I recently received an email from a potential client who is teetering on the brink of closing the doors of his IT consulting business. His savings have dried up, and he’s maxed out all his credit cards. He’s desperate and seeking our IT services marketing plans as a last resort.
Of course, we’ll do everything to help. But now that he’s so far in the red, it’ll take a herculean effort on his part (and sheer magic on ours) to get the heart pumping again.
This begs the question: Why did he wait until now to get serious about keeping his IT services sales funnel full?
Protecting Your Lifeline: The IT Service Sales Funnel
Success or failure doesn’t happen overnight.
If you’re paying attention, you know whether you’re moving forward, backward or stagnating. The key is to do something the minute you notice a decline in IT services sales or opportunities.
Don’t wait until you’re so far behind the 8 ball that your only option is to file for bankruptcy and take a job working at Circuit City.
Watch These IT Services Sales Metrics
Marketing (and selling) IT services is a numbers game.
If you get X number of leads in the door, X number will become clients and out of those, X% will end up being quality, ‘sweet spot’ clients.
If you want to forecast your IT services sales in 3 to 6 months, look at what’s coming into the funnel TODAY. There’s no marketing quick fix that’ll make up for months (or years) of marketing neglect.
Here are some critical IT services sales metrics to monitor:
Leads
Do you know how many leads come through your website and other marketing channels each month?
Marketing-Qualified Leads
How many leads have taken a specific action that deems them more likely to purchase than others?
Sales-Qualified Leads
Do you have certain criteria in place to judge leads as sales-qualified? Are you measuring this rate?
Opportunity Win Rate
What percentage of opportunities turn into customers? A low opportunity win rate could signal trouble in the sales process.
Read: 1 Simple Secret To Close More Managed Services Contracts.
Lead Response Time
Did you know that responding to a lead within an hour makes you seven times more to qualify the lead if you wait an hour longer?
Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR)
Sustainable IT services companies live by MRR. Find ways to bake ongoing value and recurring revenue into your services to help scale revenue.
Average Deal Size
How much is your average deal worth? Monitor this metric, and strategize ways to elevate it through upsell and cross-sell opportunities.
Read: MSP Sales Secrets: Charging (And Getting) Premium Prices.
If you’re really good, your sales and marketing metrics might be better than most. This means your marketing efforts bring in a good quality and quantity of leads and you close a large percentage of these leads.
But if you stink at marketing and lead generation, have no follow up system and have weak close rates, you need more leads (opportunities) coming into the funnel.
The Time Is Now To Get Serious About IT Services Lead Generation
Forecasting sales for your IT services business is simple. Yet so many IT services firms sit back and watch the slow decline in their business.
Instead of pumping leads into their IT services sales funnel, they stick their head in the sand and hope the economy improves, clients refer more or their luck will magically change.
A few months later, we get the desperate cry for help.
The truth is: In the upcoming months, more IT businesses will fail than succeed.
In most cases, they saw the decline and did nothing about it. With so many IT services marketing tools, seminars and resources, I find it difficult to sympathize with most.
As Nido Qubein once said in a seminar I attended, “An empty bank account is a sign of a lifetime of poor decisions.”
So the question you must ask now is: What are you doing to make sure YOUR IT services sales funnel stays full?
If you’re not a marketing expert, attracting and nurturing new IT services leads is an uphill battle.
The Technology Marketing Toolkit is the most complete, field-tested library of tools for marketing IT services. The program provides templates, campaigns and checklists that you can implement today to start generating more leads.
This program is guaranteed to help you effectively sell and market your IT services — or your money back.
Want to learn more? Read about the Technology Marketing Toolkit here.
