Show notes
Episode 213 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 What elements of value will make someone buy from YOU? 08:48 Use THIS trick to get past the ‘gatekeeper’ 13:41 The value and power of using your personal brand in your marketing Featured guest: Thank you to Ryan Sherrer, Director of Marketing and Special Projects for Titan Digital, for joining me to talk about why he believes that MSP owners can differentiate themselves in the market, and appeal to potential clients, by developing their personal brand and using that in their marketing. Ryan is a seasoned Director of Marketing and Special Projects. Originating from the Midwest, he’s journeyed from stand-up comedy stages to factory floors, and from bartending to boardroom discussions. It’s within the realm of marketing where Ryan truly harnesses his diverse background, offering unique insights and impactful strategies. With a story rooted in adaptability and resilience, Ryan exemplifies the essence of leveraging one’s varied strengths in a professional setting. Connect with Ryan on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryan-sherrer-822682206/ 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/ You can join me in the MSP Marketing group on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/mspmarketing/ Subscribe to my YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/mspmarketing Find out about my MSP Marketing Edge service: https://www.mspmarketingedge.com 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, Enterprise Architecture As Strategy: Creating a Foundation for Business Execution: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Enterprise-Architecture-Strategy-Foundation-Execution/dp/1591398398/ 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. [00:00:06] Speaker B: Paul. [00:00:06] Speaker A: PAUL Greens MSP Marketing Podcast hello. [00:00:10] Speaker C: And here we go. Here’s what’s in the show this week. [00:00:13] Speaker B: Hi, my name is Ryan Sherrer. I’m a marketing expert and personality means everything to your business. And if you’re struggling on how to put your personality into your business, let me tell you how. [00:00:23] Speaker C: And on top of that fantastic interview with Ryan later on in the show, we’re going to be talking about some words you can say to get past the gatekeeper when you phone any lead or prospect. [00:00:35] Speaker A: Paul Green’s MSP Marketing podcast. [00:00:39] Speaker C: We’re going to start this week by asking you to compare yourself to your direct competitors, if only so you can figure out why someone should buy from you. Because isn’t that the hardest question? Isn’t that the hardest thing that anyone could ask you? Why would I buy from you and not from your direct competitors? And the easy answer for that is that they’re buying you. I mean, literally, they’re buying your personality. I know we’re going to talk about that later in the show, but they’re buying you and your unique personage. It’s why I always recommend to every MSP that they become the face of the business. Because the laziest and easiest marketing to do is you make yourself the face of the business and you just promote yourself, says the man who named his business, Paul Green’s MSP Marketing. You get the idea, right? I don’t know about laziest, but it’s certainly the easiest way to promote yourself. But there comes a point where you’ve got to answer the question from a services point of view, from a delivery, from a customer service point of view, why would someone buy from you? And there’s an exercise that you can do, and this is something that you could spend hundreds of hours on, or you could just spend an hour on it with a colleague or your other half, or a trusted business owner friend, and you compare the elements of value between you and your competitors. So what are elements of value? What’s this jargon, Paul, that you’ve just hit me with? Elements of value are something that other people will perceive exists, buying from you. So, for example, if I buy from an MSP, an element of value is that I have to do less it work, right? I have to touch less it stuff. So it’s going to save me time. Does that make sense? It’s an element of value is it saves me time and I hire you. Now, if I compare that to let’s say if I compared you to doing my it myself, right, you’re going to score really highly on the saving you time because that’s what you do. That’s one of the big benefits of buying from you. So let’s say if we took it like a one to ten score, I buy from you, you’re going to be scoring like eight or nine, maybe even ten, because there’s very little work for me to do. Whereas if I do my it myself, I’m going to be scoring like a zero because it doesn’t save me any time. Whereas if I have a break fix company that might be like a five because the break fix, you and I know more things are going to go wrong, but I have to do some work. The brake fix company has to do some work. So that’s what I mean by an element of value. If you look at the cost of that, then. So you would score very low on the cost score because actually an MSP should be expensive. And if you’re not expensive, put your price up, right. So your score on a one to ten scale will be low on price. But for DIY, I would score ten because DIY cost me nothing. We could argue that DIY, it costs you everything because you’re going to get breached at some point. But that’s a discussion for another day. Break fix, obviously would score very highly on a six or a seven as an element of value because it’s costing me less money because I don’t have to pay for any of that proactive stuff that you’re doing for me because I’m an uneducated business owner. Now, that’s just price. Of course, people don’t just look at price, they look at value. I would argue the value of an MSP is off the chart. Right, it’s ten. If you’re doing all the proactive work and you’re stopping things from going wrong before they go wrong and you fix things before they even know they’re wrong, you are earning the big bucks, you’re delivering massive value. So again, on a scale of one to ten, MSP, high value, DIY, again, high value, maybe because you’re not spending a lot of money. Brake fix, I would argue much lower value because there’s no proactive work. These are what I mean by the elements of value and there’s no real sort of fixed elements of value. But what you kind of want to do is you want to look at it and say, what are the elements of value where we can compete very well with our competitors. So, for example, convenience, let’s take that as an element of value. So can I ring you? If I’m a business owner and I get into work early, I get into work at seven in the morning, say, can I phone you if there’s a problem? 