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Central to his company’s can-do culture, Havlik says he’s been careful and conscious not to position his company as an IT firm. “We go to market as a provider of improved business performance,” he says. He also— and quickly—admits that this approach complicates the sales and marketing equation. “Most clients and prospects have not connected those dots. We’re trying to make the connections for them in our marketing collateral and sales processes.”

 

Exacerbating SRC’s messaging challenge for most of its existence is a problem that’s common to the vast majority of IT service providers. Sales and marketing are not its domain. “We know IT service and delivery,” says Havlik. “Sales and marketing have always been our Achilles’ heels,” he admits.

 

[SRC was introduced to] Communication Strategy Group (CSG), a tech-centric brand strategy and marketing firm that set SRC on the path to consistency in its messaging, and Lead Liaison, which handles SRC’s automated marketing machine.

 

Previous to its engagements with CSG and Lead Liaison, SRC wasn’t segmenting any of its prospects, not even by market. Now, it is. First, with CSG’s help, the company identified a managed services need among manufacturing and construction companies generating between $25 million and $500 million in annual revenue.

 

SRC is also working with CSG to create a series of managed services blogs that will be shared via email with appropriate audiences among its identified segments. Before it began working with CSG on the segmentation project, such Story Leadership™ content would be mailed to all 3,500 Wisconsin-area prospects in the company’s database. In that geography, the send would potentially hit hundreds of contacts at giant companies like Schneider Trucking and Havlik’s prior employer, United Healthcare. “These companies aren’t in our targeted segments, and they’re not looking for our services. They considered it junk mail, which netted us a number of opt-outs and bulk bounces when the entirety of a company blocked our IP address,” Havlik laments.

 

After a two-month process cleaning up and segmenting its database — ensuring every prospect was associated with an organization and those organizations’ demographic information was correct — SRC worked with CSG to reposition all of its content and emails in an automation sequence attached to each piece of content’s appropriately defined segment….

 

In their simplest congruous form, says Havlik, marketing and sales are about lead generation, prospect problem-solving, and closing deals. With its marketing automation program in place, Havlik is confident that SRC is generating the leads it wants, getting him that much closer to the close. Because, as he posits, it’s a lot more efficient to sell and service a dozen large companies than 200 small ones. And that can only serve to improve SRC’s business performance.

Read the entire article at Marketing Automation for IT Service Providers.

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