Blog | April 27, 2016

Pool Helps ASCII MSPs Understand "One Hour Marketing"

jim roddy

By Jim Roddy, VP of Marketing, RSPA

Herman Pool has worn many hats during his lifetime: entrepreneur, managed services provider, father (now grandfather), and marketing guru among them. Later this year he will add one more title to that list – author – and so he shared highlights from his soon-to-be-published book One Hour Marketing on stage at today’s ASCII Success Summit in Milwaukee.

I’ve seen Pool, the president of Vertical Axion Marketing Services, speak at past ASCII events, and I appreciate how he speaks in specifics. He starts with a little bit of marketing theory, just enough to get everyone on the same page, before dousing solutions providers with specifics to help their marketing efforts.

Pool summarized how a VAR or MSP can plan their marketing in just five easy-to-answer questions:

  1. What offering will you promote?
  2. Who do you want to take action?
  3. What action do you want them to take?
  4. What does the offering help customers avoid?
  5. What tools will you use to carry out your marketing?

Pool then followed up those questions with a specific example that connects the dots for solutions providers, even if they’re a novice marketer:

  1. What offering will you promote? Backup and Disaster Recovery (BDR)
  2. Who do you want to take action? Existing clients who lack a BDR plan
  3. What action do you want them to take? Schedule a data loss risk assessment
  4. What does the offering help customers avoid? Avoid losing clients or maybe their entire business due to data loss
  5. What tools will you use to carry out your marketing? Postcards, risk assessment e-book, landing page, call script

Pool then focused on one more key question that stumps many solutions providers when it comes to marketing: Who has time to do all of this?

Pool recommended that MSPs partner with marketing experts who will have time to execute the marketing plan – provide the actions behind the answers to the five questions. “You need to ask yourself, while I may have the ability to do it all myself, does it make sense?” Pool said.

I couldn’t keep pace with the volume of info Pool provided, so I was glad he offered the nearly 100 solutions providers in attendance (and readers of this article) a link to a free chapter of his new book: www.VerticalAxion.com/freechapter  

Business Solutions has published several articles based on Pool’s talks at past ASCII conferences. Here are links to those presentations plus a webinar Pool co-produced with Business Solutions last year:

The ASCII Success Summit – Milwaukee is being held April 27-28 at the Crowne Plaza Milwaukee Airport. It is one of nine solution provider-focused conferences ASCII will host in North America in 2016. For more information on ASCII, go to www.BSMinfo.com/go/InsideASCII.