Companies switch IT providers when something breaks, when they grow past their current one or when a compliance deadline forces the issue. Outbound reaches them at those moments with a reason that's specific to their stack and their situation.
Hi Renata,
The systems administrator role on your careers page has been reposted twice since May, and the description covers help desk for 90 staff across the Fresno and Reno plants, Microsoft 365, Meraki, and on-call duty for the ERP. That is three jobs.
We run exactly that scope for two other machine shops in the Central Valley, with a technician on site one day a week and a 24-hour desk behind them, for less than the salary in your posting.
If it is still open, would a twenty-minute call about what we would take on be useful?
[Your name]
Most MSPs get their first fifty clients from the owner's network, a few vendor referrals and the accountant down the hall who knew someone whose server died. After that the growth comes from add-ons and per-seat creep at existing accounts, which looks like revenue growth on the P&L but is not new logos. The owner is still the escalation point, the sales engineer and the person who writes the proposals, and the calendar shows it: quarterly business reviews yes, prospecting no.
MSP outbound is the most crowded inbox category there is. Every operations director has seen the email about 24/7 monitoring, the free network assessment and the cyber insurance scare, most of them from a vendor-supplied template with the logo swapped. When outbound is done properly the list is built from the company's actual situation: the IT manager role they cannot fill, the second office they opened, the SOC 2 report a customer has asked for, and the email is about that and nothing else.
MSP outbound is crowded and most of it is generic. Ours names the company's actual situation, the role they're hiring, the office they've opened, the certification they need, which is what gets past an operations director's delete key.
We build the list from IT moments, not headcount bands. Open IT postings on job boards, new office announcements, mergers, and the compliance deadlines that show up in public procurement, customer lists and industry press. We take the owner, COO or operations director at companies with 20 to 500 staff, or the lone IT manager for co-managed offers, and exclude anything in your PSA or a partner's account list.
Our copywriters read the IT posting line by line, because it lists the stack: Microsoft 365 or Google, Meraki or Fortinet, the line-of-business application, how many sites, whether 'on call' appears. They check how long the role has been open and whether it was reposted, look for a new address on the website, and note whether the company sells into a sector that asks for SOC 2 or CMMC.
The email never mentions 24/7 monitoring, proactive support or a free assessment, because every MSP email says those. It names the role, the stack it describes and what one person covering all of it costs the company, then states plainly what you would take off their plate and what a comparable client pays. Under 120 words, no vendor logos, no ransomware scare, a short call at the end.
We send Tuesday to Thursday mornings in the prospect's time zone. We skip quarter-end, when budgets are locked, and the fortnight around Christmas when the only IT person is on holiday. Lists built on cyber insurance or compliance deadlines go out 60 to 90 days ahead. Every send uses dedicated domains we warm for three to four weeks, never yours, and follow-ups stop on reply.
Operations directors reply with a question: what does this cost for 80 users, or can you look at what we have. Have a per-user range ready. Replies land in the portal as interested, not now and out of office; a not now says after the migration or when the contract ends in March, and we schedule the return. Every two weeks we tilt the list towards the signals converting.
The reposting history is the signal: a role open since May and reposted twice means the company has already tried to hire and failed, so an alternative is welcome rather than insulting. The proof is two comparable clients in the same trade and region, with a concrete service shape. It leaves out monitoring, security acronyms and the MSP's certifications, none of which are what Renata is stuck on.
It works because most of that email is the same vendor template about proactive monitoring and a free assessment, sent to every business in the county. An operations director who has been trying to fill a systems administrator role for four months will read an email about that role. Ours are only sent where there is a situation like that to write about.
No. We exclude your existing accounts and any company your distributor or vendor partner has registered to you or to another partner, if you share that list. The emails are signed by you and mention no vendor by name unless the prospect's own posting does, so co-marketing rules and deal registration stay clean.
Yes. Compliance deadlines are visible from outside: a company that announces a defence contract will need CMMC, one selling to SaaS buyers will be asked for a SOC 2, and healthcare clients carry HIPAA already. Cyber insurance renewals are harder to see, so we write to what carriers now require, MFA, EDR and tested backups, and time the sends 60 to 90 days ahead of the January 1 renewal peak.