Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast

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Episode 179: How to max networking (events not cables) Apr 18, 2023

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Episode 179 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 You can’t expect ‘A Team’ game if you hire ‘B Team’ players 06:18 How to max networking (events not cables) 18:59 Helping MSPs shorten sales cycles and double sales – in 90 days Featured guest: Thank you to Simon Severino, Founder and CEO of Strategy Sprints, for joining me to talk about how MSP owners can shorten sales cycles, increasing conversion rates, and double sales in 90 days. Simon Severino helps business owners in SaaS and services discover how to be able to run their company more efficiently which results in sales that soar. He created the Strategy Sprints® Method that doubles revenue in 90 days by getting owners out of the weeds. Simon is the CEO and founder of Strategy Sprints which is a global team of certified Strategy Sprints® Coaches which has offers a customized strategy to help clients gain market share and work in weekly sprints which results in fast execution. He is also a Forbes Business Council Member, a contributor to Entrepreneur Magazine, and a member of Duke Corporate Education. Connect with Simon on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/simonseverino/ 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 Grab yourself a copy of this week’s recommended book, The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Artists-Way-Spiritual-Higher-Creativity/dp/1788164296/ Transcription: Voiceover: Fresh every Tuesday for MSPs around the world, this is Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast. Paul Green: Greetings. Hello and welcome to episode 179. This is what’s in the show this week. Simon Severino: Hi, I’m Sam Severino, and if you are in sales, you know that the sales cycles, they’re becoming longer and longer. How can we shorten the sales cycle and close more deals in the same time? This is what we’re going to cover in this episode, so join us. Paul Green: And as well as that interview later on with Simon, we’re going to be talking about networking. No, not the networking you enjoy plugging cables in. I mean networking where you go out and meet people at events. In fact, we’re going to talk about how you can totally maximize networking for your MSP. Voiceover: Paul Green’s MSP marketing Podcast. Paul Green: I have this friend. He’s a lovely guy, one of the most successful people that I have ever known, and he acts as a mentor to me still, and he has multiple businesses. He is constantly changing, and driving, and pushing things. He’s a real inspiration, and there’s one side of his business that if I was to be brutally honest and stand back and look at it coldly, perhaps if I was a consultant that he was paying me thousands and thousands of dollars to do, I would stand back and I would say his biggest negative behavior, his biggest downside to the way he operates is that he is constantly hiring B team players and expecting them to deliver an A team game. Now, let me explain what I mean by this because you may be doing this yourself in your MSP, and you may be accidentally hobbling yourself with exactly this behavior. Let me explain it. When I talk about A team, B team players, this is about ability. This is about attitude. This is about all the things that you cannot train someone in. So it’s not about skillset at all. It’s about ability and attitude. So if you think about the technicians you’ve got right now, you’ll have some technicians who perhaps when they joined you, they didn’t have the necessary skills. They weren’t ready with the qualifications and the ability to just do stuff, but what they did come in with was this amazing ability to be very open to it. They had a great attitude. They came in wanting to learn, hungry to learn, ready to throw themselves into it, to do the training, perhaps even to do stuff in their own time. They don’t complain as much. They’re very open to change, and at the same time, they just want exactly what you want, which is let’s do a great job for the customer, and let’s make some money. So do you have technicians like that? Maybe you have technicians that are perhaps the little opposite in that they came in with qualifications, with the ability to do more things, but their mind is a little bit closed. They’re perhaps not as keen to do more training, learn more things, move onto something new. They’re perhaps a little more arms folding, if you know what I mean by that; a little more of a barrier to change. That’s the difference between your A team and your B team players. A team could be 18 years old, and they could have no ability whatsoever in terms of actual formal technical ability, but they come in to you with an open mind. And an interesting fact, they will have ability. What am I talking about? A team go and teach themselves the skills that they want to acquire. It’s really rare for an A team player to turn up at any job that they really badly want without having learned some aspects of the job. They’re a bit rough around the edges sure, but they’ve thrown themselves into it in their spare time. I love it when I’m hiring writers. If I have a writer or an applicant to be a writer who’s never actually formally professionally written, but they have written blogs. They’ve done newsletters. They’ve done community stuff. They’ve written, written, written, written. They might even have gotten Fiverr or Upwork and just sold their work. And they’ve thrown themselves into it because they’re desperate to get a proper professional writing job. It’s exactly the same with techs. So A team have this amazing open attitude. They have the ability to pick up stuff and they’re just amazing people and you can upskill these people, whereas B team players, I wouldn’t say it’s quite the opposite, but typically, it’s about mindset really. That their mind is closed, their ability to learn and change is closed, and it makes them less valuable. So as I said, my friend makes this recurring mistake of hiring B team players and expecting them to deliver an A team game. So he knows exactly what the A team game looks like, but really every time he hires someone, he should be paying more to hire better people, and it is a conversation we’ve vaguely had. I think at some point we need to… Maybe I should get him to pay me thousands in consultancy fees. Because when someone pays thousands of pounds for an answer, they listen to the answer, right? This is the quandary of consulting. Exactly the same advice that no one pays for doesn’t get acted on. You pay $10,000 for it, and suddenly it gets acted on. So you’ve got to ask yourself in your MSP, are you possibly doing the same thing? I mean, don’t get me wrong. We all make that mistake sometimes, but do we make that mistake on a regular basis? If you think right now about your technicians, are they A team players? Are they B team players? Blimey, are they even C team players? C team players should be fired, by the way. C team players are just all the bad things you can think about with your team, and I know recruitment is difficult right now, but that’s no reason to hang onto a C team player. In fact, your C team players drag everyone else down. In fact, your B team players drag down A team players as well. The perfect business is full of highly paid, well organized, A team players who have all the resources that they need, and your job as the leader is just to stand at the side and let them get on with it. Be there when they need you, but just stand at the side and let them get on with it. Very hard to do that with B team players. So much easier with A team, and I would argue the extra $5,000 or $10,000 a year that you have to pay for that person is worth every single penny. Voiceover: Here’s this week’s clever idea. Paul Green: There are two types of networking aren’t there? There’s the networking that makes you excited and makes you rub your thighs, and then there’s the networking that makes you sit in your car feeling a bit sweaty and a bit cold, cold clammy hands. I’m no different actually, although I don’t enjoy the networking that you enjoy, which is pushing the cables into the slots. That all just baffles me, that kind of thing. But I really don’t enjoy the networking at events, the going to events, the meeting strangers, the shaking of hands, the eating of breakfast. It’s horrendous. When I started my very first business in 2005, and I’ll be brutally honest, I didn’t know how to get new clients. It was hilarious. It was a marketing agency that didn’t know how to get new clients. But hey, we all have to start from somewhere. So I thought, “Okay, I’m going to try 10 different things, and I’m going to see which of these things work.” That was my attitude and my mindset at the time. And one of those things was to get off my ass, get in the car, and go to every single networking meeting that I could find. And at the time, I lived in near a little town called Wellingborough in Northamptonshire. We’re talking sleepy market towns, very quiet counties in the middle of England. And so I found myself driving 50, 60 miles to go to lots of different networking events. I remember going. I think I drove, it was 100 miles to a city called Norwich, which is a lovely big city here in the UK, and I ended up getting a client. I got a marketing client from meeting them at a networking meeting. And it was a real pain because then for the next three years, every two, three months or so, I had to drive to Norwich to go and meet with this client, and it was a real pain. Anyway, the point is it got the business off the ground. It was one of the 10 channels that worked really well. Networking, which is okay for marketing people, can be awesome for MSPs because if you think about the marketing strategy that works for MSPs, and this is my three step marketing strategy that works, you build multiple audiences of people to listen to you. You build a relationship with them, and then you commercialize that relationship. If you think about it, networking, meeting people, is great for the first step and the second step. First of all, it’s a great place to meet people because who goes to networking events? I’ll tell you who? Other business owners, well actually other business owners, managers, and salespeople. Salespeople go there to sell, sell, sell. But actually, depending on the events that you pick, and certainly if you were to join something like a BNI, which can work very well, and go and look up your local chapter to see if there’s a space even for an MSP, because most BNIs, they only allow one type of each business in. And most BNIs, the IT side is just locked down immediately, but it’s worth asking the question at your local chapter. Depending on which meetings you go to, will depend on the quality of the people that you meet. I can’t think of a better way to meet other business owners, people who you could do business with down the line because you meet them, and then you get to spend time talking about their favorite subject. Their favorite subject of course, is themselves, and that’s one of the secrets to networking. You do not go to networking to talk about you and your business. Let’s be honest. What you do is a bit dull anyway, not to you, and not to me, but it is to ordinary people. They find IT technology, managed services, cloud security, cyber crime, all of that, they just find it a bit dull. To them, it’s the conduit. It’s something that they have to use to get the outcome that they want. For you, it’s your entire world plus your kids. But it’s your entire world. So the worst thing you can do is to talk about you and your business and technology. Instead, you talk about their favorite subject. You ask them about their business, lots of open questions. So tell me, what do you guys do? How long have you been doing that? That sounds amazing. What’s the best thing about this? What’s the worst thing? What’s the thing that keeps you up at night? What’s the biggest challenge? Where do you think you can take your business in the next three years? I’ve just given you there enough questions to get you through 15 minutes of conversation at networking events, and the goal of a networking event is actually to try and meet as many new people. Well, the first goal is to try and meet as many new people as you can. So you go in, you find someone to talk to, and there’s a wonderful dynamic of networking that you can look for. If you go in and there are three people talking, and their bodies are all facing into each other so it’s a circle, that is not a group that is ready to be interrupted. It will create emotional trauma for you. Maybe not for them, but it certainly will for you if you try and break into that group. Whereas you go and look around the room, and you see two people standing with their bodies facing away from each other, like there’s a gap for a third person. That is literally them desperate for a third person. Their bodies, their subconsciouses have opened up their circle, so a third person can come and join them. Boom, straight in there. Hi, how are you? They’re going to greet you because they’re ready for you to come in. “Hi, how are you?” you ask, and you shake their hands. You ask those questions, and then of course you’ve give them the business card. Ill talk about business cards in a second. Don’t be afraid to move on. One of the biggest mistakes anyone makes at networking, I’ve done this, you’ve done this, maybe you still do it, is you go in, you find the first person to talk to, and you’re stuck with that person for the next two hours, and you go away from the meeting really annoyed because you spent two hours talking to a plumber that’s never going to give you any business or that’s never going to do any business with you, and you get really annoyed with yourself. The trick is go in, meet someone, shake a hand, move on. Obviously, you’ll meet people that you have met before. Shake hands again. Hi, how’s it going? How are you? Build the relationship. Build the relationship, but move on. You have to work the room. There is value talking to the same people in 15, 20 minute bursts. You’re looking to build up the relationship over time. No one meets you on a Monday at a networking meeting and hands you a $12,000 a year contract on Tuesday because that’s just not how it works. You have to build up a relationship with you. Sure, they may call you if they have an urgent problem, and they don’t know who else to call. That can work sometimes, but the real value of networking is remember, build multiple audiences, build a relationship with them, then commercialize that relationship. So you’re meeting new people, you’re building up, meeting them regularly over time, and yo…

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Episode 178 SPECIAL: How this MSP can dominate his niche Apr 11, 2023

Show notes

Episode 178 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 week’s podcast, I’m joined by MSP owner Tony Sollars for a 121 marketing consult. He won a competition in my MSP Marketing Facebook group. We talk about his business and what marketing he’s already doing to promote it. Then I give him some advice on things he could try to push his business to the next level and become the dominant player in his niche. Featured guest: Tony Sollars is a serial entrepreneur who has launched, run and sold several successful businesses. We started Roland Schorr over 16 years ago to support businesses by improving their use of technology, so they can focus on their clients, be more efficient and ultimately have more time and freedom. Tony believes in improving his customer’s lives so profoundly with great technology, they couldn’t imagine doing business with anyone else. We succeed when our customers do! Connect with Tony on LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/tsollars/ 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 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 Episode transcription Tony: We want to sit down with somebody to come up with a whole marketing plan or a marketing strategy that makes sense, that builds towards something. Tony: How effective are the case studies? Tony: I’ve never seen the numbers. I don’t have any data to go off of. Paul: Good marketing actually doesn’t start with looking at you and your business and what you do. It starts with looking at the prospect. Tony: This is pretty gold stuff here. Thank you very much. I really value and appreciate that. Speaker 4: Paul Green’s MSP Marketing podcast special. Paul: So it’s really hard to believe that we have already made it round to Easter. I’m sure it was New Year’s Eve just a few days ago, but here we are. It’s Easter already. I hope you’ve enjoyed your Easter weekend and we have another special episode for you this week. Now it’s something we haven’t done on this podcast actually for a number of years ’cause I’m joined by a real life MSP who is going to talk us through what he’s doing for his marketing, how well that’s working for him, and then I’m going to give him a one-on-one marketing consult. Now this was something I offered as a competition in my MSP Marketing Facebook group. So if you missed out on this, if you’re not yet a member of that group, and it is completely free, just get Facebook up on the app on your phone, just type in “MSP Marketing” at the top. Go to groups, and you’ll see there’s an MSP marketing Facebook group. It’s free to join and you are welcome to join me there if you are an MSP, but no one else because it is a vendor free zone. So let’s jump straight into our marketing consult. Welcome Tony Solars. You told me how to pronounce your name that it rhymes with dollars. So straightaway, Tony, we have a strapline for you. Tony Solars brings home the dollars. Is that what’s happening with your MSP right now? Tony: Yeah, we’ve done really good in the last… My MSP merged and partnered with another MSP about five years ago and we’ve done double digit growth every year ever since then. We’re headquartered out of Honolulu, Hawaii; and we’re also in three other West coast cities. Paul: Okay. Well, you’ve jumped straight into what my next question would’ve been, which is tell us a little bit about you and the business. So tell us how you got started, a little bit about that merger, and then what kind of client base do you have? What kind of size business are you? Tony: So we are a six-person MSP. We’re headquartered out of, like I said, Honolulu, Hawaii. Telling everyone hears that, they’re like, “We’d love to go out there if you need anybody.” They think it’s always paradise. So we have two people out in our Hawaii office and we’re also based in Seattle where I’m at and we have two here, including myself. My business partner is in Oregon on the coast, and then we are also in Phoenix. And we have clients throughout the Phoenix and Flagstaff and Sedona areas. We manage clients throughout the country. So we do a lot of remote work that way. Paul: So would you describe yourself as just a standard MSP, just looking for general clients within the areas that you’re in? Or do you have a specific vertical or a niche that you work in? Tony: We don’t describe ourselves as a typical MSP. We try to avoid that word altogether, really. It’s an overarching theme of a peer group that I belong to of other MSP owners, I guess you could call them. Even though we use that term, but we try to say, “We’re not MSPs,” just because that term has become so loosely used nowadays. We’re definitely an IT solutions provider that focuses on cybersecurity. We don’t call ourselves experts for sure, but we do have several niches that we work in, and [inaudible 00:03:38] of those is law firms. That’s a place we came from. We know how law firms work; we know how they talk; and we know the tools they use and the problems that exist within their firms. Another one is financial wealth, the finance vertical. So that’s financial wealth advisors, CPAs, bookkeepers, and then the insurance game. So mostly we have quite a few brokers. But we also work heavily in construction. We have a lot of large construction firms. And then just two years ago, we broke into manufacturing, which is something that I’ve always had a love for. Manufacturing people, they’re my people. They’re real salt to the earth. They’re not great with technology, but they need it to run their business, and they’re just super down to earth. Paul: Yes. So I guess one of the downsides of working with manufacturing people is that you’ve got lots of different systems. And I’ve heard some horror stories over the years about the most important machine in the manufacturing plant running on XP and it’s been stable and up for eight, eight and a half years, and no one wants to take it down or update it or tweak with it. But I guess if you love a challenge like that, why not? Those first three sectors that you mentioned, those first three niches, which was law firm’s, financial wealth, and insurance; they’re beautiful verticals to be in because of course they’re regulated. And anyone that is regulated has a regulator breathing down their neck, which means they’re going to be a lot more open to buying more cybersecurity. They’re going to be just generally a lot more compliant because once they trust you and understand that you’re there to help keep them safe and to keep them out of the regulator’s bad books, then that can be a very good thing. Just a general question for you, Tony. If you could wave a magic wand and land the perfect client tomorrow? What exactly would that client look like? Would it sit within one of those niches for you? How many users would it be? Whereabouts would they be based? What does the perfect new client look like? Tony: Our perfect new client, and this is the one that we are targeting as far as our marketing goes and our conversations and we talk to people is in that 25 to 75 user employee range. If I had to give you an exact number, 50 employees is where is that sweet spot. Because what I find is, they have budgets. They have enough employees to give the leadership time to sit down and actually have meetings with us and do strategic planning and to build out those three month, one year, three year, and five year plans. But they’re not so big that they have IT or that they’ve actually said they usually don’t have standardization. That’s why I love manufacturing because they understand standards, but it doesn’t mean anything to them when it comes to IT. So there’s usually a lot. There’s a big game plan to be had there when it comes to teaching them standardization when it comes to IT. Paul: Yeah. I can see why you’re going for these niches, these verticals. You clearly, as a business, have a lot to offer them. Right. Let’s talk about the marketing. So what are you doing right now? And when I say what are you doing, I don’t mean, “What are you intending to do?” or, “What initiatives and programs have you got coming up?” Right now, as we record this, here in April, 2023, what is the business doing right now? What’s the marketing that you’re doing to attract attention, to generate leads, to turn those leads into prospects, and to actually get yourself sales meetings? Tony: Well, I’ll be a hundred percent honest, not enough. That’s for sure. I’ve been listening to you for a couple of years, and I haven’t been able to get your services because your markets in my areas are all locked. And they have been from the beginning. Otherwise, I would be using you. But we have a company that handles our social media and is pushing out content through social media. And we have another company that is doing some basic SEO work for our website on a very minimal basis. But we don’t do any ads, don’t do any kind of that kind of work just because we just have never seen any validity for that yet. So we do get leads. Our website does work. We don’t get enough. For me and my business partner, it’s like doing a little here, a little there, punching that just doesn’t seem to be cost effective. It’s like, we want to sit down with somebody to come up with a whole marketing plan or a marketing strategy that makes sense that builds towards something. And if that’s something that we could find and makes sense, then that’s something we would dump money into. Paul: Okay. Well let’s see if… I’m not going to give you an entire marketing strategy in a 15, 20 minutes consult on a podcast. Tony: No. Paul: But I’m going to have a good bash at it, that’s for sure. And it’s interesting you mentioned about our services being locked. I know our clients in Honolulu and I’m sorry that that’s locked. So we’re talking about the MSP Marketing edge by the way. Go and have a look. Get my little blatant plugin. Go and have a look at mspmarketingedge.com to see if one of your competitors is beating you to your area. You just put your zip code or your postcode in, and it tells you if we can work with you or whether or not it is locked. So you’ve actually made my job really, really easy because you’ve got all of these niches that you want to reach. And in fact, we’re going to pick manufacturing because that’s clearly the one you’ve got the most passion for. And we’re going to explore… We’re just going to take a few minutes to explore a really interesting question which is, why would a manufacturer want to work with you? Because good marketing actually doesn’t start with looking at you and your business and what you do. It starts with looking at the prospect and looking at them and answering that question of why would they pick you when there’s actually a thousand other MSPs that they could pick. So Tony, let’s forget lawyers ’cause no one likes lawyers. Let’s forget financial people, insurances. Let’s go for that manufacturing one. The people that you most like and that you most want to do business with. Just as an aside, pretty much everything we’re about to talk about can be used in all those other verticals as well. But I just want to go for the one that you’ve got the most passion for. So be a manufacturer now. Let’s call you… You’re not Tony anymore. Let’s call you Bob. You’re Bob. You’re the owner of a manufacturing business. Actually, rather than me saying this, you should be saying this because you know these people. Tell us what Bob is. So tell us a little bit about his business. If you want to amalgamate a couple of manufacturing clients in your mind, that’s fine. But tell us about Bob. What’s it like to own a manufacturing plant? Is it fun? Is it hassle? Is it all just cash flow crises? Is it lurching from one big order to another? What kind of a business do these guys have? Tony: For the ones that I’ve had exposure to, it is, most of them do import, export because they’re bringing in materials from out of country. So it’s a lot of legal and embargo tax stuff. They have in-house councils or that kind of thing. So they do have compliance stuff that they have to worry about. They’re not poor. There’s a lot of money flowing through these, but they are frugal with where they spend it. I would say the biggest thing that I find from owners of these manufacturing companies is they are not technical and they hate computers. I would say I have three of them, two of them directly just curse words every third word, F this and all sorts of tertiary words of, “I don’t like these things. I would like to throw them out a window, but I need them for my business. And every IT company I’ve ever worked with has screwed me. And I don’t believe what you’re telling me, but this guy’s telling me that you’re the real deal, and if you can make it work, then you’ll bring a smile to my face. And we shook on it. And I said, “Yeah, this is not the way it should work, and give me three months. I can’t fix it overnight.” And yeah, we did it. He was having outages at two, three times a week. Some of them like half day outages. So that’s probably what I would explain that these people is they have production plants that need… I’ve got one that just added a second shift and they’ve got these machines that cut, that manufacture things, and they cost anywhere from a quarter to three quarters of a million dollars for these machines, sometimes more. And workers that run them sometimes two 8-hour shifts a day, three 8-hour shifts a day, and maintenance people. And when they call, the important thing is to set expectations of when you’re available because sometimes they think you’re available at two in the morning to come in and fix stuff. Paul: So would these guys typically have this kind of Heath Robinson haphazard technical set up where things often go wrong and they’re losing money? Or do you find more often that they have an incumbent MSP or some kind of break fix IT support, but they’ve outgrown it and perhaps haven’t realized they’ve outgrown it? Tony: What I always come in and tell them… And this is what I find with especially manufacturing companies, is, they’re being handled in a reactive IT manner. Because these companies don’t know what to do. They don’t know that, “Hey, all your production machines out here on the plant floor have wireless cards in them, and they’re being provided wireless with Google Nest devices that your program manager put in three years ago. And your connection is bad because you put in consumer grade wireless with consumer grade wireless cards. And that’s why it’s going down all the time. So you need to spend $10,000 and put in proper wiring and have a wired infrastructure put into your production environment. And this is what it’s going to cost. This is how long it’s going to take. And you need…

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Episode 177: 3 MSP media release ideas to swipe & use Apr 04, 2023

Show notes

Episode 177 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 change of environment could help boost your productivity 07:03 Three MSP media release ideas to swipe & use 17:27 The future of on-demand sales is AaaS – Anything as a Service Featured guest: Thank you to Mark Wass, Strategic Sales Director at CloudBlue, for joining me to talk about how he helps make it easier for MSPs and other businesses to offer services ‘on-demand’ (AKA ‘Anything as a Service’), providing flexibility for their customers. Mark heads up Enterprise and Strategic Sales in the UK & North EMEA for CloudBlue, working with clients to drive their digital transformation and growth strategy. He is experienced in leading and managing high performing sales teams and territories, and is responsible for go to market strategy, regional growth and the acquisition of net new logos and revenue. Connect with Mark on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mark-wass-01450826/ 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 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 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 Power of Moments: Why Certain Experiences Have Extraordinary Impact: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Power-Moments-Certain-Experiences-Extraordinary/dp/0593079264/ Transcription: Voiceover: Fresh every Tuesday, for MSPs around the world. This is Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast. Paul Green: Good day to thee, and welcome to the podcast. Here’s what we’ve got lined up for you this week. Mark Wass: Hi, I’m Mark Wass from CloudBlue, and I’m going to be on the show discussing everything as a service, and how money service providers and service providers out there can provide services to their customers as a subscription, and they can start moving and turning into them aggressive digital service providers. Paul Green: So on top of that interview with Mark, we also talking about how you can get free publicity in your local media. And I’ve got three specific ideas to give to you later in the show. Voiceover: Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast. Paul Green: The question I’m going to ask you next kind of depends on where you are within your day. I have no idea what time you are listening to or watching this podcast, but my question is this; how productive have you been today? And I ask this because I’m recording this podcast towards the end of the day, it’s around about, well, it’s quarter to six on a Thursday evening as I record this. And I’ve had a very productive date today. And one of the reasons I’ve had a very productive day is because I’ve moved around to what I think is more locations than I’ve ever moved around before. You see, I don’t know about you, but I find that when I’m in the same location all the time, I get almost an itchy bum. I need to just move and my mind gets clogged up. It’s like I’m stuck in this place and I’m unable to produce an amount of work. And I’ve noticed that that tends to last, well, I tend to get around about 90 to 120 minutes. So up to around two hours in one location before I need to move. Now, back in the old days when I had an office and a building with staff, I was exactly the same. If I look back now, I used to go and sit in my office for a couple of hours and then I’d move to the meeting room, and then I’d move out into the office where the team were. That didn’t last very long because obviously they were talking to me. And then so I’d go and find a coffee shop somewhere. And looking back, actually, for the last 10, 15 years or so, I’ve been pretty much the same, where I’ve needed to move around. Now, it took me a few years to realize that it was the refreshing of my environment that helped me keep my productivity high. Now, maybe this is just me. This is the danger of doing something like this in a podcast before you discuss it with other people. You might not be like this at all, I might just be one of those really weird people who needs to wander around a lot. But if I sit in the same place, in the same environment for too long, then I don’t get as much done. And actually, that happens across all of my life. I find myself moving around into different environments all the time. So I have a home office, I work from home, but we’ve still got the builders in. Yes, I have been talking about it for months and they’re still here. Progress has just slowed, its ground to a halt. And so I couldn’t work from here today, so I dropped my daughter off at school and then first thing I did was I went to Leon. Leon is a little chain in the UK. I had breakfast at Leon, that was great. Nice, healthy breakfast. Did a couple of hours there. Then I moved over to a Starbucks just across the way. And then later on, I moved to another Starbucks, a different one in the city. And then I moved to, and for those in the UK, you’re going to judge me on this, but I moved to a Wetherspoon. Don’t judge me on Wetherspoons, Wetherspoons is basically a pub chain in the UK that people have quite an opinion on, but hey, it cost me £1.45 for unlimited tea and coffee, and their wifi was fast enough to upload some videos. So that couldn’t have been a bad thing. And then where did I finish off today? Oh, I finished at a Costa Coffee, which is another coffee chain. So I moved around all these different locations before I had to pick up my child from school. And it was like each time I got there, each time I had a deadline. Maybe this is the secret to this, it was a deadline of things. So at one of the locations I had 90 minutes of parking because that’s all you get for free before you need to pay. So that was a frenzy of 90 minutes. I ordered my coffee, frenzy, frenzy, frenzy, get work done, get work done, boom, and then I’m off to another location. And each time I get to that new location, I pick a new spot. I’m in a different chair, I’ve got a different desk, sometimes it’s my laptop on my lap, but I’ve changed my environment. And actually, for me, a hell day is being stuck all day, let’s say, it’s a day of doing Zoom calls or something, I’m stuck all day in the same environment. And I don’t just find this with day-to-day working, sometimes I try and completely change my environment. Like I’ll go and spend 24 hours in London, which is only kind of like 45 minutes away on the train for me. But if I can go and spend a day in London, and maybe even have a night staying over in London, if I can find somewhere to get rid of the child for the night, it’s amazing how much work I get done because I’ve completely changed my environment, because I can work of an evening. I’m not in my house, I’m sat in a pub having a beer that will last me two hours, getting work done. And I find that this is really good for productivity. How are you with this? Do you have exactly the same thing? Do you have a point in your afternoon where you run out of energy? Maybe, just maybe, it’s worth, at that point, trying to get out of your office. What if, after lunch every day, you just left your office and found yourself a coffee shop or a hotel lobby or a restaurant somewhere you could just go and work and spend a couple of pounds or a couple of dollars on a coffee or a Pepsi or whatever, a Pepsi Max, Diet Pepsi, we mustn’t have sugar, and just spent the time working on your business. What if that got you through that energy lull of the afternoon? What if the energy lull was actually an environment lull? This might not be you, as I say, this might be a completely out there thing for me, but I’ve certainly found that changing my environment regularly makes quite a difference to my own productivity. It’s kind of the same thing when you go on holiday, isn’t it? You know when you get away, you have the whole airport thing, you get to your holiday home, and that first 24 hours, you’re trying to unwind from not just the stress of life but the stress of travel. Because traveling is quite stressful because of deadlines and cues and security. But actually, once you’ve got past that first 24 hours, you’re in a different environment and you start to think differently when often you’ll find that your life partner says to you, “Oh, I like going on holiday because that’s when I see the real you again.” It’s that person that they fell in love with years and years ago, it kind of comes back again during a holiday because you relax a bit, you change your environment. And do you find this as well, that you start thinking better thoughts about your business? You start thinking in different directions, you start thinking bigger. This is the power of being in a different environment. It’s why I’m so keen for everyone, all MSPs, you and everyone else listening to this, to take more vacations, take more holidays. But we can do this on a mini basis by changing our environment and where we work today. Go on, try it. Let me know how you get on. Voiceover: Here’s this week’s clever idea. Paul Green: If you’ve been a listener or a viewer of this podcast for some time, and if you have, thank you very much for sticking with us, then you might know that I haven’t always been a marketing guy, I actually started my career at the tender age of 19 as a newspaper reporter, and then went on to have a 10-year media career, most of that spent within radio. I adored working in radio. It was just local commercial music radio, but I met some great people there and just had such great fun. And for 10 years, it was awesome. And then it stopped being awesome, so I stopped doing it. But because of that media background, because I am actually a formerly trained journalist, which I think is hilarious still to this day, it’s, for me, one of the marketing channels still that you can use to promote your MSP is your local media. Now, sure, when I was 19, back in 1995, I appreciate there’s people listening to this who probably weren’t alive in 1995, anyway, when I was starting as a journalist in 1995, your local newspaper, your local radio station, they had massive audiences. In fact, they controlled the eyeballs and the ears. If you wanted to reach people, decision makers, back in the nineties, you had to pay the magazines or the newspapers or the TV or the radio stations or some other the distribution, because all of the distribution was controlled by the media companies. And now, here in 2023, well, the distribution is in our hands. So we still have these newspapers and radio stations. There aren’t quite as many of them, they’re certainly not taking anywhere near the amount of money they used to take, and definitely aren’t making the amount of profit they used to make, but they are around. And what’s still good about local media is not distribution, its credibility. You see, if your local newspaper or your local radio station or TV station talks about you or mentions you in the context of technology or cybersecurity, this is amazing positioning, because even though they no longer have anywhere near the reach that they used to have, they still have the credibility. In our era, where anyone can publish anything at any time, the fact that you’ve got these 20, 30, 40, sometimes 50-year-old brands, the newspaper and the radio brands, still putting out content, they have huge amounts of credibility. So if you can get into your local newspaper, that’s a massive thing for you. Now, the easy way, well, not the easy way, but one of the ways to get featured by your local media is to send them a press release, also known as a media release. Why would you do this? And by the way, I’m about to give you two or three great ideas, specific ideas that you can use. Why would you send something out as a press release? Because actually, that’s how the vast majority of media gets its stories. People perceive that journalists are out there sniffing out stories, looking for things. And yes, there are still some journalists who are investigating or writing features, but certainly, nowadays now, there’s so much pressure on reporters, on writers to output tons of content, it’s just easier for them to use media releases. And they will look at the stream of media releases coming in and they will rewrite some of those, they will get people for interview off the back of those. They don’t necessarily tell you that they’re doing it, but it’s just an easy source of news. And to a certain extent, when you’re sending out a media release, a press release, you are playing the numbers game. When I worked in the media, we would get hundreds and hundreds of press releases a day, and you might get a press release once every month from the same company. And for the first four or five months, you might completely ignore it. And then suddenly, one day, a press release turns up from that company on a day where you have nothing to write about. And believe me, those days happen, they’re called slow news days. It’s where there just doesn’t seem to be anything new to write about. And then a press release turns up and it’s about cybercrime and it’s from a company that is local because they send out press releases on a regular basis. And there’s a little thing at the back of your brain, as the journalist, that says, “I think I could turn this into something,” because you’re, I’m not going to use you a desperate, but you’re very keen to generate new content. So here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to give you three specific headlines. So these are press releases that I have written in the past for members of my MSP Marketing Edge service. Every month we give our 700 members all around the world, we give them a specific press release with instructions, how to send it to their local media. And the whole point of that is, as I say, it’s to get the local media to write about you for credibility purposes. Once you’ve had something in the local newspaper or on their website, or ideally on the local radio station, you can take a copy of that, you can use that in other pieces of your marketing. You can say, “As seen in this newspaper,” or, “As heard on this radio station.” Subject to copyright laws, and there are different laws in different countries, you can take a copy of that, you can put it in your marketing materials, you can certainly link to their website or take a screenshot of their website and put that on your About Us page with a link to say, “Hey, we are in the so-and-so newspaper last week. Go and see us here.” That coverage is not going to get you a huge amount of tension, it’s certainly not going to win you new clients. Some of your existing clients may comment on it, they might say, “Oh, we saw you in so-and-so newspaper last week.” But the principal goal of this is credibility. It’s part of your domination. You’ve got to dominate your local market. And that’s a subject we’re going to be talking a…

Full show notes at the publisher

Episode 176: The MSP Marketing KPIs that matter Mar 28, 2023

Show notes

Episode 176 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 Retrain your reticular activating system and focus on the positives 08:01 The MSP Marketing KPIs that matter 17:42 How better communication and follow-up with leads and prospects can dramatically improve growth Featured guest: Thank you to business consultant Jon Weberg for joining me to talk about helping MSPs create a more enticing offer for their leads and prospects, and the importance of good communications and follow-ups in order to convert those leads and prospects into customers. Jon is an entrepreneur, author and business growth consultant, with more than a decade of experience working with over 2,000 entrepreneurs, companies, and businesses some with over $250 million in sales. Widely considered a leading profit, optimization, and scaling expert, Jon spends his time helping entrepreneurs grow their business hyper profitably and without outside capital. Connect with Jon on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonweberg/ 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/ Visit my Learning Hub, where you’ll find lots of resources, tips and ideas: http://mspmarketingedge.com/learning-hub/ 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 If you want to go back and learn about those ‘technical KPIs’ I mentioned, here’s the link: http://mspmarketingedge.com/podcast/episode169/ 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 mentioned Jim Rohn’s work, find out more about his ideas here: https://www.jimrohn.com/ Grab yourself a copy of this week’s recommended books, Attention Pays: How to Drive Profitability, Productivity and Accountability and Exactly What to Say: the Magic Words for Influence and Impact: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Attention-Pays-Profitability-Productivity-Accountability/dp/1119480256/ https://www.amazon.co.uk/Exactly-What-Say-Influence-Impact/dp/B077ZGFXQ4/ Transcription: Voiceover: Fresh every Tuesday for MSPs around the world. This is Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast. Paul Green: Welcome back, or if this is your first time listening to or watching the podcast, you’re going to love what we talk about here. Here’s what’s coming up in this week’s show. Jon Weberg: Hey, my name is Jon Weberg. I’m going to help you improve massively your follow-up plan to get a lot more customers and get a lot more of your current leads and prospects interested in actually wanting to buy from you because you’ve actually built a relationship with them. And I’m going to teach you how to give them pure value that will make them beg to work with you. Paul Green: And on top of that interview with Jon, at the end of this week’s episode, we’re also going to be talking about KPIs, the key performance indicators that matter the most. Voiceover: Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast. Paul Green: Now, I’ve got to start this first bit with a bit of a public information warning. In the next five minutes or so, you may make the decision to stop watching certain videos on YouTube. You may take the decision to stop reading specific websites. You may even make the decision in the next few minutes to cancel some of your friends. Let me explain why. In the next few minutes, I’m going to explain how your brain processes information and why, if you want to be a truly successful MSP owner, you’ve got to be very, very strict what you put in your brain. You see, we have this amazing piece of technology within our heads. I don’t just mean our brains, I mean inside our brains. We have something called the reticular activating system. Now, what this system does, let’s call it the RAS, the RAS, what it does is it acts as a sensory filter for us. Because if you think about the sheer amount of information that’s coming into our brains all the time, I don’t mean all your notifications and your emails and kind of the information from just work and life. I mean all of our sensory information. You think of all the things you’re touching, hearing, smelling, and seeing. Especially we get most of our sensory information through our eyes. Have I missed one there? Tasting, that one as well. All of that sensory information, if we had to physically, actively deal with it, we literally wouldn’t have any time to live our lives, would we? If you think just how much information is coming in all the time. So I guess over thousands of years, our brain developed a mechanism to filter all of our sensory information for us. This is the RAS, the reticular activating system, which by the way does have some other functions as well, but I’m primarily looking at this one. ,You see the RAS acts as a relevance filter. It will determine whether or not a piece of information is relevant to you and whether or not it should pass on that information to your active conscious brain. This is why you can, for example, drive to a brand new city somewhere you’ve not been to before. And within minutes of entering that city, you’ll spot an advert or a van or a sign somewhere for another IT support company, because your RAS, it understands that IT support is really important to you. And so it’s flagging it up and it’s alerting you. It’s telling your conscious brain, “Over there. There’s something about IT support.” What it’s not doing is telling you about that dentist’s office that you just drove past. It’s not telling you about that lawyer’s office. It’s not alerting you to that advert for a new moisturizer because none of these things are of interest to you. They are not relevant to you, so you don’t perceive them. So you’re kind of clear on how that works? It’s a very, very basic thing and we don’t really have a direct control over it other than the things that we are interested in. Our brain’s a bit like an algorithm, really, isn’t it? Like a social media algorithm. The more you consume of something, the greater the programming it has on your reticular activating system. Right at the beginning I said that you may make a decision to stop reading certain websites or watching videos or even fire a friend. Can you see the link I’m about to make between what I’ve just told you and those people? You see, if you hang out with negative people, if you read bad news, and let’s be honest, there’s a lot of bad news around at the moment, isn’t there, about the economy and just general bad news. If you watch negative videos on YouTube, things that feed your brain, this is the message that your reticular activating system is getting. In fact, there is an American motivational speaker, an entrepreneur called Jim Rohn. Go and look his stuff up because his stuff is excellent, very positive stuff. And he once said that you are the sum total of the five people you spend the most time with. Now you think about that. Who are the five people that you spend the most time with? What are the video channels or the TV channels that you spend the most time watching? What are the websites and the blogs that you spend the most time consuming? These things are programming your reticular activating system. If you constantly read negative news, then you will perceive more and more negative news because you’re programming your reticular activating system to go out and look for it. And I know there’s plenty of negative news out there because that’s what sells news. That’s what sells eyeballs. I was a journalist and a radio presenter for 10 years back in the day, and it’s something you learn on day three at journalism school is that bad news sells more newspapers. People are more inclined to consume bad news than they are good news, which is another psychological reason because basically we’re programmed to look out for danger, so we see bad news as danger. But you and me as ambitious business owners, we don’t have and we shouldn’t have the headspace for negativity. Of course, we’ve got to be aware of things that are happening, but just to be aware of them doesn’t mean that we need to consume a ton of negative stuff. We don’t have to throw ourselves into the sea of negativity when actually there’s so much good news out there. I mean, take your choice of business. You’re running an MSP. It’s one of the best business models in the world and one of the most recession proof industries in the world where change is so constant. There’s nothing but opportunity all the time. And I know a tiny number of MSPs fail and just can’t make it, but that’s a tiny number. There aren’t many business sectors where you can be really bad at marketing, really bad at growing your business, but so long as the technical work is okay, you’ll win some clients and you’ll keep those clients for a very long time. That doesn’t happen anywhere else. This is the kind of positivity I mean. If you want to be a truly, truly successful business owner, you’ve got to feed your relevance filter with the right stuff, positive stuff. It’s the only way is to fill your mind with positive stuff. Let me give myself a very quick, early free plug for something else that can help you. I have a YouTube channel which is full of positive content. It’s all highly entertaining stuff about how to grow and market your MSP. That’s one of the channels you should be spending more time on. In fact, go and subscribe to it and hit the bell notification thing so that you get notifications when I release new videos. And that’s at youtube.com/mspmarketing. No negative stuff guaranteed. Voiceover: Here’s this week’s clever idea. Paul Green: Let’s talk about KPIs, key performance indicators. And I have five marketing KPIs to give to you. Now, far too many MSPs in my view discover KPIs one day and go, “Ooh, look, I’ve got a new cool dashboard in my PSA.” Or they’ll go and get an app and realize they can use APIs to drive KPIs. That kind of rhymes, doesn’t it? APIs to use the KPIs into the dashboard and suddenly they’re tracking like 50 or 60 different KPIs. For me, doing KPIs properly means actually having the smallest number of KPIs that you can. Just because you can track a thousand different figures doesn’t mean that you should track a thousand different figures. And I try not to talk too much about technical KPIs. I’m not a technical person. We don’t really do technical stuff on this podcast, although as an aside, if you go back to episode 169, we had on Jason Kemsley from Uptime Solutions who did give some technical KPIs. It was how many tickets each line of technicians should be able to process, and also the average number of tickets you should get for each user that you are supporting. So go back to episode 169 for those technical KPIs. But here I just want to focus on marketing KPIs. Let me tell you the five most important marketing KPIs in my opinion. The first of them is the number of leads that you generate. Now I need to just explain exactly what I mean by a lead and sort of where it fits into the sales funnel. So I see a lead as anyone who is in your audiences. And let me just remind you, maybe you’ve never heard this before, of the three-step marketing strategy that I recommend for all MSPs because that explains what audiences are. So the first step of the strategy is to build multiple audiences of people to listen to you. Typically, for an MSP, that’s your LinkedIn connections, your LinkedIn newsletter subscribers, and your email database. The second step is to then build a relationship with them, which you do through content marketing. And the third step is then to commercialize that relationship. So we go back up to that first step of building multiple audiences. All those people you’re connected to on LinkedIn, all those people who are subscribed to your emails, they are all leads. And the goal should be to have thousands of them. You want as many leads as you can possibly get. Well, as many of the right kind of people, you don’t just want numbers for the sake of it, but people who could go on to become prospects and clients, you want as many of those as possible. Now, if you do start a KPI tracking this, the temptation is to track a number of emails and the number of LinkedIn connections and the number of Twitter followers or whatever you’re doing. I would just bundle them all in and just call them leads. And I know there’s going to be some crosspollination. You will get someone who is on your email database and they connected you on LinkedIn and they follow you on Twitter. You could sit there and drive yourself crazy trying to de-dupe it. Or you could just simply just throw these numbers all together and say, how many leads did we generate this week? This week, adding up seven new followers here, five new connections there, and three joined the email list, blah, blah, blah, blah. Great, we got 15 new leads this week. That’s a key figure to track. And it directly leads on to the next statistic, which is how many of those people turn into prospects. So in the sales funnel, you have leads, you have prospects, then you have opportunities, and then you have clients. So leads is, as we say, all those people in the audiences. Prospects is when someone starts a one-to-one conversation with you. So essentially they have inquired in some way or you’ve picked up an inquiry with them. And the strategy under the three-step marketing strategy that I recommend, my recommendation is always that your first step is actually of someone going from being a lead to being a prospect, is having a 15-minute video call with you. That’s a great first step for everyone, because actually it’s a low risk. It’s 15 minutes for them, 15 minutes for you. People will give up 15 minutes for a video call to explore something. Of course, the real purpose of that 15 minute call is for you to, A, qualify this person and see if they are a good opportunity or whether they’re potentially a time waster, and B, to get them engaged with you by talking about their favorite subject. And their favorite subject is themselves and their business. So first KPI to track then was the number of leads. The second KPI to track is the number of prospects, and that would typically be shown by the number of new people who’ve had their first Zoom with you or their first Teams call or whatever video call they have with you. Zoom is better though, just my opinion. How many people, how many of my leads have had their first prospect call? So if you have a second or a third or a fourth video call with someone, that doesn’t count, that’s not a useful KPI. What you want to know is how many of the leads have turned into prospects. And so for the average MSP, on a weekly basis, it’s going to be somewhere between zero to one. If you’re doing more than one or two introductory video calls with someone a week where essentially you’re ascertaining if the thing they think they want to buy or the conversation they want to have is actually an opportunity, then you’re doing well because most MSPs or some MSPs can go weeks and weeks without having those conv…

Full show notes at the publisher

Episode 175: MSPs: Remove all friction from your sales Mar 21, 2023

Show notes

Episode 175 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 Harnessing the power of your unconscious mind 09:19 Remove all friction from your sales 17:09 How a well-designed ‘welcome sequence’ can dramatically improve your email marketing results Featured guest: Thank you to Jeff Felten, The Welcome Sequences Guy, for joining me to talk about how welcome sequences can help you get the most out of your email marketing, and convert more prospects and leads into customers. Jeff is an email marketing strategist and copywriter who helps service-based business owners hustle less for leads and build armies of loyal fans. Since 2018, Jeff has written thousands of marketing emails and helped clients drive more than $100k in email revenue. Connect with Jeff on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeff-felten/ 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 my YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/mspmarketing Subscribe to the MSP Marketing Action Monthly magazine: http://mspmarketingedge.com/action/ 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, Rich Dad Poor Dad: What the Rich Teach Their Kids About Money That the Poor and Middle Class Do Not!: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Rich-Dad-Poor-Teach-Middle/dp/1612681131/ Transcription: Speaker 1: Fresh every Tuesday. For MSPs around the world. Around the world. This is Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast. Podcast. Paul: Hey there, welcome to the show. This is episode 175, and here’s what we got coming up for you this week. Jeff: Hey there, I’m Jeff Felton from contentremedy.co. I will be on the show to talk about email marketing, most specifically lead magnets and welcome sequences, and how an effective lead magnet and welcome sequence can help you turn more prospects into leads, nurture relationships better, and get more sales from email marketing. Paul: So as well as that interview with Jeff, which is going to be towards the end of the podcast, we’re going to be talking about your sales. How can you improve your sales by removing as much of the friction as possible? Speaker 1: Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast. Paul: Let’s start this week by me asking you a direct question. What’s the house that you most want to own? What’s the car that you want to drive? What’s the holiday, the vacation that you most want to be on right now rather than be sat in your car or on the golf course or probably sat in the office, whatever it is you are doing? The more that you can get clear in your head exactly what these things are, and the more that you can capture that in a way which really motivates and communicates with your brain that you most want this thing, the more likely you are to actually get it. Let me go back a step. What I’m really talking about here is vision boards. And wait, wait, don’t go anywhere. I know this is slightly hippie territory here. The idea that just having a vision board of things that you want will make it happen. I don’t believe that at all. I think of a vision board as programming for the subconscious, the unconscious part of your brain. So I’ve been using vision boards for years and I have one. In fact, I don’t actually have a board. I have it in a book that I read every morning. It’s got in there my goals. So every day I’m reading my current goals, but I also have pictures there of future things that I want and I do… I’ll tell you why I believe in the vision board so much and it’s programming abilities, because right now, the house that I am recording this in is in the specific part of the very specific village that I have wanted to live in for years. And years and years and years ago, it must be getting on for 10 years ago, we looked at buying a house here. And at that time, 10 years ago, we couldn’t quite afford it. ‘Cause this is quite a nice village on the edge of Milton Keynes here in the UK. And there’s a very specific part of that village that I wanted to live in, which is where we live now. So I went on to Rightmove 10 years ago and just pulled up a house. It wasn’t this house or anything like this, but it was a house for sale in the specific part of the specific village. And I put that on my vision board. And forgot it. It was in front of me for years and years and years, but I forgot the details of it. I certainly wasn’t thinking, [inaudible 00:03:00]. It wasn’t an active thing. It was just there in front of me. And then when we moved house, it was March, 2020. We moved in just before the lockdown, the very first lockdown happened. And I mean, literally like a week before, which was very good timing. But I bought this house and found this house. And the houses don’t come up very often in this past of the village. But it was almost like the timing was right. I put my old house up for sale and I started actively with a vengeance, looking for a new house and was drawn to this particular house and absolutely fell in love with it, and it’s been a great place for us to live. So what was important from that is that I had this desire to live in a very specific place, and it needed to be a specific kind of house as well. We have got the gravel driveway. It’s not the longest gravel driveway in the world, but there’s a gravel driveway, which is nice. And it has a very nice long garden and there’s lots of open countryside around. And we’re on the edge of the woods and there’s wildlife and birds and badgers and all that sort of stuff. And that’s the kind of thing that I wanted. I wanted a home in the country, but also that was actually quite near to town. And we’re 15 minutes away from the center of Milton Keynes city, which is great. So this was on my vision board for years and years and years, and I wasn’t actively working towards this. It’s not like I got up every morning and I’m like, “Right, what’s it going to take to get this house?” I just knew that it would be important to me in the future. The same as right now, one of the things that’s on my vision board is a villa in Portugal. And again, it’s a very specific villa because I could probably buy a villa in Portugal now. It just, it might not be a very nice villa or not in a very nice part of Portugal. The villa that’s on my vision board has a big pool, an external pool. It’s kind of modern and sexy looking. There’s plenty of spare rooms for my friends to come out. And I can see me sitting by the pool having a barbecue, drinking an nice glass of wine, socializing with friends. And that’s not for now. That’s sort of the next step. But that’s on my vision board now. And in fact, it’s actually, as I say that, I realize I haven’t actively thought about that for some time. But I see the picture of it every single morning. The power of the vision board is not to talk to the conscious mind that’s thinking about things that’s listening to this right now. The power of the vision board is to speak to the unconscious mind, the one that guides us in a big sense that we as humans don’t really understand. We don’t really understand deep values and deep motivations. We know when we’ve gone against them. When you’ve done something that goes against your values or goes away from the lifestyle that you want to lead, that it feels uneasy, doesn’t it, inside? As humans, we don’t really understand the mechanics of how that works, but we don’t need to understand it to game it, to leverage you. If you want to live in a house with a gravel drive and badgers running across your lawn… Actually they’re quite destructive. You might not want to do that, but you get the idea. If you want to drive a Maserati, if you want to fly planes or helicopters and you want that to be your hobby, you have to put it on your vision board because it is you, the conscious you, telling your unconscious self, “This is something that’s important to me. Please, in the long term, guide me towards this.” I figured out a long time ago, and I’m sure you figured this out as well, is that we have a greater problem solving capacity when we’re asleep than when we are awake. Now, don’t get me wrong. We’re very good at solving problems when we’re awake, especially you. You are a problem solving machine, my friend. That’s what you do for a living. You’re much better at it than I am because you do it all day every day, and you’re very good at it. But both of us, when we’re asleep, we are so much better at solving problems. Because when we’re asleep, we actually gain access to parts of our brain that can’t be used for problem solving during the day. Maybe they’re needed for breathing or not stepping in front of a taxi or something like that. When we’re asleep and we’re off in the land of Nod, there are different parts of our brain that suddenly throw themselves at problem solving. Now you may not have known this, but you’ll know the effect of it, which is you feel like your best ideas come to you first thing in the morning. Perhaps when you’re in the shower or you’re working out or going for your walk or your first coffee or whatever. You’ve often thought, “Oh, I get my best ideas in the morning.” No, you don’t get your best ideas in the morning. What happens in the morning is you’re delivered the results of all the work your unconscious mind was doing all night long. It’s been problem solving and working towards things all night long and it delivers that to you. It’s why if you are stuck on a big problem, the best thing you can do is actually load the problem into your brain before bed, go to bed, read for half an hour just to chill out so you’re not obsessed by that problem and it doesn’t keep you awake and let your subconscious just figure out the answer to the problem overnight. And then in the morning, if there is an answer, it’ll be delivered to you. If there isn’t an answer, it won’t be delivered to you. It’s as simple as that. This is what we want to harness and leverage in the long term. And I know it’s a bit hippy, and I fought this myself some years ago. But a number of different things have come true, have gone in that direction because of the vision board. As I said at the beginning, I don’t believe that whole law of attraction thing. You may have heard about this. There was a book about it. What was it called? Well, there’ve been many, many books about it. Think and Grow Rich, which is the original Napoleon Hill book, is kind of about the law of attraction. And then about 20 years ago, there was a very popular book. I did buy it. And I’m looking at my bookshelves now to see if I can see it. But I can’t remember what it was called. The Secret, that was it. It was called The Secret. Absolute Nonsense. That whole idea of the law of attraction, that just if you think about something, you’ll attract it. I think the law of attraction is nonsense. All you’re doing when you’re thinking about something and working towards something is you’re programming yourself to move in that direction. You’ve got to do the work. If you want the gravel drive house with five bedrooms and a Maserati on the drive, then the business needs to pay for that lifestyle. So you’ve got to do the work to get there. But having that on your vision board for a number of years, make sure that you program your subconscious mind to go in the right direction. Do you have a vision board? Are you willing to share it with us? This is the kind of thing that we call in our MSP Marketing Facebook group. If you’re not yet a member, just go into Facebook, type MSP Marketing in the search bar, go to groups and join us there. It’s only MSPs there. You’ll be joining around about 1900 other MSPs. It’ll be delight to see you in there and also for you to share your vision boards with us. Speaker 1: Here’s this week’s clever idea. Paul: Right. Gather round. We are going to have a physics lesson right now presented by the least scientific person on the podcast. Science wasn’t really my thing at school. I enjoyed English more, and history. That was about it actually. Physics and biology and chemistry, all of that stuff just left me a little bit cold. But I still retain some of my memories from school, particularly about friction, when it came to physics. I understood that friction was that the thing that stopped perpetual motion from happening. So in theory, if you push something, it would just keep going forever, I seem to remember, but for the fact that friction slows it down. And friction slows everything down. Now let me flip that into a sales and marketing thing, because friction damages your sales. In fact, it slows your sales down. What’s friction? Well it’s anything that slows down your potential customer from becoming a client of yours. And there are dozens and dozens of places where you could potentially have friction. For example, they go on your website and it’s not utterly obvious to them what the next step is. Perhaps your phone number is hidden away, or actually it’s 2023. Who wants to phone these days? There’s no live chat or your live calendar isn’t there. In fact, your live calendar is the perfect frictionless call to action on the website. It’s frictionless because they can go and book a 15 minute video call with you at a point that is convenient for them. And of course, because you control your calendar, it’s convenient for you as well. So a live calendar is a frictionless call to action. Most other call to actions, sending an email, phoning and certainly filling in a web form. No one likes filling in a web form because you always have that doubt at the back of your mind of, has it actually gone through? They never really know. So all of those are friction. What about if someone did phone up your business today? Is there friction in that? Well, it depends. If the friction is, “Good afternoon, Badger IT. How can I help you?” There’s no friction there. Whereas if the friction is your 19 year old first line tech picking up the phone and going, “Badger IT,” Immediately there’s friction. Because anytime someone gets that kind of greeting on the phone, their heart just sinks down to their feet and they think, “I don’t know if I can be bothered with this.” Because trying to explain to the 19 year old who has minimal verbal communication skills that you want to talk to someone about possibly taking you on as the IT partner. It’s friction. Anytime there’s friction, we’re less likely to go through with it. What about actually physically talking to someone? If I phone into a business or live chat or something like that, I want someone now. And we’ve talked previously on this podcast about how it’s not these days about big beating small. It’s about fast beating slow. You’ve got to be fast. If you’re slow, that’s friction. If you’re not there today and you’re not calling back within an hour, that’s friction. If they want to meet next week and you’re on vacation, you can’t do that. But there’s no one that can go in your place… Becau…

Full show notes at the publisher

Episode 174: Should MSPs do lunch & learns? Mar 14, 2023

Show notes

Episode 174 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 Building strategic partnerships within your vertical to promote growth 11:12 Should MSPs do lunch & learns? 20:43 How a servant leader management approach can empower your team to success Featured guest: Thank you to Dan Albaum, Marketing Leader and Author of ‘The Impact Makers’, for joining me to talk about leadership and the ‘servant leader mindset’. With nearly 30 years of B2B marketing experience at leading companies including Verizon Wireless, Cisco, Honeywell and Amer Sports, Dan excels in helping companies develop the right strategies, programs, metrics and processes for Go-To-Market excellence. From integrated demand generation campaigns to new product launch planning to scalable channel marketing to generating quality market insights for fully leveraging brand power, Dan brings his highly collaborative approach in helping client companies meet their business objectives. Connect with Dan on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danalbaum/ 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/ I mentioned these ‘Ultimate Marketing Strategy for MSPs’ special episodes I recorded earlier this year: http://mspmarketingedge.com/podcast/episode163/ http://mspmarketingedge.com/podcast/episode164/ http://mspmarketingedge.com/podcast/episode165/ 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 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, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Good-Great-Jim-Collins/dp/0712676090/ Transcription: Voiceover: Fresh every Tuesday, for MSPs around the world. This is Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast. Paul Green: Good day to the, and welcome back to the podcast. Here’s what we got coming up for you this week. Dan Albaum: Hi, I’m Dan Albaum. I’m marketing leader and author of The Impact Makers: Voices of Leadership. And I’ll be sharing with you some of the key learnings from the book about how global exceptional leaders drive improved performance based on a servant leader mindset. Paul Green: So on top of that great interview with Dan, we’re also going to be talking about the value of lunch and learns. Are they still a great way to warm up prospects and turn them into clients? Voiceover: Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast. Paul Green: I thought we’d start this week by talking about an advanced marketing strategy, something that you can only really start to focus on and concentrate your efforts on if you’ve already got the basics in place. What do I consider to be the basics? Well, you’ve got your fundamentals. So things like getting your website as good as it can possibly be, getting your LinkedIn as good as it could be, those are your kind of your two basic MSP fundamentals. But then you’ve got some other basics to do as well. So getting a good lead generation system put into place where you’ve got the ability to generate leads, build audiences, build a relationship with those audiences, and ultimately commercialize them. And all of the information on how to do that, it’s scattered across a whole load of podcasts. In fact, if you go back to, I think it was the end of last year, I think it was the end of last year, it might be in the beginning of this year where I actually did a whole series of specials about that, about the ultimate marketing strategy for MSPs. But you’ll find that’s on our podcast page. But today, what I mean by advanced marketing is putting in place new things which are going to give you sort of huge advantages going forward. But often, as is the case with a lot of advanced stuff, it takes quite a lot of resource to do and it takes quite a lot of effort and you often have to wait for the payback. Now the advanced marketing strategy method that I want to talk about today is building core partnerships within the marketplace you operate. What do I mean by a partnership? I mean you find the important people or the important organizations at the center of your audiences, at the center of the people who you most want to reach, that you most want to do business with, and you find some way, any way to form a strategic partnership with them. Now, let me give you an example. So this is a real life example from one of the MSPs I work closely with. It’s within a vertical, within the niche, and I’m going to change the vertical because I don’t want to give the game away of what my client, and in fact, someone who’s become a friend of mine is doing with his marketing. So I’m going to give it a different niche. We’ll say CPAs, accountants, chartered … What’s that? What does CPA stand for? Is it chartered professional accountants? Something like that. Here in the UK we just call them accountants, but I’m conscious they’re called CPAs in many other countries. So let’s say it’s CPAs and let’s say you are in a specific area or a state or a city and you want to get more CPAs. In fact, you’ve decided that CPAs are the future for your business. So you’ve still got your general business, but you’ve got two, three, four, five CPAs that you work with and you want 10, 20, 30 more. This, by the way, is a great strategy in itself, keeping your general business that got you from where you started a few years ago to sort of where you are now, but actually deciding that going forward you want to focus in just on a vertical or on a niche, on a niche. This is a very smart thing to do and what a lot of MSPs do around about 10 to 15 years in. So let’s say it’s CPAs. Let’s say it’s CPAs within 100 mile radius and let’s say there’s more than enough of them because you only want 20 or 30 more of them and you are happy with that. That would be a good stop point for you. What can you do to reach those people? Well, a lot of the basic marketing tactics I was talking about at the beginning you can do, so building audiences of CPAs and building a relationship with them and commercializing that relationship, which is often done by the phone. And having a website that’s focused on CPAs and a LinkedIn that’s focused on CPAs. All of those things are, as I say, they’re basics to do. The advanced stuff comes from building partnerships then with people that they consider to be important. Who do CPAs consider to be important? Well, we could kind of have a guess at this, even if we don’t really understand how CPAs work. First of all, their regulators. In fact their regulators are top of the important scale ’cause their regulators have the ability to find them, to put them out of business and they probably have to be registered with some organizations or do some CPD or something in some way. So often, even though they’re a pain, regulators sort of sit at the top of the important scale. Who are the other people that are important to them? Well, there will be industry bodies, industry associations. There’ll be some that they have to be a member of maybe, and then there’ll be others that they choose to be a member of because they find them quite useful. Then there will be other organizations within their world. For example, there might be someone like me doing marketing for accountants. Can you imagine anything more boring? Yeah, accounting, not accounting, marketing for lawyers that would be more boring than marketing for accountants. Anyway, but there might be someone like me, like coaching accountants, helping them to grow their business. Just add up the figures. There’s all sorts of people that within their sort of biosphere, because you are in the channel biosphere, in the MSP biosphere and they’re in the CPA biosphere and there will be a whole series of people in there. So the challenge for you is to go and meet with those people, if you can, and slowly over time build some organic relationships and become more and more and more important to them. For example, you might, let’s take one of those or let’s take the guy that does marketing for accountants. What does that guy want? So what does anyone want? They want more new business. He will want more new clients. He will want to sell more to his existing clients, which is your in, and he will want to get his existing clients to buy more every single time they buy from him because those are the only three ways to grow a business. And if he’s good at marketing for accountants, he’ll understand that. So you could seek out this person. You could offer him something to help. For example, you could say, “Hey, I work with accountants in the same area as you. You and I have the same clients, but we’re not in competition with each other. What could I do to help you? What could I do to make your life easier?” And what you’re looking to do is you’re looking to build some value quickly and early on for this person. So it would make sense to go with someone like this, someone that’s got a more commercial offering early on and you build some value for them. Now that would be a conversation that you would have with them. For example, you might have something that they can sell to their clients or you might have information or advice or something of huge value that they can pass on to their members or something like that. You don’t really know until you have the conversation. And you may have to have two or three conversations. You may have to meet up for lunch or for coffee, but that’s the point. This requires an investment in time and in resource, and there’s no fast way of doing it because the whole point here is to build a solid relationship with someone. But at some point there’s going to be something you can help them with and that’s where this really becomes quite exciting and the power comes into it from your point of view. You can do something for them. They, as part of that, expose you to the accountants, to the CPAs that they are working with. And that is what you want. Because suddenly now you have a strategic partnership with them. And you may try and do something back the other way. That’s the smart play, is where they rely on you for something and you rely on them for something. This is coming towards being a real strategic partnership. And at that point they’re telling their clients about you. You’re telling your CPA clients about them. And that’s the kind of thing that could go on for a number of years. You could speak at each other’s events. You could back each other up. You could form parts of groups. It might be that if they had meetings that you go along to meetings and you talk about technology for CPAs, you don’t get paid for any of this. But what you are getting to do is you get to be the authority in the room or the authority on the webinar in front of exactly the kind of people that you want to reach. And that is beautiful. Now, once you’ve done those sort of commercial relationships, because those are the easiest ones to start, what you’re looking to move up to, you’re kind of moving up to where the regulator at the top is the ultimate destination. So along the way you were trying to do the same thing with some associations or some memberships or the insurance companies that look after them. You look at everyone, their whole biosphere, who’s around and who can we build a relationship with? And you won’t be able to do it with everyone. Some of them will be closed shops, literally their arms are folded, they don’t want to know you, they’re not interested. It might be some kind of old boys club or something like that. You just have to kind of see how it goes. But as I said, one of the MSPs I’m working closely with, in his vertical, he has managed to work his way up into the regulator. And it’s been about three years work. He’s done so much work. So he’s been to all the trade shows. He’s a speaker. He’s an exhibitor. He writes endlessly. He markets endlessly. His job is not delivering the tech in the business. He has great staff to do that for him. His job is being the face of the business and building partnerships and all the other things that are important. And over a period of time he’s worked his way into the regulator where now they’re working together on a project about the future of technology in that vertical, which is beautiful. And it was a little bit of being in the right place and the right vertical at the right time. So luck, absolutely, well, luck, great timing, which is luck, great timing, played a part in that. But he was there and he was ready. And he was very open to we are going to build strategic partnerships because now he is the number one go-to technology partner in his vertical. And you could throw another 20 MSPs into that vertical and they will struggle to catch up because of the headstart that he’s gotten. We are talking in three years, I would say he’s done 10 years worth of work. It’s very, very impressive. And if he’s listening to this, I’m sure you’ll know I’m talking about you and I’m genuinely not gobsmacked is the right word, but proud of what you’ve done because you’ve done an incredible amount of work in three years. But anyone can do it. It might take you more than three years. You can do it. You’ve got to put those strategic partnerships together. So some actions from this bit for you. Number one is if you don’t have a vertical or a niche or a niche, please do think about it. The easiest place to start is who are you already working with? If you have two or three of them, you are already in a vertical. You just have to have a marketing mindset to expand that vertical. The second thing then is if you are there, what strategic partnerships can you build? Who’s important to you? Who are the big authority figures that your potential future clients are already listening to? And what’s in it for them to have a decent in-depth conversation with you? There’s an idea that’s been around for years, and years and years, and I think COVID killed it. And I’m not quite sure if it’s come back or not, but if it hasn’t come back, if you are not doing this, embracing this idea, then there’s an opportunity for you here. What’s the idea? It’s the lunch and learn. It’s simply getting a small number of prospects into a room. You give them some lunch and you teach them some stuff they didn’t know before. Preferably you don’t just teach them, you don’t just educate them, you also entertain them, which is of course edutainment. The concept of getting people in a room, even if it’s just for 60 to 90 minutes and embracing them, involving them into your world and positioning yourself as that authority figure, which we were just talking about, it’s so, so powerful. In fact, it’s one of the most powerful things that you can do. 60 minutes or 90 minutes spent with someone in a room can jump your relationship forward by a factor of X. It’s such a dramatic thing to do. And yet so few MSPs are doing this. Now, so few were doing it before the lockdown in 2020 ended, a…

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Episode 173: AI in real life: How this MSP uses it Mar 07, 2023

Show notes

Episode 173 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 paying your (small) suppliers faster makes business sense 07:09 The Six Steps from ‘suspect’ to ‘loyal customer’ 18:01 How this MSP uses AI in real life Featured guest: Thank you to Trenton Schuttler of Net Guardians for joining me to talk about how his use of generative AI has transformed his MSP. A self-confessed tech nerd, Trenton worked in a variety of industries including Medical, Dental, Legal, Production, Manufacturing, even large scale bakery automation, before founding Net Guardians to help people, businesses, organisations, leaders and teams across the world, overcome their challenges and find new innovating ways to integrate the latest technology to help them Grow, Scale, and Succeed like never before. Connect with Trenton on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/trenton-schuttler/ 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 the MSP Marketing Action Monthly magazine: http://mspmarketingedge.com/action/ Trenton and I discussed Chat GPT-3 and Jasper, I’d definitely recommend checking those out Find out about my MSP Marketing Edge service: https://www.mspmarketingedge.com Subscribe to my YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/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 Grab yourself a copy of this week’s recommended book, Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Purple-Cow-Transform-Business-Remarkable/dp/014101640X/ Transcription: voiceover: Fresh every Tuesday, for MSPs around the world, this is Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast. Paul Green: Hello and welcome to episode 173 of the show. Here’s what we’ve got coming up for you this week. Trenton Schuttler: Hey, my name is Trenton Schuttler. I use generative AI with my team every day. It lets us truly unlock the power to transform my MSP, and on this upcoming podcast, how you can use it to really unleash the power within. Paul Green: And as well as that interview later on in the show talking about AI, we are talking about the six stages that clients go through from where they’re a suspect with their arms folded and they don’t know you, all the way through to being a very, very happy bonded client. How do you move them faster through that process? We’ll talk about it later on in the show. voiceover: Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast. Paul Green: What I’m about to say in the next few minutes, you might think I’ve lost the plot. You might think I’ve gone completely insane in the membrane. But no, I haven’t at all. I’m going to suggest that you pay some of your suppliers faster, that if they offer you 30 days, you pay them in three days. Now that may go against every piece of business advice that you’ve ever been given. However, I have a good reason for saying this, and I could have put some context on first. You should only do what I’m about to suggest if cash is not an issue for you. So if you’ve got plenty of monthly recurring revenue, and in fact, your costs are covered on the first of every month by your MRR that’s coming in, this is for you. Whereas if you’re still at a stage where cash is a bit of a struggle, and you do have some difficult months and particularly months where you perhaps don’t guarantee, you can’t guarantee, that you personally are going to be paid, then this isn’t quite for you yet. But why would I suggest that you pay suppliers faster? Well, let me first of all define which suppliers you pay it faster. We all have big suppliers and little suppliers. So big suppliers are those massive companies that the super companies that all MSPs have to deal with in some way. Whether they’re happy about it or not, I don’t necessarily think you should pay them any faster. So if they offer you 30-day terms, you should pay them on 30 days. In fact, that helps them with their cash flow forecasting. I’m sure it does. You should, as a matter of default, always be asking your big vendor partners for better payment terms. If you buy two or three products from the same partner, and if you can get hold of this week’s account manager, you can say to them, “Hey, I’m on 30 days. How could we push me back to a 50-day payment terms?” I truly believe, the big companies, your job is to slow down the cash. Always pay them on time, of course. You should always pay your bills on time, but you should slow down that cash. No, the suppliers that I’m talking about that you should pay faster are your smaller suppliers. For example, let’s say your landlord. Let’s say you rent some premises and your landlord isn’t some faceless corporation. It’s a guy or it’s a woman who lives down the street who pops in now and again, you should pay them perhaps a little bit faster than you would pay everyone else. Maybe you’d pay them early. Maybe you’ve got other local suppliers. Maybe there are other local businesses that you do business with. I think, when you’re dealing with smaller businesses, you should always pay as fast as you can. Well, it’s a kind of a reputation for me, but I’ve had a reputation for a number of years, both in this business and the previous business, for, if you put in an invoice today, I’ll pay that today or tomorrow, regardless of the date that’s on it. And as I say, I don’t do this with the big companies. They get paid on the day that it’s due. But anyone else, so anyone who works with me in any capacity, any capacity at all, who is it’s a person or it’s a small business or I know them, I will always pay them faster. Now, you could say, “Paul, that’s crazy. Surely, the cash is better in your bank than it is in their bank.” And that’s the case with the bigger businesses. Yes, the faceless businesses where an accounts clerk is the only one who notices that you’ve paid. When it’s a small business, when for them potentially, every penny is important, I think the reputation that you build up by being a fast reliable payer can go such a long way. In fact, you can build lifelong partnerships and genuine partnerships. We throw around these word partnerships in the channel like it’s an easy thing. It’s not at all. A partnership comes from trust, and trust comes from action. You build trust or you lose trust based on your actions. I’ll give you an example of when this was incredibly useful for me. So about two years before I sold my last business, so this is around about 2014, but I mean, that’s nine years ago, we had a massive cash flow crunch. We had a couple of months where, I can’t remember what it was. I think we’d over recruited and sales dipped. I saw it coming and it was horrendous. Ah, this was just after I couldn’t pay my stuff. That’s right. You may have heard this story before. I was at a Christmas party. In fact, I was in the Premier Inn hotel room where all my staff were out drinking, having beers, texting me, saying, “Where are you? We’re having fun.” And I was desperately trying to scrape together enough money to pay them the next day. And that was kind of the start of this. And we just didn’t have enough money to get through the next month. We actually sold our way out of that crisis. By that, I mean, we just buckled down and sold and sold and sold and sold. But for three months, I needed to do everything I could to stop cash going out. And that was where I could ring people like Steve, my designer, and… I forget the names of the other people, but there were lots of regular folk who did stuff for us. And I rang them all and said, “Hey, you know how I always pay your invoice the day that it comes in. I’m going to be honest with you, cash is really tight right now. How would you feel if I took 60 or 90 days to pay your invoices? I will pay them. I will prioritize paying you above anyone else. But how would you feel about giving me temporarily 60, 90 days to do that?” And every single one of them said, “Absolutely. Of course, we can.” And of course, I paid them as soon as I could. In fact, I was able to pay them earlier than I thought I would be and we got back onto track. And of course, as soon as I could, I put them straight back onto immediate payments. Now why would they all do that to me? I mean, maybe you could argue partly that was them protecting their business and protecting a key client of theirs. Or maybe it was just the fact we’d built up trust, because for years, I’d paid their bills the day that they had put the invoice in. So it’s maybe just worth something having a look at. If you’ve got a finance person in your business, or if you pay the bills yourself, maybe you could categorize them by big evil faceless corporations where no one cares if I pay early, so let’s ask for longer terms, versus lovely, friendly, smaller business, it makes a big difference to someone if I pay my bills on time. In fact, maybe it gives us not just that partnership, but it gives us some kind of leverage. Maybe we become a more important client to them because they can trust us to pay on time every single month. voiceover: Here’s this week’s clever idea. Paul Green: You might not have realized this, but when someone goes from a Google search to being a client of yours for the 10th year running, there are actually six distinct stages that they go through along the way. And I’m going to tell you what those six stages are today. Now this is very much a simplification of a sales funnel. Sales funnels are actually deeply complex. There’s actually tremendously more stages than six. There’s all sorts of nuances and things in there, but my job, I believe, is to simplify all concepts down, all marketing and sales concepts down, so they’re easy for you to understand, and so you know what action you need to take at what stage. So let’s talk about what I believe are the six stages that people go through. The first stage is where they are a suspect. So this is the point where, let’s say they’re a business owner or a manager and they are looking for a new MSP. They’ve reached that point where their dissatisfaction with their incumbent MSP is high enough that they’re willing to go through the high level of pain to switch to someone else, because of course, these people, they don’t know what they don’t know, and therefore, they didn’t really understand technology, the difference between MSPs, and they are more likely to stick with, well, better the devil you know. But there does come a point where the pain of staying is so high, in fact it’s higher than the pain of actually moving. And that’s the point they start Googling. It’s the point they start asking their friends, “Who do you use for your IT support?” And just generally being aware of who is around them. At this stage, we call them a suspect. They’ve got their arms folded. They’re deliberately scowling when they’re Googling because they don’t trust anyone because they don’t know anyone. Like I was just saying about paying people faster, trust builds up over time. You cannot force someone to trust you quickly. In fact, this is one of the downsides of marketing. You’re asking them to trust you with one of the few things in their business that can destroy their business if it goes wrong, which is their IT. If you think about it, why does anyone ever hire an MSP? They’re trusting people they don’t know with one of their most critical functions. It’s kind of crazy, isn’t it? This is why social proof, like case studies, testimonials, reviews, are so important. This is why the way you present yourself is so important. This is why never ever talking tech with them. Don’t talk technical, talk business with them. Talk about productivity and keeping staff happy and sleeping at night and being safe and all of that stuff. That’s what turns them on. What doesn’t turn them on is technical stuff. Anyway, I digress. So they are suspects. They don’t trust anyone, but they are ready to go and start talking to people. Now, your goal is to take them from being a suspect to the next stage, stage two, which is them being a lead. So a lead is where you know who they are, as in they’ve joined one of your audiences in some ways. So someone connecting to you on LinkedIn is a lead. Someone who joins your email database, your email newsletter, is a lead. Someone who is connected to you in any other audience, perhaps you’ve met them at a networking meeting and you’ve shaken their hands, and you kind of gently rubbed it on your trouser leg afterwards, and you’ve taken the business card from them, they are a lead in some way. So you could and should have hundreds if not thousands of leads. In fact, one of the goals for you, because marketing is a numbers game, because you’re basically waiting for the timing to be right, you can’t force the timing to be any faster. So the bigger the numbers, the luckier you get on timing. One of the goals for you as an MSP owner is to get as many leads as you can into the business. And lead generation is a lot simpler than MSPs believe it to be because it is about multiple audiences. It’s about building up your LinkedIn connections, building up your email list, building up your YouTube subscribers if you do YouTube, building up your Twitter followers if you’re crazy enough to do Twitter right now, possibly the most unstable social platform to be on right now, but you get the idea. So build up multiple audiences and those are the leads. From there, we go into stage three. And stage three is where they go from being a lead to being a prospect. Now, what’s the difference between a prospect and a lead? A lead, as we say, is just someone who’s in one of your audiences, but you wouldn’t necessarily know much about that person. You certainly wouldn’t be having routinely a two-way in-depth engaged conversation with them. You might comment on their posts on LinkedIn or vice versa sometimes, but that doesn’t make them a prospect. They’re a prospect at the point that in some way they’ve put their hand up and they’re saying to you, even if they don’t use these words, “I would like to talk to you about us doing business, please.” Now they may do this by filling in a web form. It might be because you’ve phoned them and they’ve responded or they’ve booked a video call with you, or maybe you just got chatting at a networking meeting. There are dozens of different ways that someone becomes a prospect, but the prospect is where you actually start. Well, it’s kind of like where you get interested in them. It’s like, yeah, you are having a conversation with them and you are interested because you’re thinking, “Right, could I do business with these people? Is this the right kind of business for me?” So that’s the point they become a prospect. Essentially, that’s the real start of sales, isn’t it? Everything that’s gone before is marketing. So taking people from being a suspect to being a lead… Well, up to that point really, that’s marketing. And that in itself is a big job, and this is where sales kicks in if you wanted to differentiate between the two. Now the prospect, next we need to move t…

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Episode 172: This tool makes hiring techs easier Feb 28, 2023

Show notes

Episode 172 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 ‘4000 Weeks’ and the importance of ‘you time’ to your life and business 07:51 This tool makes hiring techs easier 16:48 How creating an excellent customer experience can help grow your business Featured guest: Thank you to Marc Gordon, The Customer Experience Expert, for joining me to talk about creating customer loyalty with better and more effective customer experiences. Marc is an internationally recognized thought leader in the field of customer experience. With over 25 years of marketing and business communications in a number of diverse industries, he has built a reputation for providing impactful methods that increase sales and inspire customer loyalty. Marc is also an advocate for youth business initiatives, and speaks at schools about entrepreneurship and the art of public speaking. Connect with Marc on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcgordondotca/ 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/ Order your free copy of the MSP Marketing magazine: http://mspmarketingedge.com/magazine/ If you’re intrigued by the 4000 week movement, get the book here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Four-Thousand-Weeks-Embrace-limits/dp/1784704008/ Subscribe to my YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/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 Grab yourself a copy of this week’s recommended book, The Wedge: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Wedge-Stop-Selling-Start-Winning/dp/0872183718/ Transcription: Voiceover: Fresh every Tuesday for MSPs around the world, this is Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast. Paul Green: Hello and welcome back to the show. Here’s what we got coming up for you this week. Marc Gordon: Hi, I’m Marc Gordon, the customer experience expert. Look for my interview coming up where I’m going to be sharing with you ways that you can create better, more efficient, more effective customer experiences to keep your customers coming back. Paul Green: And that really is going to be a fantastic interview with Mark later on towards the end of the show. We’re also going to be talking about recruitment this week. I’ve got a very cool tool that you could use to cut through all the noise and get straight to the very best candidates. Voiceover: Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast. Paul Green: Now, let’s start this week with a difficult subject, but it’s an important one. It’s something that we need to talk about and it’s not strictly about MSP marketing, but it is about your business and especially about you and your life and just how finite your life is. I believe this podcast should be 80% marketing stuff and 20% related stuff, and I personally find productivity things very interesting and increasingly, as I get older, I’m finding it more and more interesting to talk about the finiteness of life. Now, let’s just set some context here. At time of recording, I’m 48, but I’m around about 15, 16 months away from turning 50, which is a proper munch scream, when you’re putting your hands on your face and going, “Ugh!” It’s a proper scream moment for me because I was cool going into my thirties, I was all right going into my forties, but approaching my fifties, I don’t know. That feels like it’s old, proper old. My dad was only 23 when I was born. So at the age I am now, I’m 48 now, he had a 25-year-old son. I was 25 at the point my dad was this age. Can you see how that changes the way you think about things? And my dad now, he’s only 70 and he’s still quite a young 70, but it’s terrifying. Over the last few years or so, I’ve just been delving into something. It’s called a 4,000-week movement, and it’s based around the principle that the average person, if we are lucky, we’ve got 4,000 weeks on this planet, which is just around about 80 years. Now, I’ve just been listening to a book. I’ve just pulled it up on Audible on my phone. It’s called 4,000 Weeks by Oliver Burkeman. It’s got a few fruity words in there, bit of fruity language, but it’s a really, really good book. And it’s all about, we’ve got to, as we go through life and as we are trying to grow our business and look after our customers and do a great job and be good husbands or wives and be good parents as well, we’ve also got to not forget to actually enjoy our lives along the way. And do you ever get to this time of the year and you look up and you think, “How is it this time already? I’m sure it was Christmas four seconds ago,” because I know that happens to me. And in fact, the older I get, the more that seems to speed up. The core message within this book is about enjoying yourself now and not being so worried about the future. And I think we as business owners are very, very guilty of this, whereby we tend to put in a lot of hard work today and we self justify it as we are building something for the future so there will be greater profits in the future, more stability in the future. The business will be better and will operate without me in the future. I hear lots and lots of these things, but the risk is that you keep your nose down for 20 years and then you look up and suddenly you are old and you’re at retirement. And that’s a scary thing. And what this book is, this 4,000-week book, one of the core messages is not to forget to enjoy yourself along the way, that actually you can’t assume you’re going to get those full 4,000 weeks. You’ve got to enjoy doing the things that you enjoy doing. My enjoyment is very simple in life. I love time with my daughter. For now, she’s still 12. We’ll see what happens when she turns into that teenager at 13 and the years ahead. I know teenage girls are the most difficult. Don’t need to tell me that one. Plenty of people have told me that, but I enjoy spending time with her, quality time anyway. We go to see musicals at the theater together. We do escape rooms. Escape rooms are awesome. We have lots of shared hobbies and I appreciate those will tail off as the years come by. But it means, for me, never working weekends. Never ever, ever working weekends is literally number one priority. Weekends is family time. Evenings, I’ll work some evenings. We have lots of members of our MSP marketing edge who are in the US, which means doing stuff in the evenings. I’m comfortable with that because I’m always there to pick her up from school or do the school runs. Never missed a sports day, never missed a theater club, all of the stuff that’s important. But weekends are absolutely incredibly important to me as I’m sure they should be for you as well, particularly if you do have family. That’s family time. That’s when the family has you. But what about time for yourself? I really like walking. I like running. I like photography. As I say, my hobbies are actually very simple. I like traveling and going to places and exploring and looking at things. And for many years, I had the habit of taking Fridays off, not working Fridays. It was a habit I lost during lockdown. I’ve toyed with it, but I did find Fridays to actually be quite productive days for me. Maybe I should take Mondays off. I hate Mondays. Who likes Mondays? There’s a version of this for you. No matter how busy you are in your business, unless you are literally the business; you need to have some kind of help to do this, but there comes a point where if you can take Fridays off or take Mondays off or find a regular day a week when you can have time for yourself because you give time to your family, you give time to your business, but when is the time for yourself? We’ve only got 4,000 weeks. What we do with that time is so critical. I’m going to finish on a thing I’m going to suggest to you; a tool that you can buy or you could make your own. Now, you can’t quite see it. If you’re watching this on YouTube, you’ll notice that just over my left shoulder here, there’s a little set of drawers. I’m in my temporary office that I’ve been in for a number of months and, in the next couple of weeks, I’m moving down into my new office as the builders finish that office. I’m really looking forward to it. So you won’t be seeing these draws in the future because it’s a much bigger office that I’m moving into. But you can’t see on the YouTube video, but on the side I have a poster up. It’s quite a large poster and it says, “My life in weeks.” And I bought that from … I think the website address is 4kweeks.com, as in 4,000weeks.com. And what you do is you put in your date of birth and they print a poster where they have prefilled in the number of weeks that you’ve already lived, because the idea with this poster is it lists out the 4,000 weeks as 4,000 boxes. And at the end of every week, you get your pencil and you just fill in another little box; the idea being that you can literally physically watch the number of weeks that you’ve got left on this planet going down and down and down. Now at 48, it doesn’t look so bad. I’m just a little bit over the middle, but obviously as I get onto 50, that’s going to be a whole new section. Every 10 years is a section. So I’m entering a whole new section in about 14, 15 months time and that is terrifying. Now, these posters are really expensive. They’re something like $40, $50 for them to print off a sheet of A4 or a sheet of A3, A2, whatever it is. These are European sizes, but it’s a big sheet. Well done to them for coming up with something with a massive profit margin. The point is I’ve got to track now. I can literally look at any point and in my new office it’s going to be there in front of me to remind me not only that I’ve got to stay focused on what I want to achieve, but also I mustn’t forget to enjoy my life along the way. Maybe you could do something exactly the same. Voiceover: Here’s this week’s clever idea. Paul Green: I think we all agree that recruitment is a headache right now. It’s a headache with two sides of the sword, a double-edged sword. On one side, it’s difficult to find good technicians who aren’t just shopping around to try and increase their salary wherever they’re working right now. But the other side of the sword is when you apply or when you advertise for non-technical jobs, so admin jobs or marketing jobs or any other kind of level of job that almost anyone can apply for, you are swamped. I mean, literally swamped with a very, very broad range of people who essentially have just sat there on whatever app they’re using to apply for jobs and they’re just stabbing the button. They’ve got their phone and they’re just stabbing, stab, stab, stab, stab, stab, stab, stab. And the stabbing is the applying for the job. They’re not putting any thought into it. They don’t know really what they’re applying for. They’re just applying for jobs. They’re treating recruitment, they’re treating job hunting as a numbers game, and they’re just applying for as many jobs as they want. Now, the problem for you as the recruiter, as the person trying to take someone on, is that a lot of noise. I know this because we’ve just recruited two or three different roles, and one of them in particular, we had I think it was around about something ridiculous. It was either 1500 or 2000 applications. I forget what it was. And we were looking for a new video editor. Who knew there were like 2000 people out there who wanted to be a video editor working from home? It’s clearly a desirable job, but that was an incredible amount of noise to get through. And in fact, the person that got that job is literally one in 2000, which is awesome. So you’ve got two problems there, two completely different problems. One is the inability to find good people and the second is the inability to sort the wheat from the chaff. There is a tool that a few MSPs I know are using, and I believe it can help you with both of these problems. And in fact, this tool has been specifically designed for a number of issues and you can use it for recruitment. It is one of its published use cases. The tool is called VideoAsk, and you can find it at videoask.com. And what it allows you to do is to use video as a two-way communication between you and your job hunter. Now, let’s look at how you’d use that for hard to find technicians. Then let’s use it for the swamped version and then let’s talk about how you use VideoAsk in your general marketing. VideoAsk, when you’re looking for technicians. Let’s say you’re looking for a second line or third line technician. There aren’t many of them around. Those that are, if they’re happy where they are, they may job hunt just to get another offer so they can get their salary increase where they currently are, or they just may have totally unrealistic expectations of their worth to you, their salary. Now, the idea with VideoAsk is that, as part of the recruitment process, you record a simple video. And of course, you do this once for a job. And in that video you introduce yourself. You say, “Hi, my name’s Paul. Here I am. This is our MSP. This is what we do. We’re looking for a second line tech. What’s in it for you is this, this, this, this, and this.” So essentially you recap the advert. You sell them on the concept of you and your business in a video message. But here’s the critical thing. They then have to, as part of the recruitment process, they have to record a video message back to you. You may ask them to perhaps complete a qualifying question. It might be like a high level tech question. I can’t think of any high level tech questions. How would you reset someone’s password in Teams? I know that’s not high tech, I’m joking, but you get the idea. So you might set them a technical challenge and they have to present to you on video literally just using their phone. They don’t need any special equipment. This is just a phone app, but they have to record something saying, “Hi, this is me, this is what I do, this is my experience. The answer to the question is you’d go in with a pair of pliers, you’d turn it to the left, get an electric shock and hit it with a hammer.” And of course, when they’re saying that to you, even if they’ve Googled the answer, you’ll be able to see in their eyes if they truly understand what it is that they’re saying, because there is a massive difference between Googling something and saying what’s on Google, and actually understanding something and being able to communicate it properly. Now, here’s why Getting someone to do this on video is such a big deal. First of all, it’s a hoop to jump through. It’s something that someone has got to do and where there’s a bit of work to be done where someone’s got to do some work, that immediately is going to get rid of the time wasters. So those people who aren’t really bothered about moving, they don’t really want to leave their current job, they’re just shopping around to try and get a salary increase, they may even be fearful that if they do this on a video platform, that it could somehow get back to their b…

