Your Marketing Worked and You Got the Prospect Meeting… Now What?

Lead generation continues to be the number-one challenge facing MSPs today. Many of my blog posts to date, along with several of the boot camp sessions I have delivered so far, have been focused on this all-important topic. But what do you do when you get a bite and you now have a prospect that wants to meet with you? How do you structure this critical first meeting so that you can successfully navigate the prospect through the rest of the sales funnel to becoming a signed, closed deal at the end? Although securing the appointment is important, the ultimate goal of this initial meeting is to determine if this prospect will be a good fit for your MSP, and if your MSP will be a good fit for their business.

According to a study conducted by Sales Insights Lab.com of over 400 salespeople, 71% of respondents said that at least 50% of the prospects that they were engaged with were not a good fit for what they were selling. To me, this is a staggering statistic and such a waste of your time and energy! For ongoing MSP success, you need to get a good handle on who will, and who won’t, be a good fit for your business, and you’ll need to develop the confidence to walk away from a prospect when you determine that they are indeed not a good fit.   

So how do you properly qualify a lead to determine if they are a good fit for your MSP?  From a prospect qualification standpoint, your goal is to get an understanding of a few key items:

• Their needs
• Their timeline
• Their budget
• Their authority to make a purchasing decision

This is otherwise known as the BANT questioning framework. If you haven’t heard of BANT, what is it?   

BANT is an acronym that outlines the information gathering techniques a salesperson would go through to determine how qualified a potential lead is based on their budget, their ability to buy, their need for your services, and their overall purchasing timeline. When structured correctly, it is used to determine your MSP’s overall compatibility with the prospect and provides you with some early indicators as to whether you should continue engaging with this prospect, or whether you should disqualify the lead from the sales process altogether and move on to refocus your efforts on new leads that have entered your sales funnel.    

Some of the most successful salespeople are the ones that do a thorough job of qualifying their leads and qualifying out those prospects that are not a good fit for their services. Following the BANT questioning framework, successful salespeople do a great job of asking the right type of questions to gather the right type of intel because they recognize that their time is likely to be better spent engaging with high-quality leads than wasting precious time on prospects that won’t make for good partnerships.

So how can you implement the BANT framework within your own sales process?  What sort of questions should you be asking at your next prospect meeting, to help ensure you properly assess their true partnership potential with your MSP?

Questions to help determine their budget (but also to get some background information as well):

• “Are you currently using a managed services provider today?” This is needed to determine if the prospect has a current relationship with another MSP, and to gauge how strong that relationship is.  Chances are, most of the time, they will be engaged with another MSP and are now looking for an alternative vendor.

• “Do you feel the amount you are paying your current MSP is commiserate to the quality of services you are receiving from them?” Although you might cringe asking this question so early on in the sales process, their answer should provide you with a clear indication as to how they view the role technology plays in the overall success of their business and their willingness to pay what is appropriate to properly manage, maintain, secure, and support all elements of their network infrastructure.

Questions to help determine your prospect’s authority and the role they play in the decision-making process within the company:

• “Can you tell me about your background and your role in the company?”
• “Who reports into you? Who do you report to?”
• “Who first decided to explore the idea of looking for another MSP?”
• “Who else cares about this decision to switch MSPs?” 

Determining the decision-making process and who the ultimate decision makers are early on can help save you time and will help inform what your next steps should be if you find out that the person you are speaking with in that initial meeting is not the one who can sign your paperwork.

Because, according to Gartner, nowadays there is likely an upwards of 6-10 different stakeholders involved in a complex B2B buying decision.

So, use this initial meeting to determine what the overall decision-making process is at their organization and who is involved, because larger teams or having multiple decision-makers means that it could slow down your sales process and make it more difficult to build consensus and come to an agreement, especially if you don’t know who all the relevant people are early on in the sales process.

Questions to help determine your prospect’s actual need for your services

There are two lines of questioning that you want to use at this stage: Questions focused on the company as a whole and a second set of questions that focuses squarely on the people that you are speaking with that will be involved in the buying decision.

Company-oriented questions:

• What are your company’s biggest growth goals and priorities for the year that you are looking to achieve?

• Where is this “consideration of switching MSPs” on your list of priorities currently? If switching to a new MSP didn’t make it onto their top priorities list for this year, then how realistic is it that this deal will even happen?   
• What are the biggest challenges facing your organization this year that may prevent you from reaching your goals?

Personal Questions:

Next you want to bring the focus directly to the person who will be involved in the decision-making process. The goal is to have your prospect highlight why this purchasing decision is important to them and explain how it will impact and improve their own day-to-day work circumstances.

• “Take me through a typical day in your role and for other key stakeholders that work for you.” 
• “What challenges are you or your team experiencing that is hindering your success in meeting your departmental objectives?”
• “What is needed to help you be more effective in your role?”
• “Why is making a potential switch to a new MSP important to you?”

Questions to determine your prospect’s purchasing timeline

Here, we want to get an idea as to how quickly the prospect plans to make their decision of switching over to a new MSP.   

• “How long have you been facing these challenges and struggling with these issues?”
• “What previously prevented you from making a switch over to a new MSP?”
• “What is prompting you to do something about this now?”
• “Is there a timeline for making this decision?”

These types of questions are important so that you can set proper expectations for yourself and your prospects so that you can set up a reasonable timeline for negotiations. And if they are not yet ready to “solve this issue”, then this will help you reveal the reasons why so that you can mitigate and work around this if possible.

To hear more on this subject, on June 22, I am delivering a brand-new boot camp focused on this critical first step of the MSP sales process. During the session, I will review the right structure and the right set of questions to ask your prospect to help determine if there is a good fit between your MSP and their business so that you can move forward in the sales process to conducting a thorough network and cybersecurity assessment. Not every prospect you speak with will be a good fit for your MSP, so you want to have a strategy to vet the good leads from the poorer quality ones. 

There is still time to register, and you can do so HERE.

Stefanie Hammond is head sales and marketing nerd at N‑able. You can follow her on LinkedIn and on Twitter at @sales_mktg_nerd.