Let’s face it; we’d all rather crawl naked through a field of broken glass and lemon juice than make cold calls. But the fact of the matter is you can’t sell without contacts. If you are serious about getting new customers you are going to have to make those contacts some how. The fastest and most cost effective way to do it is to make some cold calls. If you took an hour a day and made just 15-20 calls in that hour everyday, you could very soon be landing one new customer a week, or more.

I have posted a Selling guide that goes into cold calls in great detail, as well as a guide for hiring and compensating a cold caller.

As many of you know, we are using Level Platforms' Managed Workplace to monitor our clients' networks.  During our MobilizeSMB tour this past year, we received a large number of requests for more information regarding what we monitor, and what we alert on.  The good news is that MSPSN members will soon be able to download the monitoring templates we use, as well as documentation explaning the contents of each template and why we chose to include what we did.

But for everyone else, I wanted to give a high-level insight into my thinking when I started monitoring client systems.  First and foremost - keep it simple!  It is very easy to get overwhelmed with the number and variety of items you can monitor.  When I started monitoring with LPI almost 3 years ago, there weren't any monitoring templates available - so I started setting up my mo ...

Mobilize SMB launched our Services Network (MSPSN) Portal this week. MSPSN is our response after talking to hundreds of SMB MSP Solution Providers this year during our Mobilize Tour who are looking for a place to collaborate with others who are serious about building their SMB MSP businesses. So, we’ve launched a portal that will allow us all to tap into the power that has yet to be unleashed within our SMB Community by bringing us all together and providing the infrastructure from which we can learn, colla ...

Consolidation and commoditization of the MSP market is definitely going to happen.  There are so many vars that are building NOCs and so many who have spent tens of thousands of dollars on MSP tools and infrastructure.  There is so much money that has been sunk into managed services this year.  The dirty little secret i ...

I was challenged the other day by a colleague who told me that selling managed services is really selling the unknown, that it’s not a household name and therefore difficult to sell.  I immediately countered with asking how many of his clients knew what an OS was? How many times had a prospect told him they had a server that when he looked at it it turned out to be an XP Home workstation? Small Business Server isn't a household word either but we sell it all of the time.

You have to know your market in order to sell to them, and selling managed services is not selling the unknown at all. What the MSP is selling is peace of mind to the small business owner who wants to stop managing his network so he can focus on growing his business.  The MSP’ ...