Your Go-To-Market Strategy And How To Take The Client To The End With A Well-Oiled Sales Process. 

Identify Your Ideal Customer

Before you can get to the sales process for the MSP, we have to start with your go-to-market strategy. The first step of your go-to-market strategy will be identifying who your target audience is. Who is it that you want to be able to sell your services or products to? This critical step acts as a gut-check for your organization to know who you are speaking to and allow you to build the marketing strategy that works well for your desired partners. Typically, we see that organizations like to focus around certain verticals, but it can also very frequently be company size. The goal is to create your target customer so that you have a focus for your sales force to go out, know exactly who they are looking for, and successfully secure sales.

Creating a Marketing Strategy For Your Product

Creating an appropriate marketing strategy for your product is an extremely important step in your go-to-market strategy. The product is paramount in developing this strategy, and everything should be created with that in mind. Check out our other Whiteboard Wednesday Videos which focus on the prerequisites and dependencies that come before the go-to-market strategy. 

When it is time to create marketing content, additional brochures or things that complement your product documentation will be vital. Product documentation itself is more technical in nature than what the marketing content is. For marketing content, focusing on a high-level summary of benefits from the product and what it brings to the table is a good place to start. 

After the marketing content, branding, and productization of service come next, This is a complex process that your company will need to complete. At NETRIO, we have already completed this process and we allow our white label partners and agents to just utilize our branding. We have created product lines for each of our managed service offerings that are essentially transparent to the NETRIO customer. For example, a white label partner could be called Technical Partners Inc Vigilance or Technical Partners Inc Alliance. Essentially, they are able to take any of our product brands and white label with their mission, vision, value and logo and move directly to market.

The Sales Process

NETRIO utilizes Channel Partners for the sales process, but for this example, we are going to show how NETRIO would take a client through the sales process without a partner engaged. Regardless of whether it’s NETRIO selling it directly or whether it’s sold through a channel partner or the sole white label, the steps will remain the same.

The sales process can be broken up into two parts. The first front end is where you qualify, educate and do the design for the solution you’re going to present. Then it is time to educate the client based on where they are in the buyer’s journey. After that, it is time to assess and evaluate, help the customer define their requirements, and nail down the budget. This is a good time to revisit the clients goals and make sure you are aligned to deliver the desired outcome. After these steps, it is time to design the solution.

The second part of the sales process can be summarized as propose, negotiate, and close. During this stage, you are finalizing and tweaking the proposal. The first step is so important because it allows you to identify what needs to be buttoned up or changed to finalize the proposal. After the design is finalized, it is time to bring up the agreement, customer terms and conditions, and any previously discussed financial agreements. The paperwork is then drawn up and the SOW is created based on the terms discussed in the sales process.

The timeline of the sales process will vary dramatically. Depending on the size of the deal, it can take place in six months for a deal with hundreds of locations, or it can be a lot shorter than that for the customer that wants to move fast.

This blog post is part of NETRIO’s weekly White Board Wednesday series. Follow along on Linkedin and YouTube each week as Brian and Mike discuss use cases, new technology, and trends. The goal is to provide insights for enterprise customers and channel partners, trying to solve complex problems using technology.