Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast

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**Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast**

Welcome to Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast. If you’re a Managed Service Provider (MSP) and want to improve your marketing & grow your business, this is the show for you. It’s out every Tuesday on your favorite podcast platform.

Since launching in 2019, this has become the world’s most listened to podcast about MSP marketing. Host Paul Green is the world’s go to MSP marketing expert, and the founder of the MSP Marketing Edge.

Every week you’ll get really smart ideas to improve your marketing. Plus you’ll hear from the best guests, who will help you think differently about the way you attract new clients.

You can easily email and chat to the host Paul Green, who answers MSP’s marketing questions every week. And there are versions of the podcast on YouTube if you want the full video experience.

Paul and his team at the MSP Marketing Edge say their mission for the podcast is to give you practical insights and expert advice to boost your business performance. They provide strategies to help you get more clients, increase your Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR), and grow your net profit. They know that profitability is crucial, and we’re here to help you succeed financially.

Running an MSP can feel lonely. If you ever feel lost or overwhelmed, this podcast is for you. Each week it covers key topics for MSPs, offering specific, practical advice tailored to the channel. You will learn effective marketing techniques to attract new clients and grow your business consistently and profitably.

Marketing an MSP involves many strategies, from digital marketing to traditional networking meetings. Paul’s podcast explores all avenues to help you reach your target audience. The weekly episodes discuss creating compelling marketing materials, using social media effectively, and optimizing your website for search engines.

Every episode features special guests, including industry veterans and successful MSP owners, who share valuable insights and real-world experiences. These interviews provide inspiration and practical tips you can apply to your business.

Paul Green often talks with successful MSPs about how they are growing their businesses, sharing actionable tips and strategies. The discussions cover finding new clients, increasing revenue, and building service consistency to give you a competitive edge.

They also address day-to-day business aspects like recruitment, leadership, and financial management. The goal is to equip you with the knowledge and tools to run your business efficiently and profitably. Topics include attracting and retaining top talent, creating a positive workplace culture, and motivating your team.

Business growth is a central theme. In the podcast you’ll hear strategies for scaling your business, expanding services, and entering new markets. Paul and his guests discuss the challenges and opportunities of growth, providing practical advice to overcome obstacles and seize opportunities.

Innovation is another key topic. Discuss the latest trends in the MSP industry and how to leverage them to your advantage. Topics include digital transformation, cybersecurity, and cloud computing, helping you stay competitive.

Though based in the UK, Paul’s content is relevant globally. MSP challenges are similar worldwide, and his advice addresses these common issues, regardless of your location.

The MSP Marketing podcast offers in-depth discussions about the channel and MSP industry, providing actionable insights and practical advice. Listen each week for expert advice, practical strategies, and insights from industry leaders. Whether you’re looking to boost your client base, optimize operations, or increase profitability, the MSP Marketing Podcast supports your journey to success.

About Paul Green

Paul encourages listener interaction and values your feedback and suggestions. Connect with him through the website, social media, and email to share your thoughts and ideas.

Paul Green is a le

Latest Episodes:

**Episode 239: Why MSPs must do a weekly LinkedIn Newsletter** Jun 11, 2024
Show notes

The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge

Welcome to this week’s episode of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This is THE show if you want to grow your MSP.

In this episode I explain why LinkedIn Newsletters are an essential tool for MSPs to effortlessly engage with a wide audience, build lasting relationships, and keep your services top of mind for potential clients. (jump to)

Balancing urgent client issues with important business growth tasks is crucial for MSPs, and I encourage the use of the Eisenhower Matrix to help prioritise effectively to ensure long-term success. (jump to)

My guest this week, Jon Wright, runs a successful MSP where he has systemised the hiring and managing of Sales Development Reps, to effectively drive new business – click here to find out more. (jump to)

Lastly, I tackle a question from Chloe in Sydney, Australia – she asks whether she should be using the “good, better, best” pricing strategy? This model effectively attracts clients by offering tiered options, making the middle choice seem like the safest and most appealing decision. What are your thoughts? (jump to)

Join me as we unpack these topics and learn from some triumphs and trials in the MSP world. Oh, and don’t forget to join me in the MSP Marketing Facebook group.

*READ FULL TRANSCRIPT*

**Why you must do a weekly LinkedIn Newsletter**

LinkedIn is the premier platform for MSPs, and LinkedIn Newsletters are a powerful tool to reach a vast audience with minimal effort. Over the past two years, I’ve found newsletters to be an excellent way to build an audience, engage with people, and drive new business.

LinkedIn heavily promotes newsletters, giving them significant algorithmic attention. When you publish an article, it appears in your subscribers’ newsfeeds and their email inboxes.

To start, navigate to the publishing menu in LinkedIn’s article view, write your article, and once published, it automatically becomes part of your newsletter. This isn’t a traditional newsletter with multiple pieces of content; it’s essentially your article distributed more broadly.

Regularly sending out a newsletter helps keep your MSP top of mind. It won’t instantly land new clients, but it builds a relationship with your audience, so when they’re ready to switch MSPs, your name will be the first they consider.

Though setup might seem complex initially, a quick Google search can guide you through the steps. Start leveraging LinkedIn newsletters today to enhance your outreach and engagement.

Watch on YouTube

**Here’s how to stop the tech work interrupting growing the business**

MSPs are frequently overwhelmed by urgent tasks, more so than any other business owners I’ve encountered. The nature of your work demands immediate attention to clients’ problems, but how do you balance these urgencies with the important tasks needed to grow your business?

I have the answer. In 1954, U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower highlighted a common dilemma: “I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent.” This is particularly relevant to MSPs, who are often trapped between urgent client issues and important business growth activities.

To manage this conflict, Eisenhower created the Eisenhower Matrix. This simple four-square grid helps you prioritise tasks by urgency and importance. If a task is important and urgent, do it immediately. If it’s important but not urgent, schedule it. For tasks that are urgent but not important, delegate them. And finally, if a task is neither important nor urgent, delete it.

Focus on what truly matters, even if it means letting some tasks fall into what I call the “black hole” – a list of things you acknowledge you’ll never get around to doing. By prioritising effectively, you can ensure that the important work that grows your business doesn’t get overshadowed by the urgent demands of daily operations.

Watch on YouTube

**The MSP that figured out how to get the best from its sales reps**

This week I’m joined by Jon Wright, an MSP who’s mastered hiring Sales Development Representatives (SDRs) to drive leads through outbound phone calls. Many MSPs struggle with this, but Jon’s approach has been notably successful.

Jon’s MSP journey began 13 years ago, growing from two to 30 employees organically. Early on, he realised he needed to focus on business growth rather than technical tasks, so he hired a tech on day one. Initially, growth was fuelled by referrals and relationships, but as leads dried up, John knew he needed a more scalable approach.

Their first step was hiring an outsourced vendor for sales calls, which led to a few sales but ultimately lacked quality. They then switched to a vendor who found and managed their first SDR in-house, leading to better results. Inspired by this success, Jon decided to master sales management in-house, hiring an SDR who didn’t perform well initially but learned valuable lessons.

Today, Jon tracks his SDRs’ performance through HubSpot, monitoring call numbers, durations, and discovery appointments. He emphasises hiring experienced, money-motivated individuals and maintains their motivation through regular meetings and upfront commissions.

Jon’s systemised approach ensures consistent results, proving that with the right strategies and tools, MSPs can effectively manage outbound sales and drive new business.

Watch on YouTube

**FEATURED** **GUEST:**

Jon Wright is the CEO of Core Managed, a leading Managed IT Services Provider that specialises in providing IT and Cybersecurity solutions for businesses. With over 20 years of experience in the tech industry, Jon has a wealth of knowledge and expertise in managing complex projects and driving business growth. He has a proven track record of successfully managing large teams and spearheading innovative initiatives that have led to significant growth for his clients.

As CEO of Core Managed, Jon is responsible for setting the overall direction and strategy of the company. He works closely with his team to develop new solutions and services that meet the evolving needs of their clients. He also ensures that Core Managed stays at the forefront of technology advancements by constantly seeking out new opportunities for growth and development. Core Managed was recently recognised as one of the 25 fastest-growing private companies in the area.

In addition to his role at Core Managed, Jon is a sought-after speaker and mentor in the tech industry. He is dedicated to sharing his knowledge and experiences with others and often participates in conferences and workshops to educate business leaders.

Outside of work, Jon enjoys spending time with his family, traveling, and playing golf. He also actively supports the charitable work of Hannah’s Wish, an organisation that provides support to families suffering from infertility, miscarriage, stillborn and infant loss.

Connect with Jon on LinkedIn

**Should I use good, better, best pricing?**

Got a question about your MSP’s marketing? Submit one here for Paul’s Personal Peer Group.

This week, Chloe from an MSP in Sydney, Australia, asks about using the good, better, best pricing model for sales. Surprisingly, this is a hotly debated topic among MSPs. So, what is good, better, best pricing? It offers clients three package options, for example: good at $30/user/month, better at $40, and best at $50, each with increasing benefits. This model, common in SaaS pricing, is psychologically powerful because it provides the illusion of choice.

Despite some MSPs’ reservations, I believe in doing whatever it takes to win clients, even if it means offering a lower-priced option initially and then upselling. Good, better, best pricing lets clients compare packages and choose what they think suits them best. Typically, most opt for the middle package, seeing it as the safest choice. This strategy not only helps clients make decisions but also makes you more competitive. Why is this model controversial? I’m not sure, but I’d love to hear your thoughts at mspmarketingedge.com

**Episode 238: HUH? Growing your MSP should be… boring???** Jun 04, 2024
Show notes

The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge

Welcome to this week’s episode of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This is THE show if you want to grow your MSP.

In this episode I explain why a level of boredom in your MSP business indicates success, and allows you to focus on growth and improvement. (jump to)

I also tell you why email remains the powerhouse communication tool for MSPs, essential for owning client data and building strong relationships through consistent, engaging content. (jump to)

Megan Killian joins me to discuss why MSPs must view marketing from the prospects’ perspective. She highlights the importance of a strong online presence, transparent pricing, and aligning services with their needs and values to build trust and attract more clients. (jump to)

Lastly, I answer a question from Gordan, who owns and runs an MSP in the UK. He wants to know whether Instagram is a worthwhile marketing platform or is he running the risk of marketing overload. (jump to)

Join me as we unpack these topics and learn from some triumphs and trials in the MSP world. Oh, and don’t forget to join me in the MSP Marketing Facebook group.

*READ FULL TRANSCRIPT*

**Growing your MSP should be… boring???**

Believe it or not, the key indicator that your MSP business is on the right track might just be boredom. Yes, you read that right. If your business bores you, it’s a sign that you’ve achieved a level of stability and efficiency most entrepreneurs only dream of.

Reflect on your business journey. Are you in the hectic start-up phase, managing your first employees, or at the enviable stage where your business runs smoothly without your constant oversight? Over my 19 years in entrepreneurship, I’ve experienced all these stages with various ventures. Reflecting on those early days, I don’t miss the chaos of creating systems from scratch and firefighting daily crises.

The start-up phase is stressful because every aspect of the business needs to be invented and refined – from customer experience to marketing strategies. What’s alarming is how many business owners get stuck here.

Here’s some wisdom… if you’re slightly bored with your business, it means you’ve built robust systems that run smoothly without constant intervention. No crises to manage, no fires to put out – just seamless operations. This boredom isn’t a negative, it’s a testament to your success.

Achieving this level of systemisation frees up your time, allowing you to focus on growth and improvement. Each step towards eliminating daily problems brings you closer to a well-oiled, self-sufficient business. When you reach that point, you’ll find the luxury of a little boredom incredibly liberating – a true sign that you’re on the path to long-term success.

Watch on YouTube – How to grow your MSP in your SLEEP!

**What’s your email marketing spam rate?**

Email marketing has transformed significantly in recent years, yet it remains one of the most effective tools for MSPs. Recent changes in B2B email rules, shouldn’t deter you from utilising email marketing. Despite Gmail’s low spam complaint threshold of 0.3%, it’s crucial to keep engaging your audience through emails.

Email is unique because you own the data. Unlike platforms like LinkedIn or Facebook, where you risk losing access, your email list remains yours, even if you switch CRMs. Email is still central to business communications and logins, making it indispensable. For MSPs, weekly emails – focused on edutainment – covering topics like productivity, security, and profitability, are ideal. Avoid overly technical content and instead, address subjects that resonate with business owners and managers.

For instance, my CRM (Keap) reports a 0.4% complaint rate, slightly above Gmail’s limit, but manageable given the volume of emails sent. Remember, consistent email engagement fosters relationships with potential clients. While MSPs may not see immediate new clients from emails, this consistent communication keeps your services top of mind, ready for the day prospects decide to switch providers. Email marketing is still a powerful strategy for MSPs and will remain so for years to come.

Watch on YouTube – Avoid the SPAM folder when marketing your MSP

**How to look at your marketing as a prospect does**

One of the greatest marketing skills you can develop is viewing your marketing through the eyes of your prospects. My guest today, Megan Killian, excels at this. She shares how prospects choose new MSPs, the importance of reviews, and why displaying pricing on your website is essential.

Prospects often conduct extensive research before engaging, making a strong online presence crucial. They check websites, LinkedIn, and reviews on platforms like Google and Clutch. Including pricing on your website, even a range, builds trust and transparency. Prospects care more about your service’s practical benefits than technical jargon.

Megan emphasises defining your ideal client profile and aligning your services with clients’ needs and values. This foundational work is key to effective marketing and sales strategies. Megan advises MSPs to focus on their website as it’s the face of their business. A distinctive, professional website can significantly impact prospects’ perceptions and set you apart from competitors.

By refining these aspects, MSPs can build trust and attract more clients, ensuring long-term success in the competitive tech landscape.

Watch on YouTube – How to look at your marketing as a prospect does

**FEATURED GUEST:**

Megan Killion, a distinguished B2B Sales and Marketing Leader, is the powerhouse behind MKC Agency. Her prowess in tech consultation, community engagement, and sales team training has been pivotal in escalating numerous brands from the $1-5 million range to $15 million and beyond. Megan’s decade-long experience in B2B technology marketing has enabled her to generate over $500 million in pipeline across diverse sectors such as CDN, Telecommunications, Managed Services, and more. Beyond being a business virtuoso, Megan is a neurodivergent Ravenclaw and a devoted mother, masterfully juggling a demanding career with the joyful chaos of a household of five boys.

Connect with Megan on LinkedIn

**Should you use Instagram in your marketing?**

Got a question about your MSP’s marketing? Submit one here for Paul’s Personal Peer Group.

Gordon, an MSP owner in the UK, asked if he should use Instagram in his marketing strategy. The key rule with Instagram is to use it only if your target businesses are active on it. Instagram excels for retail or hospitality businesses aiming to reach consumers – for example, if your niche is targeting restaurant owners who frequently market on Instagram, then it makes sense for you to be there. However, for traditional B2B sectors like lawyers and CPAs, Instagram isn’t typically worthwhile. Focus your efforts where your target audience spends their time for the most effective results.

**Episode 237: MSPs: What it really means when a prospect says no** May 28, 2024
Show notes

The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge

Welcome to this week’s episode of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This is THE show if you want to grow your MSP.

In this episode I reflect on what it really means when a prospect says “no”. Often it actually means “not yet”. Building trust over time through multiple touchpoints can transform rejections into future opportunities. (jump to)

I also face the truth that I’ve lived over half my life – this has sparked an urgency in my business practices. What if you had just one year to achieve your goals? This motivates me to act decisively, how about you? (jump to)

In my chat with Brian Gillette, we explore how lunch and learn events effectively turn attendees into clients by focusing on relationship building over direct sales. Have you tried these events for your MSP? They’re challenging but worth it. (jump to)

Lastly, I tackle a question from Ryan, who owns a fairly new and fairly small MSP in Chicago, about valuing employees when budgets are tight. I suggest non-monetary ways to value employees, like recognising efforts, providing personalised rewards, and offering growth opportunities – enhancing team morale and loyalty. (jump to)

Join me as we unpack these topics and learn from some triumphs and trials in the MSP world. Oh, and don’t forget to join me in the MSP Marketing Facebook group.

*READ FULL TRANSCRIPT*

**What it really means when a prospect says no**

In the competitive world of business, especially in sales, a “no” from a prospect often stings, feeling like a personal rejection. This reaction isn’t just common among entrepreneurs – it’s practically universal, and understandably so. Many of us see our businesses as extensions of ourselves, so a refusal can feel deeply personal. However, in my experience, a “no” often means “not now – I don’t trust you yet,” rather than a flat-out rejection.

Trust is the linchpin in the relationship between clients and MSPs. Prospective clients are acutely aware that a wrong choice in MSP can lead to catastrophic outcomes for their business, which makes them extremely cautious. They often stick with underperforming MSPs simply because of familiarity, which feels safer than venturing into unknown territory.

To turn a “no” into a future “yes,” it’s essential to build trust long before the sales pitch. This means engaging with potential clients through multiple touchpoints – social media, newsletters, emails, and more. Each interaction is a step towards building a relationship that fosters trust.

Consider a prospect who has interacted with your brand 30 to 40 times before seriously considering your services. They’ve consumed your content and know your ethos. By the time they’re ready to switch MSPs, you’re not just another option; you’re a familiar, trusted entity. This doesn’t guarantee conversion, but it significantly enhances your chances.

Ultimately, every decline – whether due to concerns about cost, service suitability, or company size – boils down to a lack of trust. Effective MSPs must focus on becoming known and reliable long before the decision point, ensuring they are the trusted choice when prospects are ready to make a change.

Why 83% of MSPs fail when given a “NO”

**The need for urgency in your marketing**

Reflecting on the finite nature of life can be a sobering, sometimes startling exercise. Consider the average lifespan: roughly 76 years, or about 4,000 weeks. Plugging my own numbers into this stark timeline, I’ve clocked 2,592 weeks thus far. That leaves me with just 1,408 weeks if I reach the average – only 35% of my life potentially remains. It’s a perspective that adds gravity to each day and decision, especially as my 50th birthday approaches.

Facing these figures, it’s clear that traditional retirement isn’t on my horizon. I envisage shifting gears rather than stopping – perhaps moving into consulting, an avenue many deem an easier path. Yet, humour aside, the crunch of time is palpable when thinking about professional life and goals. If all goes to plan, I might exit my current business by 60 or 65, leaving me with 520 to 780 weeks to make significant strides. This timeline isn’t just a thought experiment; it’s a motivational force.

This urgency grows when you entertain a hypothetical… what if you had only one year left to grow your business, with the results dictating your lifelong income? The intensity and focus you’d bring to that single year would be unmatched. Such a scenario strips away trivial concerns and injects a potent dose of determination into our actions.

Why don’t we operate with this mindset consistently? Perhaps it’s because a timeline of 1,408 weeks feels expansive compared to a mere 52. But this is a luxury that blunts ambition and fosters procrastination. Whether you’re nearing your fifth decade like me, or enjoying the vigour of your thirties, the lesson remains the same. We should all engage with our goals and business growth with a sharpened sense of urgency.

I suggest taking a long walk to ponder these reflections – borrow a dog if you must. Let this mental and physical journey reshape your thinking. How could you accelerate your one-year goals to achieve them in six months? Upon returning, it’s crucial to transition these accelerated thoughts into swift actions. Every business owner, myself included, should be propelling our ventures forward with unrelenting drive, leveraging every week as though it’s our last.

Why your MSP MUST grow faster… and how

**How to do successful lunch & learns**

Lunch and learn events are pivotal for MSPs to connect with potential clients, but many hesitate due to fears of low attendance or ineffective presentations. Brian Gillette, a seasoned sales veteran with over 15 years in MSP sales and founder of Feel-Good MSP, offers strategic insights on hosting successful sessions.

Brian suggests that the key to a successful lunch and learn lies in addressing specific needs with practical solutions. For instance, focusing on tailored productivity hacks can transform the session from a general presentation into a valuable learning experience. This approach not only educates but also builds the crucial trust and relationships necessary for converting attendees into clients.

Moreover, Brian advises leveraging vendor partnerships to enhance these events while ensuring the MSP remains the focal point. Utilising vendor resources, such as marketing development funds, can amplify the event’s appeal without overshadowing the MSP’s expertise.

Ultimately, a successful lunch and learn should engage attendees with empathetic communication and actionable insights, turning a simple meeting into a powerful tool for business growth. By strategically using vendor support and focusing on relevant, practical content, MSPs can maximise the impact of these events, making them a cornerstone of client acquisition and retention strategies.

REVEALED: the secret to Lunch & Learn success!

**FEATURED** **GUEST:**

Brian Gillette is an empathy driven MSP coach focusing on understanding clients’ needs and selling with trust and authenticity allowing him to handle objections seamlessly.

The priority he places on transparency throughout the entire sales process is what makes him invaluable to the MSP community.

Connect with Brian on LinkedIn and check out his website feelgoodmsp.com

How to keep staff happy on a tight budget

Got a question about your MSP’s marketing? Submit one here for Paul’s Personal Peer Group.

Navigating financial constraints within a small business, particularly within the tech industry, can be challenging, especially when it comes to employee satisfaction and retention. Ryan, a Chicago-based MSP owner, encapsulates this struggle perfectly, asking how he can make his team feel valued without the option of a pay rise.

Ryan’s concern is legitimate, after all, financial compensation is often the most straightforward form of employee recognition. However, when the budget is tight, there are creative ways to express appreciation that can resonate just as powerfully with employees.

Firstly, recognising and alleviating the day-to-day pressures your techs face can make a significant impact. Simple gestures like making coffee, offering a free lunch, or letting staff leave early on a busy week are acts of kindness that demonstrate empathy and gratitude for their hard work.

Investing in personal growth is another avenue. If funds are low, consider dedicating time for one-on-one coaching or providing personalised feedback. This not only helps in skill development but also shows a commitment to their career progression.

Lastly, tailored rewards can create memorable experiences. For instance, gifting sports tickets or unique experiences based on individual interests can make employees feel genuinely valued, often more so than cash bonuses.

These strategies not only foster a positive work environment but also strengthen loyalty and team morale, proving that thoughtfulness can indeed be as valuable as a pay raise.

**Episode 236: Is break/fix outdated… or a valid marketing tactic?** May 21, 2024
Show notes

The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge

Welcome to this week’s episode of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This is THE show if you want to grow your MSP.

In this episode I weigh up the relevance of the traditional break/fix model versus managed services. Is break/fix just an outdated concept, or can it still serve as a valuable marketing tool in our contract-driven market? (jump to)

I also investigate what truly measures success for business owners. Drawing from my 19 years of experience, we’ll explore how consistent marketing actions can transform ambitious plans into tangible achievements. (jump to)

Jeff Newton from REDiTECH joins me as this week’s guest and shares his unique experience of overwhelming marketing success. Jeff’s insights highlight the importance of robust processes and the need for perseverance and adaptability in marketing strategies after setbacks. (jump to)

Lastly, I’ve introduced a brand new element to the Podcast – Paul’s Personal Peer Group – where I endeavour to answer your personal MSP marketing questions. This week we hear from Scott in Florida who is considering the viability of Facebook advertising but is concerned about the return on investment. Find out whether this could be right for you. (jump to)

Join me as we unpack these topics and learn from some triumphs and trials in the MSP world. Oh, and don’t forget to join me in the MSP Marketing Facebook group.

*READ FULL TRANSCRIPT*

**Is break/fix outdated… or a valid marketing tactic?**

Once the go-to strategy, the break/fix business model, where MSPs fix tech issues as they arise, now shares the stage with the managed services model, which emphasises ongoing support and monthly recurring revenue (MRR).

Despite its old-school vibe, some MSPs still cling to break/fix as a crucial marketing tactic. They argue it’s a way to introduce their services, offering a taste that could potentially convert to more stable, contractual relationships.

But how does this strategy hold up in the modern MSP landscape? I reached out to the 2,300 members of my MSP Marketing Facebook group to get their take, and the responses were eye-opening. For some, offering small break/fix services is a proven method to win clients over in the early growth stages, to a tipping point where only MRR makes sense. Others have moved away from break/fix unless it’s part of a broader security audit or leads directly to an MRR contract.

This diverse range of strategies highlights a critical decision point for MSPs: is break/fix a smart business lever to pull for sampling services, or is it a relic best left in the past? Your strategy might just shape the future of your business in the ever-evolving MSP market.

Is break/fix outdated… or an MSP marketing tactic?

**You’re measured by what you get done, not by what you say you’re doing**

We often dream big about our business ambitions but it’s not the plans that impress people—it’s the results. In the world of MSPs, like in all business, actions speak louder than words. Whether you’re chasing new clients or aiming to hit ambitious revenue targets, it’s what you actually accomplish that counts, not just what you intend to do.

A commitment to action is what turns average, slow-growing businesses into market leaders. Every successful MSP owner I’ve interviewed shares a similar story… their growth accelerated when they invested seriously in sales and marketing, committing to continuous, decisive actions that drive the business forward.

For anyone looking to transform their business, remember—actions are your most powerful marketing tool. It’s about doing, not just dreaming. Take bold steps, apply that great strategy you learned, and watch as your business success reaches new heights. This isn’t just good advice, it’s the only way to make those big business dreams a reality.

You may be measuring your MSP’s success the wrong way

**My guest won too many clients and broke his MSP’s operations!**

Here’s a scenario that many MSPs fear but rarely encounter: what happens when your marketing and sales efforts are too successful? Jeff Newton from REDiTECH is my guest this week, and he shares how his killer marketing strategies ended up swamping his company’s operations with too many clients. Jeff, who has flipped hats from operations to sales over his 18-year career, explained that understanding both sides has been key to his success.

He also touches on why some marketing efforts flop and stressed that giving up after one failure is a common mistake. Like Thomas Edison’s relentless pursuit to perfect the light bulb, Jeff believes in tweaking and testing until you find what works. His journey highlights the importance of a solid process and using the right language in marketing to connect with prospects effectively. Thank you to Jeff for joining me.

My guest won too many clients and broke his MSP’s operations!

**FEATURED GUEST:** Jeffrey S. Newton, VP of Sales & Marketing of REDiTECH is a recovering MSP operations guy turned Sales Revenue Renegade. Over the last 18 years, Jeff has worked across 5 MSPs, donned 11 hats, and built sales teams that crushed goals – generating over $500k in new MRR in just 5 years. But he also built an engine so successful, it literally broke operations… talk about learning the hard way!

Today, he uses his wealth of experience to help MSP owners and sales leaders ditch failed marketing, convert leads, and boost MRR. He’s still an active “in-the-business” sales leader with an MSP who understands current challenges and delivers actionable strategies (that actually work.). Connect with Jeff on LinkedIn.

Should MSPs run Facebook ads?

Got a question about your MSP’s marketing? Submit one here for Paul’s Personal Peer Group. This week Scott, who owns an MSP in Florida, brings up a crucial query about diving into paid advertising on social media, specifically questioning the viability of Facebook ads given the concerns about return on investment and his own inexperience.

Here’s the lowdown, Facebook advertising for MSPs can indeed be tricky, particularly due to the precise targeting required and the often limited size of your specific audience. The challenge is crafting an ad campaign that reaches enough people to be effective without diluting the message.

If you’re considering Facebook ads, start small. Risk a bit of your marketing budget to test the waters. Design an eye-catching ad that directs potential clients to a well-crafted landing page that echoes the ad’s message. This consistency is key to converting visits to actions.

If direct advertising doesn’t yield results, pivot to remarketing. This technique targets ads at people who’ve visited your website but haven’t engaged further. By installing a Facebook pixel on your site, you can track these visitors and re-engage them with tailored ads, enhancing the likelihood of converting them into clients.

So, should you run Facebook ads? Absolutely, but start small, refine your strategy based on initial outcomes, and consider remarketing as a potent tool to boost your online engagement.

Jeffrey Newton — **Episode 236: Is break/fix outdated… or a valid marketing tactic?** May 21, 2024
Show notes

The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge

Welcome to this week’s episode of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This is THE show if you want to grow your MSP.

In this episode I weigh up the relevance of the traditional break/fix model versus managed services. Is break/fix just an outdated concept, or can it still serve as a valuable marketing tool in our contract-driven market? (jump to)

I also investigate what truly measures success for business owners. Drawing from my 19 years of experience, we’ll explore how consistent marketing actions can transform ambitious plans into tangible achievements. (jump to)

Jeff Newton from REDiTECH joins me as this week’s guest and shares his unique experience of overwhelming marketing success. Jeff’s insights highlight the importance of robust processes and the need for perseverance and adaptability in marketing strategies after setbacks. (jump to)

Lastly, I’ve introduced a brand new element to the Podcast – Paul’s Personal Peer Group – where I endeavour to answer your personal MSP marketing questions. This week we hear from Scott in Florida who is considering the viability of Facebook advertising but is concerned about the return on investment. Find out whether this could be right for you. (jump to)

Join me as we unpack these topics and learn from some triumphs and trials in the MSP world. Oh, and don’t forget to join me in the MSP Marketing Facebook group.

*READ FULL TRANSCRIPT*

**Is break/fix outdated… or a valid marketing tactic?**

Once the go-to strategy, the break/fix business model, where MSPs fix tech issues as they arise, now shares the stage with the managed services model, which emphasises ongoing support and monthly recurring revenue (MRR).

Despite its old-school vibe, some MSPs still cling to break/fix as a crucial marketing tactic. They argue it’s a way to introduce their services, offering a taste that could potentially convert to more stable, contractual relationships.

But how does this strategy hold up in the modern MSP landscape? I reached out to the 2,300 members of my MSP Marketing Facebook group to get their take, and the responses were eye-opening. For some, offering small break/fix services is a proven method to win clients over in the early growth stages, to a tipping point where only MRR makes sense. Others have moved away from break/fix unless it’s part of a broader security audit or leads directly to an MRR contract.

This diverse range of strategies highlights a critical decision point for MSPs: is break/fix a smart business lever to pull for sampling services, or is it a relic best left in the past? Your strategy might just shape the future of your business in the ever-evolving MSP market.

Is break/fix outdated… or an MSP marketing tactic?

**You’re measured by what you get done, not by what you say you’re doing**

We often dream big about our business ambitions but it’s not the plans that impress people—it’s the results. In the world of MSPs, like in all business, actions speak louder than words. Whether you’re chasing new clients or aiming to hit ambitious revenue targets, it’s what you actually accomplish that counts, not just what you intend to do.

A commitment to action is what turns average, slow-growing businesses into market leaders. Every successful MSP owner I’ve interviewed shares a similar story… their growth accelerated when they invested seriously in sales and marketing, committing to continuous, decisive actions that drive the business forward.

For anyone looking to transform their business, remember—actions are your most powerful marketing tool. It’s about doing, not just dreaming. Take bold steps, apply that great strategy you learned, and watch as your business success reaches new heights. This isn’t just good advice, it’s the only way to make those big business dreams a reality.

You may be measuring your MSP’s success the wrong way

**My guest won too many clients and broke his MSP’s operations!**

Here’s a scenario that many MSPs fear but rarely encounter: what happens when your marketing and sales efforts are too successful? Jeff Newton from REDiTECH is my guest this week, and he shares how his killer marketing strategies ended up swamping his company’s operations with too many clients. Jeff, who has flipped hats from operations to sales over his 18-year career, explained that understanding both sides has been key to his success.

He also touches on why some marketing efforts flop and stressed that giving up after one failure is a common mistake. Like Thomas Edison’s relentless pursuit to perfect the light bulb, Jeff believes in tweaking and testing until you find what works. His journey highlights the importance of a solid process and using the right language in marketing to connect with prospects effectively. Thank you to Jeff for joining me.

My guest won too many clients and broke his MSP’s operations!

**FEATURED GUEST:** Jeffrey S. Newton, VP of Sales & Marketing of REDiTECH is a recovering MSP operations guy turned Sales Revenue Renegade. Over the last 18 years, Jeff has worked across 5 MSPs, donned 11 hats, and built sales teams that crushed goals – generating over $500k in new MRR in just 5 years. But he also built an engine so successful, it literally broke operations… talk about learning the hard way!

Today, he uses his wealth of experience to help MSP owners and sales leaders ditch failed marketing, convert leads, and boost MRR. He’s still an active “in-the-business” sales leader with an MSP who understands current challenges and delivers actionable strategies (that actually work.). Connect with Jeff on LinkedIn.

Should MSPs run Facebook ads?

Got a question about your MSP’s marketing? Submit one here for Paul’s Personal Peer Group. This week Scott, who owns an MSP in Florida, brings up a crucial query about diving into paid advertising on social media, specifically questioning the viability of Facebook ads given the concerns about return on investment and his own inexperience.

Here’s the lowdown, Facebook advertising for MSPs can indeed be tricky, particularly due to the precise targeting required and the often limited size of your specific audience. The challenge is crafting an ad campaign that reaches enough people to be effective without diluting the message.

If you’re considering Facebook ads, start small. Risk a bit of your marketing budget to test the waters. Design an eye-catching ad that directs potential clients to a well-crafted landing page that echoes the ad’s message. This consistency is key to converting visits to actions.

If direct advertising doesn’t yield results, pivot to remarketing. This technique targets ads at people who’ve visited your website but haven’t engaged further. By installing a Facebook pixel on your site, you can track these visitors and re-engage them with tailored ads, enhancing the likelihood of converting them into clients.

So, should you run Facebook ads? Absolutely, but start small, refine your strategy based on initial outcomes, and consider remarketing as a potent tool to boost your online engagement.

Episode 235: SPECIAL: How MSPs get more leads from trade shows May 14, 2024

Show notes

Episode 235 Welcome to a special episode of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This is THE show if you want to grow your MSP. In this Special Episode I’m joined by Lyle Kirshenbaum, owner of Toronto-based MSP Wired for the Future, to talk about how he has used events and trade shows to market his business and generate leads and prospects. We also discuss a number of practical ways that MSPs can level up and get the most bang for their buck and secure the most valuable leads and data from these events. Featured guest: Lyle was always involved in the technology arena as he began his career in digital print production. He found his interests lay more in the hardware side of technology though and quickly turned his sights in that direction. Originally, Lyle focused on whole home theatre systems but again saw his interests lay elsewhere. It was for this reason, that in 2001, Lyle became what is commonly known as a trunk slammer; helping and supporting clients as he traveled from site to site. Over the years, Lyle developed, fostered, and maintained these initial connections and grew Wired for the Future to the success it is today. Lyle is no longer found traveling from site to site in his car but can be found behind his desk ensuring that the same support with the same personal connection he always prided himself on remains intact. No matter how large Wired for the Future becomes it is Lyle’s dream this level of service remains. He devotes his days to just that. Connect with Lyle on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/wired-lylekirshenbaum/ Extra show notes: Listen or watch every Tuesday on your favourite podcast platform, hosted by me, Paul Green, an MSP marketing expert: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-green-msp-marketing/ http://mspmarketingedge.com/about/ You can join me in the MSP Marketing group on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/mspmarketing/ Find out about my MSP Marketing Edge service: https://www.mspmarketingedge.com Subscribe to my YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/mspmarketing Connect with me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-green-msp-marketing/ Subscribe to this podcast using your favourite podcast provider: https://www.audible.co.uk/pd/Paul-Greens-MSP-Marketing-Podcast-Podcast/B08JK38L4V https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/paul-greens-msp-marketing-podcast/id1485101351 https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/paul-greens-msp-marketing-podcast https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cucGF1bGdyZWVuc21zcG1hcmtldGluZy5jb20vZmVlZC9wb2RjYXN0?sa https://music.amazon.co.uk/podcasts/b03a9638-adf4-4491-93f1-569183e079d7/Paul-Greens-MSP-Marketing-Podcast https://open.spotify.com/show/1Hw52ScOg5WvGaBUkaOrI7 https://tunein.com/radio/Paul-Greens-MSP-Marketing-Podcast-p1264893/ https://blubrry.com/paulgreenmspmarketing/ https://deezer.com/show/1512622 Got a question from the show? Email me directly: hello@paulgreensmspmarketing.com Transcription: NB this transcription has been generated by an AI tool and provided as-is. Speaker 1 (00:00):Fresh every Tuesday Speaker 2 (00:02):For MSPs around the world, around the world. This is Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast. Podcast. Speaker 3 (00:09):Hello and welcome to our special episode. Now have you ever wondered whether or not trade shows are a good way for you to grow your MSP in our special? Today we are going to talk to an MSP owner who did a trade show last year. The results were pretty good this year. He wants more. He’s booked a bigger booth and he wants to 10 x the return he gets from the trade show. Speaker 2 (00:32):Paul Green’s Speaker 1 (00:33):MSP Marketing Speaker 3 (00:34):Podcast Speaker 2 (00:35):Special. Speaker 4 (00:39):Hi, my name is Lyle Kirshenbaum. I’m owner of Wired for the Future. We are a Toronto based MSP in Canada. We are 15 people deep, two different locations, and we service about 3000 endpoint on a monthly basis. Speaker 3 (00:55):It’s great having you on the show, Lyle, if only for your amazing Lego collection. Now most of our audience are listening to this on an audio only platform, so can’t see your background, but if you do want to see just nip onto YouTube. Go to youtube.com/msp marketing and you’ll see that Lyle has basically invested in some of the greatest creations that Lego has ever made. And let’s be honest, Lego is making some good stuff right now and they’re all in his background. Maybe we should do a YouTube extra and actually explore your Lego and all the cool toys that you have for your staff. But anyway, that’s for another day. Lyle, thanks for joining us on the show. Now we’re going to talk about events and we’re going to talk about how you can make events really profitable for your MSP, for any MSP. Got some really clever ideas that we’re going to throw around in the next 10 minutes or so. Before we do, let’s add a little bit more context. So you’ve given us a good idea about your MSP there, where you’re based and how many endpoints and clients you’re looking after. How did you get into this in the first place? How long have you been doing it for? Speaker 4 (01:51):So we’ve been around since 2001 for a long time. I was the one guy trunk slamming kind of guy. One of our clients at the time said, you’re really good. We’re going to give you a little bit of extra money. We need you to hire somebody so that when you go on vacation we have some backup. And that worked really well. They did it then again and they said, we’re going to give you a little bit more money. Do us a favor, grab another person. And we’ve kept growing since then. And like I said, we’re now 15 people deep. We just opened our newest office or our only secondary office in Ottawa just so that we can concentrate on the clients that we had already up there. And then we’re going after a whole bunch more and one of our bigger clients is based up, has a bunch of offices up there that they want us to take care of. Speaker 3 (02:44):Cool. So essentially you’re expanding into areas where you’re already looking after people and that’s of course given you a footprint to go and get even more new clients, which is absolutely fantastic. So events you and I were chatting about events and how can you get the most out of events and that’s when you very kindly offered to jump onto the podcast and have the discussion in public, which is brilliant. Thank you for that. So what kind of events are you doing? Tell us the kind of events, the type of business owners that go and it’s an obvious question, but it needs to be asked. What do you hope to get out of doing those kind of events? Speaker 4 (03:15):So we’ve done a couple of events. The one that we’re talking about today is a vertical specific event. So it’s one of our verticals that we end up having a lot of clients in. We did their show last year. We had a 10 foot by 10 foot booth. We did some pretty, I guess interesting stuff for some stuff that kind of goes towards our logo, our brand. So we have orange and black, so the orange card that’s up there. So a lot of things are orange and black. So we ended up doing okay, we will be the orange popcorn company for this one. So the purple cow, I’ve heard it mentioned on your podcast, another podcast. So we basically gave away Orange Gourmet popcorn to everybody who came into the booth. And basically we had the conversation. We had about 600 bags of popcorn. They were like three cups worth of popcorn each. They had an offer on it and we tried to do it that way. We had pens and we had flyers and stuff like that. It was okay and maybe it was because the booth wasn’t big enough to bring in enough people. So we’ve doubled down this year and are looking for maybe that little bit of help on what would be the next, how to bring more people in. Yeah, Speaker 3 (04:35):Yeah, sure. And that show you did last year with your 10 foot by 10 foot booth, about 600 bags of popcorn given away. So we consume that’s probably around about 550 people because obviously some people will have taken a second bag, your staff will have eaten some. Yep. How many leads did you generate out of that and did actually generate any clients? Speaker 4 (04:53):So we generated about 400 ish leads. We ended up closing on about three or four of them. Out of that, we had more discussions, but the ones that we ended up closing were about three or four different clients. Did it pay for itself? We broke even, let’s call it that. And my big trick was it didn’t make a difference if we broke even or not. I look at marketing as at least our name is out there and they saw our faces and hopefully they remember us as that orange company. Speaker 3 (05:24):Yeah, absolutely. And what’s your definition of a lead that you got from that show? Speaker 4 (05:28):So in this case it was a dental show. So we were talking to either the dentists themselves or their office managers and stuff like that, or their supplementary staff that said, oh yeah, we have a big huge problem. Can you try coming and fixing it? We’d take down the notes, then we’d reach back out and see how that kind of progressed. But it was more of, I was happy just having the conversations because we were there, our largest client was there, so they were coming by. So it was a win-win. Anyways, the trick is this year we’re literally doubling and or probably tripling the amount of spend. So how do we benefit from triple the spend? I don’t think we’ll get double the people. Speaker 3 (06:11):No. Okay, well we’ll come onto that. I have another question about that. Let me ask my last question again, but I’m going to ask it slightly differently. I wasn’t clear with my own language, that was my fault. When you say a lead, what do you define as a lead? So is it a case of oh, this is Dr Drill and here’s his website and here’s his number. Or is it a case of someone’s given you a business card or have they said, oh man, we need to speak to you guys, give us a call on Monday. So what sort of level of engagement have you had with these leads? Speaker 4 (06:38):All of that and more. So we had a stack of business cards. We had basically with the trade show they had given us, not given us, we had to pay for it, but a way to scan somebody’s tag so that we would get their info and then we could actually write in the note. After that, there were two customers that we ended up getting. We literally had the conversation there. The trade show ended on Friday, on Saturday. We were literally doing work for them. Speaker 3 (07:06):So the fact you can set their budgets, that’s great and we are going to come on to how we can see if we can maximize that a little bit. And by the way, the reason I have all of these questions will become clear in a second and it is to do with events that I’ve done in the past. And actually a lot of them were dental events as well, which is really interesting. So we’ll talk about that in a second. When you zap someone’s badge, what level of detail do you get? Typically Speaker 4 (07:29):We get everything that they had to put in to get their badge. So whether they were accredited or not accredited their email address. Now whether that was a real email address or somebody’s throwaway email address, because we all know as you always want those emails, but we got the majority of the information that we needed to continue the conversation. Speaker 3 (07:52):Okay, this is really cool because there’s a number of different areas that I think we can look at with this. The reason I’ve been asking you all these questions, as I said, is because I’ve been there and done trade shows. I had a business which I started in 2005, which seems like a very long time ago. I’ve only just clocked, that’s 19 years ago, which is making me feel very old. But I run that business and it went through different iterations. It wasn’t in the MSP space, it was just a general marketing business. And then over time we discovered niching or niching depending where you are in the world. And we moved into working with optometrists or opticians and then veterinarians and then dentists. Didn’t like dentists, I’ll be honest, I never really enjoyed dentists. So you are welcome to stick with a dentist. Speaker 4 (08:37):No problem. I grew up, my dad was a dentist, so I kind of lovely people. It makes almost sense. Speaker 3 (08:43):Lovely, lovely people, dentists, they’re the best people in the world. Anyway, so we had these three verticals and I sold that business in 2016. So from around about 2013 to 2016, we hit the trade shows like hard. That was our core marketing strategy. We went to all the big shows. So obviously I’m in the uk, you are in Canada, they’re going to be very similar shows. They’ll have similar exhibitors. I bet I could reel off a load of dental names and you’ll be like, yep, they’re here. They own the software here, they have the x-ray machines here or whatsoever. It’s all been globalized, all of this kind of stuff. But even though the people are different, the way they buy is slightly different from country to country. People are people and they respond to the same kind of cues. So what we did, and we did a round about 15 to 20 shows over a period of time, we got really good, seriously good at hoovering up as many leads and as many prospects as we could. And I’m going to explain in a second what I see as the difference between the leads and the prospects. Lemme just first of all ask you one more question, Lyle, you said you got around about 400 leads. How many people attended the show do you think? Speaker 4 (09:52):So what was stated by the producer of the show versus what actually walked through the door? Two separate things. We were told there were about 14,000 people coming through the door. About 8,000 of those would be dentists. I think maybe the amount of people that came through the trade show area was probably about two to 3000, so a lot less. Speaker 3 (10:17):Okay, I see. So they’re there for lectures, Speaker 4 (10:20):They had professional services and stuff like that going on. Most were told to go through because they were all doing deals anyways, whether they were buying masks or drills and stuff like that, they should have been going through. Some do, some don’t. Speaker 3 (10:36):Yeah, side note, if you get a chance to talk to the organizers, one of the very best shows that we ever went to is called the London Vet Show for veterinarians. And they got through that problem by having the lecture halls either side of the trade show, the other side, and they deliberately did it. So you had to walk through the trade to go and access the next lecture, which was really smart. They also had all the hospitality in the middle of the trade show as well. So if you wanted your free food and your coffee, again, you had to go through the trade thing. And that was the, I think still is the fastest growing. Speaker 4 (11:04):Yeah, we were given no free food. It was free popcorn, Speaker 3 (11:08):But the dentist didn’t know that, did they? Versus if the exhibitors have put all the food in the middle of the trade show and the dentists have been told to do that. Okay. I’m going to ask you another set of just random questions and because what you’ve described there is it sounds like a great trade show. So you’ve got, even if only 2000 of them walk through, that’s still a really good audience. And obviously not all of them are going to become clients of yours. Not all of them are going to become leads and prospects. And I will explain the difference between the two in a second, but there’s so much opportunity there. And I think obviously what I did in my last business and that was selling marketing to dentists, what I did, I think some of the ideas you’ll be able to pick up because even though we were selling completely separate things to what you sell, it’s a very similar start of a conversation, which is, it is all about starting that conversation, reeling them in, getting them engaged, but also making sure you’ve got plenty of resource…

Full show notes at the publisher

Episode 234: How to market your MSP to a vertical May 07, 2024

Show notes

Episode 234 Welcome to the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This is THE show if you want to grow your MSP. This week’s show includes: 00:00 How to market your MSP to a vertical 10:14 This productivity hack will help you Get Things Done 18:56 Engender happier, more productive staff Featured guest: Thank you to Dr. Kevin Gazzara, leadership coach and Senior Partner of Magna Leadership Solutions, for joining me to talk about how MSP owners can keep their staff happy, make them feel valued, and increase their productivity – without spending a penny. Dr. Kevin Gazzara is the Senior Partner of Magna Leadership Solutions established in 2007, and the coauthor of the acclaimed books “The Leader of OZ” and “Ready, Set, Get Hired”. He is an ICF certified coach, and a certified Positive Intelligence (PQ) Mental Fitness coach and founder of CoachSultants.com. Kevin has taught and developed Management and Leadership career-changing programs in the corporate world during his 18 years at Intel Corporation and as a University professor at 6 Universities over the last 28 years. Dr. Gazzara’s work has been recognized for his international leadership development programs by Workforce Magazine, https://magnaleader.co/LTP. Kevin’s passion is in helping individuals find the leader within themselves. Connect with Kevin on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevingazzara/ Extra show notes: Listen or watch every Tuesday on your favourite podcast platform, hosted by me, Paul Green, an MSP marketing expert: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-green-msp-marketing/ http://mspmarketingedge.com/about/ Find out about my MSP Marketing Edge service: https://www.mspmarketingedge.com Subscribe to my YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/mspmarketing You can join me in the MSP Marketing group on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/mspmarketing/ Connect with me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-green-msp-marketing/ Subscribe to this podcast using your favourite podcast provider: https://www.audible.co.uk/pd/Paul-Greens-MSP-Marketing-Podcast-Podcast/B08JK38L4V https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/paul-greens-msp-marketing-podcast/id1485101351 https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/paul-greens-msp-marketing-podcast https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cucGF1bGdyZWVuc21zcG1hcmtldGluZy5jb20vZmVlZC9wb2RjYXN0?sa https://music.amazon.co.uk/podcasts/b03a9638-adf4-4491-93f1-569183e079d7/Paul-Greens-MSP-Marketing-Podcast https://open.spotify.com/show/1Hw52ScOg5WvGaBUkaOrI7 https://tunein.com/radio/Paul-Greens-MSP-Marketing-Podcast-p1264893/ https://blubrry.com/paulgreenmspmarketing/ https://deezer.com/show/1512622 Grab yourself a copy of this week’s recommended book, Built to Sell: Creating a Business That Can Thrive Without You: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Built-Sell-Warrillow-28-Feb-2013-Paperback/dp/B011T6SNA2/ Transcription: NB this transcription has been generated by an AI tool and provided as-is. Speaker 1 (00:00):Fresh every Tuesday Speaker 2 (00:02):For MSPs around the world, around the world. This is Paul Green’s MSP Marketing podcast. Speaker 1 (00:09):Hey, welcome back to the show. Here’s what I got in store for you this week. Speaker 3 (00:13):Hi, I’m Dr. Kevin Gazzara and I have found a way quantitatively to identify how to keep your people, how to retain them, and it won’t cost you a dime. Listen to Paul’s podcast to figure out how to do that. Speaker 1 (00:28):And on top of that fascinating interview with Kevin. We’re also going to be looking at Speaker 2 (00:31):The power Speaker 1 (00:32):Of deadlines to get things done. Speaker 2 (00:36):Paul Green’s MSP marketing podcast. Speaker 1 (00:40):Let’s talk about marketing to different verticals such as CPAs or accountants or lawyers or veterinarians or dentists or something like that. Now maybe you have a couple of verticals already in your MSP. Maybe you are completely vertically focused or more likely you have a general client base, but you’ve got a couple of verticals. You fell into a vertical almost by accident because you picked up two lawyers. And so for you, lawyers is your vertical. Now having a vertical is a very, very powerful thing to do for a number of reasons. Firstly, it’s so much easier for you to know who the leads are. So let’s say you are based in, I don’t know, Los Angeles and you want lawyers in Los Angeles and we’ve all watched the Lincoln Lawyer on Netflix, right? Or we’ve read the book so we know there are lots of lawyers in Los Angeles. (01:32)My point is it’s a lot easier to know who they are. You can find a directory or a Google listing or just go out there and get lists of who these people are. And so verticals make it very easy for you to know it’s a finite market. Very easy for you to know who are those people, where are they? What are their contact details? So it’s easy to know who the leads are. It’s a lot easier to reach them because you’ve got their contact details. You can direct market to them. You can send them stuff in the mail, you can email them, you can reach out to them on LinkedIn. You probably know that they’re going to specific events. There must be networking meetings for lawyers in Los Angeles. I bet that’s an interesting meeting, but you get the idea. The most exciting thing about having a vertical is that you can make your marketing message highly relevant to them. (02:18)And that’s the thing that makes verticalization. To use a made up word verticalization is the best because it’s relevant. So if I’m a lawyer in LA and I see some marketing from an MSP that says something about my legal practice in California, then that is incredibly, or it feels incredibly relevant to me. And that’s the trick that we’re trying to pull off with our vertical marketing. Now the other thing to bear in mind with marketing to a vertical is that the best clients prefer to buy the highest quality. And if you can demonstrate that you understand their world and that you are relevant to them, they will perceive that you are a higher quality. So if they’re looking at two MSPs, one of them just deals with any business, that’s what their marketing says. And the other one just deals with lawyers in Los Angeles. (03:09)They will perceive that the MSP who just deals with lawyers in Los Angeles is an expert at them and what they do and therefore is better quality. And they will basically, well, they’re more likely to choose you. And once they’ve chosen you, they’re more likely to pay you more as well. Because when we find something we perceive is of a higher quality, we are happy to pay more for it. So relevance is a big part of this. And what I really wanted to talk about in this bit was how you need to demonstrate that in your marketing. So a lot of MSPs, their approach to verticalization is just to have a page on the website. You’ve got a page for lawyers, a page for dentists, a page for manufacturers, whatever. I think if you are really going to go after a vertical, it is worth you investing more, spending more time, and really going for it. (04:01)For example, rather than just having a page on your website, you have a whole website, and that might just be a one page website, but it has its very specific domain. So it could be it for lawyers la.com for example, and that’s just a one page website. And a one page website still has navigation at the top. But what happens is when you click on, let’s say the about us button up at the top, it kind of jumps down to a piece of anchor text. Further down you get the idea. So you haven’t got three, four pages, you’ve got just one page, but you definitely have a website just for your vertical. You might choose to have two or three different LinkedIn profiles. You might have one that’s for your general audience, and then you might have a LinkedIn profile just for your vertical. I’ll let you into a secret. (04:43)I have two active LinkedIns. So if you and I are connected on LinkedIn, and if we are not just go and Google Paul Green, MSP marketing LinkedIn and you’ll find me. But if we are connected on LinkedIn, that’s my MSP specific LinkedIn. Now I started that in 2016, intending it just to be the audience of people I wanted to speak to within the channel. So it’s just vendors and it’s just MSPs. I do have a second LinkedIn, which you are probably not fine, but that’s for my general stuff. So that’s my LinkedIn I’ve had for like 15 years. It’s just my general connections. I don’t use it for marketing, if that makes sense. So I have a very vertical specific LinkedIn. It’s good marketing to do that. What else would you have? You’d have your email list as well. Now, this is easy. You don’t need to have a separate CRM if you’ve got a vertical within your existing CRM, you just segment the data. (05:33)So you might have lots of general email addresses, but you would then have a load of let’s say lawyer addresses and you just segment those within a list or a collection or by tag or however it works in your CRM. And that means that you can send an email just to the lawyers if you want to. And then you can send a separate version of that email to your general list. And of course, within your CRM, you can set up a little safety guard as well so that if you’ve emailed the lawyers, you exclude them from the list of the general businesses that you send. That would be a smart thing to do. Now, there are a couple of other things if you really wanted to go for the vertical that you would do, one of them is this, you would do a podcast. Doing a podcast to your vertical is super smart marketing because again, it tells them that you are an expert at their world. (06:23)So within their world, obviously it allows you to talk to them and broadcast a very relevant message. The other smart thing that you can do with the podcast, and I don’t do this just so you are clear, but what some MSPs do, and this is a smart thing to do, is you invite potential future clients on as guests of your podcast. So let’s say you had a podcast and it was IT or technology for lawyers in la, you would then contact some lawyers in LA and invite them to come and be guests. So you’d say to them, Hey, if you’re not chasing ambulances tomorrow, would you like to come and be a guest on my podcast? It’s about technology for lawyers in la. I’d love to have you on. And the reason for you connecting with them, and ideally you’d meet up and physically record it with them. (07:07)The reason for doing that is not to fill up your podcast with content. It’s because you then get an hour quality time with someone that could one day become a client. Do you see the smarts of that? Right? So it’s like an intense sales meeting dressed up as a podcast, and obviously you do put the podcast out with their interview, but they will, well, they will perceive you to be a very important expert at what you do because experts do podcasts, experts do videos, experts write experts produce content. And if you could do, even if you did a podcast once every two or three weeks, do that for a couple of years and not only will that in itself start to bring you business, but as I say, you can get some really good guests on there and some of those guests will choose you because you’re the smart choice. (07:54)And you can do the similar kind of thing with YouTube. And obviously YouTube is a little bit more, you’ve got to put more resources into it because these days you can start just doing a YouTube video with your phone, but once you start bringing in guests, you need to mic people up properly. You need to do lighting properly, you need to do video properly. But that could be as simple as someone with a video camera filming you and a lawyer walking along a street in LA talking about technology and their life and all of that kind of stuff. And as long as you’ve got wireless mics and a half decent camera, that will be all right. And doing it outside sort of gets past all the lighting problems. But YouTube obviously the bigger investment to those and audio podcasts are very easy to do. Now, what’s exciting, because what we’re talking about here is marketing to a vertical and doing it really well, what’s exciting is you can do this to multiple verticals at the same time. (08:42)I actually pulled off this trick in my last business. So this was a marketing agency. I started in 2005. I sold it in 2016, and we worked with three verticals. We worked with veterinarians, dentists and opticians or optometrists. We had three websites actually we had nine websites. We had a general website, we had a website, and then we had two other websites that sold a specific service. And we did that for each vertical. So we had nine websites, we had three LinkedIns, we had three Facebook groups, and we didn’t do podcasts, but we were just starting to dip our toes into YouTube. And that was a lot of work, but the veterinarians didn’t know about the dentists who didn’t know about the opticians. So as far as they were concerned, even though all the work was just being done by the same team as far as they were concerned based on our marketing, we were experts and specialists in what they did. (09:33)And don’t get me wrong, we knew their markets very, very well, and we didn’t just do the same stuff for each of them. We did some specific work for the vets and some specific work for the dentists, et cetera. But from a marketing point of view, it seemed like we only worked with them right down to we had three separate phone numbers. So our VoIP system, when they called in, it told us whether it was a veterinarian or a dentist or an optician that was calling in. So you can do this, you can have multiple verticals, but I challenge you to do more than just have a vertical page on your website to really look at your vertical and say, right, I want to make my marketing message relevant to them. How am I going to make them feel that they are the biggest thing in my world? Speaker 4 (10:15):Here’s this week’s clever idea. Speaker 1 (10:18):So if you are really struggling to get things done, let’s talk about the power of deadlines. And when I say get things done, I don’t necessarily mean getting client work done. I’m going to assume that as a business, you are organized very well around doing the client work. I mean getting the more important stuff done, which is the stuff working on the business, improving your marketing, doing some more sales. It’s only when you’re working on the business that you actually start to move the business forward and start to grow it. And most MSP owners that I speak to, they really struggle to do this. They struggle to get things done. So a couple of weeks ago, I took a week away on my own. So I’m a sole parent. There’s just me and my beautiful child who’s 13 and a teenager. So she’s beautiful, but also difficult in the way that only 13 year olds can be, but there’s just me and her in the house and it means I don’t get a huge amount of time on my own to go off and be Paul and not be a parent. (11:16)And a couple of weeks ago she went away with the school, she went on a school trip abroad. So I had the most amazing week. I just put myself into a hotel in London, here in the uk, and I had no plans. It was amazing. I had no plans deliberately because as you’ll know yourself, if you’re a parent, there’s always, you’ve got to be somewhere on time. You’re always being a taxi driver, there’s always getting food ready, there’s always routine in things. And I wanted to enjoy being an adult and being a human and not have routines. And I just walk. I love walking. I walk like 50 miles that week and I just ate and had a few beers and went to a casino. I don’t gamble. I like watching other gamble, et cetera, et cetera. And what was really interesting was leading up to that week, so in the week when I was working leading up to when I knew I’d have that vacation, that holiday that week off, I got five times more stuff done in that week. (12:09)And you’ll have had exactly the same thing when you are g…

