Show notes
Episode 154 includes: 00:00 How best to persuade your prospects in advance 08:28 A ‘Work From Home’ setup that could be a great sales tool 15:14 How to create a new revenue stream from compliance 24:26 A great book recommendation about changing the way you work forever Featured guest: Thank you to Shay Cohen from Kamanja for joining Paul to discuss a potential new automated Pen Test revenue stream. Shay’s career began as a technical support engineer for Windows desktop and server systems, and then moved to become a junior Linux engineer. Kamanja have developed a solution that involves the most experienced compliance consultants and MSPs in the market. This has resulted in a product designed to help to SMBs. Connect with Shay on LinkedIn:https://il.linkedin.com/in/shay-cohen-1749055a Extra show notes: Out every Tuesday on your favourite podcast platform Presented by Paul Green, an MSP marketing expert: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-green-msp-marketing/ http://mspmarketingedge.com/about/ In describing influential marketing, Paul mentioned the books Influence and Pre-Suasion by Robert Cialdini: https://www.amazon.com/Influence-Psychology-Persuasion-Robert-Cialdini/dp/006124189X https://www.audible.co.uk/pd/Influence-Audiobook/B00N349QTG https://www.amazon.co.uk/Pre-Suasion-Revolutionary-Way-Influence-Persuade/dp/1847941419 Order your free copy of the MSP Marketing magazine: http://mspmarketingedge.com/magazine/ Thank you to Mike Andrews from NovaBACKUP for recommending the book Rework by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, plus the blog from OpenView Venture Partners: https://www.amazon.co.uk/ReWork-Change-Way-Work-Forever/dp/0091929784 https://openviewpartners.com/blog/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikeandrews Subscribe to Paul’s YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/mspmarketing Subscribe to this podcast using your favourite podcast provider: https://www.audible.co.uk/pd/Paul-Greens-MSP-Marketing-Podcast-Podcast/B08JK38L4V https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/paul-greens-msp-marketing-podcast/id1485101351 https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/paul-greens-msp-marketing-podcast https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cucGF1bGdyZWVuc21zcG1hcmtldGluZy5jb20vZmVlZC9wb2RjYXN0?sa https://music.amazon.co.uk/podcasts/b03a9638-adf4-4491-93f1-569183e079d7/Paul-Greens-MSP-Marketing-Podcast https://open.spotify.com/show/1Hw52ScOg5WvGaBUkaOrI7 https://tunein.com/radio/Paul-Greens-MSP-Marketing-Podcast-p1264893/ https://blubrry.com/paulgreenmspmarketing/ https://deezer.com/show/1512622 Got a question from the show? Email Paul directly: hello@paulgreensmspmarketing.com Episode transcription Voiceover:Fresh every Tuesday for MSPs around the world. Around the world. This is Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast. Paul Green:Hello and welcome to a new, hot, fresh, sizzling podcast. Here’s what we got coming up for you this week. Shay Cohen:How you can take the compliance headaches for MSPs and make a real revenue from it. Paul Green:That’s Shay Cohen, he is an expert in compliance. Yeah, I know, not the most interesting subject to put in a podcast. However, compliance could potentially be a brand new profit stream for your MSP. We’ll explain more later on in the show. We’re also looking at work-from-home setups and whether you can use a work-from-home setup to persuade an existing client to buy something new from you or even persuade a brand new client to pick you in the first place. Voiceover:Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast. Paul Green:I got a strange tale of two books, one, which is the best book I’ve ever read and another by the same author, yeah, not quite so good. Years ago I read, it was probably one of my first ever marketing psychology books. I’ve talked about it on this podcast numerous times, it’s a book called Influence by Dr. Robert Cialdini, and you have to read this. It was written in 1984. Robert Cialdini, who is a marketing professor, excuse me actually, he’s a psychology professor who focuses just on marketing, somewhere in New York I think. He essentially invented the whole field of marketing psychology. He coined the term, social proof. So, go and find that book and read it and absorb it. If you find it a tough read, because it is a little bit technical in places, listen to it on Audible. But there are so many insights that you’ll get about how to influence people with your marketing. So, that came out, what? 30 odd, 40 years ago, and when I heard about five years ago that Cialdini had written a brand new book called Pre-Suasion, well, I grabbed myself a hardback copy. I got literally the first edition that came out. Paul Green:I hungrily ripped it open from Amazon and I tweeted Robert Cialdini, who didn’t reply and said, “I’ve got Pre-Suasion. It’s amazing.” And yeah, it’s not such a great book, unfortunately. If I’m honest, Pre-Suasion is one idea wrapped up in a very big book, lots of padding. His original book, Influence is many, many, many great ideas, neatly packaged into a tiny and very well written book. I don’t like to dismiss books. It’s hard to write books, but Pre-Suasion by Robert Cialdini is not a book I recommend you read. In fact, what I’m going to do or attempt to do in the next 60 seconds is to tell you what