How To Master The CoManaged Sales Process For MSPs

How many CoManaged clients do you add in a typical year? How many CoManaged opportunities didn’t close? Why? What can we change to close more?

The Sales Transformation Program is a sales peer group of elite MSPs that typically achieve an annual sales growth of 25%-33% a year. Most have achieved 2-3X sales growth in the past 4 years. And landing at least 3-4 comanaged opportunities of 10,000K a month is the cornerstone of this growth.

Across the group, we have engaged in 40-50 comanaged sales opportunities over the past 2 years and won far more than our fair share. Bottom line, if you want to grow, mastering the comanaged sales process should be a top priority.

For example, in January, one of our members landed a120 person medical practice in excess of $ 20,000 a month by following the MEDDIC methodology.

What Is MEDDIC?

MEDDIC is a proven sales qualification methodology used by industry-leading BtoB information technology companies – like Cisco, Microsoft, Oracle, Accenture and others. It is custom-tailored for large, complex and longer term sales processes. Exactly how the comanaged sales process plays out for MSPs.

The MEDDICC Sales Methodology defines the attributes required to drive winning opportunities. Industry leaders rely on it as the foundation of the sales management process and deal reviews. Mastering MEDDIC by examining the quality of the sales pursuit can springboard MSPs into far higher performance in the comanaged opportunity space.

In a comanaged deal, here are the qualifications that you are seeking:

Define Value

• Implicate PAIN: Achieving a deep and multilayered understanding of the “pain” associated with the current state – and triangulating the implication of pain across critical stakeholders is the foundation of MEDDIC. Not superficial pain but mining the full depth and interelationships of pain.
• Metrics: Next, we want to define cost /damage of the current state and quantify the value of the future state.
• Decision Criteria: Then, we relate the pain and metrics to the specific decision criteria the buyer should adopt to select the winning MSP. Our goal is to influence and gain consensus on the specific criteria – and differentiate our value from competitors in each critical area. Prospects often don’t have hard and fast decision criteria – so we can influence and direct the criteria in a favor.

Engage Stakeholders

• Economic Buyer: We place a premium on engaging with the final decision-maker in the buying process – understanding their Pain-> Metrics-> Decision Criteria equation. Without engaging the economic buyer, we may be selling the wrong solution to the wrong people.
• Champion: Cultivating an internal champion/coach is vital to winning these large, complex opportunities. A perfect champion is a person of influence who has a vested interest in you winning the business.
• “Competition”: Competition includes any force that keeps the buyer from signing with us. It includes direct competition as well as inertia, disengagement., marginalization and indecision.
In terms of direct competition, the winning difference comes down to a more compelling value equation, superior consultative style, mastery of stakeholder engagement and control of the closing process.

Manage the Process

• Decision Process: The complex nature of the sales process requires that we map out the sequence of steps/decisions that ultimately end in the economic buyer signing our agreement. We present this process up front and get the prospect to agree with it. Plus we use it to adjust as the sales process veers off course.
• Paper Process: First, we avoid submitting a proposal until the prospect is fully qualified and agrees to a business case. Then we submit all the paper work needed to close the deal and prevent any last minute surprises.