MSPs: Hiring A Salesperson Is A Mistake

The average MSP does not need a full time salesperson, here’s what you really need. Also this week, five cool marketing ideas from other sectors, and how to outsource operations without making mistakes. Welcome to Episode 341 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge. Why you shouldn’t hire a salesperson, even if you hate selling

Can I be honest with you about something that might be just a little bit uncomfortable? If you hate selling, hiring a salesperson feels like the obvious answer. You get someone else to do the bits you hate, right? Problem solved, except it’s really not. And I’ve seen enough MSPs go down this road to know that for most of them it ends in frustration, wasted money, and a salesperson who quietly stops hunting for new business within about three months. Let me explain why. The average MSP does no more than about two sales meetings a month. Two. And before you think that sounds shockingly low, it actually makes complete sense when you understand the business model of MSPs. MSPs don’t generate enormous volumes of leads because most of them don’t do a lot of marketing and that’s a kind of obvious thing to say. But more importantly, when you do win a client, that client pays you all the monthly recurring revenue for years and years and years, sometimes a decade or more. So you don’t need to win clients every week to run a very healthy, profitable MSP. In fact, you might not be able to onboard them. You might not have the capacity to onboard a new client every week. You just need to win the right new clients, at the right time, consistently. And that might be for you one every month or two every month or something like that. But here’s what that means for hiring a salesperson.

If you’re only doing two sales meetings a month, what exactly is a full-time salesperson going to do with the other 150 odd hours?

Because new logo sales in an MSP is not a full-time job, not unless you’re a reasonably large business and you have a lot of sales activity going on. And a good salesperson who’s sitting around not selling is going to get bored, demotivated and expensive very quickly. So MSPs think, I’ll get them to do lead generation as well. But asking a salesperson to generate leads is like asking, I don’t know, a network specialist to build a PC. And sure, they may be able to have a go at it, but it’s not what they’re good at. Lead generation and going out and meeting people and closing sales are two completely different skillsets. With all of the marketing jobs that need to be done within your MSP, you need different people to do each of those jobs. Bearing that in mind, MSPs then think, okay, if they can’t do lead generation, then I’ll get them to do account management as well. That seems to fit. They can look after the existing clients and hunt for new ones. And yes, that kind of sounds logical, but 95 times out of a hundred, it’ll end in disaster. And here’s why. Account management is a genuinely enjoyable job. You’re talking to people who already like you, they’re already giving you money, you’re already solving problems for them and they already trust you. These are nice conversations, sorting out little small problems, conversations about the future of their business. Everyone enjoys an account management conversation. New logo sales is the complete opposite. Until you get into the process with someone, a lot of it can be rejection, cold audiences, long sales cycles. It’s having to build trust from scratch over and over and over again. So if you give someone both of those jobs, of course they’re always going to drift towards the easier one, which is account management every single time and not because they’re lazy, because they’re human. And that means that your existing clients get lots of love...