I am very happy to announce that Pronto and our newest team member, Barb Levisay, are expanding our partnership in a new and exciting direction. Barb has now taken on the responsibilities as Pronto’s Managing Editor.

Many of you may know Barb and her company Marketing for Partners, from her years of work in the channel with IT service providers, partners, ISV and other companies just like yours. Others of you probably know Barb from her weekly “Marketing Matters” column in Redmond Channel Partner magazine. Regardless, one things is clear – she has a really unique blend of industry experience with technology companies and the ability to tell their stories with effective marketing and editorial content.

In 2011, we launched our services for Microsoft Dynamics partners with Barb. Right away, Barb’s depth of professional knowledge and fantastic editorial skills were made clear to the Pronto team. All of this combined with Barb’s delightful personality made her an excellent choice to join our extended Pronto team. Given the opportunity to work together, we decided to expand our partnership with Barb and have her take on the role as Pronto’s Managing Editor for our blog and newsletter content.

Over the next month or so we are going to more than triple the number of blog articles we write, improve the overall quality of articles and give you the opportunity to both contribute ideas and tailor the content to your specific business needs.

IMPORTANT ACTIONS FOR YOU

Update Your Blog Topic Subscriptions

First, if you haven’t already, please go to your WordPress Dashboard, and update your blog article subscription preferences. You’ll see the “My Subscriptions” link in the upper left corner, right under your Dashboard menu. There you will find over 40 blog topic categories that you can select from.

Tell Us What You Want

After you’ve updated your subscription preferences head on over to the Pronto IT Services & MSP Content & Blog Discussion forums. It is super easy share some of your ideas and requirements for YOUR blog content. Barb and I are actively involved in these forums – taking client ideas and developing them into content that meets your business requirements. Of course Barb will be developing many great article ideas on her own, and she will share them in the forums as well, but this is your opportunity to make sure that Pronto is delivering the right message, on the right topics for your unique needs.

We’re sure over the coming months you’re going to be very pleased with the breadth, quality and frequency of your blog updates. Help us help you, by updating your subscriptions right away and then joining the discussion in the Pronto IT Services & MSP Content & Blog Discussion forums.

Thanks,
Derek Brown
Managing Director

As our business has grown, our client base has become a more diverse group – across service and product offerings, business models, geography and more. Plus, many of our clients’ businesses have become more complex due to changing technology, the impact of cloud services and the evolution of the marketplace.

To address these changes we’ve built a new blog engine from the ground up, giving us the ability to scale our content generation in order to deliver more targeted content to client blogs. That means you now have the power to tailor your blog feeds to more precisely match your business and your clients.

There are several key benefits to Pronto’s new blog system:

• Better Aligned to Your Clients & Business – Choose from over 40 different topics to create a blog that really reflects your unique business and client base.
• More Focused Content – We can now provide blog content for narrower categories and specific products. If we get a few requests for the same topic, we’ll start writing on that topic. If the interest is limited, perhaps we’d write quarterly or monthly; but there would be some content available. The more subscribers to a topic, the more articles we’ll create.
• Increased Client Differentiation – With so many topic choices available, there will be a natural randomization of content going to client blogs. That means less chance of similar blog and newsletter content from client to client. Additionally, we will continue to write multiple versions of most blog articles to increase the diversity of content.
• Targeted Extension Site Blog Content – We already offer valuable Extension Sites for products and services such as Office 365, Google Apps and Cloud services. We can now provide targeted blog feeds for these sites that align with your Extension Site’s content and audience.

Have ideas for content within topics or want to request new topics?

We have revamped our discussion forms for content.  Please visit and let your voice be heard! We write up most of the requests we get, and our new blog system will further simplify this process for our writers. Because we won’t always have to think about making wide generalities to ensure content fits clients universally, we’ll be able to focus on providing more specific content.

Make blog article suggestions at: IT Services & MSP Content & Blog Discussion

ACTION REQUIRED

Take advantage of our newest service right now! This is very simple and will only take a moment of your time (you can find screen-shots on the bottom of this email).

1. Login to your WordPress Dashboard by typing /wp-login after your domain.

2. Click Dashboard, then click My Subscriptions.

3. Check the boxes of the topics you want to subscribe to.

That’s all there is to it!

If you have any questions just reply to this email; it will open a support ticket and we’ll help you out.

Thanks,

Derek

We’re happy to announce that the Pronto Marketing White Label Service is up and running, it’s working great and we’re taking on more and more non-IT services and MSP clients. Here are a few examples:

• agileDSS Inc.
• Westwood Office Park
• Greycliff Advisors
• PeopleServe Asia Ltd.
• EB Color Consultants
• T&F Drugs, Inc.
• Nut Software

The Pronto White Label program is a way for our IT Services and MSP clients to resell Pronto’s website services to their own clients. We do all the work for you via a helpdesk branded as your company. You get the same Pronto service, but under your name and brand. Pronto bills you, you bill your client.

There are four core elements to the Pronto White Label program:

• Webpage – for example: JTECH Networks Webpage
• Signup forms – you’re welcome to complete the sign-up process on the above website, just be sure to put “Test” so we know that you’re not a real signup
• Help Desk – for example: JTECH Networks Help Desk
• Marketing Support – in addition to the webpage we’ll provide you with a home page banner and email marketing at no extra charge. Once your website and help desk are live, Kelsey (our Partner Marketing Manager) will contact you.

Next Steps

• Partner: Review the client sign-up and billing process and the Pronto White Label Partner Program forum for more information. You must be logged into your Pronto support desk account to access this form.
• Partner: Open a new ticket with Pronto and let us know what price you want to charge your clients. We will put this price on your web page. The default price is $247, Pronto’s standard price for all clients. Your cost is $200 per month.
• Pronto: Your ticket will kick-off our internal process, we’ll get things going and ready for your approval. The process will take about one week.

If you have any questions, you can find answers by visiting our Pronto White Label Partner Program Q&A Forum. Please post your question if it is not already answered.

We look forward to this next step in our partnership with you.

Regards,
Derek

For the typical managed services provider there is a fairly long sales cycle in their pursuit of new clients. This time lag also applies to many of the marketing tools that are available to computer consultants, whether you’re talking about a sales training program, IT telemarketing service or even an SEO campaign. Because there is no hard data available as to whether these techniques are working until sometime in the future, many techs decide to make course corrections with just a hunch. This leads many to switching marketing ‘horses’ in mid-stream, but is this wise?

If you think about it this way consider your marketing techniques like a grenade. When you pull the pin and throw one then it won’t explode right away but will take a few minutes. If you throw one and decided that you haven’t heard it explode so you’re going to pick it up; then it just might end up exploding in your hands. Instead you should count out the minutes and wait the proper time before deciding that the grenade hasn’t worked.

Here is the connection with the marketing techniques or vehicles you might be trying in your computer services company. If you have decided to utilize an SEO service, like Pronto Marketing, to help promote your IT services marketing then you will have to wait the proper time to make sure that it’s going to deliver the sales leads your looking for. If you don’t wait long

enough and decide that the service is not working then you might be switching horses in midstream. You could end up just going in circles and never get any of the results that you’re looking for.

If you’re a computer business owner that wants to make sure you get an ROI from all the marketing efforts you invest for IT lead generation then make sure you give them enough time to work!

John Black
MSP Telemarketing

Pronto for Everybody is Launching Today

We are ready to go with Pronto for Everybody we announced last month, our services for non-IT small businesses of all kinds. We’ll be doing lots of updates the next week or so to our website and other supporting marketing and communication so this is just the starting point. You can find information at our Pronto for Everybody landing page.

As I mentioned in our last Pronto Insider for this first phase we’re going to go with a simple referral fee for each client you send to us. I’ve had discussions with some clients about deeper partnerships and will continue to reach out and see if we can build a program.

As a 90 day kick-off we’re going to offer $200 for each referral, paid when the client’s website goes live.  We’ll make the 90 days starting today, ending November 11.

The referral could be an existing client of yours, another IT service provider or any business you send our way. As an extra kick-off bonus if you get to 10 referral sign-ups within the 90 days we’ll make that $300 per referral, retroactive for all 10 referrals, assuming they go live. In other words a free year of your Pronto service!  We do expect this referral structure will change over time based on our experience but this gives us a good starting off point. And gives you a fabulous opportunity to turn your professional network into money!

