Our ABCs of Sales: Always Bring Collateral

MSPs need to dress to impress when it comes to capturing new business. Why not make sure your sales efforts are equipped for success in the first place?

Having good marketing and sales collateral is one of the most effective means to boost your sales success. Let’s examine why this is so and how to make your collateral as impactful as possible.

First: What is Collateral?

In finance, your collateral is the asset you put down when you receive a loan to prove that you intend to repay the loan. It’s a sign of good faith, proving that you mean what you say.

While not intended as a consequence, the definition of collateral in the sales sense isn’t all that different. In sales, collateral is a resource that you offer as proof of your service quality, describing the process and benefits that your client can reasonably expect to experience. Like in finance, your sales collateral is a sign of good faith, emphasizing that you really mean what your marketing is saying.

Many different forms of collateral can support your sales efforts, each with its own advantages in different situations. Case studies, pamphlets, and brochures can all be useful means of convincingly sharing information.

How to Use Your Collateral to Boost Your Sales and Marketing Efforts

Let’s review some examples of marketing collateral and how they can help you boost the success of your sales.

Blogs and Newsletters

There are numerous reasons to populate your MSP website with educational and informational content, search engine optimization being a big one. However, it is important to remember that this content can also assist your marketing by serving as an educational resource—helping you sell your services to anyone who happens to read it whenever they happen to do so.

By sharing information that your audience may find valuable and establishing your own authority in your field, you help build a reputation for being a source of valuable information, which grows each time someone comes back for more. This content can also be repurposed and shared through other avenues—platforms you don’t own, such as social media networks or industry publications—or edited into a different format to layer your marketing.

Plus, there’s hardly a better time to push someone further into the sales funnel than when they have just actively taken in information about a given good or service.

Client/Customer Accounts

Various marketing materials, including case studies, testimonials, and reviews, would fall under this bucket. All of these can be valuable bits of marketing collateral for you to use, as they can be used to share the experience that someone similar to one of your prospects had working with you. This is true whether they’re leaving a review, providing a testimonial, or sharing their experience working with you in a case study.

Consider your own process when selecting a business to work with… you probably look for companies with a solid track record and a process that aligns with your ideal customer experience. By sharing collateral that focuses on actual experiences that your existing clients have had, you help give your prospects that perspective while they are undergoing their own selection process.

Branded Swag

One particularly effective way to promote a brand is to do everything you can to get it in front of your target audience… and it doesn’t even have to be obvious. Small items, like pens, folders, privacy covers for laptop cameras, and other things in that vein, are very likely to be used daily.

If your prospect has a pen with your branding or sees your name and logo every time they open their laptop, you’ll likely be the first business they’ll think to reach out to. Depending on the branded item, you can even make that part easier for them. There’s plenty of room on a mousepad or notebook to share handy information and your contact details, making your business the most convenient option to reach out to.

Informational Resources

Managed IT isn’t the kind of purchase one makes on a whim. This means that educational materials will be very valuable for you to have ready to distribute as requested. Brochures, ebooks, guides, and similar documents can all share the kind of information that a prospect will be looking for—especially if you laser this content in on very specific topics. Otherwise, your collateral won’t be as engaging or memorable as you would want or need it to be for it to be impactful.

These materials have the double benefit of educating your audience and establishing you and your team as trustworthy, generous, and knowledgeable subject matter experts.

In a lot of cases, prospects might not read the materials, but just showcasing that you have a wide array of highly valuable materials that you’ve built makes your MSP seem more impressive than the 1-2 page quote or generic network audit PDF that your competitor is pitching.

Putting It All Together - How Our Sales Team Does It

When we plan an onsite meeting with a new prospect, we do a number of things. We have interest tracks that we put them into. We take a look at their analytics, which we sync into our ConnectWise through JoomConnect Quick Analytics. If they filled out a form to contact us, we know what pages they were on, so we know what they were interested in. We make sure we account for that, and include them in marketing groups for those services. We send them some introductory emails along with a calendar invite, and we mail them an IT Playbook. 

(The IT Playbook is a huge part of our sales process, and it impresses our prospects every single time)

We keep an eye on some of the landing pages that the IT Playbook draws readers to, so we can make sure we address those topics when we sit down with the client.

Then, before heading off to the meeting, we prepare a folder with some of our latest newsletters, our brochures, and case studies (especially when we have a case study for another company in that industry). Depending on the prospect, we might throw in some other information around compliance, or toss in a handful of phishing fliers from our MSSP Cybersecurity kit.

When we get into the sales meeting, sometimes we lead the conversation to the IT Playbook and see if the client has any questions. If the client flips through the book, it usually helps them self-evaluate and leads to conversations about additional services they weren’t initially thinking about.

We’ve Designed our IT Playbook to Be the Ultimate Piece of Marketing Collateral for Managed Service Providers

We like to say that, and not just because we’ve put a lot of effort into the Playbook. It explicitly reminds businesses of their challenges and struggles, framing them as problems that an MSP is adept at solving. Plus, it fully integrates with the MSP website, linking every subject to a corresponding webpage. 

And while it’s said that you can’t judge a book by its cover, we’ve hedged our bets and made the Playbook look as valuable as it is. 

Whatever form of collateral your business would like to use, we can be there to help. Call us at 888-546-4384 to learn more about the IT Playbook or our other pieces of marketing collateral for the MSP’s benefit.