Seeking Stasis in Your IT Business Model
When it comes to running your IT business, IT marketing is key to sustainability. Many IT providers fall into a mediocre trap. What happens is that they’ll get a regular family of clients and then refrain from sourcing any new ones. They feel they’ve got all they need in a handful of clients, and so they don’t want to work harder to expand. But the problem is that clients don’t stick around forever. Kmart was eventually bought out by Sears. Blockbuster no longer exists. Certain fast food chains have closed, and then there are those big-ticket flops everybody knows about, like Enron.
Do you imagine the MSPs providing service for Enron weren’t impacted? They had to go source new clients, and quickly, or face dissolution— Enron was a big client. The point is, nothing is set in stone, and if you just tread water with a small family of clients, when one of them is eaten by the market, you’ll lose that revenue stream. Without a solid IT marketing basis, you stand to lose out substantially.
Avoiding such losses can be done several ways. The following are several tips to help you create a sustainable business that won’t suffer substantially when clients are lost:
• Create a continuously expansive business model
• Attend MSP trade shows
• Look for and employ marketing advice
• Remain on the cutting edge
• Be visible
An Expansive Business Model
You’ve got to stoke the marketing fires if you want them to remain lit— they’ll burn out if you let them. To that end, you want a business model that’s designed to ensure that whatever happens, your marketing machine keeps running. You’ll want to funnel a certain quotient of resources that direction for this to work properly. Think of it as an essential, like utilities, or other infrastructural overhead. Get your marketing division up-and-running. Ensure that it’s delivering actionable ROI on a positively upward-trending curve, and maintain that fire by financially fueling it at regular intervals.
Attend MSP Trade Shows
Learn from peers who are in the same enterprise as you, and have successfully created successful business models of the sustainable variety. Don’t go around reinventing the wheel when there’s a tire shop just down the street. So, you’ll want to additionally allocate resources toward trade show attendance.
Marketing Advice
You can’t solely rely on other MSPs and trade shows to give you ideas, or you will lose the competitive edge. Those at such shows only know what they know; you’ve got to pull in exterior information from other vetted sources. This will be good for your business, and additionally transform your MSP into a resource when trade shows are attended, which can be lucrative for partnerships and further expansion down the line. Everybody is looking to work with successful companies in the hope that said success will additionally bleed over to them.
Remain on the Cutting Edge
Marketing is only part of the equation. You additionally want to be sure that the services you provide are continuously expansive. This means you’re on the cutting edge technologically. You’ll be able to source clients this way, and it will be a good practice to remain in, as becoming technologically outdated is surely a death knell for any MSP.
Be Visible
This is almost solely the responsibility of your marketing solution, but it’s something which can additionally be fostered by interpersonal relationships between your MSP and others at trade shows, as well as your internal technological expansion. You want other MSPs to know you’re “in business,” and you want clients to know that your products and services represent some of the finest available on the market.
Facilitating Continuing Success
IT marketing can help your business remain successful in a continuous way. There’s a saying going around: “If you’re not growing, you’re dying.” If you’re not profiting, you’re not growing. Ergo, if you’ve reached a status of mediocre operations, your MSP will slowly slide into dissolution over time. It’s much better to continuously expand your market reach even as your business expands, and one of the best ways to do this is by incorporating marketing protocols into your existing business model.
