‘Pretty good’ isn’t good enough. The only way to have your marketing messages ingested and digested is by baking them into exceptional content – what I call ‘Gourmet Content’. People find Gourmet Content because they seek it out. They consume Gourmet Content because they WANT to. It’s extraordinarily good.

Gourmet Content

A gourmet is a person with a discriminating palate and a deep knowledge of fine food. Gourmet Content is information that isn’t designed for mass consumption. It’s researched and developed with a specific audience in mind – an audience that has been carefully targeted and finely detailed. The developer of Gourmet Content knows what his audience is interested in… what fascinates and delights them.

The word ‘gourmet’ can also be used to describe meals that have been prepared with inordinate effort and art. Gourmet Content must be made from the freshest ingredients (text, animation, audio, charts, infographics, video, or other elements). It isn’t quickly thrown together and shoved through a ‘To Go’ pickup window. It is thoughtfully formulated, comprised of congruent ingredients that support a coherent message. It’s allowed to marinade overnight so the flavors mature and ripen.

Presentation is key. Where the content is placed, how it’s contextualized, the tools used to develop and display it – all must be carefully selected and expertly manipulated.

Your target prospects are much more likely to consume your marketing messages if those messages have been prepared and presented to gourmet standards. If you’re a B2B IT company, contact me to learn more.

I know there are marketers out there who will disagree with my basic quality vs. quantity premise. Please comment. Let’s have a lively, yet civilized, debate.

Social media and search have irreversibly merged the worlds of Sales and Marketing. Where marketing messages and sales relationship building begin and end is a moving target. So SMB IT providers must adopt a new set of marketing-related behaviors to thrive in this new environment.

Selling evolved long ago from an act of presenting and closing, to one of educating and consulting; but access to information via online sources (rating sites, filtering social media streams, and tools for competitive analysis) has changed the game.

Over the past five years B2B buyers have learned to research online. They don’t want to see or talk to a salesperson until they’re nearing a buy decision. That means Marketing, specifically online marketing, must create demand, nurture leads and keep them engaged until they’re ready for Sales.

Some businesses are attempting to meet this challenge by expecting salespeople to learn the ins and outs of the internet as a sales enabler, while also carrying a quota, building relationships, managing accounts and internal resources, upselling current customers, and prospecting! That’s a great way to set your salespeople up for failure.

My clients – SMB (20 to 100 employee) IT providers (hardware, software and/or services) have been evolving and they need to continue to do so. My experience with them (MSPs, SIs, VARs), is that they’ve been struggling to transition from a direct sales model to a model that better fits how their prospects want to buy.

SMB IT providers are still trying to get their web channel aligned (if they even understand that the web is their de facto channel to market). Now there’s another paradigm shift; and that’s social media. There’s the added challenge of figuring out how to reach prospects through blogs, LinkedIn, paid search, personalized email, and the new question burning up Twitter today – should we buy promoted tweets?

I want to draw an analogy here to earlier forms of media. Books were invented hundreds of years ago and they’re still going strong. Newspapers and magazines were invented later, and they’re still here, maybe not so strong. Radio is still here. So are movies and TV.

With each paradigm shift, the old way wasn’t destroyed, it was added to. That’s the situation with SMB IT providers – there’s still basic selling of boxes going on and that will continue, but there’s no margin in it. There’s still consultative selling of solutions going on, and that will continue, but now the prospect is in the driver’s seat and margins are under pressure. Effective Marketing (content marketing, inbound marketing, online marketing, social media marketing) can reduce the Cost of Sales and help IT providers to maintain margins.

There are no more blind dates. Your prospects can learn just about all there is to know re your company, your products and services, and your personnel. Some of my clients say, “Then let’s not tell them. Let’s leave that information off our website. Let’s not participate in social media. Then they’ll have to speak to our salespeople.” I disagree… vehemently. No SMB IT provider is selling any solution that prospects can’t find elsewhere. If your site doesn’t contain the relevant and useful information that people need to make an informed decision, you’ve already lost the sale.

In order to beat the competition, you need to be playing the social media game, and you need to do it well. There’s a misconception that social media is free. The platforms typically are free. Using them effectively takes time, knowledge (platform knowledge, but also business and people knowledge), and a well thought through strategy.

I have a client who asked me to help him find a recent college grad to do his company’s social media marketing. He figured that there are plenty of recent grads looking for work and they understand this social networking stuff. We couldn’t find anybody. There were plenty of applicants, just nobody capable. They didn’t understand business. They couldn’t discern what was appropriate communication, and what was not. They didn’t know the industry. When a client or prospect engaged them online, they didn’t comprehend the context of the message. They couldn’t reply in a meaningful way.

Social media is conversation. You need to make sure your end of that conversation is interesting, knowledgeable, relevant and courteous.

Social media presents a gigantic opportunity for SMBs. You can engage your prospects where they’re already congregating online, build credibility in your expertise, and (over time) gently persuade them to purchase from you. This takes both Sales and Marketing participation (and cooperation), time, effort, some money, planning, and a willingness to develop processes. It takes a concerted effort over time and across platforms. The payback is orders of magnitude greater than the Sales and Marketing ROI you’re used to.

My research opened my eyes. There are several different forces at work that make the valuation of an MSP business a dynamic process. How MSPs are valued is changing, and I was able to say, “Yes,” to my client.

Here’s what I found. The preeminent expert in this space is Charles Weaver. He’s the President of the MSP Alliance, and of a consulting group that specializes in MSP mergers and acquisitions. I exchanged a few emails with Charles. His position is that MSP valuations used to focus on annual profits. The purchaser would ask to see the books. They valued the business more if it could show a year over year improvement in net profits, and they would pay a multiple of last year’s net.

This profit metric led to MSPs choking off investment in the business for a couple of years prior to sale to pump up the size of their profits and, therefore, the selling price. Purchasers were paying top dollar for a business in decline, and they had to invest heavily to get it back into growth mode.

So the metrics changed. Instead of looking just at profits, potential acquirers also looked at the book of business. They reviewed the number of current contracts and their future value in order to get a better idea of future profits. So MSPs who were contemplating cashing out focused on signing clients to multi-year contracts. Charles feels that this is also a less than optimal valuation method. He thinks it’s actually unfair to the seller because there are many sources of non-recurring revenue that should be included. His preferred calculation method is to blend top line revenue and EBITDA.

According to Joe Panettieri, the ‘VAR Guy’ and President of MSPmentor, “effective Marketing, Sales and Consulting are the three basic criteria for long-term MSP success and maximum company valuation… the most successful MSPs have processes in place to work on social media, marketing and PR on an ongoing basis.”

What Joe is saying is that having processes in place to handle Marketing and PR functions delivers three positive influences on valuation:

1. they indicate a willingness on the part of the business’ management to build and deploy infrastructure devoted to demand generation and lead nurturing (critical sales enablement ingredients when selling complex B2B services),
2. they accrue sales assets, which are tools that accelerate and amplify the sales process, and
3. they result in company and brand visibility in the geographies served and across the online world.

Marketing is not a one and done kind of thing. Like Sales and Consulting, it’s an ongoing process that needs to be worked on all the time. Especially today when everyone is dealing with ‘short attention span prospects’. Fresh, relevant and useful content is needed on websites and for social media platforms. You have to give prospects a reason to keep coming back (i.e. new information that educates and gently persuades), until they’re ready and willing to sit down with a salesperson.

So how do I help my client pump up the valuation of his business? By doing the same things I do with all my clients… get them to:

• focus on Marketing as a strategic part of their business;
• stop doing ‘promotional activities’ on an ad hoc, opportunistic, haphazard basis;
• plan, budget and execute Marketing functions just as they do with Consulting and Sales functions.

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.

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…