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…

1. traditional, interruptive advertising was no longer effective, and
2. traditional presales activities (educating prospects about your solutions) had been replaced by Google.

Largely due to the efforts of others, like Joe Pulizzi and Newt Barrett; and to the overwhelming evidence in the market place, my prospects now understand #1 and 2 above. So what’s next?

The Content, Connection, Conversation, Conversion Continuum

We all agree that to engage prospects we need to produce and publish relevant, useful, interesting and valuable content. You can’t just put it out there anymore, though. There’s too much competition for peoples’ attention.

We need to connect the content to our prospects. That means we have to deliver it to the online places where they hang out. That might be at industry-related websites like MSPmentor, or on special interest groups within Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

Once you’ve set your content at the feet of the people it was developed for, if you’ve made the content compelling enough, your prospects connect with you. You’ve piqued their interest and they want to learn more… or they want to voice their opinion. They will comment on a blog post, in your online discussion, or they’ll email you.

Conversation ensues.  When a dialogue is created between you and your prospects, ideas are exchanged. This is the time to listen carefully. It’s a golden opportunity to find out exactly what prospects want. Let them tell you. If they feel they’ve been heard, trust is built.

Once they understand that you truly have their best interest at heart, the conversation will move from online to phone, and then face to face, as the topics move from features and benefits, to pricing, and to terms and conditions. The prospect converts into a customer. You close a profitable deal without selling anything.

The larger players have already instituted records management policies to get a handle on all the information that is created and maintained throughout the corporation. Mid-sized and smaller players are now realizing that risk has grown in both magnitude and consequence.

Businesses are now held liable not just for security breaches, but also for protecting customer information. Without a sound, uniform, comprehensive records management policy, information can’t be stored or archived consistently. That makes retrieval for business, compliance and legal requirements costly, time-consuming and inefficient.

Given ever-increasing litigation, investigations and regulatory actions coupled with the explosive growth of electronic records, automation of a corporation’s records management policies, processes and business practices is no longer an option; it’s a necessity.

If you’re a Managed Services Provider, and you aren’t offering electronic records management (ERM) solutions, you ought to look into it immediately. The need is real, the technology is proven and affordable (ROI is typically less than 24 months). The difficulty will be in convincing prospects that you can deliver not only the system, but that you understand their business and can help them implement more productive workflow processes, increase productivity, and reduce information management costs. Much more on that in future posts.