vet them.  And soon your day would consist of only following up. 

This step calls for automation.  Now there are several easy to use, highly effective email marketing software platforms out there (Mail Chimp, Constant Contact, Active Campaign), so if you do not have one, do not worry.  Pick one and become an expert. 

Continuing on, these email automations can become exceedingly complex with conditional logic and variables, so for now, keep it simple.  Start with a 4 email sequence:

1.) The “Thank You” email – This will go out immediately after the Lead Magnet is downloaded.  Write it like any email, be personal, but do not push any sales or further offers.  Our only goal is to get the email opened and introduce, so make the subject line enticing.

2.) The “Follow-Up” to the download – Here you can ask if they have any questions around their downloaded Lead Magnet (never say Lead Magnet to the lead, always refer to the name you have given it), ask if they need any help or advice.  This email should go out 2 – 3 days after the first email.

3.) The “First Offer” – Here is where you finally push for another action.  Offer a free consultation, another lower-tiered service or product, a discount for them because they downloaded the Lead Magnet.  This is where we are looking to separate the good leads from the not-right-now leads. Again, this should be triggered to send 2 – 3 days from the last email.

4.) The “Final Follow-up” – If the new lead did not take action on email 3, it’s time for one last follow-up before we send them to the long-term nurture automation.  Here you reiterate the offer, if you haven’t already, you can offer that discount.

Now you have separated out those leads that are actually interested and could potentially become a client.  What now?

Step #4:  MSP Marketing Department & Business Development Alignment

Your Marketing Department and your Business Development team must be on the same page.  This is not just important for these four steps, but for the overall goals of the organization.

When it comes to this example, alignment is critical because your sales team should understand where these leads are coming from and what journey they have been on. 

Furthermore, with your business development team out in the world, networking, shaking hands, they can use your Power Page as a sales tool.  If someone is not interested in buying today, well they may be interested in assessing their current cyber security systems. 

At the end of the day, we want to create a frictionless sales process, from when that potential lead lands on the website to when they are talking on the phone with a sales rep.  This will make the decision easier for the lead and will make life easier on your team.

It seems like a simple process. It is.  And once this system is dialed in, you can move on to the next one and then the next one.  The key is to focus fully on one task before jumping into six other projects.  This is where things get complex, steps fall through the cracks and the whole campaign starts to crumble.

Think about your specialties, your expertise and leverage that.  Here at First Call Digital Agency, our expertise is in lead generation for MSP companies.  We have honed this process and help our clients continuously fill that sales funnel.

Whether you have a marketing department or a marketing director or you are the marketing department, we have solutions for your problems.

Let us know how we can help: