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How MSPs Can Find New Clients With Direct Mail Jul 20, 2026

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MSPs not yet using direct mail to warm up leads are missing out on a major marketing channel – here’s five ideas to get started. Also this week, do video testimonials like this to influence prospects, and how MSP owners unintentionally self-sabotage their marketing. Welcome to Episode 349 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge. Five super smart ideas for MSPs to use direct mail If you’re not yet using direct mail to warm up leads and find out who’s nearly ready to buy from you, then I believe you’re missing out on a major marketing channel for your MSP. Back in May this year, I was a guest at the MSP Show in London, and I got to share a stage with Ian Luckett, Darren Strong, and Mit Patel. These are all people who’ve been on this podcast in the past. It was great to meet particularly Mit for the first time in real life. And we were talking about what it takes to grow and succeed with your MSP. Anyway, later in the day, I was interviewed by James Steel for the GTIA on Location YouTube channel, which by the way, is well worth you looking up, there’s some great content on there. And James asked me a whole load of questions about marketing, but the one that really got me going was when he asked about direct mail. I’m a massive fan of direct mail for MSPs, and I think it’s one of the most underused tactics in the whole channel. So today I want to give you five smart ideas for making your direct mail stand out and actually get a response. And let’s start by asking why direct mail at all? And remember, I’m talking about stuff that’s sent through your letterbox, physical real life stuff. Well, here’s why. In 1999, yes I was alive then, I had 1000 pieces of mail come through my post box every single day. I mean, we were inundated with mail back then. Those of us that were alive, we remember what it was like. So we had all of this stuff in our post box, but we would only get three emails. And today of course, it’s the other way around, right? Everyone’s inbox is full. Their email inbox is full, their notifications inbox is full, their social media feed. It’s all ping, ping, ping, ping, ping. It’s a complete digital mess. So our brains and our inboxes in our digital world are completely full. We’re now getting 3000 things every day digitally, but the physical post, well, that’s almost empty by comparison. In fact, just before recording this, I went out and I checked my mail. Where I live here in the UK, I have an external mailbox. I haven’t checked for a week, which shows how unimportant it is. I just went out there and I’ve got two pieces of mail that were sent to me. One’s like a bank statement that the bank can’t actually physically switch off, they don’t know which computer’s sending it to me. And then there was a letter from some company about something and three flyers for Domino’s and stuff like that. So there’s not a huge amount of physical mail. And this is good because it allows you to stand out in a space where there’s not a lot of competition. A well-crafted piece of direct mail gets physically handled, which means it’s noticed. Notice what I just said there. I went out of my way to go and get my post. I don’t go out of my way to check my notifications or my email. It’s just something that I have to do every day and something I choose to want to stay on top of so I don’t have 67,000 unread emails, which my girlfriend currently does, which is driving me crazy I’ll be honest. But your competitors are almost certainly not doing this, right? They are not sending direct mails. And that means that the physical mailboxes, the physical postal space of all of the prospects in your area or your vertical, that could be yours. Now this works brilliantly alongside LinkedIn. Imagine if you were hitting the same prospect in two completely different places. So you send them a message on LinkedIn or even just email them and the message is about the thing that you’ve sent to them in the mail, the thing you’ve shipped to them. That’s very powerful. You can message someone about the same kind of thing using two or three different platforms and that’s not overwhelmed. Three pieces of mail in a week is too much. Three emails on the same subject in the same week is too much, but the same kind of communication on three different platforms is very, very good marketing. So let me give you some ideas that you can take away from this and actually go and have a go. And the first of them is something called a lumpy envelope. So a flat letter gets opened last or not at all. And by flat, I mean it’s literally physically flat. There’s clearly a bit of paper in it and that’s it. There’s nothing intriguing in that at all. Whereas if you get something that’s lumpy or bumpy, that always gets opened first out of curiosity. And this is why for years and years, and I don’t know if they do this where you are, but here in the UK for years, charities, when they used to send out sort of charity appeals in the mail, they would put a little pen or a pencil in there for you. Supposedly for you to fill in the form and send back your donation, but actually it made it lumpy. You’d get something you weren’t expecting and you’re like, “Ooh, what’s this inside here?” So here’s what you could do to do this. You could put something small and physical inside the envelope. This could be a stress ball, it’s a pretty common thing for MSPs to use, a stress ball with your branding printed on the side. It could be a USB stick, perhaps one that has printed on it, “Do not put this in your computer.” Yeah, you know that’s the first thing that people are going to do. I mean, it could be as simple as just a branded pen or a small toy or something like this. Really the item that you send out in the mail, it should tie into your message somehow. So a stress ball that says, “Is your IT giving you stress?” That would work perfectly. Or like we said, the USB that says, “Don’t plug this in.” And when they do, there’s one file in there that says, “Read me” which says, “We told you not to plug this in. This could be malware.” I don’t know how people would take that actually thinking about that. But the curiosity alone of having lumpy mail or bumpy mail dramatically increases your open rates. Now, it is worth you knowing that the cost per mail is going to be higher depending on how your postal system works. Typically, if it’s lumpy, if it’s got bulk, you end up paying more for it, but you’re sending this to a small targeted list. When it comes to direct mail, it’s always quality over quantity. There’s no point sending out thousands of these, but you would send out 50 to your hottest prospects, particularly if you can follow them up by phone. Idea number two, a personalised letter that genuinely looks personal. So for this, you wouldn’t do something that’s been printed with your logo on it. Instead, you go the complete opposite. You pull together a letter that looks like a real human wrote it. So for example, this could be a handwritten envelope. You might actually put a real stamp on there and yes, that means a little bit of licking stamps. I think most stamps have their own glue these days, but they would put their first name at the top, that kind of stuff. The opening line should reference something specific about their business or sector. Essentially, it should feel like you have sat down and physically written this to them. So you wouldn’t write a generic letter inviting them to a webinar or “Is this a good time to talk about your IT?” or something like that. Well, actually, maybe you would. Maybe you’d write a letter to someone that says, “Dear Dave, can I ask an open question? Are you happy with your current IT support? If you are, please throw this in the bin. If you’re not, please call me on this number, or please email me on this address, or here’s my live calendar,” or something like that. And actually the more it looks like someone has just personally written the more likely it is to be opened and read and of course acted upon. So there’s a couple of ways that you could do this. You could either do it yourself on your computer and download a handwriting font and then print that off on your printer. It’s kind of cheating if you do that though, and everyone can tell. So I would say go the extra mile. What’s the extra mile for this? Well, something like, for example, there are services out there that will either use robo writers. I mean, it’s literally a robotic arm that has a pen and that will write. There is even a service, there’s certainly one here in the UK, there’s bound to be one in the US, that will get actual humans to write these letters for you. And I suspect that we as humans can tell when something’s being robo written versus handwritten by human. Because handwritten by humans, there’ll be kind of a lack of consistency, won’t there? Even people who’ve got really nice handwriting that there are different ways that the letters are written, whereas I guess a robot just does it exactly the same each way. But even a robot is better than printing something. So just go have a look for services for that and that’d be really interesting for you to test that and see how that works. Okay then. And idea three, the follow-up sequence. So one piece of direct mail rarely works and that’s why earlier I recommended you send them out in small batches when you have a phone person to follow them up for you. But actually what if you sent three pieces of direct mail over six or nine weeks? You could do something simple like the first piece could just introduce yourself and offer something useful to them. No hard sell. Maybe just say we’ve got an IT services buyer’s guide on our website, something like that. And that in itself is only going to interest to people who are nearly ready, willing and able to have a conversation, but that in itself is a valuable piece of direct mail. And then three or four weeks later, you could send another direct mail, which might reference the first letter and say, “I sent you this thing. We have an IT services buyer’s guide. Did you want one?” Or you could offer a new idea. You could say, “Oh, we’ve just written a guide about increasing your business’s productivity with Copilot or with Teams.” Essentially, you’re just gently reminding them that you exist, but you’re still adding more value into their life. And then the third one you could send again another four or five weeks later, just could be a very final piece with a very simple clear call to action. “Are you looking to change your IT company in the next six months? If you are, here’s my live calendar.” Something like that. And each letter should feel like a natural continuation of a conversation, not sort of three separate campaigns. And if you think about it, this is the kind of thing that you do with an email sequence or a LinkedIn messaging sequence anyway. So it’s a really smart way of just building a relationship with someone. The difference is you’re doing it in that space where there’s no competition because no other MSP is writing to them. Most people, if they’re going to do something like this, they’ll do one letter. They don’t get any responses and they say that it fails, “Direct mail doesn’t work for MSPs”, which is nonsense. A sequence and especially when you have the follow up, this is where the results really come. And I cannot stress this more, and I’m going to say it for the third time. Send some direct mail to someone and expect a response. You’re not going to get it. People don’t act on it that way. But the real power of that direct mail is to make it easy for you to follow them up by email or LinkedIn message or definitely the phone. Send someone a postcard or a letter and phone them a week after they receive it or three or four days after they receive it. And I promise you, I promise you, it’ll be so much easier for you to a) get hold of them, and b) actually have a conversation with them. And even if they’re not in the right place at that time, that’s okay. The point is you’re having a conversation, you can then schedule them for follow-up in a year’s time or whenever is going to be an appropriate buying time for them. When someone gets a piece of direct mail, they do pick it up intending to do something, but often it then just goes down again. Whereas if someone in your office, or you, follows them up by phone, they’re much more likely to have a decent conversation about their business. So the way to look at it is that the direct mail opens the door and makes it easier for callers. Right, I’ve got two more ideas for you. Let me whiz through idea four and five. Idea four is the grabber at the top of the letter. So it’s a physical object actually glued to the top of a letter and that really increases readership. So the classic examples from back in the day are a coin or a $1 bill or something like that. And you say, I wanted to get your attention before this gets lost. Or another classic one is like a sticking plaster, like a bandaid. “Is your current IT support just patching over the cracks?” You could do a tea bag, couldn’t you? Let’s have a virtual cupper and talk about your IT. This sounds gimmicky, but I’ve looked, not recently, but in the past I’ve looked at data on response rates and just adding the teabag or the coin or the sticking plaster or something like that works because it’s unexpected. These are lower costs than sending a stress ball or something like that. Important though is that the attention grabber that you’re gluing to the letter must link to the content of the letter. The whole letter explains the object. And then idea five is send something worth keeping. So instead of just sending them a letter that’s going to go in the recycling, send them something that’s got shelf life. I mean, I mentioned earlier like the IT services buyer’s guide, that can be a very good thing to send out to your hottest prospects. Or you could just do a one-page guide and maybe even laminate it. “Five questions to ask before you switch your IT provider.” Or if it’s towards the end of the year, you could send a small desk calendar with your branding on or a printed checklist, IT security, something like that, or Copilot ideas, something they’ll pin up next to their desk because stuff like that tends to stay there. The idea is that every time they look at something that’s pinned up on their desk, your name is there. And that’s some very important passive brand building between now and when they’re ready to buy. In fact, the wall planner is a great example of this principle, something useful that stays visible. And I’ve got a wall planner I’m going to offer to you very, very shortly. Before I do, let me just throw in a bonus sixth idea, something I just thought of… Printed newsletters. These are still a massive and criminally underused tool to stay in touch with hot prospects because the beauty of a newsletter is it’s seen as an educational and a communication tool, it’s not seen as a piece of sales literature. And that means it gets stuck on walls, it gets passed around a business, it goes in drawers and stays there for years. I’ve heard from quite a few MSPs who sent out newsletters for a number of years and then later on down the line, they’ve won deals from someone they actually stopped marketing to and they haven’t marketed to them for a few years, but that person rang them out of the blue talking about a newsletter that they’d sent three years before. And this is why we actually give newsletters to our B2B MSP Marketing Edge members because the newsletters are so powerful. Just a reminder on this direct mail that the list, the people you’re sending this to matters as much as the creative of what you actually send to them. And none of this works if you’re sending this to the wrong people. So you do need to either build or buy a list of the exact businesses that you want to work with in your area. Of course, LinkedIn…

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MSPs' Greatest Sales Weapons Jul 13, 2026

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Here are six psychological weapons of influence that you can apply to your MSP’s marketing to win more clients. Also this week, three hot marketing ideas around Copilot, and the surprising secret for talking to clients about cyber security. Welcome to Episode 348 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge. A deep dive into the psychology that drives prospects One of my all-time favourite books is called Influence by Dr. Robert Cialdini. And today I want to walk you through his six psychological weapons of persuasion and show you exactly how they apply to winning clients for your MSP. Now, this book which I’ve owned for about 20 years, in fact, if you’re watching on YouTube, the copy I’ve literally got in my hands now, I’ve had for a round of 20 years or so, it was actually first published in 1984. Of course, it’s been updated since, but it is still, in my opinion, the definitive work on why people say yes. Dr. Robert Cialdini is a psychology professor, but he specialises in marketing. He’s still active now, I don’t know if he teaches still, I think he’s in his 70s, but he’s in New York, I believe. He’s identified six psychological weapons of influence, and we can apply every single one of them to your MSP. So let me take you through them and give you an example of how each one can help make your marketing so much easier and more effective. The first is something called reciprocity. People feel compelled to give something back when they’ve received something completely free or something of high value at very, very low cost. So for example, I give away a free MSP marketing wall planner, and I do that partly because I want to educate thousands of MSPs around the world how to have better marketing. But also I know that in giving someone a physical free wall planner that I’ve had printed at my cost, that I’ve mailed out to them at my cost, there’s a certain level of reciprocity in that. And many, not all, but many of the people who get one of those wall planners will come back and buy something from me at some point in the future. And by the way, if you don’t have one of those wall planners yet, I’ll tell you in just a few minutes how you can get one completely free. And there is no obligation to buy anything if there’s a psychological obligation that’s set up in your brain and that’s just good marketing from Dr. Robert Cialdini. But you can do this as well so you can give away free guides, you can give away other kind of lead magnets, scorecards are working really well right now as a lead magnet, and there’s still some reciprocity from that. You could do a really in-depth LinkedIn post, you could do a major in-depth guide on cyber security or something else on your websites. All of this is reciprocity in action. What you’ve just got to remember is that when you give genuine value first, then the prospects feel a pull towards you before you’ve ever asked them for anything, ever asked them to buy anything from you. So practical question on this, what are you giving away that’s actually useful? So things like a buyer’s guide or a sales brochure, those kind of things are okay, but the more value you can give in your freebie, in the things you give away, the better. And just a reminder, by the way, if you’re a member of the MSP Marketing Edge, we have a book called Email Hijack. That’s available to our B2B members. You can get it in the portal right now. It’s in the tool section and it’s kind of like a book, a fictional book about an email compromise attack. So you can very quickly update that with all of your details, put that on your website for free. People just enter their email address and you email them or physically post them, mail them, ship them a copy of email hijack. But that is a great example of a high value giveaway that you haven’t really asked much for. You’ve asked for their email address and their physical address, that’s it. It’s going to help you to build a relationship with prospects before they’re ready to pick a new MSP. So Dr. Ciardini’s second weapon of influence is commitment and consistency. Once people take a small step, they want to stay consistent with that decision. So getting someone to download something or attend a webinar or even just reply to an email that you’ve sent to them, every small yes makes the next yes easier. And this is why nurturing is so important. You may have heard me talk on this podcast before about the fact we are not hunting. Hunting is one-off activity where you go out, see an opportunity, and you kill the clients, you kill the prospects, you hunt them and you bring them in. I’m much more interested in farming. Farming is where you are growing something. You are very slowly working hundreds and hundreds of seeds at the same time to grow them. And some of them will turn into big trees that you can harvest into clients. Essentially, you’re building a trail of small commitments that leads you to a meeting. So from a practical point of view, what’s the smallest possible yes that you can ask a cold prospect for? And actually the easiest is hit reply to an email. “Hit reply to this and tell me what you think about this” or asking them to comment on a LinkedIn post or something like that, or even just getting a hold of them on the phone just to find out a little bit about their business. All of these little things, they help to build a relationship with them and at the point they’re ready to switch MSPs, they’re going to want to be consistent and continue that conversation with you. Number three is social proof. You’ve heard of this before, right? People look to other people like them to decide what the correct course of action is, especially when they’re uncertain about what to do. So for ordinary business owners choosing an MSP, they are very, very uncertain because they don’t understand the technical stuff. That’s kind of easy to understand if you are targeting business owners. Now, if you’re targeting IT directors for co-managed contracts, obviously they do understand the technical stuff, but they are operating from a position of greater fear. Business owners are scared of making the wrong choice, picking the wrong MSP because it will cost them time and money. IT directors are typically employees. If they get the wrong choice, if they pick the wrong MSP, it could cost them their job, their career. That’s actually a bigger perceived risk for them than it is the business owner. The business owner loses money and time. It’s annoying, but it’s not the end of the world. The IT director could lose their job and their career. That is the end of the world. So even though both of these people are completely different, they want to know that other people like them have trusted you already because that makes you perceived to be safer. So we know that social proof is made up of three primary tools. You’ve got testimonials, reviews, and case studies. So a testimonial is where someone gives you a review of the business, but they give it to you, you’re in charge of it, you can edit it. And a testimonial’s okay, but it’s not as good as a review. A review is a testimonial that goes on a third-party platform. So people will look at it and know that you haven’t edited it. It’s very, very powerful. My recommendation is always that you pursue reviews on third-party platforms and then you copy those reviews into your website and other marketing and you just say where you got it from. So for example, get Google reviews and then take the very best of those Google reviews and copy them, either screenshot them or recreate them into your website. So you’ve got testimonials and reviews, and then the third form you’ve got is case studies. A case study is telling a story. It’s essentially the same as a review of a testimonial, but it’s a structured case study and you see someone’s journey from the problem they had to the solution that you put in place to the outcome, which is of course always a much better outcome because they’re working with you. Now, specific and named social proof is always, always better than generic social proof. So “Jane at XYZ Accountant saved three hours this week”, is always going to be better and more powerful and more persuasive than someone just saying, “Great service would recommend”. And I know that MSPs hate putting people’s photos and their names and their job titles and the name of the business. I know you hate that because there are security concerns and I understand that, but the reality is if you have a good system in place for your client to make sure that it is you and your technicians calling them the persuasive power of publishing the name of your client and their photo, which is best practice, it far outweighs the security risk of you doing this thing. So a practical action on this. When did you last proactively ask a happy client for a review or a testimonial? The answer to this of course is you systemise it. So you either have something built into your PSA. You know when you close a big ticket and it sends out the little faces thing, it says, “Are you happy?” And they can tap the happy face or the sad face or the one in between. If they tap the happy face, that should take them to a page asking them to leave a review. If they haven’t done so already, you have to set up basic rules for this kind of thing. That’s one good system. Another good system is just to ask everyone after their first 90 days with you or when you’ve completed a project for them. Both of those are great times to ask for reviews. And you should also explain why you want reviews. Another little thing that Cialdini has put in one of his books I’ve read somewhere is that when you give someone a reason why you’re asking for something, even if the reason doesn’t make sense, they’re much more likely to go along with it. The example he gave was, and this shows how old this was because it’s about photocopying, but when there was a queue of people for a photocopier, if you said to someone, “Hey, can I just cut in the queue?” Nine times out of 10 they said no. Whereas if you said to someone, “Hey, can I cut into the queue because I need to do some photocopying?” Even though that reason doesn’t make sense, everyone’s there because they need to do some photocopying, the person was much more likely to let them into the queue. It’s curious, isn’t it? So when you’re asking people for a review, you just say to them, “Would you mind helping me out by giving us a review please, because we’re trying to attract more clients like you.” Simple as that. Okay, next weapon of persuasion from Dr. Robert Cialdini is authority. Now, people follow credible experts. They want to be led by someone who they perceive knows more than they do. And this is exactly why, for example, why I do this podcast, it’s exactly why I do a LinkedIn newsletter every week, and why I do things like a wall planner, why I’ve written my book MSP Marketing Start Here, which you can get on Amazon and Audible and Kindle. Now I’ve done all of these things to help demonstrate my perceived authority. You can do the same thing as well. You can write a book. In fact, that book Email Hijack I was talking about earlier for our MSP Marketing Edge B2B members, that’s a really great example of this. You can publish guides, you can write a LinkedIn newsletter, you can talk, go and speak at local events or events within your niche or your vertical. The MSP who publishes useful content and speaks at events and puts on webinars is automatically perceived as more authoritative than the MSP who doesn’t. And trust me, the vast majority of your competitors are not doing this. So what are some of the other authority signals that you can put out there? Well, things like good credentials, accreditations being mentioned in the media, as I’ve already said, speaking at events. All of these are authority signals. So a practical suggestion for you, where on your website and where on your LinkedIn does your authority come through? Can I go on your website and your LinkedIn right now and see you speaking at events, see the guides and books and things that you’ve published, or join your webinar? Because as I said, your competitors are not doing this. This is a big opportunity for you. Then we’ve got weapon number five, which is liking. People buy from people that they like. It really is as simple as that. And likability comes from how similar you are to the person you are talking to, how familiar they are with you, and this is why building a relationship with someone is always a good idea before you ask them to choose your MSP. And it also comes from genuine warmth as well. The more your real genuine personality comes through in your marketing, the more people will feel like they know you. Please don’t ever try to be someone else. You might watch me on YouTube or listen to me on this podcast and think, “Well, that Paul seems all right.” I hope you think that, and maybe you’d think, “I’ll try and be like Paul.” But I’m just being me, right? It’s taken me many years to get to the point where I’m comfortable being me. And I know that some people don’t like me. They don’t like the way I present, the way I talk, the ideas I’ve got. And do you know what? I’m okay with that because actually it’s better to be yourself, be authentic and have some people, a very small proportion of people that don’t like you, whereas most people will like you because they’ve got something to hook onto. They can be attracted to your genuine authentic personality. It’s really important that people feel like they know the real you. And they might not spot you being inauthentic or unauthentic, but they will feel it. We have all sorts of incredible gut reactions and gut feelings inside ourselves, and they warn us when something doesn’t feel quite right. And you trying not to be you is going to trigger that in someone else. So just be you. Be the authentic you. And I promise you these days where anybody and everybody does content and video, being yourself is the best thing you can do. So a practical thing then, does your marketing sound like it’s coming from a person or does it sound like it’s coming from a corporation, from a business? The more authentic and real and human your marketing is, the easier you’re making it for people to like you. And it is so important. And then the final weapon. The final weapon from Dr. Cialdini is scarcity. People want what they might not be able to have. And real scarcity is much more powerful than manufactured scarcity. Prospects really can smell the difference. I’ll give you an example. Our MSP Marketing Edge membership, we genuinely only work with one MSP per area. Well, it’s one per membership. So we’ve got one B2B member and one co-managed member. And it’s genuine so that no one’s using the same marketing in the same marketplace. And we actually have more people, this is true. We have more MSPs on our waiting list than we actually do as active members. So it’s genuine scarcity because it helps keep our quality high and it keeps everything working for me and for our members. Now for your MSP, you can’t use anything like scarcity of software, scarcity of tools because we all know that software is endless. it’s limitless, it never really runs out. So your scarcity is your time and your attention. For example, onboarding. Now genuinely, you can probably only onboard one client per month, right? Or maybe two at a push because I know how onboarding takes so much work from you and all of your team. So actually you can use that. If you’re having two or three sales conversations, you can say, “Hey guys, look, as you’re making this decision about which MSP you’re going to go to, and obviously we hope you choose us, just be aware that for quality reasons and for workload reasons, we only onboard one client a month. We already have someone right now for this month. Next month we currently have free and the month af…

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MSPs: Use Webinars To Find Hot Prospects Jul 06, 2026

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Let’s look at why webinars are an amazing way for MSPs to grow their business primarily because most MSPs aren’t doing them. Also this week, get up at 5am every weekday to grow your MSP, and before you do any marketing or sales, you MUST get these foundations right. Welcome to Episode 347 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge. How to use webinars to identify the hottest prospects So have you ever thought of doing webinars to promote your MSP and if you have, what stopped you from actually going ahead with it? Were you worried that perhaps no one would turn up or worse than no one… one person would turn up? Or maybe you were worried about your own performance. Let’s look at why webinars are an amazing way for MSPs to grow their business primarily because most MSPs aren’t doing them. And let’s just address this right from the start. Yes, there is room in the world for more webinars. You might think there are too many webinars already, but that’s just because you’re inside the channel. Outside the channel, they are getting lots of webinars about the law or carpentry or manufacturing or whatever line of work your prospects are in, but they’re not hearing a lot from MSPs that are pushing technology and talking about the importance of cyber security. There’s plenty of business out there to be won through webinars, but you’ve just got to approach it the right way. Most MSPs think the goal of a webinar is all about getting the attendance numbers in. Get 50 people on a webinar, get big conversion rates. That’s not what it’s about at all. The real goal of a webinar is intelligence. It’s telling you something about the leads and the prospects that you’re talking to right now, the people who are in your CRM or who are connected to you on LinkedIn. I mean, even if you just look at who has done something, so who registered for a webinar in the first place? Actually, you could take that back a step and say, who clicked the email link to have a look at the webinar that I’m promoting? Who then registered for that webinar? Who then showed up for that webinar? Who stayed for the majority of it? Who asked questions? Who booked a meeting or did something afterwards to say thank you? All of this tells you really interesting things about the leads and prospects that you are talking to. And it helps you to kind of sort out the wheat from the chaff. It helps you to show who are the hottest prospects right now and where should you be focusing all of your attention. I mean, the very fact that someone would attend your webinar or even register for your webinar that says something to you. Now, you might know that with my members, I work either helping them to win B2B business, which is what most MSPs want, more business owners, or I help them to grow their co-managed business, so helping them to reach IT directors. And in both these instances, webinars can be a really, really powerful tool. It can help you to see who through their behaviour alone is worth me talking to. Who’s worth me following up, ringing them, sending more emails to them, sending stuff to them in the post in the mail. Someone registering for a webinar and turning up for a webinar and being engaged with a webinar, it’s like their hand going up. These are buying signals that people are inadvertently sending to you and it’s great for you because you then know exactly who you should be following up and exactly who you should be talking to over the next couple of weeks. Now there are three, if you like, kind of three tiers of heat after a webinar. By heat, I mean, how hot is a prospect. So the first tier is where someone has attended and they’ve asked a question or they’ve stayed to the end. So they’ve turned up, they’ve stayed engaged. In fact, if they’ve asked a question, they’re the hottest possible engagement. These are the hottest people and they’re the ones that you should be on right now. Someone who attends a webinar, regardless of the subject, let’s assume it’s just about something technology. It could be cyber security, it could be productivity, it could be about co-managed IT if you’re trying to win co-managed IT contracts. The fact they attended and stayed and engaged with you, that shows they’re interested. Now, the timing might not be ready for them to actually take the next step or go and buy from you, but I would definitely ring them straight after the webinar. You could ring them and lead with literally, “It was great to see you on the webinar. I loved that question you asked me. Hey, did I answer that question well enough for you or do you have follow-up questions to that?” And in a one-on-one environment, someone is much more likely to start asking follow-up questions and that’s more engagement, right? Now you’re on the phone with them, you can push to have that proper discovery call or even to have that in real life sales meeting. So that’s the first level of heat. The next level of heat is where someone’s registered and they’ve attended, but they’re passive. They’re a lurker. Lurkers are going to be 90% of people who show up on your webinars. In fact, there’s something called, I think it’s something called the 90/1/9 rule. When you’ve got any kind of performance or show or webinar or even something like a community or something like that, 90% of people who use that are not going to engage with it. They’re lurkers. They just want to turn up for seeing what’s there. 9% of them will engage in some way and 1% of them will take a bit of a leadership position. So 90% will do nothing. 9% will engage and 1% will create new content or ask amazing questions that just contribute, but the vast majority of people are lurkers. So if you can get people to show up to your webinars, that is where most of them are going to be. They are just going to be warm. Now the next level of hotness down is where they registered, but they didn’t show up. And it’s still worth following these people up because even if someone’s registered that says to you that there is a level of interest there. And actually what you may find is that they may register for two or three webinars and eventually they will show up for one. The thing about a webinar is, and you’ve done this and I’ve definitely done this, is we get to the day where we really intended to go onto the webinar and then 10 minutes before we’re looking at our watch and we’re like, “Oh, I’m really busy today. Do you know what? I’ll watch the recording.” And you will find that for every person who shows up to your live event, two or three or four will watch the recording, which just goes to show that’s true. But obviously the downside of them just watching a recording is there’s no engagement. You don’t know what questions they would’ve asked, etc. etc. So there’s your three lead heat registers there. And actually with the no shows, I forgot to say that no shows are not dead leads. As I say, send them the recording, watch who watches it. You may even invest in some kind of software which tracks for you, not just who’s opened it, but who’s watched to the end. Someone who opens it and watches 30 seconds are not as hot as someone who’s opened it watched three quarters of the way through, that’s going to be a much hotter prospect. But all of the purpose of the webinar and the reason that you’re doing it is to find out who’s hot right now so that you can then follow them up. Webinars should not be done just for educating your audience or entertaining them. The webinars should be done because they help you to see who are the hottest people to speak to. So you can put all of your tiny amount of resources onto just those people. So your follow-up sequence should be different for each of those tiers. So the hottest tier, as I say, they should get all of your attention. I believe if they’re hot, and that means they’ve attended and they’ve engaged with you, personal outreach within 24 hours. Reference something specific from the webinar, their question or something they liked or something like that, or go in just with a question about the webinar. It’s a really easy way to start a conversation with them. All of the other people, of course, you should send out the recording. You should send them your live calendar. You should say, “Hey, as you know, we help local businesses with this kind of stuff. Here’s my live calendar. The next step is to have a 15-minute one-on-one conversation with me. ” Some of those people will book that conversation when they’re ready to do that. So that’s how I see webinars. I see them as a way of sorting the wheat from the chaff, but what do you actually do a webinar about? Well, I believe on webinars, topic choice is absolutely everything. So you have to pick a subject, not that you are interested in presenting, but a subject that your ideal prospect is genuinely worried about right now. So as an example, it might be cyber threat topics. I mean, they don’t want the ins and outs of today’s big cyber threat because they don’t really care. Unless it’s something like, CrowdStrike. CrowdStrike, which took down the world, all the planes stopped, didn’t they? So when something like that happens, it’s very much on the mainstream news then it’s of interest to them. But all of the other stuff that’s in front of you today, they don’t really care about it. But you can talk to them about how other business owners like them have been threatened or hit by cyber security problems. If you work with a client and they got breached and you rescued them, perhaps they got breached because they didn’t follow your advice, you can use the anonymised case study of that to educate other business owners. This is not using FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt), this is purely an educational thing. So cyber security threat topics are great. Compliance deadlines are great because they’re deadlines and in marketing we love deadlines. AI… AI is everything right now, right? Copilot, go and do a Copilot webinar. I know loads of MSPs who are putting on Copilot webinars and they get loads of people registered and loads attend because people want to roll out Copilot. They want to use AI strategically in their business and they don’t know where to start. And you can use this either to sell your general managed services or even some Copilot consulting. These kind of topics, they pull in warm audiences with a pain, and that’s the key thing. They pull in people with a pain. When someone has a problem to solve or something they want to gain or a need or a want, they’re dramatically more likely to engage with you. And if they engage with you, they’re dramatically more likely to actually go on to do some work with you down the way. Webinars also give you a reason to reach out to your LinkedIn connections and particularly cold LinkedIn connections to people you don’t really know. You can reach out to them and say things like, “Hey, I thought this would be relevant to you. I’m doing a webinar series. It’s for local business owners. I don’t think you’ve attended one yet. I wonder which of these subjects might be relevant to you. Are you interested in cyber security? I’m doing that in the next couple of weeks, or I’m doing one about Copilot AI next month,” Or whatever the subjects should be. Now that brings me onto how often should you run webinars? Well, I believe you should run them quarterly at a minimum. You might even choose to do them monthly because you could do the same three webinars but just on a repeating pattern. So it could be productivity, cyber security, AI. So every month you have a new webinar, but actually you’ve only got to do three webinars and just do them on a repeating loop. And the compounding effect of this builds your reputation. You’re trying to be perceived as the local technology expert, right? Well, either locally or in your niche, your vertical. So doing webinars on a regular basis makes you an expert. There’s something that hasn’t changed in the AI age, which is that experts create content. And yeah, sure AI can do that for you super easily these days. So now you need to bring yourself above just the blog articles and the LinkedIn stuff that everyone is knocking out with AI, and you can tell it’s AI most of the time. You need to write seriously write proper things like a book or you need to present, go and present at live events or go and do webinars on a regular basis. Experts share what they know and how it helps other people. So if you really want to be seen as a technology expert, doing a quarterly or a monthly webinar is a great way to do this. So there’s a lot to think about there and I know that webinars are scary, but you’ve got to remember this. Webinars are not just a great way for you to find out who’s hot right now and give you an easy in to start a conversation with them, but the MSP who runs webinars on a regular basis is automatically positioned as the authority and most people in most marketplaces want to buy from the authority. Would you get up at 5am every weekday to grow your MSP? Would you like to hear my personal confession? I got up at five in the morning every single weekday for 15 years from 2005 to 2020 and not because I’m a masochist of some kind or extreme. It’s not because I don’t sleep well. I sleep very, very well, but it’s because I wanted to work on my business. And actually 2005 was when I started my first business. I sold that in 2016, which is when I started working with lovely MSPs and I kept that habit going until it stopped in lockdown. And I’ll tell you a bit more about that in a second. But getting up at five in the morning allowed me to have a chunk of time every single day to do the important things that grow your business. The biggest problem as a business owner is how do you find enough time to work on the business when you’re so busy working in the business. Now, let me tell you some stuff that kind of made it easy for me to get up at 5am I kind of had a head start because my previous job before I started my business in 2005, I was a breakfast radio presenter so I was getting up. You know the people you hear on the radio in the mornings, who listens to radio, it’s 2026 Paul, but if you do, they all sound a bit up and high and woo and jolly. Often that’s because they’ve already been up for a couple of hours. So my show started at six in the morning, I was up at four in the morning and I was at work by 4:30. So getting up at four in the morning and quitting that job when I started my own business, getting up at five in the morning actually felt like a lie in. So I will admit, yes, I kind of had it easy, but it was still a hard habit to keep going for all of those years. 15 years I kept that going. Unfortunately, I lost the habit in lockdown. I started sleeping in a bit more. We all did, didn’t we? Because our lifestyles were different, better in some way. Whitehaired Paul today needs his sleep, so now I get up at six and I don’t know if I could ever get up at five again, but the principle behind getting up at 5am every weekday has never changed. You’ve got to remember this, the only real silver bullet to grow your MSP is taking action. Action. It’s all about the action. Loads of people know what to do. Knowing what to do isn’t the problem anymore. In the age of AI and with people like me and hundreds of other people who know exactly what you need to do to grow your business, knowing what to do is not the problem. The problem is taking action. And whatever the problems right now in your MSP, action can overcome them. You can call it if you like, the will to act. The will to act means you know you’ve got things you need to do, you know that they’re difficult but you are choosing to protect time at the beginning of every working day to get things done. It’s the choice is the most important thing. There were many mornings that I work at 5am and it was a struggle. It really was. And there were times when I just pulled my laptop into the…

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Are Facebook Ads Suddenly HOT Again For MSPs? Jun 29, 2026

Show notes

Facebook has a new ad system that could be a game changer for MSPs. Also this week, where should you put your LinkedIn energy… personal profile or company page?, and meet the guy who built an MSP from zero to $20 million in six years. Welcome to Episode 346 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge. Are Facebook ads suddenly hot again for MSPs? I want to start with something that I think is genuinely underused by MSPs and that’s Facebook advertising. Now, just to give some context to this, Facebook advertising was really hot for MSPs like years and years ago and then suddenly it wasn’t. It stopped being an effective way to reach people, but actually I think it’s back. Let me bring you up to speed. Now I know what you might be thinking. Facebook, Paul, really? Isn’t that where your mum posts pictures of her garden and people just argue about politics and yes, it is that. But it’s also something else. Facebook is the most universally used social platform on the planet. 3.5billion people use Meta’s platforms every single day. And that includes the business owners and managers that you want to reach. Of course they’re on LinkedIn and that is still the primary social platform because they use that for work. But what if we could reach them during their downtime? They’re almost certainly on Facebook or using other Meta products and that makes it a very interesting place to advertise. As I said, for the last few years, I’ve been pretty lukewarm about recommending Facebook ads to MSPs. The targeting was getting harder after the iOS privacy changes of a few years ago and the costs were creeping up and the results were kind of inconsistent. And most MSPs just don’t have the budget or the time or the patience to run the kind of long test cycles that Facebook advertising used to need from you. But something changed at the very end of 2024 and it matters enough that I think it’s now worth revisiting this whole question. So Meta introduced a completely new advertising engine. It’s got a great name, it’s called Andromeda. And if you haven’t heard of Andromeda, then you’re not alone because it obviously wasn’t front page news. But in the world of digital advertising, it’s actually a pretty big deal. Here’s what Andromeda is and why it matters. Previously, Facebook’s ad system worked by letting advertisers define their audience very precisely. So you’d pick interests, age ranges, job titles, locations, obviously, behaviours if you could, and then the system would try to match your ads to the people that you described. And that sounds sensible, but the problem was the algorithm was really blunt. It would find one ad in your campaign that seemed to be working and dump all of the budget into that ad, kind of ignoring everything else. So it was very rigid and actually got less effective over time, especially as privacy changes made the audience data less reliable. Andromeda replaces all of that with a completely different approach. Instead of you telling Facebook who should see your ad, the AI figures out who should see the ad by itself based on your creative, based on the actual advert that you’ve created. So your ad becomes the targeting signal. The system watches how people respond to it. It looks for patterns, it detects who engages and who converts. And then it goes off and finds more people like them across the platform. So there’s no interest targeting required and no demographic filtering required. You just go broad and the AI does the matching for you. And this is really exciting. Because it’s been running for over a year already, the results from advertisers who’ve adapted to this properly have been really impressive. In fact, Meta’s own data shows a 22% increase in something called return on ad spend, ROAS. It’s a way of measuring how much business you get out of your ad spend. So they’ve shown a 22% increase for advertisers who fully embrace this new Andromeda approach. Advertisers are reporting 17% more conversions at a lower cost when they restructure their campaigns around Andromeda’s logic. So what does all of this mean for MSPs specifically? Well, a few things. First, the audience reach argument for Facebook is now a lot stronger. Business owners don’t leave Facebook and other Meta products at five o’clock like they might do with LinkedIn. They are on Facebook and Instagram and all of the others in the evenings, at the weekends, during their commute. They’re not necessarily in business owner mode when they see your ad on a Meta platform, but that can work in your favour because they might be more relaxed so they might be more open. And an ad that talks to them about a problem that they think, “Oh yeah, we’ve got exactly that problem – are you worried about what would happen to your business if your IT went down tomorrow?” That kind of stuff can land very effectively in that context. Secondly, the targeting problem has largely gone away. So under the old system, trying to reach the right business owners and managers in a specific geographic area with your Facebook ads, it was really hard. You’d try and layer the interests and the job titles and kind of just cross your fingers and hope for the best. But now, under Andromeda, you don’t need to do that. You just let the creative do all the work for you. So if you can write an ad or better still film an ad that speaks directly and specifically to a business owner’s pain, then the system will find the people who have that pain. It will find the match. And that’s a big change because your audience is fairly well defined even if it’s not a huge volume of people. Oh, and by the way, yes, it does still work under specific geographical limitations, although that is still something that a lot of people report does still need some improvement. Of course, for you as an MSP, it’s not such a big issue, right? Because you can work in theory with any business anywhere. Would you be that upset if you won a new client in the next town and it meant that now and again, you had to drive 30, 40, 50 miles to go and see them? I think for most people, the thrill of winning the new client would override the downside of having to jump in the car. Third then, and this is the bit I find most interesting, you no longer need to run hugely complex campaigns. The old advice was to split test endlessly, run retargeting sequences, build all these elaborate funnels. Andromeda has simplified all of that. You can run one campaign with a handful of creative executions of different approaches, different adverts. You can let the AI then optimise all of this for you. In fact, some advertisers have actually stopped running separate retargeting campaigns. You know the one where you show adverts to people who’ve already visited your website. They’ve done that because the algorithm is smart enough to know who’s seen you before and who hasn’t and they’ll serve the appropriate ad automatically. This all sounds so cool and obviously it’s never going to work exactly as designed because nothing ever does. And AI… we all know AI is not perfect, but I’ve been slowly and gently and just sort of on the edge monitoring this for a year or so for our own marketing as well as for your marketing. And I’ll be honest, it certainly seems to be a lot better than it ever used to be. I’ve got a couple of friends who are putting up to $10,000 to $20,000 a month into these Meta ads and they’re getting much better results than when they had the equivalent kind of spend a few years ago. So question for you, and I know you wouldn’t spend $20,000 a month on it, but a question for you, would a sensible Facebook ad strategy actually look right for an MSP right now? Well, if you’re going to do this, just start simple. Pick one clear message, something that’s rooted in a fear or a frustration that your ideal client has. So it shouldn’t be about your services or your stack or your accreditations. Focus the ad on a problem that talks to them. Which could be cyber attacks on businesses. You could say something like “Cyber attacks on businesses like yours or up significantly. Is your IT provider watching for threats 24/7?” Or it could be something like, “Most businesses only find out their backups don’t work when they actually need them.” So you could pick one message, run two or three variations of that message with different images, slightly different copy, that’s the words that you write. Or as I say, what will be better is a video advert. Use very broad targeting. Go for business owners and managers in your geographic area, but just keep the audience definition very loose, let Andromeda do the hard work. Now here’s the thing. If you do this, you need to give it six to eight weeks. You need to spend a few hundred pounds or dollars of budget before you judge the results. And it is the thing that the more you spend, the quicker you get to results. In fact, in any kind of ad campaign, you either need to give it time or you need to give it money, or ideally both. If you give it time and money, you get much better results at the end and you find out what works the best. The system needs time or money to learn. And here’s the thing about Facebook advertising for MSPs in 2026. It’s not going to replace LinkedIn as your primary relationship building channel. LinkedIn is still where you do the slow, steady farming that I talk about on this podcast all the time, but I believe that Facebook can now compliment that with a paid awareness level that puts your name in front of local business owners who’ve never heard of you on a platform they’re actually using every day. And it’s likely that most of your competitors aren’t doing this, which means the space is yours if you grab it and go for it. Where should you put your LinkedIn energy? Personal profile or company page? We talked earlier about Facebook advertising and how the Andromeda update has made it worth a second look, but I do want to come back to LinkedIn because there’s a question that comes up constantly from new members joining my MSP Marketing Edge and I want to give you a definitive answer. The question is this, “On LinkedIn, should I focus all of my attention on my personal profile or my company page?” And to me, the answer is clear, unambiguous, and backed by 3,000 million data points. I made that number up, but you get the idea. It’s a mountain of data. The answer is your personal profile. Full stop. And here’s why. LinkedIn’s algorithm treats personal profiles and company pages in completely different ways and those differences are not subtle. All the data from last year and this year to date is consistent across every study that I’ve looked at. Personal profiles generate somewhere between five and eight times more engagement than company pages posting identical content. In fact, one study found that personal profiles deliver 561% more reach than the equivalent company page. And organic reach for company pages has dropped 66% since 2024. In other words, if you’re putting most of your LinkedIn energy into your company page, then the algorithm is quietly making sure that almost no one sees it. Only about 2% of LinkedIn’s feed is made up of organic company page content. 2%! You can look at that yourself. Go into your LinkedIn feed. How often do you see updates from pages? Not very often is the answer. Compare that to top creator content from personal profiles, which actually makes up 31% of the feed. LinkedIn is explicitly built to show content from people not from businesses and LinkedIn has been very deliberate about this direction. It wants to be a place where humans connect with other humans, where a business owner in your town feels like they’re getting useful content from a real person that they’ve come to respect over time. And that means that a company page, no matter how well maintained, can never replicate that feeling. It always feels like it’s a brand talking, but people trust individuals far more than they trust brands. In fact, 92% of B2B buyers trust content from individuals over content from company accounts. So what does all of this mean practically for your MSP? Well, it means that you pick one person to be the face of the business on LinkedIn and for most MSPs, that’s the owner and then everything flows through that one personal profile. All of the daily posting, the connection requests to ideal prospects, all of the conversations, the direct messages, all of the relationship building. That on profile is your LinkedIn engine. Now, if we’re doing all of that one personal profile, does the company page matter at all? Well, yes it does, but for a very specific purpose. At the point when a prospect is seriously considering working with you, they’ll almost certainly look up your company because that’s just how people buy things these days. They Google you or they get an AI recommendation and then they check you out by looking at your website and your LinkedIn company page. And if your LinkedIn company page looks neglected with no content for six months, a blurry logo, it just creates doubt, right? It makes them think, “Hmm, is this business serious? Are they still active?” Doubt kills inquiries before they ever happen. So you do need to keep your company page alive, but alive doesn’t mean active in the same way that your personal profile is active. Here’s what I suggest. Post something on your company page once a week. That would be great. Or even just once or twice a month, that’d be fine. You could share your podcast episodes in there, if you do a podcast. You could cross post your LinkedIn newsletter in there. You could put up the odd piece of news or the odd achievement, a bit of celebration from your business. Just keep it ticking over. So when a hot prospect lands on your company page during their due diligence phase, it reassures them and doesn’t create doubt ever. But don’t pour your energy into it. Don’t write content specifically for it and definitely don’t expect it to reach new leads or new people because the algorithm is just not going to allow that to happen at any meaningful scale unless you’re willing to pay for LinkedIn ads. And if you do want to run LinkedIn ads, that’s a different conversation for a different day, but you do need the company page for that, which is another reason to keep it maintained. So to summarise, because I want this to be crystal clear, your personal profile is where you build audiences, grow relationships and ultimately convert those relationships into meetings and new clients. While your company page is your digital shopfront that prospects have a look at during due diligence. Treat them accordingly and give almost all of your time and attention to your personal profile. Just keep the company page tidy and updated and please don’t let anyone convince you otherwise because the data tells the truth. Members’ Update If you’re already a member of the MSP Marketing Edge, I want to make sure that you know about something that a lot of our members find genuinely transformative inside our member portal. It’s the training library and I don’t just mean a few videos that someone recorded in a hurry. It’s a proper structured collection of training that walks you through every major area of your marketing. Now, as you may know, we have two memberships available. So in our B2B marketing membership, there’s everything from how to maximise LinkedIn, how to build a proper marketing machine, right through to how to improve your website or build your unique selling proposition with my standout MSP system. There’s also operations training on things like finding and motivating an outbound phone person and what to do if your business needs a course correction. And then on our other membership, which is all about helping you to win co-managed IT, this is the newer one and one I’m really proud of. There’s a full sequence of training that takes you from understanding why B2B messaging backfires with I…