the book is about and the implications on your MSP’s marketing. The very concept of pre-suasion, which is if you like, pre-persuasion. Pre-suasion is where what goes before affects what comes after. Let me give you some examples which I’ve just made up on the spot, because normally when I talk about a book I reread the book before I come and mention it on the podcast. Paul Green:But I cannot bring myself to reread this book, sorry Dr. Cialdini. So, I’m going to make up some examples off the top of my head. So, let’s do some from outside of technology. Let’s say for example you were going to look at houses, and in fact what I’m about to describe happened to me when I was looking for the very house that I’m living in now. The state agent I went to, said to him, “Look, I want to live in this area, this village. I’m looking for this kind of house. This is my budget from kind of minimum up to, if you get past this, I’m just not going to get a mortgage on it. Can you take me and show me some houses please?” He took me to three houses and he deliberately took me to two of the wrong houses before he brought me to this house, which was very much the right kind of house. I think he was doing that deliberately because I think he knew that what goes before affects what comes after. So, he took me to the first house, it was a little bit pokey, it’s got an old Victorian house, there wasn’t much parking. It was nice, don’t get me wrong, it was nice and it was within budget, but it just didn’t feel right and it didn’t meet my criteria. So, then we drove to the second house and this was exhausted. Paul Green:I mean this house was, it was big, it was huge, it was lovely, it just wasn’t a great house. It wasn’t the right house. And then he brought me to this house, and this house wasn’t perfect but it ticked a lot of the boxes. In fact, it was near the top of our budget. It needed a lot of work doing to it, which is what I’m having actually done right now, but it was amazing and I literally fell in love with this house as I walked in. I was reflecting on this a few months later as all the paperwork was going through, where if he’d taken me to this house first then maybe I wouldn’t have been so open to it, so receptive because he almost told me, “Well, I’m going to take you to two houses which I don’t think are right for you. Then the final house I think is perfect.” What goes before affects what comes after, so he pre-suaded me. He did that by deliberately showing me the wrong choice before he took me to the right choice. Lots of people do this in many, many different ways. How would you do this within an MSP? Well, there’s lots of different things that you could do. Paul Green:For example, you could pre-suade your prospects by sending them things before they ever meet with you. So, let’s say you’ve got a prospect meeting with someone next week, it’s the first time that you’re going to meet with them. You could pre-suade them by posting shipping out to them some social proof, as Cialdini talked about in Influence. So, let’s say you have a case study done, in fact let’s say you’ve had an amazing case study done. It’s one of your clients, they’ve had an amazing amount of success and you have wrapped that case study up into almost like a booklet. It’s there as a printed form and you send that out to your prospect with some candy or with some chocolate or some merch of some kind, mugs, pens, doesn’t really matter, whatever. You send it all in a box, we call this an impact box and you send it out to them and you say, “Hey, can’t wait to meet you next Thursday. Please, before we sit down and discuss your business, please can you read this case study. Or even better still, here’s a link to it on YouTube. Read this case study and go watch one of our clients talking about our business on YouTube.” Paul Green:This is pre-suasion because you will be the only MSP that does this and the chances of you winning the sale are dramatically higher than your competitors because they are reading, the prospect is reading and watching a happy client. Someone like them are having a great experience with your business. What great pre-suasion. It’s almost setting up that yours is the sale to lose, if you understand what I mean by that. You’ve got to perform quite badly not to win that sale. That’s a great example of pre-suasion. You could do exactly the same with your existing clients. If you’re doing a strategic review with them, you’re going to build them a technology roadmap, then you might do exactly the same thing. You might send them a technology roadmap of another client and say, look, we are going to sit down and we are going to work out your technology priorities for the next two, three to five years. And I’m going to ask you to commit to that roadmap because then I know the work I’ve got to do, you know what you’ve got to budget, and actually this is taking a very strategic overview of your business, which they will love. Paul Green:You can pre-suade someone, you get them coming into that strategic review thinking immediately, here I am ready to commit to three to five years of technology spend with my MSP, with my IT company. This is amazing. This is exactly what we want. So, the book itself you can skip, it’s a big long read with one idea in it, and that is the idea that what we do before affects what comes after. If you want to get more sales