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Episode 233: The MSP that’s unstoppable Apr 30, 2024

Show notes

Episode 233 Welcome to the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This is THE show if you want to grow your MSP. This week’s show includes: 00:00 Why you need Big Mo in your business 08:01 Systemize your ability to under-promise and over-deliver 15:41 This expert can help you grow your MSP business Featured guest: Thank you to MSP Coach Brian Hoppe, for joining me to talk about his experience of scaling MSP businesses, and how he uses that experience to coach other MSPs in how to scale their own businesses. Brian has been part of the Managed Services industry since the early 2000s. He earned both his Bachelor’s and MBA from Baylor University. For over 20 years, Brian has worked in multiple MSPs and has bought and sold multiple MSPs. He’s been everything from a technician to Ops Manager to CFO to CEO. He has grown multiple MSPs to over $5 million in revenue and managed MSPs in excess of $15 million in revenue. Brian has a thorough understanding of all the ins and outs of running a highly successful MSP. But more importantly, he understands how to help MSP leaders get the most from their business. His expertise in leadership and coaching can help any MSP owner or CEO achieve the results they want in both business and life. He is passionate about finding the right clients for his coaching practice to help take their business and leadership to the next level. Connect with Brian on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brianhoppe/ Extra show notes: Listen or watch every Tuesday on your favourite podcast platform, hosted by me, Paul Green, an MSP marketing expert: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-green-msp-marketing/ http://mspmarketingedge.com/about/ Connect with me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-green-msp-marketing/ Find out about my MSP Marketing Edge service: https://www.mspmarketingedge.com Subscribe to my YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/mspmarketing You can join me in the MSP Marketing group on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/mspmarketing/ Subscribe to this podcast using your favourite podcast provider: https://www.audible.co.uk/pd/Paul-Greens-MSP-Marketing-Podcast-Podcast/B08JK38L4V https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/paul-greens-msp-marketing-podcast/id1485101351 https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/paul-greens-msp-marketing-podcast https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cucGF1bGdyZWVuc21zcG1hcmtldGluZy5jb20vZmVlZC9wb2RjYXN0?sa https://music.amazon.co.uk/podcasts/b03a9638-adf4-4491-93f1-569183e079d7/Paul-Greens-MSP-Marketing-Podcast https://open.spotify.com/show/1Hw52ScOg5WvGaBUkaOrI7 https://tunein.com/radio/Paul-Greens-MSP-Marketing-Podcast-p1264893/ https://blubrry.com/paulgreenmspmarketing/ https://deezer.com/show/1512622 I mentioned the book The Compound Effect, if you’re interested in reading more you can find it here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Compound-Effect-Darren-Hardy-LLC/dp/1399805789/ Grab yourself a copy of this week’s recommended book, The Obstacle is the Way: The Ancient Art of Turning Adversity to Advantage: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Obstacle-Way-Ancient-Adversity-Advantage/dp/1781251495/ Transcription: NB this transcription has been generated by an AI tool and provided as-is. Speaker 1 (00:00):Fresh every Tuesday Speaker 2 (00:02):For MSPs around the world, around the world. This is Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast. Podcast. Speaker 1 (00:09):Hi there and welcome back to the show. Here’s what I’ve got in store for you this week. Speaker 3 (00:14):Hi, I’m Brian Hoppe. I have built an MSP up to 45 staff and also built and sold a second MSP. Join me on Paul’s podcast where we talk about how to scale your MSP. Speaker 1 (00:25):We’re also going to talk about how to guarantee that you delight every single one of your clients by systemizing how to underpromise and over deliver Speaker 2 (00:35):Paul Green’s MSP marketing podcast. Speaker 1 (00:39):Let’s talk about a key member of your team who might actually be missing. You haven’t got him yet, but you do need him if you’re ever going to get anywhere with your marketing. In fact, his very appearance within your MSP shows that you are getting it right. His name is Big Mo, and he brings with himself big momentum. Now, I first heard the concept of big, big momentum, whatever you call it, reading a book called The Compound Effect. It’s an amazing book. If you haven’t read it or listen to it because it is on audible, please go and get it. Obviously, it’s not about MSPs, but it could be because it’s talking about productivity and talking about getting into a flow and repeat things. In fact, one of the other key phrases I remember from that is the secret of success is not about doing 5,000 things really well, it’s about finding a tiny number of things and doing them 5,000 times. (01:35)And that is so the case with marketing because marketing your MSP, it’s a long game and it’s like rolling a stone down a hill. In fact, it’s not really a stone. It’s a massive rock. Think of a rock that’s bigger than you and you’ve got to get that started and get it going down the hill. So first of all, you’ve got to put your shoulder into it. It takes a lot of effort, a lot of work to start to push that stone, and you’re rocking back and forth and the stone’s rocking back and forth, and then eventually the stone reaches that tipping point and it starts to go down the hill, but it’s a shallow hill and it’s a very, very slow roll of the stone. In fact, you have to keep pushing it and keep pushing it to keep it going. But what you’re trying to do is you’re trying to get it to that point where it reaches big momentum or achieves big momentum and the hill gets steeper and the stone, the rock starts to turn and turn and turn. (02:26)It gets faster and faster. And believe me, at that point, no one is stopping it. Now, obviously, I’m not really talking there about a rock down a mountain. I’m talking about your MSP’s marketing. It takes a lot of effort to get things going. You’ve got to really put your shoulder into it and push and push and you won’t see results at first, but eventually you reach the tipping point where you start to see some momentum, you start to see some things happening, and then you have to keep pushing and pushing and pushing and making sure the marketing continues. The rock continues because eventually it builds up big, big momentum. The problem is that too many MSPs, they give up way too soon. They start doing some marketing, they’ll throw themselves into LinkedIn and then two minutes later they’ll stop. Perhaps they’ll take a vacation or a break or something, or maybe they’ll just skip a week because they’ve just got out of the habit of it and the momentum goes because then that week becomes two weeks, three weeks, and suddenly LinkedIn didn’t work for me or insert this marketing tactic here, didn’t work for me. (03:28)Whenever someone says to me, oh, I tried that. It didn’t work for me with one or two minor exceptions like paid ads for example, pay-per-click ads, there are in many instances times where that’s not right for you. The same with SEO search engine optimization. It’s not right for every MSP in every marketplace, but other marketing tactics, they do work if you do them long enough. I mean, look at this podcast. We are about four and a half years into this podcast, so we have put this podcast out every single week since November, 2019, and I know that no one listened for the first year they have now, because what happens is people discover the podcast and then they go back and they start at the beginning. Some people do not. Everyone does. So now we have lots of views on our first five 10 episodes, but when we first put them out in 2019, no one was listening. (04:17)There was zero feedback, no one cared. But you know what? Me and my production team, it was just a guy called James at the beginning, and now it’s James and Simon and Laura, and there’s a whole team of us working on this podcast and we all turn up every single week and we’ve systemized doing this podcast. I record it ahead of time. I record guests ahead of time, and we’re talking weeks ahead of time. We’ve got a great production process, we’ve got a marketing process, and we’ve got Big Mo on the big momentum on the podcast, and that’s deliberate because it’s a really important marketing channel for us, and we don’t ever want to trip up and get it wrong. But that first year there was literally tumbleweed. There was no one out there. We’re having a similar thing right now with YouTube. So we have put an massive amount of effort. (04:58)It’s the same team. We work on podcasters, work on YouTube, and at the moment we will put out a video that perhaps takes two hours of filming time for me and either James or Simon who direct me remotely. I hear in my studio, I’ll put on props. We’ll write scripts. We spend, I’d say it’s two hours of filming. It must be at least three to four hours of scripting and probably another four hours or so of editing. So we’re investing 10, maybe 12 hours into a YouTube video that’s getting 60 views and we’ve got like 800 subscribers. These are tiny, tiny little figures. But here’s the thing, I’m not worried about it because I know if we keep putting out a video and we’re working up to doing it every single week, we will grow that channel. That 800 subscribers will become thousands of subscribers, all MSPs. (05:45)Those 60 views per video will become 600 views per video, 6,000 views. Eventually it will grow because we will get big mo on it. LinkedIn, I’m very active on LinkedIn just as I recommend that you should be. And right now I’ve got 9,000 followers on LinkedIn and those are people who are, some of them are connected to me as well, and some of them will be getting my LinkedIn newsletter, but some of them are just following me. So on LinkedIn, if you’re a content creator, so you’ve switched on content creator in the settings, then people can just follow you and see the content that you put out there. 9,000 MSPs, that’s pretty impressive, right? But that comes from Big Mo because we’ve been working on that since roundabout 2017. We’ve got big momentum on it. So what I suggest to you within your SP, if you set the right marketing strategy, you then commit to it for years and years and years, and let me give you the right marketing strategy to make it really simple. (06:42)It’s a super simple three-step marketing strategy we’ve built as service. The MSP marketing edge around this very simple step. Number one is to build multiple audiences, typically LinkedIn and your email database. Step number two is then to build a relationship with those audiences, and you do that through content marketing. So putting out social media daily, sending out an email once a week and sending out a printed newsletter once a month. And then the third step is you then convert those relationships into clients, and that’s done by phoning those people up and just seeing how they’re going well, is now the right time for you to have a chat with them? That is a great marketing strategy, but only if you commit yourself to it for the next five years. And once you get big mo, by the way, be very, very careful not to accidentally show in the door, as I said to you with our podcast, with YouTube, with our LinkedIn, not with YouTube yet, but with those things we’ve got Big Mo and we work very, very hard to make sure that we never, ever accidentally kill that momentum. For us, that means working ahead. Well, it means resourcing it well, it means communicating well. If I’m going around on holiday, someone is going to do the jobs that I normally do and vice versa. When my team are away, we work very, very hard to make sure that once Big Mo is in the building, we never let him out of the door. And you need to do exactly the same thing. Speaker 4 (08:02):Here’s this week’s clever Speaker 1 (08:03):Idea. One of the smartest ways to always make sure your clients are always happy is to underpromise and over deliver, but you need to build that into a system because if you’re kind of hoping that it happens or constantly having to chase your technicians to make sure it happens, well it’s not going to happen. Whereas if you’ve built it into a system, then it just happens. So what are some examples of how you would underpromise and overdeliver? Let’s take for example, a project. Let’s say you’re doing a migration project. Well, let’s go with that. We’re going with a migration project. So for example, it takes, let’s say eight days, eight working days to do this. So you would tell your client, this takes 10 working days, and you would give them a project map or whatever it is that you give them that shows them 10 days. (08:53)Now, there’s two benefits for you of working those extra two days into that schedule. The first benefit is that if something goes wrong, I’m not a technical person, but I’m sure that things go wrong all the time In migrations when you stumble across things you didn’t know that you were going to be involved in migrating, well, you’ve just bought yourself two extra days so you can actually deliver on schedule, but still take an extra two days because it’s eight days, the client thinks it’s 10 days, there’s two day spare. It’s good. But the other thing, and what we really want to do here is for you to be able to go back to the client after eight days and say, good news, we had spare resource within the business, so we threw them onto your migration at no cost to you. The upside of this is we’ve delivered it a day early or we’ve delivered it two days early. (09:38)And imagine if you are able to do that with every single project that you scheduled. That’s really cool, right? Isn’t it? Another thing that you could do to under promise and over deliver is to give your clients more than you promised. So just as an example, let’s say you bought them a new laptop or they’ve asked you to buy them some new laptops. What you do at the same time is you buy them some monitors and you find a way to subsidize those external monitors. So it might be that you say to or, well, no, I’m just thinking that’s probably a big cost. Let’s say they buy laptops and they buy some external monitors. You go and buy some laptop docks. I dunno how much those cost. Let’s say that’s like a hundred dollars or a hundred pounds per laptop dock. So obviously you are losing a bit of margin, but you just build it in and for you to turn up and say to them, right, here’s your new laptop, it’s all set up for you. (10:26)Here’s your external monitor. Hey, we just wanted to make your lives easy, so I hope you don’t mind, we are not charging you for this. It’s a free gift from us. We’ve got some laptop docs for you. Look, you just slide it in Bing and it comes up on the monitor, right? That would be really cool. I mean, I know I would as an end user, as a client, I will be delighted with that. And you know, don’t even have to go out of your way spending hundreds on kit for them. You can just find very simple ways to surprise your clients, and this is another way to underpromise and over-deliver. For example, what if a Friday afternoon you just dropped in to a client with cakes, right? With donuts or with cakes, nice fresh ones, not cheap, nasty shop bought ones, but lovely fresh cakes, fresh cupcakes, fresh donuts that you’ve just picked up from somewhere. (11:15)What if someone has been put in a ticket yesterday to say their mouse was a bit sticky, they spilt something on it, their mouse is sticking and you just turn up or or someone turns up at the office and you make a big thing of, hi everyone, sorry to bother you. Obviously you go with this. If this is your personality to do this, sorry to bother you, but Dave, do you know that Dave’s spelled some Dr. Pepper on his mouse this week? I’ve got a new one. And you hold the new one up and you say, Dave, here we go. It’s on us because there’s nothing worse than a sticky mass, right? Something like that. And imagine, in fact,…

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Episode 232: Sell something small to build trust Apr 23, 2024

Show notes

Episode 232 Welcome to the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This is THE show if you want to grow your MSP. This week’s show includes: 00:00 Build trust by doing a small thing well 08:04 Have you heard of Feedback Donuts? 10:51 Harnessing Intent Data to convert leads into prospects Featured guest: Thank you to Paul Franklin, founder of Koala B2B, for joining me to talk about ‘intent data’, and how MSPs can track and use intent data to identify and engage warm leads at the point that they’re already interested in your services. Paul Franklin is founder of Koala B2B, an intent data lead gen company. Paul has overseen millions of pounds worth of lead generation campaigns across the Tech B2B division he ran as Publisher for Dennis Publishing. The division included IT end user, cloud , and MSP/CSP/Reseller audiences specifically. He also ran the UK Cloud Awards for 6 years, a recognition and celebration of all cloud innovation in the country. Connect with Paul on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-franklin-8922236/ Extra show notes: Listen or watch every Tuesday on your favourite podcast platform, hosted by me, Paul Green, an MSP marketing expert: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-green-msp-marketing/ http://mspmarketingedge.com/about/ Find out about my MSP Marketing Edge service: https://www.mspmarketingedge.com Subscribe to my YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/mspmarketing You can join me in the MSP Marketing group on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/mspmarketing/ Connect with me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-green-msp-marketing/ Subscribe to this podcast using your favourite podcast provider: https://www.audible.co.uk/pd/Paul-Greens-MSP-Marketing-Podcast-Podcast/B08JK38L4V https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/paul-greens-msp-marketing-podcast/id1485101351 https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/paul-greens-msp-marketing-podcast https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cucGF1bGdyZWVuc21zcG1hcmtldGluZy5jb20vZmVlZC9wb2RjYXN0?sa https://music.amazon.co.uk/podcasts/b03a9638-adf4-4491-93f1-569183e079d7/Paul-Greens-MSP-Marketing-Podcast https://open.spotify.com/show/1Hw52ScOg5WvGaBUkaOrI7 https://tunein.com/radio/Paul-Greens-MSP-Marketing-Podcast-p1264893/ https://blubrry.com/paulgreenmspmarketing/ https://deezer.com/show/1512622 Grab yourself a copy of this week’s recommended book, Marketing Made Simple: A Step-by-Step StoryBrand Guide for Any Business: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Marketing-Made-Simple-Step-Step/dp/1400217644/ Transcription: NB this transcription has been generated by an AI tool and provided as-is. Speaker 1 (00:00):Fresh every Tuesday Speaker 2 (00:02):For MSPs around the world, around the world. This is Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast. Podcast. Speaker 1 (00:09):Hi there and welcome back to the show. Here’s what we’ve got coming up up for you this week. Speaker 3 (00:13):Hi, my name’s Paul Franklin. I’m the guy who can tell you when companies are particularly interested in your products and services. I’m going to be talking about this and how you can tap into intent data on Paul’s show. Speaker 1 (00:26):That’s my special guest, Paul Franklin. He’s joining me later on to talk about something called intent data marketing. It’s where you use data to find people who are clearly looking for an MSP right now. I’m also going to tell you about how to get better feedback from clients who’ve declined your offer and picked another MSP. How dare they Speaker 2 (00:47):Paul Green’s MSP marketing podcast. Speaker 1 (00:51):Can you hook a new client into managed services by selling them a lower value item? Well, I believe you can, and let me tell you why and give you some specific examples that you can use. So the idea about selling them something kind of lower priced is because the jump from being a prospect to signing a managed services contract, it’s a massive leap if you think about it from their point of view. And especially if they don’t know you and most people who are buying from you, they don’t know you. So they have maybe been referred into you, maybe they’ve done some Google searching, maybe they saw something that you did on LinkedIn, whatever it is. The point being is that going from that point of they’ve just met you to signing that contract, it’s huge. It’s a chasm. It’s a massive chasm in between the point they start and the point at which they finish. (01:42)And I know that people do do this, and indeed many of the clients that you have signed up have done it, but it’s a big, big, big leap. So anything that we can do to reduce that down is better. What we have to do to take someone from being actually, they don’t just start as a prospect, they start as a suspect. They’re suspicious when they first find you. So to take someone from being a suspect, to being a prospect, to being an opportunity to becoming a client, to becoming a bonded client and a bonded client is where they stay with you for 10 years or more. To do that, we have to build trust. All of this, the entire journey is about building them trust, building trust with them. So this is where the concept of selling them something small, something one off and delivering it really well can help you to build trust. (02:31)So the goal here is not really to make a great deal of margin. The goal here is simply to impress them. The best way that you can build trust with someone is to sell them something relatively low cost and deliver it really, really well. So for example, I’ll give you a couple actually backups, right? You might advertise something or you might find someone and say to them, Hey, let me have a look at your backups. What you are doing right now. I’ll be honest, it leaves you a little open. You’ve got one backup. It’s only in one site. Actually that should be mirrored elsewhere. It should be happening continuously. It shouldn’t just be a daily thing. Why don’t we get all of that set up for you? It will be X cost, whatever it will cost. You could do the same with password managers. You could sell someone a password manager for them and for their team. (03:16)Relatively low cost. I appreciate actually, there’s an ongoing cost to that. It’s a subscription, but that’s okay as well. It’s a low cost, but you and I both know that you implement password managers properly for a business. Not only are yet, they’re safer, but actually they’re more productive as well, right? Password managers use properly by staff instantly removes a whole load of productivity hassles for a business. So these are perfect things that you could just sell someone as a startup. Now, let me give you a third one, and this is my favorite and it’s a little off the chart. It’s actually to sell something like a perfect video call setup. So if you imagine you put together, let’s say it’s a decent camera, it’s a USB microphone, there might be some LED lights, you might even link it all up to Alexa or something like that. (04:07)And the point is that you have this perfect video call setup, which you sell as a one-off thing and you sell it and you go and install it for someone. And you could offer to do that for the owner of the business. You could then when you’re talking to them, you could say, well look, we’ve set you up this video call setup in your office. Why don’t we do the same for your home office as well? And then what about the rest of your management team? And then what about your salespeople and who else is doing video calls on a regular basis? Because actually the more professional you can appear to be on a video call, the better you will communicate and the better you’ll come across. You could even look at optimizing their teams or whatever platform they’re using. So can you see that? (04:48)That’s actually a perfect sort of one-off not too high price. I appreciate there’s a lot of kit in there. So it’s going to be some investment, but it’s a beautiful thing to do because also when you are setting it up, if you’re setting up for the boss that buys you and your time, you and your team some time with the boss, and it might be that you and one of your technicians goes along to the office to set it up and while your technician is literally setting it all up and optimizing it to the boss’s height and all of that kind of stuff, then you are having a chat to them about their business and asking them open questions about their favorite subject themselves and their business. In fact, we could take this even further. If I owned an MSP and I had some proof that people bought that kind of video call setup, then I would set up actually a front offer. (05:35)I would put together a lead magnet on this. So a lead magnet is something you give to someone in return for their contact details. So I might offer on LinkedIn or even through paid advertising, the ultimate video call setup guide. And this would be a PDF guide, which they can get by putting in their name and their email address in my website. So I’m driving traffic to a landing page on my website. People who are interested in a better video call setup, they enter their email, their contact details, I then send them that PDF. But the purpose of that PDF is to make it seem more complicated and difficult than it actually is because what I really want to do is to sell them that setup myself. So I send them through that guide. I perhaps have some kind of email sequence follow up to it. (06:18)I would definitely do a follow up phone call. I’d just give them a call, maybe not me, maybe someone in my office give them a call and say, Hey, did you get the guide? Is this something you’ve thought about? Tell me what kind of video call setup have you got right now? Oh, you’re just using your webcam. Are you, what lights have you got? Oh, you’re sitting in front of a window, are you? But with your back to the window. So actually you’re in silhouette and you can sort of talk people through all of this and then of course you sell them that setup and then you go on to sell it through them to all of the other senior people and it gets repeated around all of their staff. And as I say it, then you are then buying yourself some time with talking to them. (06:56)By the way, if you are thinking, but Paul, we are not experts at video call setups. Yes, you are compared to the ordinary business owners and managers that you are dealing with. You are an expert because you can spend the time and make a decision on which is the best camera, which is the best USB microphone, which are the best LED lights. How do I get all of this set up with things like sight lines? So their eyes are exactly at the point that the camera’s looking at them. How do we set up the lights to be correct? Let’s be honest, if you don’t actually know this stuff, it’s an hour’s worth of researching, right? It’s really not difficult, this kind of stuff. So you can set yourself up as that expert and you can deliver this very, very easily and by yourself, that 2030 minutes of quality questioning time with the owner or with the manager of the business. Now, if you like the sound of this, please don’t overthink it. Just do a test. Get a video call set up, created something that you know can sell. Just try and sell it to two or three prospects and see if actually that time talking to them while it’s being installed is valuable sales time. It’s all something you can just test. Speaker 4 (08:04):Here’s this week’s clever Speaker 1 (08:06):Idea. I’m sure this has happened to your MSP. You’ve submitted a proposal, but you didn’t get the clients and they haven’t really told you why. Well, here’s an idea that you can try for better feedback. Such a simple idea. You deliver a box of quality donuts to the decision maker. And when I say quality donuts, I don’t mean something where you walk into like a gas station or petrol station or just a store and buy a small box of slightly stale donuts. I mean expensive, spend 20, 30 pounds or dollars on there’s band to be a bakery or someone near you that does donuts or cupcakes or something like that. The point is, they must be quality and nice. And then in that box, when you deliver it, you include a short note and the short note says something like, could you give me 30 seconds please to tell me why we didn’t get your IT business? (08:56)Thank you. And then you put your email address at the bottom. Lemme say that again because that note is actually the critical thing. Could you give me 30 seconds to tell me why we didn’t get your IT business? Thank you email address. Now, most reasonable people, they will email you back and you can always call them to just say, Hey, hope you got my donuts, my cake, or something like that. And would you be able to tell me why we didn’t get the business? Why would they respond? Because you are essentially buying their feedback. That 20, 30 pounds or dollars you spent on decent donuts or decent cakes is you buying that little bit of feedback. What’s really interesting as well is that in doing this, it will demonstrate that you are a mature business owner just because you didn’t get the business, you didn’t drop off and sulk and fold your arms and say, well, I’m not talking to you if you are not talking to me. (09:48)So this going to behavior, asking for quality feedback in this way, I really believe it works in your favor because you never know they might a few weeks or months down the line, they might develop buyer’s remorse on the MSP that they chose instead of you. And you want to make it as easy and as pleasant for them to be able to come back to you and say, guys, we made a mistake. Can we talk again? So you showing maturity in the way that you are asking for feedback, that’s a very smart thing to do. Speaker 5 (10:17):Paul’s, Speaker 4 (10:18):Paul’s blatant plug Speaker 1 (10:20):Plug. Smart business owners make smart marketing decisions and 700 MSPs are now part of the MSP Marketing edge. If you want new clients and an awesome life for you and your family, but you’re feeling stuck, well, you can get the answers you need Inside the MSP Marketing Edge, my online portal gives you a simple plan to follow and white label marketing content to help you get new clients and make more money. Join the MSP marketing edge@mspmarketingedge.com, Speaker 4 (10:51):The big, big, Speaker 5 (10:52):Big interview. Speaker 3 (10:54):Hi, I’m Paul Franklin. I’m a intent demand generation owner and I’ve got a great deal of experience with MSPs marketing from the publisher perspective. Speaker 1 (11:07):And thank you so much for joining me on the podcast, Paul. And we’re going to talk about what exactly intent means in a second and how MSPs can use that within their marketing. But first of all, tell us about your publishing background. So although you are not, as you were telling me just before the interview, you’re not a technical person yourself, you’re not an SP owner. You obviously know MSPs inside and out because you’ve actually been serving them as a publisher of websites. Tell us what you did. Speaker 3 (11:32):Yeah, absolutely. So I was publishing director at Denis Publishing for a number of years, ran the p and l for the IT B2B and it B2C divisions. From the B2B perspective, we had IT pro cloud, pro channel Pro where we had audiences that were targeting or we were speaking to audiences that were technical end users, business decision makers, but also very much the channel MSPs, CSPs, all of those sort of managed service providers. And we tracked through Channel Pro especially, we tracked the sort of evolution of MSPs from when, I guess originally it was the reseller wholesaler dynamic all the way through to the modern offering and service provision that the MSPs and CSPs offer right now. So I manage those brands. We spoke to MSPs and end user entities and the tech partners on a very regular basis. We also ran the UK cloud awards when cloud became or before cloud became ubiquitous and it was really important for cloud and managed service providers to really help…