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The 4 types of CRMs used by MSPs (and which is best) Jun 22, 2026

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How to choose the best CRM for your MSP by answering a few key questions. Also this week, the most important metrics to focus on, and how MSPs can actually make money from AI. Welcome to Episode 345 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge. The 4 types of CRMs used by MSPs (and which is best) One of the most common questions I get from MSPs when they start thinking seriously about their marketing is, “Which CRM should we use?” And on the surface that sounds like a really simple question, but actually the more you dig into it, the more complicated it becomes. Isn’t that always the way? Because this isn’t really a question about software. It’s a question about frustration. What MSPs are really asking when they ask me about CRMs is, “Paul, where do I put all my prospect data? How do I build a pipeline that I can actually see? How do I know who to follow up and when to follow them up? How do I stop things falling through the cracks? And why is all of this giving me such a headache?” Those are all the kind of questions that MSPs really have. So before I walk you through the four types of CRMs that MSPs tend to use, let me say something to you. It may be slightly controversial. I believe there isn’t one best CRM for MSPs. There’s only the best CRM for how your MSP markets and sells itself. And those are two very different things. And the reason so many MSPs end up with the wrong tool or with a perfectly good tool that they never really properly use, is that they chose the software before they defined the marketing process and that’s backwards. The tool should serve the process never the other way around. Let’s look at the four types of CRM based on the four types of MSP. The first type is what I’d like to call PSA led MSPs. So these are MSPs who basically live inside their PSA. ConnectWise, Autotask, HaloPSA, Synchro, Atera, Kaseya, whatever it is. Their agreements are in there and this may be you. The billing’s in there, your tickets are in there. So for you, the idea of keeping your sales activity in exactly the same place feels logical and tidy. And actually if your sales are largely driven by referrals or renewals and everything’s kind of straightforward and simple, then this can work perfectly well. If you’re not trying to build a sophisticated marketing engine but you just want visibility on leads without having more software, then that might be the right answer for you. But a big word of caution. When a PSA vendor says their platform has a marketing module, that’s a little bit like a Swiss Army knife saying that it has a saw. So technically, yes, it’s true, but it’s not what you would choose if sawing things was something that you did every day. You can’t use that tiny little knife every day on a tree, can you? It’s just for the odd job. And it’s exactly the same with your PSA. Most marketing modules in PSAs, and I haven’t looked at all of them, so if I’m wrong on this, please email me and let me know. But most marketing modules in PSAs are not really up to the job of actually doing good comprehensive marketing every day. The second type then is marketing-led MSPs. And these tend to be MSPs that don’t have enough leads and know that marketing has to be their principle growth activity. Again, you may be in this category right now. So they want to run campaigns, they want to publish content consistently, they want to capture leads through forms, and importantly, and this is the right thing to do, is use automation to follow up all of these leads. So if that is you, the platforms to look at are things like HubSpot, making sure that you’ve got the marketing hub, HubSpot’s broken into lots of different hubs, so you’ll need the marketing hub. Or you could look at ActiveCampaign or look at Zoho One, or there are more budget-friendly ones like MailChimp or MailerLite. Or if you belong to The Tech Tribe, then you get Growably, which is built on something called GoHighLevel. And actually GoHighLevel itself is also worth looking at, although it’s cheaper to actually join The Tech Tribe and get Growably than it is to buy GoHighLevel independently. So all of these platforms I was just talking about here, they combine contact management with automation and lead scoring and campaign reporting. And they all do those at various different levels. But here’s the thing, all of those tools I just mentioned there, they only make sense if you’re genuinely prepared to use those capabilities because some of those platforms are not cheap. I’m looking at you, HubSpot. We’re with HubSpot, I love it, but it’s $1,700 a month for all of the things that we use. It’s a massive, massive bill every single month and all of them come with a steep learning curve. I’m looking at you, HubSpot. HubSpot is perhaps the steepest learning curve of any software ever, but it’s worth it. And it took us pretty much a year to migrate our entire setup from Keap over to HubSpot. I don’t recommend Keap anymore. I do recommend HubSpot, even though we went through months and months of pain, it was worth it. The third type of MSP is a sales-led MSP. So these are MSPs that are doing a lot of sales activity. They maybe even have or probably do have a dedicated salesperson, or maybe there’s a couple of partners within the business and one of the partners focuses all of their time on marketing and sales. And in this instance, the MSP wants clarity on the pipeline above anything else. So they want defined stages, they want forecasting, they want some accountability for follow-up. Actually, that’s more of a problem if you’ve got two or more salespeople and often they will want a dashboard as well that they can look at every day and understand what’s going on. So if you’ve ever said out loud, “I genuinely don’t know what deals we’ve got on right now,” then you’re probably in this group. And in that instance, I would recommend something like Pipedrive, that’s a great choice if you’re in this group. HubSpot again is good for this, it has something called sales hub, which is like the functionality you switch on in HubSpot. Again, Zoho is worth looking at, Zoho CRM. Freshsales and something called Close. I’ve not looked at those two myself but I’ve heard other MSPs talk about them. So they’re all worth looking at. And these systems are often simpler than the big enterprise platforms that we’re actually just about to talk about, but they tend to be far more structured than a PSA add-on. They have a different functionality to the pure marketing ones. So if you go get something like HubSpot, you can do the marketing hub, you can do the sales hub and you get both of those in the same software and they integrate, which is great, but obviously you pay the price for that in terms of cash. Whereas if you go something like MailChimp as your marketing tool, it doesn’t typically have the sales thing. So that’s typically where you have these separate tools. Ultimately, to have both tools, a really good marketing tool and a really good sales tool both in one CRM, you’re going to pay for that functionality. So these sales tools I was just talking about there are built more for sales clarity than for actual marketing ability, although they do all overlap in some kind of way. And then we come onto the fourth type, which I’m going to briefly mention for completeness, but it’s very, very few MSPs. Certainly the kind of people who listen to this podcast or watch on YouTube are probably not in this group, and that’s enterprise-led MSPs. So for these businesses, these MSPs, we’re talking Salesforce, Microsoft’s Dynamics 365, NetSuite CRM, they’re very powerful, they’re very expensive. You think $1,700 is a lot money, Paul, Salesforce you probably can’t even switch it on for less than a few thousand dollars a month because these are enterprise solutions and they demand a level of process maturity and some level of internal ownership that most MSPs just don’t have. Certainly not the kind of MSPs that this podcast and this YouTube channel is aimed at. So if you don’t have those clearly defined sales stages or solid reporting requirements, if you don’t have someone internally who can spend half of their working time maintaining data quality and just hygiene of your CRM, then these systems are not for you because they become very expensive, very over complicated. They’re kind of just big, expensive, over complicated databases more than anything. And you don’t want that. You want your CRM, whatever you choose, whether it’s down at the free to get going end of the market, like Mailchimp or at the very expensive but very good tool set end, like HubSpot, you want them to be revenue driving assets. That’s what they’re supposed to be. So to pull all of this together, before you ask yourself which software should I use, which CRM should I pick? A much more important question first is: How do you generate leads? How do you turn those leads into warm prospects? How do you convert them into clients? If you know the answers to those three questions really clearly, then the right CRM quickly becomes a pretty obvious choice. But if you can’t answer those three questions, no software in the world is going to rescue you. The process always must come first. The most important metrics to focus on (not tickets) Have you had a chance to listen to or watch last week’s podcast? Because back then I said that every MSP needs to think of itself as a media company and a marketing company rather than a technical company. I’m not going to go into that again, you can just visit episode 344 or we have them all on every podcast channel. But today I want to take that one step further… Once you accept that marketing is a core function of your business and not just something you kind of get round to when things are quiet, the next question becomes – How do you know whether or not your marketing is working? And this is where a lot of MSPs go wrong, not because they don’t measure things because they do. MSPs are actually really good at measuring things. Your PSA is full of data, isn’t it? You’ve got ticket volumes and response times and resolution times and SLA compliance and all of that kind of stuff. I know that stuff gets tracked and reported and reviewed, which is all great. Those metrics, the ones I was just talking about, they matter for running a good service operation. But the problem is none of those numbers tell you whether or not your business is growing, or whether your marketing is working, or whether or not you’re lining up winning new clients in the next month or the next quarter. They just tell you how well you’re looking after the clients you already have. And yes, yes, I know that’s important, but it’s only half the picture. And for many MSPs, it’s actually the only half they’re ever looking at. So when I ask an MSP owner how their marketing is performing, the answers I usually get are things like, “Oh yeah, absolutely, our LinkedIn following has gone up, or we’re getting more website visitors, or we had a 22% open rate on our last email.” And those things are not meaningless. Audience size and engagement are indicators of potential future growth, but they are very far from the numbers that matter the most. Because you can have 10,000 followers or connections on LinkedIn and win zero clients, but you can also have 200 connections on LinkedIn and be having three sales meetings a month. Followers and connections don’t pay your bills. New clients absolutely do. So what should you be tracking? Well, you might be surprised by this because I believe that when it comes down to it, you should only really be tracking two numbers, just two. But if you can get these two numbers right, everything else in your marketing will just make sense, it will just contribute to new clients. So the first thing to track is something called MQLs, which stands for marketing qualified leads. An MQL is someone who’s engaged with your marketing in a meaningful way, which suggests that they might one day be ready to buy. I mean, it’s a big might, but it’s kind of a level of engagement. So not just someone who likes a post or opens an email, but someone who has taken a more deliberate action. Maybe they’ve downloaded something or they’ve replied to an email or they’ve clicked through to your website from your LinkedIn content and they’ve spent a little bit of time on it. All of these things are good measures of engagement. Maybe they’ve responded to a direct message or they’ve asked you a question or they’ve just generally engaged in a way which signals something beyond passive consumption. They’re being proactive, they’re warming up, they’re not ready to buy yet, but they’re moving in that right direction. So that’s the first thing to track. The second thing to track is SQLs. So we had marketing qualified leads. SQLs are sales qualified leads and an SQL is someone who is actively considering switching MSP. They’ve probably had a discovery call or some kind of level of conversation with you. They’ve asked about pricing or services and you can see that they’re asking the right kind of questions and they’ve agreed to maybe a Zoom or a Teams meeting or something like that. So if they’re not there right now, they are right on the edge of a live buying conversation. Does that make sense? Now here’s why these two numbers are so important. Together they give you a clear picture of whether or not your marketing machine is functioning properly. So if your MQL number is growing month on month, then your marketing is working. You’re pulling people into your world, you’re warming them up and they’re engaging with you. If your SQL number is growing, then your conversion process is working. You’re turning warm relationships into real opportunities. And if either of those two numbers, the MQLs and the SQLs is flat or worse, it’s falling, then actually you know where the problem is. So you’re either not generating enough warm interest and that’s a marketing problem or you’re not converting that interest into conversations, which is a sales process problem. Two very different problems with two very different solutions. And you can only really see the difference if you’re tracking both of those numbers. And actually, as we said, most MSPs aren’t tracking either of those numbers. So if you’re still watching the vanity metrics like follow accounts, open rates, you’re feeling good or bad based on how many people are connected to you on LinkedIn, then unfortunately you have no idea whether your marketing is generating actual commercial momentum or not. What I’d encourage you to do if you haven’t got a CRM that does this for you, well, we were just talking about CRMs, weren’t we? Go and get one of those, or if it comes to it, just set up a simple spreadsheet. And at the end of each week, write down how many MQLs you added that week, how many people took a meaningful step forward and how many SQLs are currently active, how many live buying conversations do you have going on right now? And that’s it. Those are only really the two numbers you need to track. You could track all of the others because they feed into them, but if you just tracked your MQLs and your SQLs every single week, that’s going to make a difference because I know it’s a cliche, but it’s true that what gets measured gets managed. So if you’re serious about consistently growing your MSP, those are the two numbers that will tell you what’s actually working and what’s not working right now. Members’ Update If you’re already an MSP Marketing Edge member, you probably know that one of the most used parts of our service is our world-class support. Unlike all of the other content suppliers out there that just give you content and leave you with it, we give you three things. We give you, first of all, a system for your marketing. Then we give you all of the marketing content you need to run that marketing system. And then thirdly, we give you what we b…

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Focusing On Tech Doesn't Grow Your MSP Jun 15, 2026

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MSPs must build audiences and relationships before selling IT support, which is why marketing is so important. Also this week, why technically superior MSPs lose deals to “average” competitors, and how MSPs can build resilience every day. Welcome to Episode 344 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge. Every MSP is now a media & marketing company I want to start today with something that landed in my email inbox a few weeks back from a guy called Tom Orbach. Now, he writes a newsletter called Tom’s Marketing Ideas. I’ve been a paying subscriber for a while. He’s sharp, he’s very original and when he says something, I really do pay attention. Now, the subject line of his email was this… Every company is now a media company. And after I read the newsletter, I just couldn’t stop thinking about it because I believe he’s absolutely right and I believe it matters enormously for your MSP. Let me explain what he wrote about and then I’m going to add my own layer on top of that. So Tom’s argument started with a data point. It was about OpenAI and how they’d recently spent over $100 million to acquire a podcast, which is kind of weird if you think about it because they didn’t acquire another technology company or any kind of software platform, they spent all that money on a podcast. In fact, it was two guys who’d been doing a live tech show for just 17 months. And then the week before that, a fintech company called Plaid, which by the way is worth $8 billion, they bought a newsletter with 200,000 subscribers and actually Tom listed company after company after company that have done the same thing. HubSpot bought a newsletter with 2.5 million subscribers. Stripe bought a founder community. Semrush, which is an SEO tool, they bought several SEO publications. And these are not media companies, these are software and technology businesses, but they’ve all been spending hundreds of millions of dollars to own audiences. So before we explore why, let me first of all just put something out there to the universe. If there’s any business that wants to come and buy this podcast for let’s say $100 million, then please email me. Obviously I’m joking. (I’m not joking. Email me.) Anyway, let’s look at why all of these big businesses are doing this and why even though these are big businesses buying podcasts and newsletters and stuff like that, it’s still relevant to you as an MSP. They’re doing it because they figured out something that most businesses are still catching up to. In a world where AI can produce infinite content at practically zero cost, the one thing that can’t be replicated is a trusted human voice with a loyal audience. Attention is the scarcest resource in business right now and the companies that own attention don’t need to chase customers anymore. The customers come to them. Tom Orbach in his newsletter puts this brilliantly. He says, “The company that teaches about the industry earns the right to sell the tool.” And that sentence is basically the entire philosophy behind what I do with this podcast, with my LinkedIn newsletter, with my weekly emails, with all of my content. I’m not really selling my MSP Marketing Edge membership. I’m building audiences of MSPs who trust me. And when they’re ready to take their marketing seriously, I’m the person they’re going to think of. Now, here’s where this is applicable for you because the good news is you don’t need to spend $100 million on a podcast network, but you do need to think of your MSP as a media company. And what does that mean in practice? It means you should be publishing content consistently. Something that educates the business owners and managers that you want to work with. At the very least, a weekly email, a weekly LinkedIn newsletter, a short video, ideally every week or every month, a blog post every week. And not all of these at once. Pick one or two, do them consistently, do them week after week after week and then systemise them so someone else is doing the hard work on your behalf. I write this podcast and I read this podcast and my team do all of the rest of the work, and believe me, they do a lot more work on this than I do. But you would do this because the business owners in your area are out there already consuming content every day. And the question is whether any of that content is coming from you. If it’s not, they have no relationship with you. And when the day comes that they’re finally ready to switch from one MSP to another, if you’re not out there with your content and they’re not consuming that content, you’re not there in their head and in their heart someone else is. And you know there’s something else that Tom Orbach says that I want to reinforce? He says that in 2026, every company has access to the same AI tools and can now publish endless content at almost no cost. And every company blog now reads kind of the same. 2000 words are very well structured, SEO optimised, annoyingly forgettable content that sounds like it could have been written by anyone about anything. And do you know what? People can feel this. They are drowning in slop and they are hungry for something real. A human who actually works in the industry has real actual opinions, who tells them what’s happening and what to pay attention to. That is the opportunity for you. And it connects to something that I believe very deeply about, which separates the MSPs that grow from the MSPs that stagnate, because here’s the second part of what I want to say today, and it’s something that I’ve observed of many, many, many years working with MSPs all around the world. The most successful MSPs are not the most technically brilliant ones. They’re also not the ones with the best tech stack or the most certifications or the slickest operations. The MSPs that grow the fastest and the most consistently are the ones where the owner has made a fundamental mindset shift. They’ve stopped thinking of themselves purely as a technology business and started thinking of themselves as a marketing and growth business that also happens to deliver excellent IT. And that sounds like a subtle difference, but it really isn’t. It changes everything about how you spend your time, what decisions you prioritise, and what kind of business you end up building. When you’re running an MSP that’s primarily focused on operations, your whole day is consumed by tickets, clients, staff, vendors, firefighting. Marketing is the thing you’ll get round to when all the other things quietened down. And things never quieten down, do they? So marketing never happens. When you’re running an MSP that’s a marketing and media company first, you protect time every single day for the activities that grow the business. You treat your weekly email as non-negotiable. You treat your LinkedIn presence as a business asset, not something you’ve got to do. And you end up thinking about your audience, your message, and your pipeline in the same way you think about your SLAs and your response times. All of these things matter, but in most MSPs, only one of them gets proper attention. Tom Orbach, the guy that writes the newsletter, he’s right. Every company is now a media company. And I’ll add to that that every MSP needs to become a marketing company as well, those two things together, not instead of being a great service provider, but alongside it. The MSP that teaches, that shows up consistently, that earns the trust of its local market through content and personality and genuine helpfulness, that MSP does not have to chase clients. Clients find them. And trust me, that is a very different and much better business to own and run. Why technically superior MSPs lose deals to “average” competitors Can I say something that might make you feel a little uncomfortable and a little not particularly humble, even if it’s actually true? Technically you are probably better than some of your competitors. Do you agree with that? Maybe your tech stack is stronger, maybe your people are more capable, maybe just your systems and processes are more robust. And yet, despite all of that, every single day some local businesses choose another MSP instead of you. And so the question that should be keeping you up at night is this. Why? Why are they picking MSPs that technically aren’t as good as you? What on earth is wrong with these people? Most MSPs assume that the answer is to keep improving the service, so better tools and processes and delivery, all of that kind of stuff. And while all of these things are absolutely true and they matter, they don’t solve the core problem that’s costing you new deals. The issue usually isn’t about effort or quality or commitment. It’s usually down to how buyers perceive you. And that is a completely different problem because here’s the reality, to an ordinary business owner or manager, someone who doesn’t live in our world, most MSPs look broadly the same. That’s not intended as an insult, it’s just how human decision making works when someone’s buying something that they don’t fully understand. When a business owner starts thinking about switching IT support companies, they go into research mode. So they might Google a bit, probably these days ask an AI tool to do some research for them, they’ll skim a few websites. And they might shortlist two or three MSPs and start to compare them. Now from their point of view, this is actually really hard because for most MSPs on their websites and their marketing, the messaging looks and feels the same everywhere. It’s all about we’re proactive, we’re secure, we’re responsive, we’re reliable, we’ve got great service, we’re your trusted partner. And none of that is wrong, but none of it helps them to choose when everyone’s saying the same things. When buyers can’t clearly see a difference between options, they will default to one of two things. They’ll either pick on price or they won’t switch. They’ll stick with their incumbent, this is absolutely true. And neither of those outcome works in your favour. This is why, and if you’ve been listening to this podcast for a while you’ll have heard me say this before, samey kills sales, even for technically excellent MSPs. What’s happening is that most MSPs are accidentally positioning themselves as just another option. Not because they lack the expertise, but because they explain their business from their own perspective rather than from the buyer’s perspective. They lead with features instead of outcomes, with process rather than reassurance, and with technical competence instead of clarity. And the result of this is that your average competitors, the people who technically aren’t as good as you, they are winning deals and beating you to win deals simply because they feel easier for a non-technical person to understand and therefore easier to choose. And that’s the key shift that most MSPs never make. Do you know really this is a positioning problem. If a buyer can’t quickly answer three basic questions: Who do you help? What outcome do you deliver? Why are you different? If they can’t answer those three, they will not choose you. And not because they dislike you, but because their heart cannot differentiate you from all the other MSPs. And if the heart can’t differentiate, the brain cannot justify picking you. Those two things have to both be won over. So what’s the answer? I believe you need a USP, a unique selling proposition, and I want to be really clear about what that is and what it isn’t. A real USP is not a slogan or a clever line. It’s the foundation that makes everything else work. It’s what turns your website, your LinkedIn and your sales conversations into something coherent and distinctive instead of interchangeable. So here’s a simple way to test where you stand right now. Open up your AI tool of choice, ask it to look at your website and the websites of three or four of your local competitors, and then ask it this question. From the point of view of a stressed business owner who doesn’t understand IT, how different do these MSPs sound from one another? Let me give you that question again, it’s such a critical question. So you ask AI, From the point of view of a stressed business owner who doesn’t understand IT, how different do these MSPs sound from one another? Now, if the answer that your AI tool gives you is not very different, then that’s not a failure, it’s just a blind spot. And actually it’s one that almost every MSP has at some point. Strong positioning usually anchors around something very specific and very deliberate, which might be the outcome that you deliver, or the sector that you specialise in, or let’s say a value that your ideal clients care about above all else, like compliance for example, or even the human personality behind the business. That’s the approach that I’ve taken with my business, it’s our big differentiating factor is me. Obviously we’re very good at what we do, but no one can ever copy me. It’s what makes our business unique. What matters for you is that you’ve got to give the buyers something clear and memorable that they can grab hold of that they can latch onto. Here’s a core positioning format that works really well for MSPs. We help achieve by . I’ll give you an example… We help to by . Or here’s another one… We help by . These are great USPs, you’re more than welcome to swipe these and adapt them and use them. Here’s one more for you. We help by . Now, these are kind of internal statements that you just use for you to know what is our USP, but can you see the difference between those statements and the usual, we’re proactive, we’re reliable, we’re a trusted partner? The same kind of language that every MSP defaults to. Once you’ve got a core positioning statement locked in, something that will guide all of your marketing efforts inside your business, everything else follows. It’s then kind of easy to change your website. It’s easy to tweak your LinkedIn. It’s easy to make sure you’re having the right sales conversations. You stop sounding like every other MSP and you start sounding like the right one to your ideal clients. So here’s the question to sit with after today’s show. What’s stopping you from just doing this and fixing this? Because the answer is probably a lot simpler than you think. Members’ Update If you’re a member of the MSP Marketing Edge co-managed membership, which is there to help you win IT directors as clients, have you had a look at the training yet? Because if you go into our co-managed portal, you’ll see training right there in the navigation. And we have a ton of training to help you understand why marketing for co-managed IT contracts is so different from marketing B2B. Business owners and IT directors think and act in completely different ways. So it’s a completely different relationship you build with them. It’s a completely different type of buying and you have to market to them in a completely different way. So that’s there right now if you’re a member. If you’re not yet a member, just to let you know, we only work with one MSP per area. So one for our B2B marketing membership and one for our co-managed marketing membership. You can see if your area is available at mspmarketingedge.com/membership. How MSPs can build resilience every day Featured guest: Steve Judge is an award-winning, international motivational speaker, two times world champion in paratriathlon, author, coach, and workshop facilitator. He shares his journey that took him from wheelchair to world champion and beyond in business. MSP’s live in a world of relentless and complex changes, challenges and uncertainty. In this podcast Steve will share the Golden Wave of Resilience needed to combat constant pressure and the need for peak performance. It will empower the audience to unlock the essential habits that high achievers use to succeed in this competitive world. It’s really hard work being a business owner, more so I think in t…

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Deep Dive: How MSPs Win Healthcare Clients Jun 08, 2026

