Show notes
Episode 183 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 Should MSPs do SEO? 06:15 Improving your outbound call success rate with a ‘pave the way’ letter 11:23 Hate selling? Then try invitations and conversations Featured guest: Thank you to David Newman, Founder and CEO, Do It! Marketing, for joining me to talk about how by reframing how MSPs think about selling, they can secure more clients, charge premium prices, and increase sales. David Newman is a Certified Speaking Professional and member of the NSA Million Dollar Speakers Group. David is the author of the business bestsellers, “Do It! Marketing”, “Do It! Speaking and “Do It! Selling”. David helps solo consultants and business coaches grow their revenues by 50%-500% in less than 15 months. Nothing makes David happier than client results. (Well, maybe puppies – but that’s it!) Connect with David on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidjnewman/ 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 Find out about my MSP Marketing Edge service: https://www.mspmarketingedge.com 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 Got a question from the show? Email me directly: hello@paulgreensmspmarketing.com I discussed SEO with Aaron Nihat in Episode 117, which you can find here: http://mspmarketingedge.com/podcast/episode117/ And here are the ‘Ultimate MSP Marketing Strategy’ episode links to catch up on: http://mspmarketingedge.com/podcast/episode165/ http://mspmarketingedge.com/podcast/episode166/ http://mspmarketingedge.com/podcast/episode167/ Grab yourself a copy of this week’s recommended book, How to Win Friends and Influence People: https://www.amazon.co.uk/How-Win-Friends-Influence-People/dp/938787320X/ Transcription: Voiceover: Fresh every Tuesday, for MSPs around the world, this is Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast. Paul Green: Hello, my friend, and welcome back to the podcast. This is episode 183, and here’s what we’ve got in store for you this week. David Newman: This is David Newman. Have you ever asked yourself, man, why is it so hard to sell? Why is a sales process so gosh darn challenging? Why can’t I put up my fees? Why can’t I start charging more money for the amazing work that our team does? Tune in, and we’ll explain all of that and unpack it for you step by step. Paul Green: And on top of that great interview with David, we’re also talking about something called a “pave-the-way letter”. It’s a unique tool which gives you a very good excuse to pick up the phone and call your prospects. Voiceover: Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast. Paul Green: This could be one of the quickest segments of the podcast ever, because I have a one-word, very simple answer to the question I’m about to pose myself. Should your MSP do SEO, search engine optimization? The answer is probably no. There we go. We’re done, right? I can just go home now. See you, everyone, bye. Oh, hang on, you want me to finish the podcast? Okay, I will do. No, the answer is probably no. And I know that there will be 100 SEO experts listening to this putting their head in their hands thinking, “What is he doing?” And we have had some great experts on this podcast over the years. In particular, go back to episode 117, Aaron Nihat was my guest there talking about SEO. Now, don’t get me wrong, there is a massive value in SEO. And what I’m not saying is that you shouldn’t do SEO because it doesn’t work. SEO works if you get the right people doing the right things, and they understand your audience, and they understand why people are looking for you. So SEO as a marketing strategy, as a marketing tactic, works, but the question I posed myself was, should your MSP do SEO? And the reason that I gave a negative answer to that was probably because you may not already have some of the marketing basics in place. Because here’s the thing, SEO, it feels like you’re doing good, it feels like you’re doing your marketing. Because you can go and find an SEO agency, and you can put some gold and silver in their palms, and you can say to them, “Please go and do your search engine optimization magic.” And when you’ve done that, you get a little rush of adrenaline. You kind of feel like, “Yeah, I’m doing marketing. I just paid someone to go and do some marketing.” And most SEO companies will very happily take your gold and silver and go and do some marketing. But if they are just focused on sending new organic traffic to your website, and your website was built in 2007, 1884, it’s the same year really in website terms, if your website is slow, if it never has any new content added to it, if it’s clunky, it’s full of stock images, there’s not a very clear call to action, and it doesn’t differentiate you from your competitors, so all the basic mistakes, or many of the basic mistakes, MSPs make, the problem is, you can drive as much traffic in the world to that site as you want, but it isn’t going to convert. When it comes to good, decent