In 2015 I helped an MSSP escape bankruptcy by building a sales pipeline in less than 60 days, cutting costs, and narrowing the focus from 100 products to 10. Here are 6 ways to right the ship headed to bankruptcy island.
- Find the Path to Profit
- I walked into an MSSP that had 100 products. There’s no wonder that they didn’t have a successful sales person in 5 years. Literally, when I closed the first deal of $5k they said that was the first new revenue in 5 years.
- So what I did was create the ICP based on the skillset of the engineers. I narrowed the linecard to 10 products and targeted SMBs and Mid-market selling firewalls, cloud backup, engineering hours, and 7 other things adjacent to that.
- Bankruptcy means you need new cash fast so profit is the most important.
- Cut Costs
- Looking at the team, I knew who was a hard worker and who wasn’t based on who was trying to build a relationship with me. I found out that we were spending a ton of money on borrowing so we found ways to eliminate people, data centers, company vehicles and free up capital to pay off the high interest loans used to stand up the company while there were no sales in the past 5 years.
- Equally as important to getting cash, is you have to cut costs to avoid bankruptcy.
- Fill Your Funnel
- Next I created a sales pipeline. Because there was already 30k customers (mind you they were personal email) I knew that some of them would have jobs so I started calling on people because warm leads are better than cold ones.
- I also filled my funnel with cold leads too.
- New business takes 2-18 weeks to get so filling your funnel now will help with revenue for the long term to avoid bankruptcy.
- Work on your Image = Marketing
- Work on the marketing for the new business model by updating your website and posting on social media so that people know what you now offer. That generated a few leads for us but more importantly solidified the conversations I was having with current customers.
- The first three steps puts your company in a different direction and you are targeting new customers. Tell this new story with marketing to avoid outdated branding that may keep you on track to bankruptcy.
- Rebuild your Partner Vendor Relationships
- As an MSSP or VAR for that matter, the sales reps at the products you resell will help you fill your funnel too so rebuild those relationships with your partner products!
- A lack of sales strength and history in the past due to a lack of a sales person was a major reason to rebuild important relationships.
- Be Open to Help
- With all this change, there are bound to be surprises – good and bad.
- Be open to help! If you have issues, reach out to a coach. I helped an MSSP escape bankruptcy in 2015 by doing everything in this eBook, that’s why I wrote it.
- So you don’t have to do it alone like I had to.
If you are struggling to keep the lights on, download this eBook and call me today. Let’s fix the ship before it sinks!
hashtag#bankruptcy hashtag#mssp hashtag#var hashtag#businessadvice hashtag#salestips hashtag#saas hashtag#salescoac