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MSPs love healthcare practices for many reasons, so here’s how to reach them and win them as clients. Also this week, the 5 questions your MSP website’s MUST answer (or prospects go elsewhere), and the scary implications for MSPs when your clients buy cyber liability Insurance. Welcome to Episode 343 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge. Deep dive: How MSPs win healthcare clients Let’s talk about one of the most attractive client verticals that any MSP can go after. Healthcare practices. And when I say healthcare, I mean private practices specifically. So doctors, dentists, dental surgeons, optometrists, or opticians as they’re known here in the UK, veterinarians, we call them vets here in the UK, physiotherapists, cosmetic clinics, all of that kind of stuff. The kind of practice that’s owner operated or partnership run. I mean somewhere that’s got a reception desk, clinical staff, and a growing pile of technology holding the whole thing together. This is not about hospitals or large health networks. This is about those small to medium-sized healthcare practices that need IT support and they’re probably getting it from someone who maybe doesn’t really understand their world, and that is your opportunity. A heads up that this podcast is consumed all around the world and obviously there are lots of different healthcare systems out there. So for example, here in the UK, most doctors and what we call general practitioners, GPs, they work within the National Health Service, which is run by the government. So this means I’m not going to dive into specific details or specific laws for any particular country. Instead, I’m going to talk generally about how you can reach all of these kind of clients, whichever country you’re in. Because even though there are different laws and different systems around the world, these healthcare professionals all think and feel and act pretty much along the same lines. So why do MSPs love healthcare practices so much? Well, let me count the reasons… First of all, they’re almost entirely recession proof. People don’t stop going to the dentist when the economy wobbles. They don’t stop taking their dog to the vet. I mean, they might cut back on the extra spend such as having all their teeth replaced with those weird looking teeth that Hollywood people have, but they still maintain the basic essentials. So these businesses have a good solid base of revenue still coming in no matter what’s happening to the economy. In fact, these are businesses typically built on recurring appointments, loyal patients and services that can’t be postponed indefinitely. Second, they are deeply dependent on technology. The appointment system, the patient records, the digital imaging, the billing software, the online prescribing, the payment processing. It’s all technology, right? And all of it needs to work all day, every single day, because when it doesn’t work, the consequences are immediate and painful. A dental practice that can’t access its patient management system on a Monday morning isn’t just frustrating. It’s losing appointments and revenue and it’s letting its patients down. And that’s the kind of downtime that gets you fired as their IT provider and the kind of risk that makes them incredibly motivated to find someone they can genuinely trust. A side note, I worked with dentists in a previous business, one that I sold 10 years ago, and here in the UK, they call helping the patient’s “chair time”. That’s all the dentist wants, they want chair time. They want the patient in the chair, they want their fingers and metal things in the patient’s mouth, that makes them happy because they’re earning money, and anything other than chair time is losing them money. So it’s really good for you to get into the mindset of what is most important to the healthcare professional that I’m talking to here. Third, they are regulated, very heavily regulated in some areas. So sure, different countries and regions have different specific rules, but the principle is the same everywhere. Healthcare practices handle very, very sensitive patient data. They have legal and ethical obligations to protect it. In the US, dental and medical practices have very specific compliance requirements around patient data. In Australia, Canada, and the UK, there are equivalent frameworks. Even veterinary practices, which in some places aren’t covered by the same strict health data regulations, but they still handle client personal data and payment information and they’re increasingly expected to protect it properly. Compliance is both a burden and a gift for you as an MSP. It’s a burden for the practice owner because they have to meet it and it’s a gift for you because it creates a constant legitimate reason to have conversations with them. Fourth then, and this one matters. They talk to each other. Healthcare professionals within a specialty are a very tightly networked community. Dentists know other dentists, veterinarians know other veterinarians. They all attend the same kind of conferences and belong to the same professional associations. They send referrals to each other’s practices. The referral flywheel in this sector is powerful. One happy healthcare client, treated well and looked after properly, can easily open the door to three or four more clients. So how do you actually reach these people and win them? Well, let’s get into the practical stuff… The first thing to understand is that the owner of a private healthcare practice is not primarily thinking like a business owner. They’re thinking like a clinician. A dentist’s identity is as a dentist, not as a small business owner. So when you talk to them about technology, you have to translate everything into the language of clinical practice. Not uptime percentages, but time their patients spend waiting because the system is down. Not endpoint protection, but whether their patient records are safe. Not disaster recovery, but whether they could open the practice on a Monday morning after something went wrong on the Friday. Does that make sense? I mean, this is the same principle we always talk about in this podcast. It’s features versus benefits. But in healthcare, it matters even more because the emotional stakes are higher. A practice owner who loses patient data isn’t just losing data, they’re potentially losing their registration, their reputation and the thing they’ve spent their career building. So lead with that, but not in a scary, ambulance chasing kind of way, but in a calm understanding, we know your world kind of way. The second thing to understand is where to find them. Healthcare practices are locally rooted businesses typically. So the dentist that you’re targeting is almost certainly in your geographical area. And that means local marketing tactics work brilliantly here. Local LinkedIn outreach to practice owners and practice managers, Google business profile optimisation so that you come up when someone searches for IT support for dental practices in the area, and attending local professional networking events where practice owners gather. Even a direct mail to a list of local practices, which you can often build yourself pretty easily from online directories and professional registers, that could work as well, or you could just use Google Maps for that. One of the most effective things you can do is to create a vertical specific page on your website. Something that says at the top, something like IT support for dental practices or Technology for veterinary clinics. Make sure you do a different page for each vertical. So one for dentists, one for veterinarians, one for doctors. When a practice owner lands on a page that speaks directly about their world and the specific imaging software that they use, and the scheduling systems that they rely on, and the compliance requirements that they face, well, something just clicks. And that’s why you should actually name systems that these healthcare professionals regularly use, especially if you have experience of working with them, because then they think, “Oh, these people actually understand us.” That feeling of being understood is so much more powerful than any list of services that you could put on the page. Third, create content specifically for this audience. So a short guide called something like The five biggest IT mistakes that dental practices make, or a blog post about what happens to a practice’s patient data if a laptop gets stolen, or a video walking through what a cyber incident response plan looks like for a small healthcare practice. Now this content does two things, a) it attracts the right people to your website and your LinkedIn and b) it positions you as the expert who understands their world before you’ve ever spoken to them. Fourth, and I can’t stress this enough, get one client in the sector first. Even if it takes a little longer, even if the first one comes through a referral or a favour, get in, get that first client. Get your first dental practice or veterinary clinic as a client. Then look after them, like overservice them. Learn the sector from them, learn about the tools that they rely on and the language that they use and their stresses internally. And then go build a case study around that person. Get a testimonial from them because you can use that as the foundation for everything else that you do in this vertical. One genuine client story from inside the sector is worth a hundred claims that you make on your website, because the real story proves that you’ve actually done it. And when another practice owner like them reads about a practice that sounds just like theirs and the problems that they had that you solved, that’s the moment they’re most likely to book in to talk to you. Healthcare is a long game, like all good verticals, but it is a very, very good game to play. The practices are stable, the compliance pressure is real and ongoing, the technology dependency is growing year on year, and the referral networks are tight enough that one great relationship can seed a dozen more. So if you don’t currently have healthcare practices in your client base, this is a vertical worth some serious attention. The 5 questions your MSP website’s MUST answer (or prospects go elsewhere) A few weeks ago, an MSP showed me their brand new website and they were really proud of it. And I could completely see why because it looked great, really clean layouts, nice colours, modern fonts, and they’d got AI to mostly put it together but guided by humans. Visually it absolutely did the job, and that was my problem with it because although it looked professional, it didn’t really say anything. There was no positioning, no emotional pull, no clear sense of what made this MSP different from their many, many competitors. There was no obvious reason for any prospect to land on it and think, “Ah, yes, this is the one for me.” Now AI is brilliant at creating websites, but what it still can’t do is create meaning or connection or intent. And here’s the thing, plenty of MSPs have exactly the same problem even when they haven’t used AI to build their site. Your website looks good or at least acceptable on the surface, but behind the scenes it’s not converting traffic into leads, then into sales appointments. And that’s the only job a website actually has. So let me give you something practical that you can use right now. When a prospect lands on your website, they subconsciously ask a small number of questions. And of course they don’t write them down, they don’t consciously think them through. But if those questions are not answered quickly and clearly, they’re not going to give you feedback or fill in a form to tell you what was missing, they’re just going to leave. They’ll go and look at another MSP instead. So here are the five questions that matter the most. Question one, is this actually for a business like mine? Prospects want to recognise themselves almost immediately. If your website feels like it’s for any business anywhere, then it kind of ends up feeling like it’s for no one in particular. A strong website makes it super obvious who you work with, what size of business you’re geared towards, and the kinds of problems that you specialise in solving. Specific feels safe, generic feels risky. Question two, do these people understand my world? This isn’t about technical brilliance or listing every tool in your stack. It’s about showing that you understand the realities your prospects live with every day. The pressure, the downtime, the security worries, their frustrated staff and the risk to their reputation if something goes wrong. If your website talks more about your technology than their problems, then you’ve missed the point. Prospects don’t want IT, they want fewer headaches. Understand this and show it on every single page of your website and you could be one of the most successful MSPs on the planet. Question three, can I trust these people? Trust isn’t created by saying you’re trusted. It’s created by evidence: social proof, client stories, real examples from real people with real opinions. All of those do far more work than marketing claims ever will. If your website has no proof that anyone has ever actually been helped by you and given you money to do it, then the message you’re sending is, “We sound good, but you’re taking a leap of faith.” And honestly, most buyers won’t take that leap. Question four, roughly how much is this going to cost me? And this is where so many MSP websites fall down. No one expects an exact price on a website, but complete silence on the subject creates anxiety. Your site should help prospects understand what affects the price, what a basic package looks like versus a comprehensive package and whether you are even in the right ballpark for their budget. Trust me, mystery does not increase conversions, clarity does. Question five, what do I do next? You’d be amazed how many MSP’s websites forget this part entirely. After reading any part of any page on your site, it should be absolutely blindingly obvious what the next step is, why they should take it and what’ll happen when they do. We call this your “call to action”. And if your call to action is vague or kind of hidden somewhere at the bottom of one page or just on your contact us page, or even if it’s just a bit too timid, then prospects hesitate and hesitation kills momentum. The best call to action is your live calendar. Ask them for a 15 minute video call if they’re a B2B prospect. For Co-Managed, you need a longer call because that’s a much longer in-depth call. There you should ask for a 30 minute call, but put your live calendar, embed it on the page. In fact, embed it on every single page. And if it’s a long page with lots of content and pictures and videos, then you might have that two or three places throughout that page. So it’s obvious for them that the next step is to book a discovery call with you. So here’s a quick challenge for you then after those five. Open your website right now, or if you’re driving, do it later. Read it as if you’ve never seen it before then ask yourself honestly… does my website clearly answer all five of those questions or does it just look nice? Because a good looking website without any substance is just decoration, and decoration doesn’t grow your MSP. Members’ Update This podcast episode’s been released on the 9th of June, 2026. And that means that brand new content drops tomorrow for the members of my MSP Marketing Edge membership. On the 10th of every month we release new content both for our B2B membership and our co-managed IT membership. So tomorrow we’ll drop into the portal all of the content for July 2026. And what we do is give our members a three-step marketing system that they can use to generate leads and all of the content that they need to implement that system. That’s videos, blogs, Google business pr…

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What Happens When You Copy Another MSP Jun 01, 2026