Next week we will roll-out client facing marketing materials if you want them. If you’d like us to email information on the websites to your newsletter list we can do that. There’s no charge for this and would include a landing page on your site. This could be on your menu, or just a landing page on its own. If you are interested or have questions, just let us know.

Once again, you can begin directing your friends and clients to the Pronto for Everybody page. We’ll be sure to track the referals and get going Pronto!

Updated Billing System

On another topic we’re right in the middle of a migration from our current PayPal & FreshBooks billing system to an integrated subscription platform from a company called Zuora. It’s a very powerful and flexible subscription management platform that is a big step forward in terms of improving your billing and subscription experience with Pronto.

During this time there might be a few bumps in the road. If anything is amiss in your billing, please let us know. But at least you’ll understand that this transition is probably the reason.

As always, thanks!

Thanks for everything and let’s get going on Pronto for Everybody!

Derek

Pronto for Everybody! – and your opportunity for a year of free service.

A big shout-out to everyone who participated in the Pronto Expanded Client Offering Survey, about 75 of you, for taking the time to provide valuable feedback. 93% of you said you were Probable or Very Probable to refer your existing clients to Pronto, thank you for that vote of confidence! We’ll make sure as we roll this out we work extra hard to continue to earn your trust.

If you didn’t have time to participate in the Pronto Expanded Client Offering Survey yet we’d sure welcome your thoughts.

There are a number of you who are interested in deeper relationships or partnerships; I’ll be following up with each of you in the coming weeks to understand more what you had in mind. For the initial phase we’re going to keep it simple with a straightforward referral fee.

Let’s Get Going – Our Ramp up for August 1 Launch.

We are going to officially launch “Pronto Everywhere” on August 1st. The team has been hard at work getting things ready; new sign-up forms, editorial process and other elements to make this launch super successful. The past six months we’ve made huge investments in our infrastructure, business systems and people to be ready for this.

As part of the preparations we are excited to announce that August 1 Jenny Reese, our lead freelance copywriter the past two years will relocate to Bangkok to work full time in our offices. She will be leading an expanded on-site editorial team to enable us to ramp-up for these new clients.

Also building up the team in July Jerome Le Louer joined us as Director of Operations and CFO. Jerome moved from France to Thailand about seven years ago. He speaks and reads Thai fluently, trains with the Thai national judo team along with being a highly experienced CFO. Amazing business leader and person! Also happy to share the news that Eric Hanau joined the Account Management team, moving over from his online merchandising position with Petco.com in San Diego. More to come!

We’ve built a world-class team, we can scale the business and are ready for this next phase in our growth.

Here is it – Pricing & Offer Details.

We’ll offer the same amazing full-service, turnkey, pay-as-you-go solution as you have today with the exception of blog posts and newsletters which will not be included. Our launch price will be $299 setup and $199 per month. Introducing the setup fee makes it possible for us to spend time up-front to understand the client’s business, develop the website architecture and write effective web copy. Newsletter will be a $50 option, without the blog content. If we decide to focus on a vertical such as IT service then we’ll have the same structure; website, SEO, blog and newsletter for $249. This is our keep it super-simple approach. Full details will be on the website August 1.

We won’t have vertical specific applications so we won’t be right for every small business. We won’t have features such as reservation systems for hotels, ecommerce or shopping carts or other very vertical specific requirements. If you’re not sure, send the referral our way and we’ll quickly review their requirements to determine if it’s something we could support or not.

Referral Fees – Earn a free year of Pronto service!!!

Here comes the good part! As a 90 day kick-off we’re going to offer $200 for each referral, paid when the client’s website goes live.

This could be an existing client of yours, another IT service provider or any business you send our way. As an extra kick-off bonus if you get to 10 referral sign-ups within the 90 days we’ll make that $300 per site for all 10 referrals, assuming they go live. In other words a free year of your Pronto service!  We do expect this referral structure will change over time based on our experience but this gives us a good starting off point. And gives you a fabulous opportunity to turn your professional network into money!

Let me know how we can help.

Help me, help you. As we build this program if there is anything we can do to help you tell the story and get the referrals we’re all ears. If you have any questions, be sure to let me know.

As always thanks for your support!
Derek