07:00 a.m. Monday morning, get into work, no Internet. Can I phone you? And if the answer is no, then for convenience, you’re a lower score than another MSP, a competing MSP, who perhaps has an outsourced help desk for out of hours calls. Does that make sense? So, outsourced help desk for out of hours calls. Convenience ranks very, very high. What’s another one that we could look at? We could look at, will you come to me? Is that an element of value? I guess it would be. Will you come to me? So essentially, will you send someone on site? Now, your entire business model could and probably should be based around never going to their site, because it’s incredibly unprofitable to go to sites. Or you could say to me, but Paul, you’re wrong, we send an engineer to site every X or on demand, because that’s our USP, that’s our unique selling proposition. So again, elements of value. Will you come to me? And it won’t cost me anything extra? If you do that and it’s a ten, bingo. If you do it reluctantly and you charge them for it, it’s very much lower down and you can go through a whole host of things. The question to ask yourself is, why do people buy from an MSP in the first place? What are all these different elements of value? And then how do we rank against our competitors? On things like price, on value, on convenience, On how easy we make it, on how simple we make it, on our strategic advice, on how well we protect them. Now, you could compare yourself to the local brake fix, you could compare yourself to DIY. That’s almost pointless, I think. But what you should do is pick out three or four MSPs. Who are the three or four names that you find yourself coming up against? Don’t do it for everyone in your marketplace, because that’s soul destroying. Just do the three or four that you most come up against, and it could be there’s a big MSP in town that you come up against, and maybe there’s like a one two person band that you come up against, but who are the names that you come up most against? Or who are you most worried about? And you can plot on a spreadsheet, you can plot your elements of value for your competitors. And how do you find out? How do you know if they’ve got an outsourced help desk? Well, they will be shouting about it on their website. So you kind of do it from what’s on your website and what’s on their website. Now you almost know too much about your own business, so you have to be careful just to do it from your own marketing. But what you end up with, which is really cool, is you can start to see which of the areas that you are better at that they are not, and that can start to influence your marketing. And this is starting to answer that exciting question of, why should I buy from you? Why should I buy from you? Well, we have a 24 hours help desk. You can get into the details of that later down the line. We fix 94.7% of problems before our clients even notice them. So we’re highly proactive. And these two become your differentiators. Because then when they go to talk to one of your competitors that you’ve compared yourself to, and they ask them, so, oh, the people we’re looking at down the road, you, we can bring their help desk 24 hours a day. Can we do that with you? And one of the problems with marketing and sales is where the prospects, the clients are comparing apples and orange. You’re the apple. Your competing MSP is the orange. What we’re trying to do here is to get them to compare apples to apples. We take the things that you’re really good at and we make that the conversation. We change their conversation, and we make them ask those things, the things that you know that you are good at. But it all starts, as I say, with looking at people’s websites, your competitors websites, and figuring out what elements of value you are better at delivering than your competitors are. Now, if this sounds a little bit baffling to you, I’m here to help you. In fact, I have a Facebook group that is just for you. It’s just for MSPs. And to answer questions like, you know, that thing you were talking about on the podcast, Paul, how would we actually do that again? Tell me more about that. If you want to join, just grab your phone, go to Facebook, type in MSP Marketing, go to groups. You’ll see me tap your finger on my face. Come and join our MSP Marketing Facebook group, and we will happily answer this and all of your other marketing questions. [00:08:48] Speaker A: Here’s this week’s clever idea. [00:08:51] Speaker C: Let’s say you’ve decided to start phoning your leads and your prospects, which is a very smart thing to do side note. You personally shouldn’t be phoning them. The business owner shouldn’t be making these calls. Either outsource it or find someone to do it for you. Like a back to work mum picking up the phone two to 3 hours a day, two to three days a week, phoning your leads for you. But that’s a side note. So you’ve decided to start phoning leads and prospects. This is a really smart move because it moves the relationship forward. You get to learn more about these business owners, these decision makers, how happy or unhappy they are with their incumbent MSP, and ultimately, when they may or may not be ready to sign another contract. That’s the kind of information we want. So let’s say you or someone picks up the phone on your behalf, they dial a number and they get through to someone. Let’s call this person the Gatekeeper. And the gatekeeper says, good afternoon, so and so company, probably in that exact home. And you say, hello. And then you say one of either two things. You say, hi, can I ask who’s responsible for your it, please? Or you say, can I speak to the person responsible for your it? And at this point, the gatekeeper is going to start repeatedly banging their head on the table. Bang, bang, bang. Because they’ve heard this question like 17 times already today. Not necessarily the it one, but they’ve heard, can I speak to the person who’s responsible for your. I was going to say photocopier. Does anyone have a photocopier anymore? I suppose people do. Who’s responsible for your photocopier? Can I speak to the person who’s responsible for your accounting? Basically everyone who phones up all these cold calls and warm calls and people selling. It’s almost like when someone’s selling something, they declare themselves to be a salesperson inadvertently in the way they ask to speak to someone else. It’s kind of a crazy thing. Now what I’m going to suggest to you instead, and I have a couple of MSPs I know who are doing this is actually using the same terminology, but inserting something that’s a bit of a. Wait, what? I haven’t heard that one before. And it’s this. Can I speak to the person who’s responsible for your cybersecurity? So you ring them up, you get the gatekeeper and you say, can I speak to. Or could you tell me who is responsible for your cybersecurity? Now I know that that’s the same question, but it’s actually asking them about something that they haven’t been asked 17 times before. In fact, the chances are pretty high that very few, if any, people have ever called up and asked that question, who’s responsible for their cybersecurity? And what that’s going to do is it’s going to make them just pause for a second and go, wait, what? Cyber what? Cybersecurity. So who’s responsible for the security of your business’s data and making sure that you don’t get breached? And that’s going to get them thinking, and this is brilliant, because we have an opportunity, and in fact, it’s very desirable, to turn the gatekeeper into your secret weapon. See, gatekeepers aren’t really there most of the time to stop you from getting to the decision maker. They’re just there to do efficient routing or routing. They are there to get you to where you need to go. And actually, if you can turn the gatekeeper into your friend, this may take a couple of calls to do it. That can be a very, very smart thing to do. Hi there. Let’s start by the beginning of the cal…
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