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Most MSPs are just copying other MSPs’ marketing and this is a massive problem. Here’s what to do instead. Also this week, LinkedIn’s big algorithm change is SEXY for MSPs, and don’t bother starting marketing until you’ve got these fundamentals in place. Welcome to Episode 342 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge. The trap of copying other MSPs’ marketing (and how to escape it) Let me describe a scene to you. You sit down one afternoon because you’ve decided that you’re finally going to sort out your marketing and you think, “I’m just going to do a bit of research. I’m going to see what other MSPs elsewhere are doing.” And that sounds like a sensible place to start, right? So you Google IT support not just in your town, because you want to look out there and see what other people are doing, so you go and look for IT support in a few different towns. And you pull up 10 MSP websites and then you start looking at them and reading them and just getting a feel for them. After about 20 minutes or so, you close your laptop and you realise that they all say kind of the same thing. They all say things like proactive IT support or your trusted technology partner or we keep your business running, something like that. Tailored solutions for businesses of all sizes, cyber security you can rely on… all of these kind of things. They’re all versions of the same thing. Here’s the problem, because you looked at all of those websites and thought, that’s what all MSPs say so I suppose that’s what I should say too. And because of that, you then go away and write your own version of exactly the same thing. And now your website sounds exactly the same as the other websites that you already looked at. Does this make sense? I see this pattern constantly and I do completely understand why it happens. When you don’t know where to start with your marketing, looking at what other MSPs are doing feels logical because you think maybe they’ve already figured something out. Why do I need to reinvent the wheel? I’ll just do a version of what they’ve done. The problem with that is that in the MSP world, almost nobody actually has it figured out. Most MSPs are just copying other MSPs, who themselves copied other MSPs, who copied someone who copied the first MSP website that ever got built around about 1873. That was a bit of a confusing sentence, but you get the idea. It’s like an echo chamber of sameness that’s been bouncing the same tired phrases around the whole of the channel for 20 years or so. When everything looks and feels the same, ordinary business owner prospects cannot tell MSPs apart. This is a massive, massive problem across the whole channel. So the business owner prospect defaults to comparing you and all of the other MSPs on the only thing that they can compare you on, which is price. And that’s exactly the outcome that you don’t want. Now here’s the really interesting bit. The reason that MSP marketing is so samey isn’t that the businesses themselves are samey. It’s just that as I was saying, when MSPs write their marketing, they think about what they do rather than what their clients feel. So they describe their service from the inside looking out and the result is technically accurate but forgettable. It’s completely interchangeable with everyone else. So how do you escape this trap of sameness? I believe the answer is to stop looking sideways at your competitors and start looking outwards at your clients. Specifically three things: First of all, look at who you actually are not what you do. So your personality, your story, your opinions, the way you run your business. These are all the things that make you slightly different, slightly unconventional. They’re very specific to you and that stuff is yours alone. No one else can copy it because it’s you, right? And we’ve talked about this in the podcast a few times over the years, about putting your authentic personality right at the centre of your marketing. And this is exactly why you do that. It’s the one thing that automatically separates you from the herd. So that’s the first thing. Second, listen to how your best clients talk about you. So not the technical stuff, but listen to the emotional stuff. When a happy client describes what it’s like to work with you, they don’t say things like, “Oh yes, they provide proactive monitoring and their patch management skills are second to none.” They don’t say things like that. They say things like, “Honestly, since we moved to them, I sleep so much better at night.” Or they say things like, “Oh, my staff used to complain about IT all the time and now they just never mention it. ” Or they say something like, “Yeah, do you know what? The IT people just get on with it. I never have to think about my technology anymore.” Those kind of phrases are marketing gold. They’re chef’s kiss because they’re honest, they’re specific and they’re so different from anything else that you’ll find on your competitor’s websites. So go and talk to your clients and find those phrases. Ask your happiest clients, on video, to describe what life has been like since they started working with you and then use their words and not your words. Because their words are going to be more real and they’re going to be different. That’s what you want. So those are the first two things. Then third, go and look at what other industries are doing, but not other MSPs. So if you want fresh ideas, the last place you’re going to find them is staring at your competition or even looking at other MSPs in other towns. You’ve got to cast your net a bit wider than that. So what do the best financial advisors lead with on their websites? What does a great management consultant’s LinkedIn page look like? What makes a really compelling plumber’s van or builder’s van? What makes it stand out when you drive past it? New fresh marketing ideas are everywhere outside the channel and almost nowhere inside the channel. And I’m not meaning that to be critical or offensive in any way. It’s just that everyone or almost everyone inside the channel is copying each other. There is one more thing that’s worth saying here. I do understand the anxiety behind the copycat habit, because when you look at what everyone else is doing and you think about doing something completely different, that feels risky. What if people don’t get it? What if it puts off prospects? What if you look weird? Well, here’s my answer to that. Looking weird is infinitely better than looking identical. An MSP that stands out for the wrong reasons will at least be remembered. Whereas an MSP that looks like every other MSP will just be forgotten in seconds. And remembered even for being slightly different is always a better commercial position than being invisible. So the next time you feel the urge to look at another MSP’s website for inspiration, close that tab. Go and talk to your best client instead and ask them what they say to a friend who is looking for IT support. Listen really carefully write it down and then build your marketing around that because that right there is the most distinctive and powerful marketing material you’ll ever have. And when you throw some of your own unique personality in as well, it’s going to be completely unique to you. LinkedIn’s big algorithm change is SEXY for MSPs Let’s now talk about something that’s changed very quietly on LinkedIn but really matters a lot for MSPs. It’s a big algorithm change called 360 Brew and I know that sounds like something you’d order at a trendy coffee shop or maybe an overpriced craft beer, but hear me out because this isn’t a small tweak or a minor nudge. LinkedIn has fundamentally changed how it judges your content and who gets to see that content. And the good news is, if you understand this properly, it works very much in your favour. Let me explain. Until this change, LinkedIn judged each of your posts in isolation. So each post lived or died on its own merits. Did it get engagement quickly? Did people react or comment or share? And if they did, then it got some traction. If not, it just kind of quietly disappeared. So essentially it was a post by post lottery model. Sometimes you won, sometimes you didn’t, and you really had no idea why. And it’s also what led to people chasing engagement tricks, where people are begging for comments, they’ve got those kind of weird polls/surveys that go up, or a carousel that ends with a cliffhanger. And I’m not judging because I’ve done some of these things myself. But that whole model is now dead. With this new 360 Brew, LinkedIn no longer looks at individual posts in isolation. Instead, it looks at everything about you. It looks at your posting history, how consistently you show up, what topics you talk about, who engages with you over time, whether people stop scrolling when your name appears, all of that kind of stuff. So in other words, LinkedIn is now building a reputation profile for every person who publishes content. And this bit is important, so I’ll say it again… every post you publish is now judged in the context of everything else you do, not on its own. And if you’re consistent, especially if you talk about the same core problems for the same audience, this is fantastic news, because random posting on LinkedIn is now officially dead. What LinkedIn is trying to do is understand who you are, what you’re about, and whether the audience you’re speaking to actually cares. If it can’t work that out, it’s going to play safe and show your content to fewer people. And that’s why posting every couple of weeks about random things, in random formats just doesn’t work anymore, because when you do that LinkedIn can’t form a clear picture of you so it doesn’t know who to show your content to. But if you show up regularly, talking about the same themes like using technology to solve problems and grow your business, for the same audience of business owners and managers, then something interesting starts to happen. LinkedIn starts to trust you. It learns that you talk about this stuff and it sees that the same kind of people engage with you over time. It understands who finds your content relevant and then it starts showing more of your content to more of the right people, and that’s the flywheel. And this is exactly why consistent focused content is so much more powerful than viral chasing one-off stuff. You don’t need viral posts now. You don’t need tricks. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel every time. What you need is predictable, consistent content, covering the same few topics from different angles. There’s one more change worth highlighting here and it’s a big one. Engagement now compounds over time. When the same people regularly like or comment on your posts, then LinkedIn sees a relationship forming and that strengthens future reach, which means that replying to people’s comments is no longer optional. If someone takes the time to engage with your post and actually leave a comment, you must reply. That two-way interaction matters now enormously. In fact, the algorithm specifically looks for what researchers are calling “lexical diversity” in comments, which means that it can tell the difference between a genuine back and forth conversation and a comment section full of “great post” and it treats those as very, very low value noise. Oh, and there’s one more thing that 360 Brew does that’s worth knowing about, especially if you’ve been using AI tools to write your LinkedIn posts. The algorithm can now detect AI generated content. And it does not reward AI generated content. The reason for this is fairly straightforward. AI generated posts tend to follow very predictable templates, they’ve got that kind of certain polish to them, haven’t they, a certain structure and lack of personality that 360 Brew has been specifically trained to recognise. So when it detects that AI pattern, it deprioritises the content. So AI content is not banned from LinkedIn, it isn’t at all, but because 360 Brew is designed to reward authenticity and personal perspective and genuine human voice, the things that AI output lacks, then it’s going to ignore the AI output. There’s also an engagement signal problem here, AI written posts tend to generate very surface level reaction to almost get like the AI bots responding to something that’s been written by an AI bot, quick likes, generic one word comments, great posts like we were just talking about. 360 Brew is looking for the opposite. It’s looking for humans talking to humans. So things like dwell time, like I said earlier, real back and forth conversation, that’s what the algorithm is looking for. So the practical implication is this. By all means, use AI to help you think or to structure an idea or draft a rough outline, but please, please always rewrite it in your own voice. Add a personal story or a specific observation from your own experience, or add an opinion because the version of you that actually shows up in the words is the version that 360 Brew rewards. And it’s also not coincidentally the version that your prospects actually connect with. Let me summarise the practical takeaways from this. First, post consistently, I’d recommend one piece of content every 24 hours because consistency matters more than ever now. Second, stick to the same audience, business owners and managers. Or for example, if you were targeting IT directors for co-managed IT, you’d have a separate LinkedIn for that so you’re very consistent on one LinkedIn to business owners and then on a second LinkedIn to IT directors. In fact, that was something we were talking about a few weeks ago in our co-managed IT deep dive. Know your ideal client profile and speak to that person every single time. Third, stick to the same themes. So in B2B, it would be technology, security, productivity, growth, and running a better business. Co-managed IT would be about the strain on internal IT teams and how reinforcement can help. Pick your lanes and stay in them. Don’t suddenly post about your weekend run and wonder why your reach has dropped. And then fourth, reply to every comment. If someone engages with you, treat that interaction like gold dust because under this new algorithm, it really is. Members’ Update If you’re a member of the MSP Marketing Edge, make sure you access my new high performing website framework. I put this together over a number of months based on the best MSP websites that I’ve seen. And I know that earlier I was talking about how a lot of websites are the same. Well, over the last number of years, I must have looked at well over a thousand websites and most of them are pretty bad and samey, but some of them are very, very good. And it’s been a delight to spot the things that work well on each of them and then compile that into a framework just for our members. So you can access this right now, it’s in the portal, just go into the training section. There’s also some training on it there as well, plus a document you can download with a framework. And of course, you can also put your website into the monthly website review. Now, if you’re not yet a member of the MSP Marketing Edge, we do only work with one MSP per area. You can check to see if your area is free. It’s very simple, you don’t even have to enter your email address. Just go to mspmarketingedge.com/membership and then put in your postcode or your zip code. Don’t bother starting marketing until you’ve got these fundamentals in place Featured guest: Mark Gordon is the founder of Integrated Go-To-Market Solutions, a US-based consultancy that helps startups and mid-market companies turn scattered sales and marketing efforts into one aligned, revenue-generating machine. He’s built and sold an eight-figure mortgage company, architected a platform that generated over a billion dollars per year in funded volume, and taken companies from $1 million to $30 million in annual revenue as head of…

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MSPs: Hiring A Salesperson Is A Mistake May 25, 2026

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The average MSP does not need a full time salesperson, here’s what you really need. Also this week, five cool marketing ideas from other sectors, and how to outsource operations without making mistakes. Welcome to Episode 341 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge. Why you shouldn’t hire a salesperson, even if you hate selling Can I be honest with you about something that might be just a little bit uncomfortable? If you hate selling, hiring a salesperson feels like the obvious answer. You get someone else to do the bits you hate, right? Problem solved, except it’s really not. And I’ve seen enough MSPs go down this road to know that for most of them it ends in frustration, wasted money, and a salesperson who quietly stops hunting for new business within about three months. Let me explain why. The average MSP does no more than about two sales meetings a month. Two. And before you think that sounds shockingly low, it actually makes complete sense when you understand the business model of MSPs. MSPs don’t generate enormous volumes of leads because most of them don’t do a lot of marketing and that’s a kind of obvious thing to say. But more importantly, when you do win a client, that client pays you all the monthly recurring revenue for years and years and years, sometimes a decade or more. So you don’t need to win clients every week to run a very healthy, profitable MSP. In fact, you might not be able to onboard them. You might not have the capacity to onboard a new client every week. You just need to win the right new clients, at the right time, consistently. And that might be for you one every month or two every month or something like that. But here’s what that means for hiring a salesperson. If you’re only doing two sales meetings a month, what exactly is a full-time salesperson going to do with the other 150 odd hours? Because new logo sales in an MSP is not a full-time job, not unless you’re a reasonably large business and you have a lot of sales activity going on. And a good salesperson who’s sitting around not selling is going to get bored, demotivated and expensive very quickly. So MSPs think, I’ll get them to do lead generation as well. But asking a salesperson to generate leads is like asking, I don’t know, a network specialist to build a PC. And sure, they may be able to have a go at it, but it’s not what they’re good at. Lead generation and going out and meeting people and closing sales are two completely different skillsets. With all of the marketing jobs that need to be done within your MSP, you need different people to do each of those jobs. Bearing that in mind, MSPs then think, okay, if they can’t do lead generation, then I’ll get them to do account management as well. That seems to fit. They can look after the existing clients and hunt for new ones. And yes, that kind of sounds logical, but 95 times out of a hundred, it’ll end in disaster. And here’s why. Account management is a genuinely enjoyable job. You’re talking to people who already like you, they’re already giving you money, you’re already solving problems for them and they already trust you. These are nice conversations, sorting out little small problems, conversations about the future of their business. Everyone enjoys an account management conversation. New logo sales is the complete opposite. Until you get into the process with someone, a lot of it can be rejection, cold audiences, long sales cycles. It’s having to build trust from scratch over and over and over again. So if you give someone both of those jobs, of course they’re always going to drift towards the easier one, which is account management every single time and not because they’re lazy, because they’re human. And that means that your existing clients get lots of lovely attention, which is great, but on the flip side, your new logo business pipeline is quietly running dry. So again, I believe that these have to be two completely separate roles done by two separate people, and I believe that with every fiber of my being. Account management is one job, new business development is a second job. They require different skills, different personalities, different metrics, and different conversations. Merging them is almost always a mistake 95% of the time. So what do you do if you genuinely can’t stand selling and you really want to just get someone in and get it off your plate? Well, first of all, let me push back slightly on the premise, because even if you hate it, you’re almost certainly more effective at it than any salesperson you could hire. Full stop. Because you know your business inside out, you carry the credibility of the founder, which means when you walk into a sales meeting, prospects know they’re talking to the person who actually runs the place and that matters a lot more than you think. I know several MSP owners whose entire contribution to the business now is a) driving growth, and b) doing the sales meetings, literally two, three meetings a month and everything else. The technical work, responsibility for the technical work, the account management, all the operations, all of the admin, is handled by their team. They’re brilliant at sales because it’s pretty much all that they do and they don’t have to worry about the fuss of everything else. They channel all of their energy into winning new clients and driving growth in the business. That’s it. And often they find that doing the selling is much more enjoyable when you can take your time and you don’t have to run back to the office to do any second or third line support. But if you genuinely need or want someone else to do it, the smart answer for most MSPs is not a full-time salesperson. It’s a part-time one. Let’s call them a fractional salesperson to use the modern lingo. So maybe this is someone who is semi-retired from a successful sales career. So they don’t need or want to be busy all day, every day. They want to enjoy their life, but they also do still want a little bit of a challenge, something to do maybe a couple of afternoons a week. Someone who’s happy with a couple of meaningful meetings every month, doing the follow-up, they’re happy with the decent basic for just working the few hours they do, and they’re happy for a good commission when they do close that new client once a month or whatever it is. It’s kind of like a market of mature people in their 50s or their 60s, semi-retired, but with a huge skillset and a huge experience. You know, this mature person market is real and it’s underused. It’s massive in fact, but you’ve got to go in with realistic expectations. The key is knowing what you’re hiring for, keeping the role honest for you and for them about what the volume of work actually looks like. And remember the golden rule, never ever mix it with account management. Five cool marketing ideas from other sectors Here’s something that you might not know about me. I love looking outside the MSP world for marketing inspiration because sometimes the best ideas for your business come from somewhere completely different. So after reading a load of ideas, I got my little AI chum, Claude, to do some research for me and together we’ve been looking at what other B2B service sectors do to win clients right now. I’ve found five ideas that I think you can genuinely swipe and adapt. Let’s go. First up, law firms. Here’s something smart that a lot of law firms do very well. They publish what are called Client Alerts. These are short, punchy pieces of communication sent to their existing clients and prospects whenever something changes in the law that could affect them. So it’s not a newsletter, it’s not a blog post, it’s a short, urgent, specific message that says, “Hey, here’s something that just changed and here’s what it means for you.” And the reason this works so beautifully is that it’s genuinely useful. It arrives at the right moment and it positions the firm as the expert that was watching out for the client before the client even knew that they needed watching. Sound familiar? That’s exactly what you can do with cyber security alerts or new threat intelligence or government guidance updates like we were talking about earlier. Anything that’s changed in your world that matters to your client’s world. Send them a short, human, client alert, not a marketing email and watch how differently it lands. And by the way, even though we call it a client alert, you could send that out to your prospects as well. In fact, you must send that out to your prospects. Number two, accountants or CPAs. Now, accountants are famously conservative about their marketing. They’re not exactly known for bold personal branding, but the most successful accounting firms have figured out something really clever. They niche down and then they write a report. Every year they publish something like the State of Construction Finance Report or the Annual Benchmarking Report for Dental Practices, something that’s packed with real data from their own client base or from publicly available figures and then they put their name on it. And that report then gets shared at conferences, it gets referenced in articles. They can send it out to every prospect in that niche and it is quoted back at them for years. And they’ve become the authority, especially if they update it year after year after year. The MSP equivalent to this is kind of obvious. Could you publish an Annual State of IT Security Report for small businesses in your area, or a Cyber Readiness Report for your chosen vertical once a year, real data, your name on the front? I mean, that is a huge credibility weapon. It’s a lot of work, but that’s why other MSPs wouldn’t do it. You could be the only one that does it. Number three, financial advisors. Financial advisors are obsessed with what they call the annual review. Mine does it with me, does yours do it with you? Every single client, every year, no exceptions, they get a proper sit down conversational these days on video call, I suppose, a formal review of their situation and a written summary of what was discussed. So on the surface, that sounds like basic account management, but the genius here is that it’s also marketing. Because every one of those annual review meetings is an opportunity to introduce a new idea, a new upsell, or an additional service, or just ask for a referral. And this has happened to me. Almost every time I meet with my financial advisor, I end up either switching to a higher level product that they sell or buying something new. And actually, I’m pretty happy with that because I feel as though they are thoroughly looking after me. And actually what’s happening is that my advisor is constantly planting seeds for future growth. MSPs who do this, who do a proper annual review, a structured, strategic technology review are doing the same thing. In my experience, a large proportion, maybe even the majority of MSPs still don’t do these strategic reviews with all of their clients consistently. If you want to steal one idea from the financial advice sector, make this the one that you steal. I know it’s a lot of work, but you’ll be surprised how many projects and how much extra recurring revenue you generate. Number four, management consultants. So these kind of consultants are very good at one specific marketing trick, which is writing a white paper or a framework that they then name after themselves. So here are some famous ones from big consultancies. You probably haven’t heard of these, but you’ve got the Boston Consulting Group Matrix, you’ve got the McKinsey 7S Framework. These things have been taught in business schools for decades and they keep pointing back to the firm that invented them because they named them after themselves. Now, most MSPs aren’t going to create the next management framework, I’ll grant you that, but the principle is powerful. If you have a unique way of approaching onboarding new clients, or maybe you have a specific methodology for how you handle cyber security reviews, give it a name, brand it, put it on your website, call it Five Step Secure Start Process, or Tech Health Scorecard, or whatever fits your personality. When something has a name like that, it feels proprietary, and proprietary feels premium. Number five, recruitment agencies. Now, this one might surprise you. Recruitment agencies live and die by relationships and the smartest ones have a very deliberate tactic for keeping those relationships warm during the periods where they’re not actively placing a candidate for a client. They send what are called Market Insight Updates. These are just short notes to their clients and prospects that say things like, “Candidate’s availability in your sector is tightening right now because of X, Y, Z.” Or salary expectations for software engineers have shifted by Y percent. So none of it is a pitch. It’s just genuinely useful information and it keeps the recruiter top of mind as the intelligent, connected expert who understands the market. So you can do exactly the same thing. A short monthly email to your hottest prospects, your Dream 100 prospects that says, “Here’s what’s changing right now in the cyber threat landscape.” Or, “Here’s what we’re seeing right now in businesses in your sector getting caught out by.” It’s not a pitch, it’s just an insight. And when they’re ready to switch MSP, whose name is already in their head? It’s going to be yours. By the way, have you noticed how many of these ideas are centred around adding value, creating information or packaging information in a way which is really useful to the people you most want to speak to? This is a great way to build a relationship. So five ideas from five very different B2B sectors: client alerts from law firms, annual research reports from accountants, structured annual reviews from financial advisors, branded methodologies from management consultants and market insight updates from recruitment agencies. All of them are things your competitors are almost certainly not doing and all of them are things that you could start doing this week. Members’ Update If you’re a member of the MSP Marketing Edge, don’t forget that at any time, you can talk one-on-one to a member of my team to get direct help with your marketing. And we are the only marketing service at our price level that will let you talk one-on-one to a knowledgeable human at any time, as often as you like. We do have members who use this actually a couple of times a month and we are delighted with that. Because getting your marketing right isn’t just about having a clear marketing strategy and marketing content to implement that strategy, we give that to our members of course, but we also give them unlimited support to help them implement it. It’s so important. By the way, if you’re not yet a member of the MSP Marketing Edge, we have two memberships, one for B2B marketing and another for winning co-managed IT contracts. And with each of them, we only work with one MSP per area. You can check to see if your area is free at mspmarketingedge.com/membership. Just enter your postcode or zip code on that page. How to outsource operations without making mistakes Featured guests: Mark Copeman is a non-exec director and advisor, specialising in sales and marketing for IT businesses. He is currently enjoying advising and working with businesses from Manila to Manchester. He is the author of the books, MSP Secrets Revealed (eps 1&2) and Helpdesk Habits, as well as being the creator of the online customer service video program, helpdeskhabits.com and the MSP M&A Blueprint programme, mspmanda.com. Peter Bell has 32 years in the MSP industry and 13 years leading TGT. He’s worked with businesses of all sizes – many stuck in the daily grind, unable to find the time or resources to grow. TGT helps businesses across the globe through hiring and managing dedicated staff from the Philippines and Sri Lanka. Tod…