Full show notes at the publisher

Episode 231: No-one buys MFA… they buy “sleeping better” Apr 16, 2024

Show notes

Episode 231 Welcome to the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This is THE show if you want to grow your MSP. This week’s show includes: 00:00 Don’t sell the FEATURES, sell the BENEFITS 03:20 3 KILLER offers to stand out from the MSP crowd 11:17 How to hire and integrate the best remote employees into your MSP Featured guest: Thank you to Michael Nelson, Co-founder of Scaled, for joining me to talk about why MSP owners should embrace remote working, how he was able to successfully integrate remote staff into his team within his own MSP business, and how he found himself perfectly positioned to help other MSPs do the same. Michael Nelson is a founder of Scaled, a staff-augmentation firm that deploys L2 & L3 Technical Talent for MSPs from South Africa and the owner of a successful & growth-oriented MSP in California He started TLC Tech, a Sacramento based MSP in 2004 serving all types of clients. In 2008 the company made the transition to fully managed services. Averaging 20-30% year over year growth, the company consistently maintains best in class EBITDA. Currently with a staff of 28, the company has transitioned to being a fully remote MSP, with 30% of the staff working remotely from South Africa. After recognizing the benefits and the market need, Michael started Scaled with Jason Knight (also a former MSP owner) to place L2 & L3 techs with MSPs Connect with Michael on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelnelsonca/ Extra show notes: Listen or watch every Tuesday on your favourite podcast platform, hosted by me, Paul Green, an MSP marketing expert: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-green-msp-marketing/ http://mspmarketingedge.com/about/ Subscribe to my YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/mspmarketing You can join me in the MSP Marketing group on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/mspmarketing/ Find out about my MSP Marketing Edge service: https://www.mspmarketingedge.com Connect with me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-green-msp-marketing/ Subscribe to this podcast using your favourite podcast provider: https://www.audible.co.uk/pd/Paul-Greens-MSP-Marketing-Podcast-Podcast/B08JK38L4V https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/paul-greens-msp-marketing-podcast/id1485101351 https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/paul-greens-msp-marketing-podcast https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cucGF1bGdyZWVuc21zcG1hcmtldGluZy5jb20vZmVlZC9wb2RjYXN0?sa https://music.amazon.co.uk/podcasts/b03a9638-adf4-4491-93f1-569183e079d7/Paul-Greens-MSP-Marketing-Podcast https://open.spotify.com/show/1Hw52ScOg5WvGaBUkaOrI7 https://tunein.com/radio/Paul-Greens-MSP-Marketing-Podcast-p1264893/ https://blubrry.com/paulgreenmspmarketing/ https://deezer.com/show/1512622 Got a question from the show? Email me directly: hello@paulgreensmspmarketing.com Grab yourself a copy of this week’s recommended book, The Sales Acceleration Formula: Using Data, Technology, and Inbound Selling to go from $0 to $100 Million: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Sales-Acceleration-Formula-Technology-Inbound/dp/1119047072/ Transcription: NB this transcription has been generated by an AI tool and provided as-is. Speaker 1 (00:00):Fresh every Tuesday Speaker 2 (00:02):For MSPs around the world, around the world. This is Paul Green’s MSP Marketing podcast. Speaker 1 (00:09):Hello and welcome to episode 2 3, 1 of the podcast. Here’s what we’ve got coming up for you this week. Speaker 3 (00:16):Hi, my name is Michael Nelson and I’m the founder of Scaled a staff augmentation firm that places South African talent with MSPs across the world. We’re going to help you understand how to successfully pull remote techs into your culture to make sure that they represent you, your company, and your culture well. Speaker 1 (00:33):And on top of that interview with Michael, I’m also going to tell you about three killer offers that will make you stand out from every single other MSP out there. Speaker 2 (00:44):Paul Green’s MSP Marketing podcast. Speaker 1 (00:48):Don’t sell cybersecurity instead, sell your sleep better at night. What we’re talking about here are features versus benefits. Cybersecurity is a feature. Sleeping better at night is a benefit. And ordinary business owners and managers, they don’t really buy the services you sell. They buy what these services can do for them. Side note, the exception to this rule is when you’re selling co-managed it, and here you are selling to people who understand and know about the technology concepts that are foreign to normal decision makers. And this is why co-managed. It needs a completely different marketing and sales approach based more around building trust and credibility and a working relationship. But let’s come back to selling to ordinary people. And let’s put this another way. They, as I said, they buy the benefits and not the features. So the features are what something does the benefits describe why this matters to them. (01:49)Now, understanding this and looking at the world from their point of view will change your marketing and sales forever and ever. And I can give you some specific examples. So for example, like I mentioned at the beginning, they don’t buy cybersecurity. They buy, you can sleep better at night knowing that your data is safe. They don’t buy password managers, they buy, you never have to think about passwords ever again. The software does everything so that you don’t have to, they don’t buy network monitoring. They buy if something goes wrong, we’ll know and fix it before it affects you. They don’t buy the cloud, they buy work anywhere on anything at any time without any hassle. They don’t buy backups they buy, you’ll never have that sick feeling of not being able to find that critical file. They don’t buy email signatures, they buy. You can promote your core message in every single email everyone sends and they don’t buy managed services. They buy someone else’s doing everything for you. So you don’t have, think about it. If there is a problem, help is seconds away and it’s a fixed cost every month. So there’s nothing to ever worry about. Look at your website, look at your marketing materials. What are the phrases you often say in sales meetings? How often are you too focused on the feature and not on the benefit? Speaker 4 (03:21):Here’s this week’s clever idea. Speaker 1 (03:24):Let me give you three killer offers that will make you stand out from every single other MSP out there. Now your offer is your basic business proposition and it’s one of the most important elements in your entire marketing. It’s the thing that makes you different and it makes it easy for ordinary business owners and managers to choose you. You must have heard of the USP rights, the unique selling proposition. Well, your offer is kind of the same thing. Sometimes it’s too easy to overthink your offer as business owners. We’re so close to the business that we stop seeing it as strangers see it. And you know that you are great at what you do, right? You do know that don’t. You are great at what you do and you assume that everyone else sees that you are great at what you do. But the reality is that they don’t by default. (04:17)You have to tell them. And the offer is a great tool to do that. So I want to encourage you to think bigger because the best offers directly address the pain points of the prospects. Let’s think what those are. So they hate losing time. They hate losing productivity to tech problems. They hate their staff moaning and they’re concerned that their tech will go wrong and it will affect their whole business. So if we address those pain points, here are three killer offers that directly do that. And these are not things that you can just pick up directly and use. They’re kind of overarching themes just to push you in the right direction. And the first of those, well, I’ll tell you what all three are and then we’ll go through them. So we’ve got risk reversal is the first one. The second one is timeframes. (05:04)And the third one is making your offer benefit driven. So let’s look at that first one, risk reversal. When someone buys from you, the risk of it going wrong is on them because if it doesn’t work out, they’re screwed, right? Because their business is so dependent upon technology, I realize it does feel like you are taking on the risk because there’s a cashflow issue if they leave you. But really from their point of view, they are the ones taking on the risk. So the smart thing to do in your offer is to reverse that risk. What if you guaranteed your work or better still you guaranteed their happiness, you’ll be 1000% happy with us or we will pay your bill until you are, that would probably scare you actually, wouldn’t it? That kind of guarantee around money like that. So you can dilute it down, it will always be. (05:55)Or maybe something like you will always be 1000% happy with us or we’ll release you from your contract and give you a thousand dollars or a thousand pounds to say sorry. So that’s the same thing. But you’ve limited your downside for you by the way, that kind of guarantee there where you are guaranteeing utter delight and satisfaction, which is what the vast majority of your clients experience, but you are guaranteeing it and with something to back it up. So if they are not insert whatever you’re guaranteeing here, then we will. And it is either release ’em from their contract, give them money back or something like that, having a guarantee that will attract you a ton of new clients and only one of them will go on to claim on the guarantee probably because they’re an idiot and they disrespect all of their suppliers and don’t worry too much about that because karma will get them back for you. (06:49)So the second kind of killer offer you can make is about timeframes. So what if another prospect pain point is the fear of how long it will take to switch from you? And no one enjoys that kind of switching process. The old MSP doesn’t, you really don’t. Maybe you do, but certainly the client, they just want to get back to our technology working. So in which case your offer might be something like a fully painless switch to us in 28 days or less guaranteed. And being very specific about the timeframes there within 28 days, which is four weeks, our brains understand what that means and telling them what you will achieve in that timeframe that helps to understand what they’re getting into. And not only that, it helps you to stay focused on delivering the highest quality. If you said to someone this will happen in 28 days, then it’s less likely the projects that the migration project is going to shift it internally. (07:47)I know how it can be and I know that things shift very, very easily. Whereas if you know we’d had 16 days and with three days behind, then you are going to put greater emphasis on that internally. And I know you might be worried about meeting a deadline like 28 days or whatever it is that you do. So the answer of course to that is to only onboard one client at a time. And in fact, that in itself creates some scarcity. You can say to the clients, Hey look, if you want to join us, sign the contract. We can onboard you starting a week on Monday, but after that we can’t onboard you for two months because we’ve got other clients coming on board, they’re already booked him and we only onboard one client at a time because we have that guarantee. We guarantee it will take no more than 21 days, 28 days, whatever it takes. (08:35)And we can’t do that for two people at a time. So if you want to start with this, we can do it a week on Monday, otherwise it’s going to be a two months time. And actually having that kind of scarcity, that can be a very powerful marketing thing. And then the final killer offer is to have something that’s benefit driven. And again, you’ve got to look at the world from their point of view. What do they most want from you? What is it? What’s the thing they want more than anything else? And then build your offer around that. The fastest support you ever enjoyed. You’ll never have to listen to your staff complaining about technology again, not just IT support a strategic partner to help you grow. When you look at everything and I mean everything through the eyes of your prospect and not through your own eyes, suddenly marketing becomes really easy. (09:26)You can only influence what John Smith buys when you look through John Smith’s eyes. So putting an offer together is simply about looking through their eyes, understanding them, understanding their world, and then reflecting that back in your marketing. From a psychology point of view, that’s a very, very powerful thing to do, to tell people you would deliver exactly what it is that they want. They may not be able to put into words what they want, but they know deep down at an emotional level that they want it. This is such a good marketing trick to pull off if you can get this right. In fact, what we’re talking about here is world class marketing, Speaker 4 (10:09):Blatant plug, blatant Speaker 1 (10:10):Plug. We are constantly creating edutainment videos where I’m trying to educate you about some important MSP marketing stuff through entertainment. I have a lovely home studio at my home and every week we do some filming. It’s really cool actually, we’ll have remote direction. So my director who’s about a hundred miles away from me, he directs me over Zoom and they send props to my house and then they send me the script. And we have a lot of fun with that. It’s really cool. But it’s all there to help you improve your marketing education and ultimately get more clients for your MSP just by watching YouTube videos. Of course you’ve got to go and take action, but watching those YouTube videos is a good place to start. So you can access our channel at youtube.com/msp marketing, Speaker 4 (10:58):The big, Speaker 3 (10:59):Big interview. Hi, I’m Michael Nelson and I’m one of the co-founders of Scaled a staff augmentation company. Speaker 1 (11:05):And thank you so much for joining me on this podcast, Michael. So we are going to talk about how you can hire people around the world and successfully embed them as part of your team regardless of where your actual team is based. And I know that from lots of MSPs that I speak to that that’s one of the hardest things for them. It’s a bit of a mind barrier for them of if I hire someone who’s based a thousand miles away, how do I actually integrate them as part of my team and not just have them as a resource outside? So we’re going to come onto that and I think we should probably answer the question of why you would do this as well. Before we do this, let’s just talk a little bit about you. So tell us about your background and for those people who are like, Hey, I know this guy, I know this guy’s name, where have I seen him before? Tell us a little bit about you. Speaker 3 (11:49):So I own an MSP in California that I started 20 years ago. Ironically, I was adamantly against having any remote employees that changed about five years ago. And then it really escalated obviously with covid and we really learned how to navigate it well. We ended up starting another company to help people get remote staff. What we’ve learned over the years is how to integrate them really well. You talked a lot about it, that fear of bringing people in remotely and that’s whether they’re in your state and your country or overseas in another country. Speaker 1 (12:24):Yeah. So if we go back to that trigger five years ago, what was the thing that made you, so you are based in the US and we have listeners and viewers all over the world. We have loads in the us, loads in the uk, Australia, all the sort of the main western countries. So this is a global thing. This isn’t just a US thing, but what was the trigger for you five years ago that actually made you look outside of the us? Speaker 3 (12:48):So we were really having problems finding good qualified…