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Episode 171: MSPs: A clever idea for LinkedIn Live Feb 21, 2023

Show notes

Episode 171 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 structure your day to manage your MSP effectively 6:02 Growing your client base with LinkedIn Live 12:48 How you can retain staff and use data to grow your business Featured guest: Thank you to Darren Strong of Scalable MSP for joining me to talk about how MSPs can improve their operational data and hiring practices to build their business. Darren works with over 60 MSP Business Owners every quarter to help them and their teams to build profitable, scalable companies to achieve more value for their futures. Darren has also been heavily involved with the ConnectWise Evolve peer group as a facilitator for over 9 years and in that time has seen the highs and lows that MSP owners face. Connect with Darren on LinkedIn: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/darren-strong 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 the MSP Marketing Action Monthly magazine: http://mspmarketingedge.com/action/ Remember to check out the creator tools I mentioned, including LinkedIn Live, over on LinkedIn Find out about my MSP Marketing Edge service: https://www.mspmarketingedge.com Subscribe to my YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/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 Grab yourself a copy of this week’s recommended book, Crossing the Chasm: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Crossing-Chasm-3rd-Disruptive-Mainstream/dp/0062292986/ Transcription: Voiceover: Fresh every Tuesday, for MSPs around the world. This is Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast. Paul Green: Oh, hello, it’s you. Welcome back to the podcast. Here’s what we got in store for you this week. Darren Strong: Hi, I’m Darren Strong from scalablemsp.co.uk. We’ll be talking about retaining talent and using data in your business to execute on your strategy here and your legacy plan. Paul Green: And that interview with Darren is later on in the show, we’ll be talking about how you can better retain your staff and also use data to grow your business. We’ll also be talking this week about LinkedIn Live; is it a useful tool to get more clients for your MSP? Voiceover: Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast. Paul Green: Literally just before I recorded this week’s podcast, I’ve just rerecorded some new onboarding videos for my core service, it’s called the MSP Marketing Edge. And one of the challenges that I set for our new members in those onboarding videos is to try to find at least 60 minutes, and ideally 90 minutes, every single day to work on their business as opposed to working in their business. What’s the difference between the two? Well, working in your business is admin, definitely technical work, you could argue, chatting to your staff about stuff, that’s all working in your business. The only real activities working on your business is stuff that gets you brand-new clients, stuff that gets your clients to buy more often from you, and stuff that gets your clients to spend more every single time they buy Those three big activities, those are the definition of working on your business. Now, many MSPs really struggle to find time every day to work on the business, especially if you’re a small business and it’s just you and a bit of help. It’s certainly the bigger the business, the more resources you have, the easier it is to spend more time working on your business. But everyone, and I truly believe this, everyone can find 60 to 90 minutes a day to work on the business. And typically, certainly in the early years, this has to be done at a time when perhaps other people aren’t working. Put another way, some people get ahead in the time that other people waste. Now, I’ve built two businesses from scratch now, and the very first one, which I started in 2005 and sold in 2016, it was a marketing agency, not in technology, in healthcare. That business was built, in the first probably six or seven years, at 5:00 AM in the morning. Now, I don’t do this anymore because I’m too old and because I value my sleep, and also I don’t need to do this anymore. I would if I absolutely had to. But back then I would get up at 5:00 AM every single weekday, I tried not to work weekends, ’cause it’s important to have a complete break. But every single weekday I would get up at 5:00 AM and I would work for 90 minutes on the business. So by the time my family was starting to rouse from their deep slumber at 6:30 AM in the morning, I’d done 90 minutes worth of work. Now, to put that in context, I literally got out of bed at 5:00 AM, I microwaved a mug of coffee that I’d prepared the night before, and I was sat at my desk, in my office, in my house, hair everywhere, smelling, in pajamas, don’t wear pajamas to bed, but you get the idea. So we’re not talking any presentable, not looking all gorgeous as I am right now. We’re talking literally stinky breath, fallen out of bed, but I’m on it. In fact, I was such in the habit for this, I used to fall out of bed at 5:00 AM and instantly, as soon as I woke, my brain was like, “Right, we’re doing this and this and this and this. Let’s see if we can get that done in 90 minutes.” And you know what it’s like when you have a deadline, and mine was an immovable deadline, at 6:30 AM people were waking, child was young back then, very young, child would wake up. There is activity, can’t focus anymore. So I pretty much built that business in the first 5, 6, 7 years from 5:00 AM to 6:30 AM. And I would go into work, I would get to my office at, let’s say, 8:30 AM and my staff bombarding me with daft questions as they do. And it didn’t matter because I felt epic, absolutely epic, because I had already done the most important thing. It didn’t matter what happened and how my day was completely ripped away from me by clients and by staff and other people, I’d already done the most important thing. And there were perhaps a handful, in those number of years, a handful of times that I didn’t get up at 5:00 AM and work on that business. And we reinvented that business several times. It wasn’t a linear thing, that we started it in 2005 and it grew linear, in a linear way, up to 2016. I struggled with that business for a good 5 to 6 years. We didn’t get any traction with it, I had to reinvent it a number of times, and then we just found a model that worked, which, as I say, that was a marketing business so I don’t need to go into the details of that. The point is the work that was done in the morning. Some people get ahead in the time that others waste. So my challenge for you is this; if you are desperate to grow the business, I mean truly desperate, you really want it, it’s like, “It’s got to happen this year.” We’re already a couple of months into the year or certainly at this point of the year, you’ve got to do something different. And that means finding time to work on the business, getting more new clients, getting those clients to buy from you more often and getting those clients to choose to spend more every single time they buy. You need 60 to 90 minutes every day. Now, 5:00 AM might be too extreme for you, but what about 6:00 AM? What about 10:00 PM? What about Saturday mornings or Sunday mornings? I mean, an hour a day is better than trying to do a four-hour block on one particular day because it’s too easy to lose time on that four-hour block. But actually, something is better than nothing. What’s the time that you’re wasting? Where’s the dead time, and how could you refocus that back in on working on your business and achieving the things you so desperately want to achieve this year? Voiceover: Here’s this week’s clever idea. Paul Green: Usually, when I give you a clever idea in this podcast, it’s something that either I’ve tried or a friend of mine has tried somewhere or an MSP has tried. I try not to bring experimental ideas into this podcast. However, I’m going to break my own rule today because I have an idea that I would like someone somewhere to test to see if it’s worthwhile. And there’s not a lot of risk in this, it’s not going to cost you money, it’s going to cost you a little bit of time, but it could really make you stand out. And as we have been talking about on the podcast, I think it was the last week we were talking about this, do you remember me saying last week that samey kills sales? You’ve got to stand out and be different from all the other MSPs. So here’s my idea; there is something in LinkedIn called creator mode. Now, this is something that was only introduced, it was either about a year ago or maybe just late in 2021. But creator mode is where LinkedIn, you essentially turn on a different type of LinkedIn. I’ve had this going for about 45 weeks or so now. And in creator mode, people can’t just connect to you, they can follow you because you are creating content. So for example, you may have heard me talk about LinkedIn newsletters a lot ’cause LinkedIn newsletters are awesome. And LinkedIn newsletter is where you publish a newsletter once a week, say, and you can build up a list of subscribers. And these subscribers are separate to your LinkedIn connections. You can only do that when you’re in creator mode. You can Google how to turn on creator mode, it’s fairly easy to do. But the whole point of creator mode is you are creating content. One of the other tools, and I’m sure there will be many other tools that LinkedIn are working on and will release down the line, but as well as newsletters, one of the other tools that LinkedIn offers to you is the ability to go live. So we’ve seen this before. Facebook has been doing this for, oh my goodness, it must be a decade at least, where you can go live on Facebook. And do you remember when that first came out and everyone was just going live all the time? My first ever Facebook Live was me drunk walking back from a train back to my house, and I was live-streaming going to a kebab shop, which is embarrassing. In fact, I had to delete that video ’cause I didn’t realize that when someone connects to you on Facebook for the first time, the first piece of content they see is your most popular content. That was my most popular content, so that wasn’t necessarily one I wanted new friends and MSPs I was connecting to to see. Anyway, I digress. On LinkedIn, you can just go live. Literally, you press a button, you go live and you are broadcasting a video. It occurred to me that LinkedIn Live is cool, but what if you use LinkedIn Live to try to achieve what we’re doing here? What if you did a live broadcast, kind of like a podcast, on a regular basis? What if every single, I don’t know, Tuesday at 7:00 PM, you went live on LinkedIn just for 15 minutes to talk about how to use technology to make more profit out of your business, or to be more productive? In fact, it could be The Productivity and Profitability Podcast. Try saying that after you’ve had a few beers, Paul. Wouldn’t that be cool? ‘Cause remember, ordinary people don’t really care about technology per se, they care about what it can do for their business. They care about profitability, productivity, all of that kind of stuff. So doing a formal podcast like this, where you have to record something and edit it and put it on all the platforms and promote it and all of that, don’t get me wrong, the rewards are great, we have a huge audience, we get loads of MSPs talking to us and joining our services because of this podcast, and thank you for being a listener or a viewer, depending on which platform you’re consuming this on, but it is a lot of work. I do a bit of work and producer James, say hi, James. James: Ah, hello, hello. Paul Green: Producer James does tons of work on this because he’s actually the secret weapon. A quicker way to get going with a regular broadcast is just to do that live on LinkedIn. So challenge there, do you fancy that? Do you fancy giving it a go and seeing if this is the thing for you, if maybe you could be one of the first MSPs to start doing a regular podcast, which, of course, your LinkedIn connections would see as well? I’m just thinking actually, 7:00 PM on a Tuesday wouldn’t do it, you want to do it during the workday, so maybe at lunchtime. Lunchtime would be a good time to do it. Could you be the first or one of the first MSPs to start doing a lunchtime, once-a-week live broadcast on LinkedIn? If you do, do it for at least three or four weeks, see what reaction you get. You won’t get a lot of reaction, but the goal is to be doing this consistently. And just drop me an email and let me know, would you? ‘Cause I’d like to watch it, see what you’re doing, and also, of course, see if it does actually help you start conversations with prospects. That’s the whole point of all of our marketing, it’s engagement and moving prospects forward, further and further and closer to you becoming a client or then becoming a client of yours. So if you do do this, just drop me an email, would you? It’s hello@paulgreensmspmarketing.com. Voiceover: Paul’s blatant plug. Paul Green: Right, hang on two seconds. The postman’s just been and I just want to see what’s in today’s mail. So okay, we’ve got a flyer there, a bit of junk mail, that’s no good. A bank statement, which banks still send out statements in the post? Well, clearly my bank does. Oh, and this is much more interesting. Look at this, it’s the Marketing Action Monthly. This is actually my own newsletter, my own printed newsletter that I send out every month to MSPs all over the world. Let’s crack this baby open. Let’s see what’s inside for this month. Let’s have a look. Oh, look at that. That looks good. So inside this issue we’ve got “Give LinkedIn Newsletters an Hour a Week”, I said I talk about those, don’t I? “Prepare Your MSP Now for the Shift to MSSP”, managed security service provider, and another one, Your Attitude and Not Your Aptitude Determines Your Altitude. Well, those are the headlines. We’ve got here, what is this? 16 pages. I know exactly how long it is, I write this myself. 16 pages every month, printed and sent to your door. See, the thing is, if you are serious about improving your marketing, actually getting something in your hands that you can read on the toilet is, well, it’s much more likely you’ll read it and much more likely that you’ll take action on it. In fact, we’ve even summarized on the back the action points that you should be taking. Go and have a look at this because this could be a game changer for you. This could really get you taking action on your marketing and making this year the year that things start to happen. There’s a reason that we call it the MSP Marketing Action Monthly because it’s all about getting you to take the necessary actions that really improve your MSP. You can see all the details of this and how to get it shipped to your door, regardless of where you live in the world, at paulgreensmspmarketing.com/action. Voiceover: The big interview. Darren Strong: Hi, Darren Strong from Scalable MSP. We help MSPs specifically to improve their operati…

