Archive for March, 2010

MSPs Building Trust

Monday, March 29th, 2010

I’m reading ‘The Speed of Trust’ by Stephen Covey Jr. It’s a great book. The basic premise is that everything happens faster within organizations where there’s trust. Time is money, so organizations that don’t engender trust burn through more cash to accomplish the same amount as their more trustworthy competitors.

It got me to thinking about how we at acSellerant might help our MSP clients build trust with their prospects. Using Covey’s universal tenets, I’ve come up with the following guidelines:

Talk Straight

Tell the truth. Be transparent. Work hard to communicate clearly so people understand exactly what to expect. Communications can get foggy for many reasons. What I see most are these three:

  1. You’re rushed – slow down, make the time, think it through. It’ll save time in the long run.
  2. You don’t completely understand the function/process/technology yourself – do your homework. Don’t communicate to the client until you’re confident you understand.
  3. You understand a complex function/process/technology very well – be aware that the client may not be as versed in it. Slow down. Don’t use jargon or acronyms.

Right Wrongs

Mistakes happen. When they do, come clean immediately, apologize, and make it right. See what you can do to prevent the mistake from reoccurring.

Get Better

This is one I think most MSPs do well. They have the systems and the metrics in place, and they’re constantly trying to improve service levels. That’s great, but your clients are probably unaware of it. Think about things from their perspective. You know that fewer help desk calls means more profitability for you. The case can be made that fewer help desk calls also means better profitability (or at least productivity) for your clients. If you have stats that show you’ve brought the number of help desk calls down over time, SHARE THEM with your clients, and connect the dots for them re increased productivity.

How many other metrics that you work to improve can be framed as a benefit to your clients?

Listen First

We all know this is important, but most of us don’t practice it as often as we should.

Covey has thirteen tenets, but I think if you put the four I’ve listed above into practice 100% of the time, the rest will take care of itself.

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Posted in acSellerant, business to business, information technology providers, trust | 4 Comments »

Cisco Enables VAR Marketing / Social Media

Friday, March 19th, 2010

Revealing video from Cisco outlining how they make corporate marketing assets available to their resellers, MSPs, SIs, etc. and encourage customization for their specific target prospects. I have to believe that HP, IBM, Microsoft, SAP et al will follow suit… if they haven’t already.

I’ve been on  the other side of the fence at DEC and EMC, and it was blasphemy to allow the channel to mess with our collateral. “They might go off message!” That was then, and this is now. You can’t protect the marketing assets anymore (and after all, the whole point is to spread the word). Much better to assist resellers in leveraging all those expensive white papers, case studies, etc.

I wrote a post about how those corporate assets miss the mark when you get down to street level. They can’t address local environments and competition. I call the process of customizing corporate vendor collateral, ‘Sales Enablement‘.

This is a great opportunity to cost effectively add useful and relevant content (which Google LOVES) to your website. btw - acSellerant specializes in customizing generic vendor content for your market and distributing it via social media. View this well reasoned video from Cisco here…

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Posted in acSellerant, Bob Leonard, content marketing, execution, information technology providers, sales enablement | 1 Comment »