Show notes
Episode 192 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 a ‘stop doing’ list can supercharge your productivity 04:40 Set yourself up for sales success by taking control of the meeting environment 15:27 Understanding the implications of cyber insurance Featured guest: Thank you to Doug Kreitzberg, Founder & CEO of SeedPod Cyber, for joining me to talk about cyber insurance, and helping MSPs understand and protect against cyber risk. In 2018, Doug founded a cybersecurity and data privacy risk consulting firm. It was through his consulting practice that he learned the value that Managed Service Providers bring to small and medium sized businesses. That insight formed the basis for SeedPod Cyber, a cyber insurance managing general agency Kreitzberg founded in 2021 which partners with Managed Service Providers to provide cyber insurance to their clients. Connect with Doug on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dougkreitzberg/ 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/ Subscribe to the MSP Marketing Action Monthly magazine: http://mspmarketingedge.com/action/ 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 You can listen to my interview with Brian Gillette about improving your sales here: http://mspmarketingedge.com/podcast/episode133/ And here’s my interview with Fiona Challis, talking about breaking your sales process down to a set of step-by-step instructions: http://mspmarketingedge.com/podcast/episode146/ Got a question from the show? Email me directly: hello@paulgreensmspmarketing.com Grab yourself a copy of this week’s recommended book, Linchpin: Are You Indispensable? How to drive your career and create a remarkable future: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Linchpin-Indispensable-career-create-remarkable/dp/0749953659/ Transcription: Voiceover: Fresh every Tuesday for MSPs around the world, this is Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast. Paul Green: Hey, hello, and welcome back to the show. This is what we’ve got in store for you this week. Doug Kreitzberg: Hi, I’m Doug Kreitzberg. I’m a cyber insurance expert and I’ll teach you enough about cyber insurance to know how to integrate it with the solutions that you’re providing your clients so that you can be successful and your clients can be better insured. Paul Green: And on top of that interview with Doug, we’re also going to be talking about sales meetings. We started a short series last week and looked at how to influence your prospects before you even meet them. Today, we’re looking at making the meeting itself so much more successful. Voiceover: Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast. Paul Green: We’re all busy people, aren’t we? I’m busy, you’re busy, everyone’s busy. We’ve always got things that we’re doing. We’re always multitasking. Even now, you are probably listening to this podcast while weeding the garden or running or walking the dog or driving somewhere or you’re doing something else, and in fact, audio like this, it’s designed to be listened to in the background. That’s okay, but actually, when it comes to doing our work, and especially for you, I know that for you, the temptation to do six things at once is massive because actually, while you’re setting up a new user and you’ve got to delay here. You can switch to another task and you can do this and then you can pick up a sales call, and so you’ve got 25 things that you do, and in fact, maybe you are overly reliant on a particular productivity app. I am. I know. I use Todoist. I love Todoist. I would marry Todoist. I would not just marry Todoist. I would take it on a really expensive honeymoon that I could not afford. That’s how much I love it. So I use and have used Todoist for well over a decade and I use it all day, every day as my list of things to do. I am a slave to Todoist. If my account was wiped, was hacked and wiped, I literally wouldn’t know what to do. I wouldn’t know how to get out of bed in the morning. That’s how much I love it, and you probably have an app similar to that. Here’s the thing though, maybe, just maybe you and I, as productive as we may feel, maybe instead of having a to-do list or a to-do app, maybe we should have a stop doing list. Let me explain what I mean by this. There are probably a series of things that you do in your business that really, you personally shouldn’t do. I know I have those things as well. There are things that we shouldn’t be doing like admin, any form of admin, and I know it’s easy for you as an MSP to try and hang on to some level of the admin because it makes you feel like you’ve got some level of control, particularly invoicing. If you haven’t yet completely automated all of your invoicing, and I know it’s hard when licenses go up and down and things change and you sell projects and unsell them, but if you find yourself in QuickBooks or Xero making adjustments yourself, that’s a mistake. That’s something you shouldn’t be