Full show notes at the publisher

Episode 230: How to attach MRR to hardware & project sales Apr 09, 2024

Show notes

Episode 230 Welcome to the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This is THE show if you want to grow your MSP. This week’s show includes: 00:00 How to attach Monthly Recurring Revenue to hardware & project sales 07:33 5 quick wins to improve your net profit margin 16:45 Attract your ideal clients with strategic content marketing Featured guest: Thank you to Kristi Mitchell, Founder of Marketing Uncomplicated, for joining me to talk about how MSPs can use content marketing to target and attract, nurture and convert their ideal clients. Kristi Mitchell is a Marketing Strategist specializing in helping service-based small business owners who have relied on referrals and word-of-mouth to build their businesses. They know in order to reach more clients with their services, they need to finally think more strategically about their marketing. Kristi brings an MBA, over ten years of corporate marketing experience, and a drive for continual learning to the work she does with her clients. Kristi offers 1:1 strategic consulting, fractional CMO services, workshops, and group implementation support. Connect with Kristi on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kristimitchell/ Extra show notes: Listen or watch every Tuesday on your favourite podcast platform, hosted by me, Paul Green, an MSP marketing expert: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-green-msp-marketing/ http://mspmarketingedge.com/about/ You can join me in the MSP Marketing group on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/mspmarketing/ Find out about my MSP Marketing Edge service: https://www.mspmarketingedge.com Subscribe to my YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/mspmarketing Connect with me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-green-msp-marketing/ Subscribe to this podcast using your favourite podcast provider: https://www.audible.co.uk/pd/Paul-Greens-MSP-Marketing-Podcast-Podcast/B08JK38L4V https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/paul-greens-msp-marketing-podcast/id1485101351 https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/paul-greens-msp-marketing-podcast https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cucGF1bGdyZWVuc21zcG1hcmtldGluZy5jb20vZmVlZC9wb2RjYXN0?sa https://music.amazon.co.uk/podcasts/b03a9638-adf4-4491-93f1-569183e079d7/Paul-Greens-MSP-Marketing-Podcast https://open.spotify.com/show/1Hw52ScOg5WvGaBUkaOrI7 https://tunein.com/radio/Paul-Greens-MSP-Marketing-Podcast-p1264893/ https://blubrry.com/paulgreenmspmarketing/ https://deezer.com/show/1512622 Grab yourself a copy of this week’s recommended book, The Coaching Habit: Say Less, Ask More & Change the Way You Lead Forever: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Coaching-Habit-Less-Change-Forever/dp/0978440749 Transcription: NB this transcription has been generated by an AI tool and provided as-is. [00:00:00] Speaker A: Fresh every Tuesday for MSPs around the world. Around the world, this Paul. Paul Paul Greens MSP Marketing podcast. [00:00:09] Speaker B: And welcome to episode 230 of the podcast. [00:00:13] Speaker C: Here’s what we got in store for you this week. [00:00:15] Speaker D: I’m Kristi Mitchell. Come join me on Paul’s podcast, where we talk all about using strategic content marketing to help you attract, nurture, and convert your ideal clients. [00:00:25] Speaker C: And on top of that interview with Kristi, we’ve also got five quick wins to help you improve your net profit margins. [00:00:33] Speaker A: Paul. Paul Paul Greens MSP Marketing podcast of. [00:00:38] Speaker B: The best things about being an MSP is the monthly recurring revenue, right? [00:00:43] Speaker C: Because MRR is everything. It is absolutely the Holy Grail. The more monthly recurring revenue that you have, the better your cash flow, the more predictable your growth is, and ultimately, the more valuable your MSP will be. [00:00:59] Speaker B: When you sell it. [00:01:00] Speaker C: So let me set you a challenge in today’s podcast. How can you attach monthly recurring revenue. [00:01:08] Speaker B: To every piece of hardware that you. [00:01:10] Speaker C: Sell and every project that you deliver? Now, this is a heck of a challenge, but I do think with some creative thinking, it really can be done. And I was kind of inspired to. [00:01:21] Speaker B: Talk about this on the podcast today by an MSP that I worked with years ago. [00:01:25] Speaker C: I haven’t spoken to him for ages. His name is Darren. [00:01:28] Speaker B: He’s based here in the UK. [00:01:29] Speaker C: Hi, Darren. [00:01:30] Speaker B: If you are watching this on YouTube or listening to this on the podcast. [00:01:33] Speaker C: Now, Darren, when I met him, was. [00:01:35] Speaker B: Very, very focused on only generating streams of monthly recurring revenue. [00:01:41] Speaker C: That was his entire focus for the business. [00:01:44] Speaker B: And he was always asking himself, how. [00:01:47] Speaker C: Could I create a new stream of MRR? If I go and sell a project. [00:01:53] Speaker B: Or I deliver some hardware to someone. [00:01:55] Speaker C: How can I attach some MRR to that? [00:01:58] Speaker B: And he opened up new revenue streams offering marketing services. Some of them he was doing in house. Some of them he was buying them. [00:02:04] Speaker C: In, putting a margin on and selling. [00:02:06] Speaker B: Them on, which is fine, because obviously his clients, you may have done this yourself. You have your clients saying to you, hey, you guys do computer things. [00:02:15] Speaker C: Can you build me a website? Because that’s a computer thing. [00:02:18] Speaker B: You and I know that websites aren’t computer things, but sometimes your clients think that. So Darren saw that as a revenue stream, and he started creating websites and selling those for monthly recurring revenue, not. [00:02:29] Speaker C: As a one off project, but as. [00:02:30] Speaker B: A monthly recurring revenue. But he was very, very focused. And Darren’s goal was to get to. [00:02:35] Speaker C: 80, I think it was 85 and a half thousand pounds a month, which. [00:02:40] Speaker B: Is a million pounds a year of recurring revenue. So every month he’d have done 85,000 pounds over the year. That’s a million of recurring revenue. And all the rest of his sort of turnover, his one off turnover, in. [00:02:51] Speaker C: His mind, that didn’t count. [00:02:53] Speaker B: It all had to be monthly recurring revenue. [00:02:55] Speaker C: Now that is focused, and that’s the. [00:02:58] Speaker B: Kind of focus that I think if. [00:02:59] Speaker C: You are really serious about building up the business and staying completely focused on. [00:03:06] Speaker B: Getting somewhere that you’ve never been before, that’s an incredible kind of goal. [00:03:12] Speaker C: So let’s look at then the hardware. [00:03:14] Speaker B: And the projects, and how do you attach monthly recurring revenue to something like that? [00:03:19] Speaker C: So I’m not quite sure about laptops and desktops, but certainly when you add in other hardware, you can add in. [00:03:27] Speaker B: Potential revenue, monthly recurring revenue streams. [00:03:30] Speaker C: For example, if you sold a router. [00:03:32] Speaker B: I know some MSPs that well, first of all, I know some MSPs that don’t sell hardware. They only lease hardware. And I know that sometimes you can lease it through some of your suppliers, but other MSPs, they will go and buy the laptop for 1000 pounds or $1,000 or whatsoever, and then they will lease it to their clients on a three year deal. I appreciate that there are some financial. [00:03:55] Speaker C: Risks that you’re taking on with that. [00:03:56] Speaker B: You’re putting out the big outlay at the front and then obviously you’ve got that revenue coming in. But typically after, I don’t know what, 1215 months you are in profit. You need to sort the figures out from that. [00:04:07] Speaker C: Or maybe it’s easier or less risk. [00:04:10] Speaker B: For you to lease it from your supplier and then put some margin on top and send it out. But that’s one way you could turn, I guess, a laptop or a desktop into some recurring revenue. Some other MSPs that I know, they. [00:04:23] Speaker C: For example, will take something like a router, they won’t sell the router again. [00:04:27] Speaker B: They will lease it. [00:04:28] Speaker C: They may only buy this router for. [00:04:30] Speaker B: A few hundred pounds, but they’ll lease that out for 50 pounds or $50 a month. [00:04:33] Speaker C: Or another way of doing it is. [00:04:35] Speaker B: You do sell the, you sell the router onto the clients, but then you. [00:04:40] Speaker C: Charge them a fee every month to manage that router. [00:04:43] Speaker B: And managing that router, of course, means monitoring it. It means making sure the updates are done. It means, I don’t know, maybe you do a speed test every day or something like that. You know the kind of things that you can do. And obviously you want to make all of these automated as well, don’t you? So there’s no actual work for you to do, but you’re getting a fee every single month to manage something. [00:05:04] Speaker C: In fact, I think when it comes to projects or hardware, adding on some kind of recurring management fee is the. [00:05:11] Speaker B: Right thing to do. [00:05:12] Speaker C: And we’ve got to strike the right balance here because we’re not trying to wash the clients. We’re not trying to wash them and ring them and get every single drop. [00:05:20] Speaker B: Of revenue out of them. [00:05:22] Speaker C: Some MSPs do do that, but that does create a sort of a retention tension. I’ve just invented that phrase. I’m going to use that phrase again in the future. I like that one. So we don’t want to ring them too much, but at the same time we want to charge them good fees in order to do a good job. Right. So if you are genuinely managing their router and you’re genuinely monitoring it and updating it and watching the speeds, and you can automate all of this in some way, I don’t know how you do that. [00:05:49] Speaker B: I guess you’d know that. But if you can do all of that and it’s all automated and you. [00:05:53] Speaker C: Get an alert once or twice a month that your text can then go in, fix whatever the problem is with. [00:05:58] Speaker B: The router and it’s all done. [00:06:00] Speaker C: Fantastic, right? Someone somewhere. Well, the right clients with the right mindset will pay for that because they understand that not having to lose an hour or 2 hours of their life. [00:06:13] Speaker B: Resetting things, listening to their staff moan, just coming in in the morning, everything works, we can get on with business. [00:06:19] Speaker C: Boom. The right kind of clients with the. [00:06:22] Speaker B: Right mindset, they completely understand that. [00:06:24] Speaker C: And to go with that, as well. [00:06:26] Speaker B: As having the right clients, you have got to have the right positioning as well. You’ve got to have the right positioning for what it is that you do. [00:06:33] Speaker C: If you say to someone, look, we. [00:06:35] Speaker B: Can supply you with this new router. [00:06:36] Speaker C: In fact, we would prefer that we. [00:06:39] Speaker B: Supply you with the router. This is the one that we recommend because of ABC, we’re going to sell that to you. [00:06:44] Speaker C: It’s going to cost you this much. It will last at least three years. [00:06:48] Speaker B: But we hope to get a five to six year life out of it. And there is a fee of, I don’t know, $50, $100 a month. And that’s for us to manage it. [00:06:56] Speaker C: I can tell you the details of. [00:06:57] Speaker B: What we do when we manage it. [00:06:58] Speaker C: But essentially what we do is make. [00:07:00] Speaker B: Sure that everything just works. That’s what you’re paying that fee for. [00:07:05] Speaker C: And that’s really good positioning. If you say that and you genuinely mean it and you know that you can add value. Why wouldn’t you add that kind of. [00:07:13] Speaker B: Monthly recurring revenue onto a hardware or a project like that? [00:07:17] Speaker C: That’s my challenge to you. In the next couple of weeks, every time someone says to you, hey, can I get a quote for this? Or you find yourself specking out a project for someone, just have something at the back of your mind that constantly asks you, how do I add monthly recurring revenue to this? [00:07:34] Speaker A: Here’s this week’s clever idea. [00:07:37] Speaker C: Let’s talk about five quick wins to improve your net profit margin. And first, to define what I mean by net profits, we’re all talking about the same thing. If you take your accounts, and obviously. [00:07:48] Speaker B: I’m in the UK, but I assume that accounts, although they have their differences, they’re pretty much fundamentally the same the world over. [00:07:54] Speaker C: So you’ve got your top line revenue. [00:07:57] Speaker B: That’S your money that you’ve brought into the business, and then you take off your fixed costs and that gives you your gross profit. So your fixed costs are things like your office, your staff, stuff like that. That’s your gross profit, and then you. [00:08:10] Speaker C: Take off the cost of sale. So, for example, if you sell a laptop and you sell that for $1,000. [00:08:16] Speaker B: But it’s cost you $700, then your cost of sale, of that, you wouldn’t. [00:08:21] Speaker C: Have had to have paid that 700. [00:08:22] Speaker B: If you hadn’t sold it. [00:08:23] Speaker C: So that cost of sale, and with. [00:08:25] Speaker B: The same for all of your services that you buy in as well, that all comes off from the gross profit. So you’ve got top line revenue, then you’ve got gross profit, then you take off the cost of sale and that’s what you’ve got then, is net profit. Net profit is typically. Well, certainly in the UK, it’s the figure at the bottom of the PNL. [00:08:41] Speaker C: The profit and loss sheet. Oh, my goodness. I just did account stuff. [00:08:45] Speaker B: I’m really bad at numbers. [00:08:47] Speaker C: I’m great with words. [00:08:48] Speaker B: But numbers, even though I’ve been a business owner for 19 years, I still struggle today with PNL and balance sheets and stuff like that. [00:08:54] Speaker C: And I just explain net profit to you. [00:08:56] Speaker B: I know you know what it is, but I thought I’d mention it anyway. [00:08:59] Speaker C: So, five ways that you can improve your net profit margin, and the first. [00:09:04] Speaker B: Of those is the easiest one to do. You put up your prices for new clients. [00:09:08] Speaker C: Now, if you reduced your prices by 10%, you’d need to sell 33% more just to make the same amount of profit. Do you get that? It’s kind of crazy, isn’t it? But the good news is it works the other way around. So if you put your prices up for 10%, and so long as your cost of delivery doesn’t change, then you will make the same profit on less volume of work. Or if the volume of work stays the same, you will make more profit. Now, I’d advise you not to put. [00:09:38] Speaker B: Up prices for existing clients. [00:09:40] Speaker C: That needs to be done very carefully so as not to affect your retention. [00:09:43] Speaker B: And that subject is another podcast subject for another day. [00:09:48] Speaker C: But for new clients, you should be constantly nudging up your per user or per device charge until you discover the. [00:09:55] Speaker B: Limit of what your local market will buy. [00:09:58] Speaker C: So someone who buys at, let’s say, $35 per user today, and then tomorrow. [00:10:03] Speaker B: The price, if they sign up is. [00:10:05] Speaker C: $37 a user and that sells, and you could nudge that up to $39 a unit. Does that make sense? But if you find that at 39 it doesn’t sell, we hit the barrier. [00:10:16] Speaker B: Then you can return back to $37 a user. [00:10:20] Speaker C: But price testing should be sort of. [00:10:21] Speaker B: A permanent thing that you’re doin…

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