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MSPs Using LinkedIn To Find Clients: NEW WARNING May 18, 2026

Show notes

MSPs, there’s a danger lurking inside my marketing advice… platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram are actually “borrowed audiences”. Here’s how to build an “owned audience”. Also this week, how to turn boring compliance updates into lead gen on LinkedIn, and how to sell more cyber security by telling stories. Welcome to Episode 340 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge. The danger of building your MSP’s marketing on borrowed platforms Can I be honest about something? There’s a danger lurking inside the marketing advice that I give to you every single week in this podcast and I want to address it head on. If you’ve been listening to or watching this podcast for a while, you’ll know that I tell you to build your audience on LinkedIn to make connections, post every day, send messages, and just grow your network. And of course, I stand by all of that. LinkedIn is still the number one place for MSPs to go farming for new business. But here’s the thing… LinkedIn is not yours. Your connections, your content, your years of relationship building. All of it lives on a platform that belongs to someone else. Well, it’s Microsoft, I mean, they own LinkedIn. So that means that someone, some vice president of Microsoft hidden away in a building somewhere can change the rules at any point without warning, without apology, and without any obligation to protect what you’ve spent years building. We have a name for platforms like LinkedIn and Facebook and Instagram within marketing. They’re called “borrowed audiences”. And borrowed audiences are really cool right up until the moment that they’re not. So let me give you two examples from my world that really bring this to life. And the first one involves my own MSP Marketing Edge Facebook group, which we use for member support. So I started that in 2017 and for years that group has been a buzzing community with members sharing ideas and asking questions and getting answers and just helping each other out. It’s been great. But over the last couple of years, I’ve noticed something. The engagement has dropped significantly and it’s not because our members stopped caring or because the content within the Facebook group got worse. It’s because Facebook changed its algorithm. It stopped showing content from the groups that you’re in, in your feed. And you might have noticed this yourself if you still use Facebook. You’re probably still a member of 10 or 20 groups and they’re all things that you’re really interested in. But the content from those groups never really appears in your feed anymore. You have to remember to go to those groups. And instead in your feed, you just see content from other places and other people trying to sell you stuff. And Facebook, for whatever reason, has prioritised that. So I’ve still got great content in my group, there’s great help there and great conversations, but some of my members never see it because they don’t remember to go and look at it. And the algorithm has decided without asking anybody that group content wasn’t worth promoting anymore. Thank you, Mark Zuckerberg. I didn’t get the memo on that. Well, actually there was no memo on that, there was no announcement, the rug just got pulled slowly and silently. And that was a risk. It crept up on me. And obviously we’ve now actually gone and we’ve started other communities for our members on other platforms. Technically, we’re going to face the same problems again, but at least we can get around the Facebook algorithm problem with our other places that we can build communities. Now the second example involves a friend of mine, Matt Solomon of Better Tracker, who’s very, very well known in the channel. A couple of Christmases ago, Matt got what I can only described as LinkedIn slapped. His account was closed for breaking a rule that he didn’t even know existed. In fact, I’m not even sure he yet knows what he did wrong all those years back. But for a couple of weeks, he lost access to his entire LinkedIn network. Thousands and thousands of connections that he’d spent years building, gone just like that because an algorithm somewhere decided that something wasn’t quite right. Matt did get it back eventually, but those couple of weeks were a huge reminder of something that we all need to take seriously. If LinkedIn or another borrowed audience is your only marketing platform, you are one algorithm update or one account flag or one unexplained restriction away from losing everything that you’ve spent years building. So what do you do about this? Well, the good news is there is an answer. You build two audiences at the same time, a borrowed audience and an owned audience. So your borrowed audience is, let’s say, LinkedIn. You still build it, you still farm there every day because right now, as I said, it’s still the best place to find the right kind of business owners and managers that you want to work with, or indeed IT directors if you want to win co-managed IT. But your owned audience is your email list, sitting inside your CRM. And the reason it’s called an owned audience is simple. If your CRM provider decides tomorrow that they don’t like you and they kick you out, the data inside the CRM is still yours. You take that data with you and you move it to another CRM. The data does not belong to the platform. It belongs to you. So here’s the practical bit. As you’re growing your LinkedIn connections, make a habit of getting those connections off LinkedIn and into your CRM. You find their email address, you can use data enrichment tools like Lusher or Apollo or Hunter.io to do this really quickly, or you could just Google them kind of like a brute force. It’s pretty easy to find someone’s email address online. There are just various things you could try… bruce.wayne@batcave.com, b.wayne, bruce.w, bruce@. You get the idea, right? There’s about seven or eight of those that you can try. And it doesn’t matter how you do this, whether you brute force it and do it the hard way or whether you automate it with a tool. What matters is that you actually do it. Because the moment someone’s email address is sitting in your CRM, and particularly if you’ve then used data enrichment tools to build up more of a profile of them in your CRM, you now have a direct line to them that no algorithm can ever take away from you. LinkedIn can change its rules because it’s not like Microsoft is well known for not changing things, is it? Microsoft changes its rules all the time. Twitter became something that none of us recognise anyway. All of these platforms can and will eventually just disappear or restrict you or simply decide your content isn’t worth showing to anyone. All of that can happen on all of those borrowed audiences. But your email list, that’s yours, and always will be. The MSPs who market themselves really well don’t rely on any single platform. They use both the borrowed platforms like LinkedIn to find people and start relationships, but they also used owned platforms like their email list to deepen those relationships over time. One without the other is fragile, together they’re a marketing system that can withstand almost anything. How to turn boring compliance updates into lead gen on LinkedIn Let me ask you something. When a new piece of legislation drops or a compliance deadline gets announced, something that’s relevant to the kind of clients that you work with, what does your MSP do with that information? Because most MSPs do one of two things. Either they email their existing clients about it, which is good, or they do nothing at all, which to me seems like a massive missed marketing opportunity. What almost nobody does is use compliance news as lead generation fuel on LinkedIn. And that’s a genuine shame because compliance updates are one of the most powerful pieces of content you will ever post on that platform. And not because they’re exciting, they’re not, but because they’re perfectly timed, highly relevant, and maybe even quietly terrifying to the business owners who sees them. And terrified people look for help. Here’s the thing about compliance news. When something like a new cyber security regulation drops or there’s a deadline for something or a government guidance update goes out, every business owner who sees it has the same reaction. It’s actually three questions that they think. First, they think, “Does this affect me? ” And then they think, “What do I need to do? ” And then they think, “Who can help me with this? “Does this affect me? What do I need to do? Who can help me?” That three question sequence happens every single time. And if your MSP is the voice that surfaces in their LinkedIn feed at that exact moment explaining what it means, whether they need to worry and what their options are, then you’re not just posting content. You are positioning yourself as the expert they need to talk to right now. So how do you actually do this? Because it’s not as simple as just sharing a PDF sent out by the government and saying, “Here you go. That’s boring.” That’s just going to force your audience into a coma. Instead, here’s the approach that works. First, do watch out for the news before your prospects see it. So subscribe to alerts, updates, government cyber bulletins, whatever is relevant in your market. In the UK, US, Australia, Canada, every market has official channels that push out this stuff. And you probably know about this stuff already, right? You just maybe need to sign up for the alerts or you could also set up a Google alert for things like the words “cyber compliance update” or “data protection guidance” or “IT regulation 2026”, just perhaps do 2027, 2028 when you’re setting it up at the same time. And when something drops, you then want to be the first to talk about it, but you must do that in plain language. Second, translate it for your audience. And this is the crucial bit. Take the compliance update, strip out all of the jargon. Don’t post the actual regulation itself, it’s boring. Post what it means for a business owner who has no idea what they’re looking at. So instead of saying things like “organisations must implement appropriate technical measures”, what does that mean? You write something like this, you say, “Hey, a new government guideline just dropped. Here’s my two-minute version of what it means for businesses with fewer than a hundred staff.”, which by the way is 80% of the whole marketplace. And what you’re doing is the translation work so that they don’t have to do it, because they don’t have the time or the inclination to do it themselves and they will love you for translating it for them. Third, make it about them and not about you. An easy mistake to make is ending every compliance post with a pitch. “Call us if you want to find out if you’re compliant.” That kills the trust that you’ve just built. So instead, end it with an engagement question. “Does your team know what your current backup policy covers and what it doesn’t?” Or you could say, “When did you last have someone check whether your email security meets current guidance?” A question is good because it invites engagement. And engagement tells the LinkedIn algorithm that this is interesting content, and it opens a conversation in the comments that you can take further. Fourth, and this is the really smart bit, follow up privately with the people who engage. So if someone likes your post or better still, they comment on it, in a way that’s a hand going up and they’re not really ready to buy, of course, selling managed services doesn’t work like that, but they’re telling you that this landed with them. So send them a short personal message, no pitch. Just something like, “Hey, I’m glad that that post was useful. If you ever want a second opinion on where you stand, I’m happy to have a quick chat.” and please don’t be scared to do this. Don’t overthink it. Don’t talk yourself out of it. Just do it. Send them that simple message. Because there’s no hard sell, there’s no brochure attached to it. It’s just one human being offering to help another human being. The reason all of this works so well is timing. Compliance updates have an urgency built in that most of the rest of your marketing content doesn’t. They create a natural deadline. They tap into loss aversion, which is one of the most powerful psychological drivers there is. People are a lot more motivated to avoid a problem than to pursue a gain. So a compliance post says something is changing and you need to be aware of it. And when your MSP is the one saying that consistently in natural language over months and months and months, you become the authority. And in fact, you become the person that local business owners and managers think of when the next update drops. The expert who makes complicated stuff simple. What a great position to hold, right? And that trust built, post by post, is what eventually turns a LinkedIn connection into a discovery Zoom call, into a sales meeting, into a new client. Members’ Update If you’re a member of the MSP Marketing Edge, a reminder that we recently relaunched our website reviews. Every month I pull one of our members’ websites at random and I do a full review based on our specific framework that we’ve created to help you create a website that converts traffic into leads. Now you can enter your website into the draw anytime in our member portal. You just go to portal.mspmarketingedge.com/websitereviews. And if you need a more urgent review, perhaps as you’re about to do some review on your website, there’s also details in our portal of how you can get a member of my team to give your website a quick going over. And by the way, if you’re not yet a member of the MSP Marketing Edge, we do only work with one MSP per area so you can check if your area is free at mspmarketingedge.com/membership, just enter your postcode or zip code on that page. How to sell more cyber security… just by telling stories Featured guest: Adam Pilton spent 15 years in law enforcement, culminating as a Detective Sergeant leading Covert Operations and Cyber Crime. Since 2016, he has worked across cyber security roles, advising organisations, improving cyber maturity, and translating complex threats into clear guidance for leaders, end users, and global businesses. Every MSP wants to sell more cyber security to their existing clients and also to the new business that’s starting with you. And that makes sense because the more protection they buy from you, the more protected they are and actually the more protected you are. I realise that security is probably the one thing that’s most likely to keep you awake at night, right? Well, if that is the case, you’re going to love my special guest right now. He is a true expert at selling more cyber security and his approach to it is very natural and very authentic. He believes you can turn cyber security into compelling stories that you tell to your clients. Hello, I’m Adam Pilton. I’m a cyber security advisor at Heimdal Security. Thanks so much for joining us on the show, Adam, because we’re going to talk about something very important today. How do you persuade more of your clients to spend more on cyber security, to protect themselves, to listen to you and actually realise how big a deal it is? And as we are here sort of getting towards the middle of 2026, you and I know that cyber security is 50 million times more important than it was last year and the year before and the year before that, but the ordinary business owners and managers out there, they don’t know that. So that’s what we’re trying to do in the next 10, 15 minutes or so is to give the MSPs who are listening to this or watching this on YouTube, some weapons, some tools that they can use to help business owners to protect themselves. So let’s first of all just delve into your background. How did you end up with a fantastic job like the one you’ve got right now? Certa…

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