SEO, it’s not just about traffic, it’s about two things; it’s about traffic and conversion. Traffic without conversion is pointless. And the reality is that if your marketing fundamentals are not in place, there is no point driving a ton of traffic to your website. So should you do SEO? If you meet these criteria, then maybe you should. Criteria number one is you have an up-to-date exciting website that’s full of images and videos of real people. It’s got social proof in it, so case studies, testimonials, reviews. It’s got lots of new blog content that’s going on there. There’s a very clear call to action, and that call to action is probably booking a 15-minute Zoom call with you to talk about their business. If this is your website… Oh, and it’s optimized as well, as in it’s fast, it’s a now, it’s a 2023 website in every way. If you’ve got that website and you’ve got someone whose job it is, and that might be your job or it might be some kind of marketing system, but someone whose job it is to look at people who are coming in and capture their details, and get them to join your email list, and work your LinkedIn, and just generally you’ve got a ton of marketing activity happening. If this is your business right now, then, yes, you will/could/should benefit from SEO, depending on the marketplace that you are in. Obviously in the big cities, you’re competing against a lot of other SEOs, so it’s going to take a lot longer than if you’re in a small, one-horse town in the middle of a desert, a dusty desert at that. So yes, SEO could be the right thing for you, but you’ve got to get your marketing fundamental in place first. My experience, and this may not be the case with you, but my experience with working with many MSPs is that 80% are simply not in a position where they would benefit from SEO right now. And it does come down to the website’s just not right, there’s not enough work going into LinkedIn, there’s no machine. We talk a lot on this podcast about building a marketing machine, and that machine needs lots of different cogs that goes in it, things that happen on a daily basis, a weekly basis, and a monthly basis, and you keep turning the handle. That is the machine. If you haven’t got that yet, please don’t waste your money on SEO, but do spend the money, go and get your website fixed, get in place all the cogs of the machine that you need, and that is the right thing to do to get started. And if you’re wondering at this point, what are the cogs of the machine? If you go back to our first podcast episodes of this year, the first three podcast episodes of the year covered off the ultimate MSP marketing strategy. That will tell you the pieces that you need to put in place your own marketing machine. Voiceover: Here’s this week’s clever idea. Paul Green: I’ve just checked, and those podcast episodes about the ultimate MSP marketing strategy are episodes 165, 66, and 67. And if you go back and watch those, you’ll see that the strategy I recommend has three parts to it. You build multiple audiences of people to listen to you, you build a relationship with those audiences through content marketing, and then you commercialize that relationship. An important part of commercializing that relationship is having somebody to make outbound phone calls on your behalf. And we normally recommend a back-to-work mum for this. Now, just in case you’ve never heard me talk about this before, I’m not talking about cold calling, I’m not talking about selling on the phone. I’m talking about having a warm, friendly person picking up the phone, calling everyone you’re connected to on LinkedIn, calling everyone that’s in your email database, people that you’ve been sending content marketing to. And her job is not to sell, it’s not to talk about technology or your business, it’s to talk about them and their business, and essentially try to see if this is the right moment for them to have a 15-minute Zoom with you. And then you do the hard work because, on that 15-minute Zoom, you qualify them and you check to see if this is the right time to talk and turn them into a proper sales meeting. Now, that job, even though it’s not cold calling and it’s not Robodialing and it’s not a Wolf of Wall Street style kind of telesales room, even so, it is a difficult job to do. No one really likes picking up the phone and making outbound calls to people who don’t really want to talk to you. Very, very few people enjoy that. So there are a number of things that you can do just to make life easier for that person, and one of those things is called a pave-the-way letter. And it does literally that, it paves the way for their call to be more likely to get through a gatekeeper, to be more likely to be taken by the decision maker, and for actually the call to be a much more pleasant thing. So the pave-the-way letter is literally something you send to someone in the mail, you ship it to them, before you call them. And it can be a letter, literally just a