doing. If you find yourself doing any kind of level one work, first line work, there’s plenty of other people that can do that for you. In fact, there’s a whole ton of things that you and I should not be doing. Maybe unless you’re driving right now, you could make a list, or maybe just as you’re going through today, through the next week, make a list. Keep a list on your phone or on a good old-fashioned pad, writing down the things that you know you really shouldn’t be doing. As you do a task and you think, yeah, I’m the highest, most capable, highest paid maybe, most capable person in the business definitely, why am I doing these particular tasks? As that thought occurs to you, write those tasks down and actually, that then becomes your stop doing list. This is then the most exciting list in the whole business because now your mission as the leader and the person who should be spending most of their time driving the business. Your mission now is to find someone else to do all of those tasks so that you don’t have to. You may have heard me say this before if you’re a longtime listener, but if not, take this sentence I’m about to say, get it tattooed on your head in mirror writing, reverse writing so when you look in a mirror, it will make sense. This is the sentence: you should only do what only you can do. You should only do what only you can do, and for everything else, there’s someone within your business or some outsourced person or freelancer out there that can do it for you. Voiceover: Here’s this week’s clever idea. Paul Green: Last week, we started a little miniseries all about sales meeting we’re doing before the meeting, during the meeting, that’s today, and then next week, we’re going to do after the meeting, the follow-up and the proposal. So if you haven’t heard last week’s show yet, please do go back and have a listen to that. I talked about something called pre-suasion, which is where you attempt to influence your prospect, the person you’re meeting before you actually meet them, and we also talked about some practical elements of preparing for the meeting. Now today, I want to talk about the meeting itself and I’m going to give a caveat with this, which is I’m not a salesperson, I’m not a sales trainer. There are some great people out there, people like Brian Gillette who has been on the show within the last year or so. There’s Fiona Challis. There’s loads of really great sales trainers out there who will give you so much more information and advice than I will, but one of the things that I can talk about just based off the selling that I’ve done myself over the last couple of decades, makes me feel old, and just talking to MSPs as well, what can you do? How can you set up a meeting environment for success? Well, the very first thing is to try to choose and influence exactly where you’re going to meet with someone. The last place that you want to have a sales meeting is their office, literally, the place where they have a desk and a computer because there are too many distractions surrounding them in their office. It is their environment. I once had a sales meeting, what was the guy’s name? I can’t remember. It was back when I had a general marketing and PR business, and I was sat talking to this guy and we were sat either side of his desk. Well, actually, I was sat at the side. So he was sat behind his desk and I was sat at the side, and I knew that sales was about asking questions more than it was talking, so I was asking him questions about his business and he was just distracted. He kept looking at his computer and tapping on things, and you know when someone’s answering, but their mind, they’re on kind of autopilot answer and his answers didn’t really make sense, and I shuffled in my seat and managed to just catch a glimpse of what he was looking at because I thought, I’m going to have to address this. This is ridiculous. I’ve driven an hour for this meeting and this guy’s basically being rude, and he was betting, he was gambling. He was actually, he had open the William Hill website, which is like a gambling shop here in the UK and he was betting on horses, and as I looked and saw that he was doing it, he clocked me looking and he realized that I knew, and as you can imagine, he didn’t become a client. Anyway, I’m sure there was some kind of issue going off there, but that’s not the only reason that you don’t want them sat behind their desk. The desk in itself is actually a barrier between the two of you. If you think about it, if you’re sitting one side of a desk and they’re sitting the other side with their arms folded and there’s this big expansive, compressed, medium fiber, wood, metal, whatever their desk is made of, there’s this big expanse between you. We’re trying to start a 20-year partnership here. We’re trying to start something that’s going to be lovely, that’s going to involve them giving you hundreds of thousands of dollars or pounds to you over a number of years. And