Excluding Customers in your Marketing Strategy Can be a Good Thing

Last month, I kickstarted a year-long series I am doing focused on new customer acquisition and MSPs’ struggles when it comes to prospecting and lead generation. Lead generation continues to be one of the top business challenges facing MSPs currently, and I wanted to tackle this predicament head-on through a variety of new blogs, micro training videos, and bootcamps, along with a new Book Club I am launching this month called “Sales and Marketing by the Book”.  Each book that has been selected for my book club has been thoughtfully curated through recommendations from top N‑able MSPs, marketing experts, and key N‑able marketing executives. They will all be centered around how MSPs can improve their sales and marketing efforts when it comes to their abilities to acquire new customers and improve their sales revenues. 

The inaugural meeting of the ‘Sales and Marketing by the Book’ Book Club, is taking place on February 18^th and there is still time to register and participate (especially if you have an Audible subscription!), and you can register HERE. 

The book we will be reviewing is called the ‘The 1-Page Marketing Plan’ by Allan Dib.  There are so many great concepts shared in Dib’s book, but the two big ones that I wanted to write about in this month’s blog are:

• Being intentional in who you are targeting and wanting to do business with, and
• It is OK to fire customers as required – especially if they don’t fit your target audience profile or are unprofitable.

Many MSP marketing plans fail because the MSP has neglected to specify who they really want to have as customers. Many MSPs’ profitability suffers, because they continue supporting clients who aren’t the best fit for their business and take up a disproportionate amount of time and energy when their monthly spend doesn’t warrant it. 

When speaking with MSPs about their marketing challenges, the very first question I ask is: “Who is your target customer?” And inevitably the answer I get back is “Everyone! I want to target every small- and medium-sized business in my area”.  They feel they need to target every small and medium-sized business in their area because that is what is needed to increase their chances of landing more deals. But as Dib says in his book, targeting everyone is a huge marketing mistake. If you are targeting everyone, then you are effectively targeting no one, and that is going to hamper your prospecting and sales success.

To quote businesswoman and entrepreneur, Martha Stewart: Excluding certain businesses from your marketing strategy can actually be a good thing.  

Six Reasons Why Excluding Customers in Your Marketing Strategy is a Good Thing

Niche Marketing can be an incredibly effective marketing strategy for your MSP. Many of the top MSPs that I speak with choose to only support a select group of businesses, and are quite successful in doing so.

But what is a niche? Dib describes a niche as “a tightly defined portion of a subcategory”, and outlines in Chapter 1 of his book, that there are several benefits that MSPs can realize by focusing on market niches, rather than choosing to remain more generalized:

1. It allows you to make better use of your limited marketing dollars. MSPs need to be strategic in how they spend their hard-earned profits as they often don’t have the funds to target ‘everyone’ with their marketing budget – they are not Apple or Microsoft or McDonalds. By focusing on a particular niche, it allows MSPs to make better, more informed decisions with respect to their marketing expenditures. As an example, if you are an MSP trying to sell security services, and your ideal clients are accountants, it would be less expensive – and more effective – to run campaigns that specifically target professional accounting organizations, accountants, tax specialists and bookkeepers, than running campaigns that target everyone in your metropolitan area.  

2. It allows for better connections and increased relevance of your marketing message, which will help improve your conversion rates. Because you know this niche intimately, and are schooled in what the niche’s particular challenges, trends, and opportunities are, your messaging will resonate much better because your prospect is going feel that you are speaking directly to them and that ‘you get it’. Trying to be all things to all businesses will fall flat.

3. It will help increase your visibility, authority, and credibility. You become that ‘big fish in a small pond’, helping to reduce competitive pressures, as there will likely be less businesses doing exactly what you do; servicing the market the way that you do. This approach will differentiate your MSP and help it stand out to prospective Business Owners who operate in that particular niche and may be looking for a new MSP.

4. It helps to prevent you from becoming a commodity that is only purchased based on price. Through specialization and highlighting your expertise, knowledge, and thought-leadership capabilities, it will go a long way to making the monthly price you charge for your services irrelevant because you are viewed differently by your prospects. Specialists are sought after and afforded greater leniency and acceptance when it comes to their prices. It is the more generalist-type of MSP that unfortunately gets beaten up on price because they haven’t adequately conveyed – via their marketing – how they are different, so price is all the prospect has to determine their worth.  

5. It can help to improve your operational efficiency, streamline your business and improve customer satisfaction levels. It allows you to dedicate and map your onboarding processes, service delivery, and support processes to the specific needs of that industry, thereby creating internal ‘experts’ within your MSP. This in turn will provide higher levels of customer satisfaction that can then be used in your promotional material to differentiate your MSP from others in your market. This can help to attract and win more customers within that niche vertical and reduce churn.

6. It enables you to be selective as you get to choose which type of customers you want to spend your days supporting, while giving you the freedom to ‘The 1-Page Marketing Plan’. This will allow you to focus your finite resources of time, energy, and attention on those industries and organizations that you truly have a connection with – making your days much more balanced and gratifying.

And it’s this last point that I want to expand upon, because if you have customers that you don’t enjoy working with, who are unappreciative, problematic, and generally difficult to deal with, then  focusing on building a niche clientele of your choosing this will afford you the luxury of being able ‘fire’ those customers.  Not all revenue is good revenue, and not all customer growth is good customer growth. If you can be intentional and deliberate in who you target and accept as clients, it will reshape your revenue and customer mix to the point where it soon becomes ALL good revenue and ALL good customer growth. This will help you build and maintain a quality book of business that will become incredibly valuable someday when you decide to exit your business.

Welcome to the Sales and Marketing by the Book

If you are an MSP that is struggling with marketing and lead gen, hopefully you will be excited to join and participate in my book club this year. Our first virtual meeting will be taking place February 18^th, and you can register by signing up for my February Office Hours Session HERE.

Although I have curated my own list of titles I would like to review and discuss this year, I am always looking for new book suggestions, so feel free to send them across if you feel it will benefit other MSPs in the group. This will definitely be an interesting experiment to try out, one that I am looking forward to exploring, as I think we all can benefit from a little more continuous learning in both our professional and personal lives.

Here’s to a prosperous and thriving 2025!  

Stefanie Hammond is Head Sales and Marketing Nerd at N‑able. You can follow her on LinkedIn