One of my MSP clients asked me during our monthly Q&A session “When we’re doing letter campaigns and list cleaning, one of the things that I run into because we target small law firms is they typically have multiple partners in the firm. So my question is would I address something like a mailer to one person or all people? Or how could I approach that?”
And here’s what I had to say….”You’re not going to like my answer. I’ll give you the best way to do this, and then I’m going to give you probably what you’ll end up doing.”
As an MSP owner if you’re in a sales opportunity when there’s more than one decision-maker, there’s a process we like to use called the Circle of Leverage approach.
You’re going into your law firm, and there might not just be the attorneys.
There’s probably an office manager as well, and if not, all lawyers have assistants.
So you got an office manager who’s the one dealing with all the tech and nonsense.
There might be an IT person, and then you have senior partners and other attorneys.
We want to send a campaign where we address a letter to all of them with a line on the letter that says I am also notifying and copying these other people.
The letter says, “I’m writing to find out who the most appropriate person or people to talk to about how we can resolve all your IT issues, get your billable hours up and drastically reduce the chance of you getting hit with ransomware. ”
When you send the letter, you’re sending it to the office manager, and you’re saying on the top of the letter, CC, and you name the other people you are sending that letter to.
All Toolkit owners get access to a Circle of Leverage Campaign.
For example, let’s say you were one of the partners.
Debbie’s the office manager, Alissa and John are also a part of the office. So if my letter were going to you, it would say I’m sending this letter to you, Alissa, Debbie, and John, to find out who the most appropriate person is to take this matter up with.
When they get the letter, they’re saying, “Well, shit, you know, this is everybody, right?”
So what this does is create the elevator conversation. In the morning, they all meet in the elevator; going up to the office, they say, “Hey did you get that letter?” And somebody else will say, “Look, I got the letter, I’ll take the lead on it.”
For example, if Debbie were the office manager, she’d say, “Well, you know, I got that letter. Let me follow up and see what’s going on.”
That’s what we want to see because when you have multiple decision-makers.
You never know the person who’s going to be your champion and who’s going to nix the whole damn thing.
It’s the same approach that I taught with the co-managed IT.
When you’re selling co-managed IT, you’ve got a CEO, a CFO, and you’ve got an IT manager. If you market just to the CEO and you leave out the IT manager, then what happens is the CEO might pass the letter down to that IT person and they feel threatened.
They feel like you’re trying to get in around them.
If you send just the letter to the IT person, they might block you from getting up to the CEO or CFO because they don’t want them knowing about you.
By sending letters to both and by making it transparent that both have received the letter, what you’re doing is you’re avoiding trying to go around them and pissing somebody off. Then when you follow up, you start with the top.
Further, you start with the CEO, and you say, “You may recall I sent a letter to your office last Friday. It should have arrived by now; I’m calling to see if you got the letter and what would you like to do?”
And they might say, “Well, what letter is it?”
And that’s the opportunity for you to say, “We’re an IT firm. We specialize in working with law firms, and we help you increase billable hours and drastically reduce the chances of getting hit with a ransomware attack. And we are offering a free network assessment. Is that something that would be of interest to you now?”
The CEO might say, “Well, that might be, but I don’t get involved in that. You’ve got to talk to Debbie.”
So then, by calling the top person, you get passed down to Debbie, and Debbie now can’t ignore you.
So it’s the same thing if Debbie was the IT director, if you call the CEO and you have that conversation, and they are interested, they pass you down to the IT person and send the letter to the IT person.
#1 They don’t feel like you’ve shut them out
#2 Now the IT person knows that the CEO knows about you. You’ve had a conversation, and it prevents them from blocking you and saying, “We’re fine, we don’t want you in here now.”
They have to take your call.
That’s the right way of doing it, but it isn’t straightforward.
I did this when I was trying to get into big accounts for sponsorship because one good sponsor could be $500,000 to $1 Million a year for me. So to me, I was very strategic when I was trying to get in some of these big sponsorships.
If I ever try to get in a big deal, that’s precisely what I’m doing. I’m writing the letters, or I’m going on LinkedIn, or I’m doing it in an email, and I’m naming these other people. I’m contacting all these other people starting at the top, working down.
Now, that is a lot of work. I get it. It takes somebody who knows what the hell they’re doing.
You have to train a highly-skilled salesperson because they’re strategic to get in.
However, the quick fix is you mail the letter to everybody, and you call who you think might be the most senior partner.
That’s the quick fix where you’re not naming the other people. You include them all.
Another option is trying to find out who the most senior person is at the company. If you want to put in the extra work, you can look and see how long they have been there at the law firm.
Are they the founder? If yes, then they will have more pull than somebody who just joined a year ago, like a junior partner.
Furthermore, that would be the other extra step you could make, mail to those who are the senior partners.
That would be a tag or a field you would put in your CRM so you would know that these are the decision-maker.
Then, as you’re doing your follow-up, make sure you’re also recording notes like ‘At this law firm, Joe is the decision-maker, not Mary.‘ Because that’s what you’ll find when you do the follow-up.
However, sometimes they make it easy, and they say who the managing partner is.
There’s never a one-size-fits-all.
When you’re sending out letters and making the follow-up calls, the process is figuring out in this particular account who the key decision-maker is, and who the influencers are. Then you record that data in your CRM with a tag.
Whenever I’m marketing to them in the future, I’m targeting that decision-maker. I’m not wasting time with the non-decision-makers.
When pulling a list of old, unconverted leads from our CRM, we ask ourselves things like:
- Who’s that sweet spot prospect?
- Who’s the decision-maker?
- Who is the key person on the account?
People want the easy button, the easy approach, the lazy approach. But they want the results that we get from doing all the steps and all the work.