we can’t start that when we’re sat opposite each other like opponents. So we’ve got to make sure that that meeting happens in a more neutral environment. Now, a meeting room at their building is fine so long as it is a place where people go to meet. If a meeting room doesn’t work, then maybe you would go for a hotel lounge or some other environment. You don’t want it to be cheap and cheerful, you don’t want it to be too expensive, but you’ve got to try to find that right place that would suit you where you would feel comfortable and where they would feel comfortable, but it is critical to get them out of their own environment. I have to say I prefer meeting, I don’t do sales meetings myself having them for many years, but when I did, I preferred to meet people away from their building because when they’re in the building, their staff will knock on the door and interrupt your sales meeting to give them an unimportant message. The most important thing they can do while they’re talking to you is to listen to you, to open up about their business, and mentally and emotionally commit to buying from your MSP, and they can’t do that if there’s a little knock at the door. I’m sorry to bother you. It’s just, there’s a phone call from a client who’s 1% unhappy and we don’t know what to do, or we’ve run out of milk or whatever it is, that you can’t sell in that kind of environment. So if you can, get them out of your building. Now the other thing to remember is when you sit with them, do you remember I was saying about not sitting opposite them with a desk? I think you should try and sit next to them. Now I know that sounds a little bit weird, but we are trying here to form a relationship. We’re trying to bond with this person emotionally. We want them to feel like you are the people to trust, and when you sit next to someone, then that can help to form a connection because that’s a natural thing to do. I don’t mean, of course, literally the two of you sat thigh to thigh and you’re twisting round and looking at them because that’s weird. But particularly, if you’re in a hotel lobby and you get there early, which you should do if you’re going to a neutral meeting place, you get there early, you pick exactly where you’re going to sit. You pick out the little chair cluster and you arrange the chairs. So maybe there’s a sofa and there’s a little table and a chair, and you’d put the chair next to the sofa and you’d move the table around and don’t let the hotel staff come up and say, “Please don’t move the furniture,” because actually, you can say to them, “Well, we’re going to buy at least two coffees here today. That’s your reward for letting us sit here.” You get the idea, but just move it. You can be in control of that environment. Couple of other practical things. Whenever you start any meeting, you need to check for any time limitations they may have. I’ve made this mistake, I bet you have as well, that you have started a meeting with someone. It’s going really well. You’re about 45 minutes, 50 minutes in. They’re really engaged, they’re really open to you, and then suddenly, they look at their watch and they say, “Oh my God, I’ve got another meeting. I need to go,” and they’re gone. They’re two minutes out and it’s like you’ve not finished. It’s like you’ve done the shopping in the store and you’ve got a shopping trolley full of stuff, but you abandoned the trolley and you never get to the checkout. Is that a good analogy? No, that’s a terrible analogy, but you get the idea. Always check for time and limitations. First thing you say in the meeting is, “Can I just check? I’ve got an hour aside for this. We may go a little bit over. If we really get on and have a good conversation, can I just check, is there a hard time that you need to walk out of here?” Beware that they will lie because they want to give themselves an out. So they’ll say, “Well, I’ve got an hour,” and you’ll say, “Great. What time is your next appointment after?” You can, without going too far, you can ask follow up questions on that because you need to establish, is it a hard I have to be out of here in an hour. Or is it actually they’re going to lunch or they need to do some shopping on the way back or whatever. Other practical things, make sure you put your phone on do not disturb. Literally, take out your phone, grab it and say, “I’m just going to put this on do not disturb,” and then put it face down on the table and you perhaps invite them to do the same if they haven’t done, and my final thoughts on having a successful meeting is not to use a laptop, and ideally, you wouldn’t even use an iPad. In an ideal world, you would take handwritten notes, and I know you might be listening to that thinking, well, that’s weird. Why would we take handwritten notes in 2023? Because actually, well, first of all, if you’ve got a laptop with you, that laptop is a barrier. It’s not only a barrier, tha…
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