letter that you’ve written, and I’ll give you an example in a second. It could be a postcard. It could be like a magazine or something like that. You might have a case studies book put together. There’s a number of different things that you can do. Our MSP Marketing Edge members, we put together something called an IT Services Buyer’s Guide, which is something that they can send out to people before that call. Now, the idea of this is that you cut through the noise. You capture their attention, and you cut through the noise, because you are sending them something. And then when you phone them up, you also have a reason to phone them up. So it cuts through the noise and it also makes it easier for your telephone person. Because starting a call with, “Oh, hi, I sent something through to you in the post a few days ago. I’m just calling to check you got it,” that seems like a much more natural start to a conversation, doesn’t it, than just, “Oh, I’m ringing today because…” We all put the phone down or kind of reject those kind of callers. So what could you send? Well, use your imagination. What’s something unexpected and exciting that you would like to get through the post? And don’t immediately jump straight to thinking of merch, and branded pens, and lumpy mail, and all that sort of stuff. And it can be as simple as, in fact, this is something else that we give our MSP Marketing Edge members, we give them a four-page sales letter, which just asks the recipient to think about the customer service levels they’re getting from their current IT support company. And it literally says, “Are you getting the customer service you deserve? If not, here’s what some of our clients say about us.” And they open this up, it’s like a four-page letter, they open it up, and the two middle pages, it’s just full of testimonials and reviews and quotes from clients. And then, on the back, there’s a call to action. It’s a very, very simple thing. It’s a sales letter that doesn’t look like a sales letter. You’re more than welcome to pick up that format. I can’t give you the files, of course, but that kind of format works very well, or even just a simple postcard asking them a question about some aspect of their technology. It almost doesn’t matter what you send so long as it paves the way for your phone person and makes it easier for her to pick up the phone and say, as I said earlier, “Hey, we sent you something in the post a couple of days ago, just calling to check that you got it.” Oh, and by the way, when she asks that question, a surprising number of people will say, “No, I didn’t get that.” Trust me, they did get it, it’s just fallen out of their mind. It doesn’t matter. The point is not for them to read this thing and consume it, and they certainly won’t act on it. The point of this is to pave the way for your phone person to call them. Voiceover: Paul’s blatant plug. Paul Green: Cancel Netflix, get rid of Amazon Prime, and you definitely don’t need Disney+ or Paramount+ anymore. Because if you want to be entertained and grow your MSP at the same time, you’ve just got to go to youtube.com/mspmarketing. Voiceover: The big interview. David Newman: My name is David Newman. I’m the author of Do It! Selling, and I want to help you sell even if you don’t like it. Paul Green: And that’s what we’re here for, we’re here for more selling. And I don’t think there’s any, or virtually any, MSP I’ve ever met who enjoys selling, it’s just something that, of course, they have to do to grow their business. Now, David, you’ve worked with hundreds, possibly even thousands, of business owners who need to get out and to sell to grow their business. What is it that we do as business owners that sort of hobbles ourselves? How do we hold ourselves back in selling? David Newman: Well, I think there’s a huge psychotic rift between the work of the work, which most MSPs love, and that’s why they started their business in the first place, and then what they call the selling part. And, of course, the moment that you’re in business, no matter how wonderful you are and how much you love the technology, you realize, “Oh, wait a minute, this is not about doing the work, it’s about selling the work.” And then maybe you go off and you go to some sales training, you go to some seminar, and what you see there and what you hear there makes your skin crawl. You’re like, “Oh, I don’t want to do that. That sounds terrible. I come across like a peddler. I come across like a vendor. This is the lowest possible positioning I could possibly be in. I’m chasing business, I’m persuading, I’m convincing, it’s one step away from begging.” And that is thinking about sales and selling the completely wrong way. So I’m going to channel all of our MSP listeners, and I’m going to say, if you don’t like the words “sales” or “selling”, you may remove them from your vocabulary. That’s right, you may remove them completely from your vocabulary and…
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