How to prospect leads for an MSSP?
Leads for MSSP
A lead is a prospect, not qualified as yet. So, a lead is a potential client who has expressed interest in your product or services or engaged with you to know more about your products and services.
These leads can be directly sourced from vendors such as Google News Alerts, Linkedin groups/discussions tagged with the keywords that describe what you do; blog comments; twitter hashtags (that mention what you do); through forums (from trusted forums like Reddit), etc. The list is endless.
To qualify if these leads are worth calling back or not, we generally use multi-dimensional qualification criteria:
Traffic Scorecard:
Traffic scorecard means traffic of the site where the lead has come from and time taken to load this page.
Bounce Rate:
Page view of a page indicates the level of interest of a visitor in that particular product or services. Bounce rate is defined as Percentage of visitors who leave after viewing a single page on the website/blog/forum…etc, without going to any other pages on this site. In short, it indicates how much time did he spend on your site before leaving for another web destination.
Averages out to be around 50%. If more than one page, then divide by two and add 50% ….. So if three pages are loaded, the bounce rate will be => 2 + 50% = 3.5% Time on Each Page: This is usually less than 1 minute or 4 minutes or so an average per person visiting the site. Keeping the time to less than 1 minute is a good indicator that they did not read much before leaving your site or blog/forum etc.
Now come to Quality Scorecard:
This may vary from industry to industry, but 100% on all these criteria is considered BEST and any one having less than 50% of drops out automatically immediately after this step even if he has a great traffic scorecard….
How to find targeted MSSP leads?
It is very important to get an outlook on the industry you are targeting so that you can more effectively target your campaign. Directly reaching out to prospects with no idea of what they do will not give you any positive results.
This article will help you gain insights on the basic requirements for getting targeted MSSP leads. Industrial Outlook: It’s always better if we know where our clients are working, their infrastructure and network size. Having an idea about this helps us in doing research to find out who these people are, what services they offer and whom all they work with…etc..
So that we can come up with a list of companies/locations/companies who would be interested in our products or services without much effort from our side. Besides this, we should have an idea whether these companies are looking for our products or services now.
How To Prospect MSSP Leads
So here is the list on how to prospect leads for an MSSP?
Industrial Outlook:
It’s always better if we know where our clients are working, their infrastructure and network size. Having an idea about this helps us in doing research to find out who these people are, what services they offer and whom all they work with…etc.. So that we can come up with a list of companies/locations/companies who would be interested in our products or services without much effort from our side. Besides this, we should have an idea whether these companies are looking for our products or services now. Are they going to be a threat to us in future if not approached now?
Research:
After knowing the industry, we can move on to research of who are all involved in this industry? What do they offer and what’s their market share? Who is doing better than others. We can research through various tools like Google news alerts, Linkedin groups/discussions tagged with the keywords that describe what you do; blog comments; twitter hashtags (that mention what you do); through forums (from trusted forums like Reddit), etc. Even if they don’t directly help us get MSSP leads, it will definitely help us understand dynamics of our target industries.
Linkedin:
Once done with research, we can directly reach out to targeted people on LinkedIn by researching companies/infrastructure they are working for. After getting a good lead list, you can use techniques like message them or send them requests for invitations to work together…etc.. There are various tools available which help you scrape data from Linkedin and provide it in excel spreadsheets so that you can easily analyze the result for your campaign.
Email Campaigns:
Use email blasts to reach out individually to these companies/people based on their profile information that specifies their designation at present.
Offline Approach:
There are some places where you have plenty of MSSP leads without much effort. No matter whether they are interested in your product or services; pitch them with self interests at least. You can use places like Internet Security forums, people with MSSP designation in conferences or events related to the security industry, etc.
Social Media:
Social media is a place where you have both highly targeted and untargeted MSSP leads depending on how well you are doing your campaigns. Use Twitter hashtags that are relevant to your products/services; post them up in LinkedIn groups relevant to your target industries; create Facebook pages dedicated to organizations/companies involved in the same industry as yours where you can mention about what you do; commenting on their posts etc..
How To Protect MSSP Leads
Once you have a list of companies that would be interested in your products or services, it’s very important to protect this list from the competitors.
Some of the ways to hide your presence from any other security services provider are:
1) Create a landing page using a free service like Leadpages and then redirect traffic from all the sources mentioned above to this landing page.
2) Once they land on this page, ask them to give their name and email address so as to get more information about these services….
3) Create a Privacy Policy/Disclaimer page which gives out an impression that we do not share our customer details with anyone else.
4) If you are interested, you can tell them about your products or services and ask them to fill up a form that says that they are interested in knowing more about our products or services.
5) It’s always better if we give out the impression to customers that they are getting something for free/discounts etc by filling these forms which makes it look as if customers have nothing to lose
6) Adding an extra layer of security by using Recaptcha? on all signup forms…this helps us check out easily whether the customer is real or bot. We should be careful while choosing keywords for this captcha so as to not turn away legitimate customers who don’t know what “reCAPTCHA ” means.
Conclusion
Now coming to the basic question of getting targeted MSSP leads, we can say that it is a very tedious process which requires a lot of effort. It has been noticed that many companies have been spending half the money in creating awareness about their products or services and gaining initial leads through various sources. However, they fail to gain a good number of customers from these lead generation campaigns. Targeted MSSP leads do not come cheap and they can’t be gained easily if you are just starting out.
It’s no doubt that most security professionals keep themselves aware of possible threats in order for them to protect their business data from cyber criminals. But one thing which all such professionals need to understand is that hiring a great number of customers without proper service infrastructure and support is not going to help them in the long run. As it’s been seen that most companies go out of business within the first three years due to lack of quality support and infrastructure.
If you take care of these two things and also understand who your target audience or customers are, you will be able to protect yourself from your competitors as well as future threats.
