Two New Sources of Sales and Marketing Help for MSPs
Just because channel partners generate most of their own leads these days, according to IDC’s data, doesn’t mean they’re any good at it.
Or that they have much time for it. Nancy Henriquez (pictured left), a former MSP with deep experience in sales and marketing, is working to fill both gaps through a new venture named Sibyl Consulting. Aimed at younger, smaller MSPs with maybe a handful of techs, the service takes care of lead gen for them.
“They aren’t really looking to have someone on staff to handle that,” she observes.
Sibyl also designs and optimizes sales processes, trains clients to execute them, and assists with related operational tasks.
“We’ll basically make sure that an onboarding process is not only in place but also that it aligns with the promise that they’re making with their sales and marketing efforts,” Henriquez says.
Pricing begins at $500 a month for the outsourced marketing piece of the service.
Sales and marketing figure prominently in the newest offering from Gradient MSP as well. Called MSP Studio, it’s a resource hub for managed service providers stocked with ready-made marketing toolkits.
“We’ve got 12 full turnkey campaigns, about one month each, so call it a full year’s worth of marketing, all professionally designed,” says Colin Knox (pictured right), Gradient’s CEO and co-founder.
The site also offers two to three minute “microlearning” content. “We’ve pulled together a list of industry experts and thought leaders across a variety of topics, like sales and marketing, operations and scaling, and forming cybersecurity programs,” Knox says. New content about M&A, service delivery, and additional subjects will be added regularly, he notes, and a series of educational webinars launches next week.
“We continue to bring more and more experts into the fold,” Knox says.
Included as well is an expanded and redesigned version of the pricing benchmark tool we first told you about last August. “We had hundreds and hundreds of MSPs that came through and benchmarked themselves,” Knox says. “We wanted to be able to deliver that same data and insight in an easier to digest manner.”
Like the pricing tool, MSP Studio is entirely free to use whether you’re a Gradient client or not.
“It’s all wide open,” Knox says. Costs for the portal are being covered by a collection of vendors that includes Augmentt, Barracuda, Huntress, Keeper Security, and Sherweb.
MSP Studio debuted two weeks after another addition to Gradient’s portfolio, a managed edition of its flagship billing reconciliation system.
“MSPs were coming in ultimately looking for a solution where they didn’t have to do any reconciliation at all,” Knox says. Gradient’s managed reconciliation service lets them hand that chore off to a dedicated team of billing specialists, shielding themselves in the process from errors that can destroy client relationships.
“There’s few areas where you can make a single mistake and lose all trust from your customer,” Knox says. “It’s just not worth that risk, especially when there’s alternatives and easy ways to offload that from your team.”