and you want better conversions and clients to say yes to you more often, then you’ve got to put more work in before you are actually going to see them. Case studies, prep like that, all of those kind of things. It really is a worthwhile use of your time. Voiceover:Here’s this week’s clever idea. Paul Green:Now, here’s another persuasive tool. This isn’t quite pre-suasion, this is almost bribing your clients to do something. You see I’ve had this idea, I think it’s a cracker. I’d be interested to see what you think about this. You can let me know by the way, any feedback on this podcast, just email hello@paulgreensmspmarketing.com. It’s me, you will actually reach the real me at the end and I will reply to every single email that I get, as long as you’re not rude to me. So, this idea is to use technology to bribe either an existing client to commit to a new contract or to sign off a big project, or maybe to get a brand new client to choose you in the first place. Bribe probably isn’t a good word, there are probably legal ramifications of the word bribe, he says, thinking of the UK’s Anti-bribery Act. Paul Green:So, let’s say persuade, it’s something you give, it’s a freebie. You give someone a freebie, but the freebie you give them is unique, expensive, and beautiful. And that’s what makes this ideally something that’s going to make you stand out from all the other MSPs. Now, the idea behind this is that you build them a unique work-from-home setup, because we know right now two odd years, was is it two and a half years on from the start of the pandemic that everyone has some element of work-from-home right now. So, if you’ve got a decision maker, either an existing client or a brand new prospect and you’re trying to persuade them to make a sensible choice and pick you, what you could throw into the mix is you say to them, hey, look, when you make this commitment we are going to come into your house and we’re going to set you up with the ultimate work-from-home set up. Paul Green:We’re going to get a highly professional webcam, we’re going to attach it to your desk so it’s fixed and all the wires are hidden and it’ll look beautiful. There’ll be some LED lights on the side, we’ll have a professional proper microphone for you. It’ll all be set up and it’ll be wonderful. It’ll be on your desk. Hey, do you have an Alexa? You do? Okay, we’ll bring some smart plugs and we’ll set them all up as well so that when you say Alexa, you know can say, Alexa, switch on, switch off, whatever it is, and please don’t let my own Alexa go off. Are you going to? Well, the blue ring is on. That’s a scary thought. Sorry if I’ve just triggered your Alexa there, but you get the idea. So, you set them up with this amazing work-from-home setup. I mean you could go even further if you wanted to. Paul Green:You could get them a stand up, sit down desk. You could get them one of those expensive ergonomic chairs. What was it? The Herman Miller ones. You could really go to town on that and you could actually put a dollar value on that of a couple of thousand dollars. Certainly a decent camera, lights, microphone, all the other bits and bobs that go with that. There’s an expense for that, but this is free to them. So, you’re setting this up in the boss’s home, in the decision makers home as a thank you for them picking you for their business. Now, what’s the cash cost to you? Well, it’s going to be a little bit less than the retail value, but yes, there will be a cash cost and I would look at that as a marketing investment. Let’s say it cost you a $1,00 plus the hell of sending a technician to someone’s home. Paul Green:I know we don’t want to go near homes and I know as well, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, yeah, at some point that work-from-home setup is going to break and we are going to have to go and support that, or maybe even go into that home, and I know that’s hell. But if that wins you a new client that’s spending a couple of thousand dollars a month and they stay with you for 10 years, is visiting someone’s house now and again to fix their broken webcam if you can’t do it remotely, is that such a big deal? I didn’t think it is. I think that’s a great investment in marketing. That’s what I would do if I ran an MSP. And the thing is, you can actually probably recoup that actual investment anyway, because you could say once you’ve set up the work-from-home setup, you could say to the decision maker, would you like us to replicate this in your office for you? Paul Green:So, not your home office but your workplace office, literally exactly the same setup. So, you just plug your laptop in wherever you are and it works exactly the same. And of course many, not all, but many decision makers will say, yeah, I quite like that. You charge for that. That becomes a project. In fact, you could even take that a step further, if they have a management team you could say, would you like us to set up this professional video calling work-from-home setup for you and all of your team? So, the one that you get in your house is free Mr. or Mrs. decision maker, to do it in your workplace or to do it for your senior leadership team’s homes there’s going to be a cost to that. Even if you say to them, look, you just please cover the cost of the equipment and we’ll install it at no cost…
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