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Episode 170: Should you use AI for your MSP’s marketing? Feb 14, 2023

Show notes

Episode 170 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 you use AI for your MSP’s marketing 11:42 Beware of killing sales with ‘samey’ marketing 19:10 Get out of your own way to grow your MSP Featured guests: Thank you to Stuart Warwick and Ian Luckett from The MSP Growth Hub for joining me to talk about how get out of your own way to grow your MSP. Following many years successfully helping large corporates grow and mastering skills in Business & Leadership Development and Commercial & Financial Performance, Stuart and Ian now help ambitious MSP owners to Scale with Confidence. Connect with Stuart and Ian on LinkedIn: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/stuartwarwick https://uk.linkedin.com/in/ianluckett 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/ On the subject of using AI to help with your marketing, I mentioned the Chat GPT service Find out about my MSP Marketing Edge service: https://www.mspmarketingedge.com Subscribe to my YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/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 Grab yourself a copy of this week’s recommended book, Born To Run: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Born-Run-Hidden-Ultra-Runners-Greatest/dp/1861978774 Transcription: Voiceover:Fresh every Tuesday for MSPs around the world, around the world, this is Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast. Paul Green:Hello and welcome along to episode 170 of the show. Here’s what we’ve got coming up for you this week. Stuart Warwick:Hi, this is Stuart Warwick from the MSP Growth Hub. Ian Luckett:This is Ian Luckett. Stuart Warwick:Getting out of your own way is the number one key to scaling your MSP with confidence. Ian Luckett:If you’ve come into January and you’re now in February and you’re feeling a little bit flat, we will help you get that momentum and energy back into your business. Paul Green:They’re going to be here later on in the show challenging you to get out of your own way. Now we’re also going to be talking about your marketing and the fact that samey kills sales. Voiceover:Paul Green’s MSP Marketing podcast. Paul Green:We’re going to start this week’s show by answering three common marketing questions that I get asked by MSPs. I do loads of webinars and I hang out in lots of different forums and places, and you do tend to see the same kinds of questions coming up again and again. I’ve picked out three common but not that common ones. They’re not the usual ones, which is how do I generate leads? That’s the number one question I get. How do I get more new clients and how do I get more new leads? These are some of the newer, more common ones that are starting to come up. The first of them is about TikTok. Paul, should I be using TikTok to market my MSP? I can give you a one word answer for that and then I’ll expand on it. The one word answer is, nope.You really shouldn’t be using TikTok for marketing your MSP. The main reason for that is because TikTok’s audience is primarily not the middle-aged business owners and managers that you want to reach. The thing with any social media platform is to look at who is using that platform. Now, I appreciate that TikTok is kind of moving into the mainstream. It’s trying very hard to reach people like you and me. In fact, here in the UK, I can’t remember where it was, it might have been some posters on the Tube in London, but I saw some posters kind of aimed at me. It certainly wasn’t aimed at 13 year olds going like, “Renegade, Renegade, Renegade.” Whatever it is that 13 year olds watch on YouTube. It was definitely aimed at me.I can see the power of TikTok, I see the shorts on Facebook and on YouTube. That sort of short style, zip through quickly video is certainly growing in popularity, but right now, even though TikTok is huge and it’s used by so many people, and there will be MSPs doing marketing on it, it’s not for you right now. At the point at which a bulk of the audience is middle-aged decision makers, and obviously the Gen Z, the generation that’s around right now, they’re going to be using TikTok for, we assume they will, TikTok for search and for answers and video and entertainment and content down the line when they are decision makers. Right now the average decision maker isn’t on TikTok.In the spirit of there are many other platforms to focus on, I wouldn’t use TikTok. If you’re going to do videos, I would focus more on YouTube. YouTube is the everyone social media network. I mean, people say that Facebook is the universal one, but actually YouTube is. Do you know anyone who doesn’t use YouTube? They may not use it as a social platform, but the commenting side of it is so big on YouTube, everyone, putting that in speech marks, everyone uses YouTube. If you’re going to focus on something on a new platform, I would focus on YouTube ahead of TikTok.Another question, and this has only really come about since the backend of last year when ChatGPT released the, what’s it called? It’s called ChatGPT, isn’t it? Where you can go in and you can ask anything of the AI and it will generate something. The question I’m increasingly getting is, “Paul, can I or should I create content for my marketing using AI?” Because you can go into ChatGPT with a free account and you can type, “Write me a 300 word blog on how businesses should buy technology.” The content is good. It’s not just okay, it’s good. It’s almost as good as low level writers on Fiverr and Upwork are outputting.In fact, if I was a low level writer on Fiverr and Upwork, I’d be genuinely scared right now. Because there’s no personality in the content that’s produced, but if you just want basic content to go onto your website, perhaps for SEO purposes, then you could output hundreds of blog articles in just a couple of hours using ChatGPT. You’ve been able to do this for a while using Jasper, but ChatGPT is new. The interface is great and it’s free currently for low level use. The question is, should I use it to generate content? My answer is yes with extreme caution.When I talk about generating content, I don’t really mean good marketing content that you would use for humans, but if you just need, for SEO purposes, you need 50 blog articles for your website, absolutely go in there. You could tighten the brief. The tighter the brief you give to ChatGPT, the better the output. Please write me a 300 word article that would be of interest to business owners in the US who are thinking of switching from one IT support company to another about the things they should ask about, the factors they should ask about it. That’s certainly, when you tighten it down like that, it produces a very targeted and focused piece of content in about 20 seconds or something like that. Absolutely use that to fill up your website.My big caveat with this is going to be that at some point, Google and the other search engines will kind of figure, well, I believe this. I could be wrong, but I believe they will figure out a way of spotting AI generated content. Because what’s going to happen is if we continue down the trajectory we’re going, where you can do virtually anything with AI at the moment. You can produce written content, you can deep fake yourself. I was looking into how much it would cost to create an avatar of me and it wouldn’t pass the uncanny valley test. I can recreate my voice and my likeness for a couple of thousand dollars I think. I thought, ooh, for creating quick and easy instructional videos, maybe that’s something worth doing. The technology is rapidly becoming not quite mainstream, but nearly mainstream, and certainly within the next few years it will become good enough.I believe that people will start to use, generate thousands of blogs a day and put them on their websites, which would immediately give them a massive search engine boost. I think Google will find ways of detecting AI content. Already I’ve seen some things about OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, building in some kind of watermark. I don’t know how that would work, but within the words, within the pattern of the words, some kind of water mark that would tell people this is AI generated content. I believe that eventually Google will find a way of identifying it and they will essentially discount it for SEO purposes.It’s kind of like link farms. If you go back, I don’t know what, 7, 10 years, link farms were the big thing and the big SEO tactic was to pay to have, because it was all about links. It was having a high quality link to your website was massive for SEO. It’s still part of SEO, it’s not as big as it was, but back in the day you could pay to have thousands of links from link farms all over the web directed to your website. Google didn’t like that because it was artificial, it wasn’t real. They eventually discounted, and link farms are not good now for link building. I believe they could go down that route with AI if they can figure out a way to spot AI. Maybe there’s a new arms race starting here between the search engines and AI content.Yes, my short answer is yes with caution. Certainly keep track of which pages you’ve put on your website in case you do need to take them off if and when Google has a rule against AI. Be very cautious with just using that content straight to humans. I would certainly put that content through an editor first to make sure. It’s all about emotionally talking to people and affecting someone emotionally and persuading them emotionally. People buy from people. The content on your website is just all part of that process. You want to make sure you’re affecting them in the correct emotional way.Then the final, and this isn’t a very common question, but it’s been asked of me twice in the last month and by different people, and I thought that’s quite an in interesting one to answer. Paul, if you only had a hundred pounds to spend on marketing or a hundred dollars to spend on marketing, what would you spend it on? I have sort of sat and thought about this. Most of the marketing that I recommend, the strategy that I recommend, which is to build multiple audiences and build a relationship with those audiences through content marketing and then commercialize that relationship by picking up the phone. There’s very little actual cash cost in that. The cost is in time. Someone somewhere has to set up the social media profile, set up the email database, post content, put content into the email and send the emails out.Someone somewhere has to pick up the phone and call people, but they say that’s a time cost. That’s not a cash cost. If I only had a hundred pounds, I would be doing all of that. It’s the same question, in fact the version of the question that was asked me was if you had a hundred pounds or if you had to start again, what would you do with your marketing? I would do exactly that. I would build multiple audiences, I would work those audiences, build a relationship with them. I would get them to a stage where I could be picking up the phone and literally working round all of my prospects until I found someone who’s nearly ready, willing and able to buy. Then obviously I can move towards a sales meeting.I think if I had a hundred pounds, I would actually spend that on business cards, really expensive looking, good quality business cards with my photo on the back, because people remember faces rather than they do names. I would go to networking meetings. I would invest that hundred pounds, a hundred dollars into networking. This is on top of all the digital stuff. I wouldn’t just do this. I don’t think networking on its own is of great value, but networking added in to really good content marketing, to really good phone follow up is dynamite.Because when you physically meet someone in a room and you have an overpriced horrible tasting breakfast with them, your relationship with that person, one meeting with someone can be the equivalent of a year’s worth of emailing them or a year’s worth of LinkedIn stuff. It really is surprisingly dramatic what a difference it makes meeting people. Didn’t we all find that or rediscover that post COVID? I would invest that money in going networking, but I would be there, I’d be the first person there, I’d be the last person there. I’d meet everyone in the room, I’d put all of their emails into my email database. I would start emailing them my newsletter. I’d ring them all up anyway just to say it was great to meet you. Because somewhere, if I could meet 300 people for that a hundred bucks, it’s somewhere there, there’s someone who is nearly ready, willing and able to have a conversation about leaving their incumbent MSP and moving somewhere else. Your chances of getting the right timing go up the more people you meet and the more marketing that you do to them.By the way, if you have a specific marketing question, I would be delighted to answer that. You can either go and put it in my Facebook groups. If you go into Facebook and type in at the top MSP marketing and go to groups, it’s a free Facebook groups. It’s just for MSPs. There are no vendors in there, or you could just email me directly and I’d be delighted to hear from you with any question at all. The email is hello@paulgreensMSPmarketing.com. Voiceover:Here’s this week’s clever idea. Paul Green:This would be a fun exercise to do. Get five ordinary people, ordinary business owners and managers. Get them into a room and show them a whole load of websites of MSPs in that area. Literally just bring up the homepage of each one and get those ordinary people to go and look at all of the homepages and then ask them which of those MSPs is the best MSP in town? Which of them is the very best? Which is the one that they would call if they were looking for a new technology partner? Now I predict that they would all pick one or two pretty much the same MSP, and that would be based on the friendliness and the warmth and the marketing superpowers of their website.Of course, it can’t be based on the actual technical knowledge and the efficiency of the business because at this stage they have no idea. In fact, they’re normal people. They couldn’t assess that anyway, but they would typically pick the website that was different, that was better than all of the other websites. The reason they would do that is because if you do actually look at a whole load of MSP’s websites at the same time, you quickly realize they’re all exactly the same. I mean literally exactly the same. They may have different words and different pictures, but they’re all different on the same theme. They all pretty much say the same things.They all talk about technical services, they all talk about the things that they do. They sometimes throw in a bit about the area, but they’re more focused on services and capabilities than anything else. Certainly when I first got into the world of MSPs back in 2016 and I was doing my research and literally loo…

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