Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast

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Episode 140: Use LinkedIn to build a recruitment pipeline Jul 19, 2022

Show notes

Episode 140 includes: Why you should be constantly recruiting on LinkedIn – even if you don’t have a vacancy How you can use marketing momentum to grow your MSP Plus on the show this week a branding expert explains the power of a single message Featured guest: Thank you to Mike Verret from Verret and Associates for joining Paul to talk about how MSPs can be better at talking about themselves. Mike has spent over 25 years in the brand marketing business and the hallmark of his career is his ability to understand an audience. Now he shows businesses how to talk about themselves To THEIR audience. Connect with Mike on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mike-verret-7027211 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/ Find out more about Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Edge: https://www.mspmarketingedge.com/ Right now you can watch the extended interview with this week’s featured guests on the YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDRSdM8tZbEBEL1Sh4Z-t3PXKbsW7b4BC To dig deeper into this episode, Paul joins Sophie Law on the complimentary YouTube show ‘Another Byte’, from this coming Thursday: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDRSdM8tZbEAXxJRY5vU4LWldRNLjZZng Thank you to Max Pruger, Compliance Manager at Kaseya, for recommending the book Becoming Your Own Banker by Nelson Nash: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Becoming-Your-Own-Banker-Infinite/dp/B001NZO1DS https://www.linkedin.com/in/maxpruger In next week’s episode, Paul will be joined by Adam Wootton from Impact Sales Coaching to talk about how you can make great sales people, unstoppable: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/adam-wootton-b4607015 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, this is Paul Green’s MSP Marketing podcast. Paul Green:Well, hi there. Welcome back to the show. This is what we’ve got coming up for you this week. Mike Verret:I’ve had to do everything across the marketing spectrum. But when I looked back, the one commonality was the audience that I was speaking to. Understanding how your audience reacts to what’s important to you, versus what’s important to them, is a blind spot in business. Paul Green:That’s Mike Verret. He’s my guest later on in the show. And he’s an expert at helping businesses, like yours, communicate with their prospects. He’s got some great advice for you in this week’s show. We’re also going to be talking about recruitment. It’s a bit of a nightmare at the moment, but I’ve got an idea for you. It’s not going to solve your short-term recruitment problems, but long-term, it’s going to help you build a pipeline of prospective staff. Voiceover:Paul Green’s MSP Marketing podcast. Paul Green:One of the most challenging aspects of my work is translating everything that I do to make it as relevant as possible to multiple cultures. So as you can hear from my voice, I’m based in the UK. And let’s take, for example, our MSP Marketing Edge service. So we produce a ton of content every week and every month for our members. Now, we have about 650 members and a proportion of those are in the UK. So we produce a UK version of everything that we do. And then we produce a different version for our members in the US, and to be used internationally. Paul Green:And there are some easy aspects of that conversion and some difficult aspects. The easy aspects are things like the spellings. Take the word, recognise. In the UK, it’s spelt with an S, in the US, it’s spelt with a Z. So that’s easy to do. You can get a spell checker to do that for you. There are some minor punctuation differences between US and UK English, things like dollars instead of pounds, that stuff’s kind of easy. The hard stuff is, actually, the cultural references. So I’m 47. I’ve grown up with a whole load of sayings, phrases, just cultural references, that are normal for me because I’ve lived in the UK my whole life. And yet, they’re not applicable to people in the US. So we have to strip out cultural references, or change those references, when we are pulling together our US content. Paul Green:But that also works against me in the other way. What I mean by that is, sometimes, I’ll read something in a book and assume it’s a cultural reference in the US. And actually, it turns out not to be. I’ll give you an example. So I read a book, a number of years ago, and I cannot for the life of me remember what the book is. But I read about something called big mo. What is big mo? Well, it’s big momentum. It’s that thing that, once you get started with something and keep pushing on it, actually, it becomes easier and easier because you’ve got momentum. And momentum’s a wonderful thing; it’s what we’re going to talk about in this bit. But big mo, it turns out, is not a widespread cultural reference in the US. And I only found this out after doing a number of webinars for US vendors, where I talked about big mo, “You got to go and get big mo.” And some feedback I got was, people didn’t know what big mo was. That was a bit embarrassing, wasn’t it? Paul Green:So big mo is just big momentum. It’s what happens when you throw yourself into something and you just keep going and keep going and keep going with it. And it takes time to build up this momentum. The easy way to think of momentum is to think of something like a cart or something on wheels being pushed down a hill. We’ve all done that as kids, perhaps with our bikes or a toy or something like that. And of course, as it builds up momentum, it gets faster and faster and faster. And you’ll know from your business, that that’s exactly how business works. When you get started in your very first business, and you’re sat in your spare bedroom on day one, you’ve got nothing but good ideas. Maybe a business plan, but you don’t have any clients. You don’t have any marketing. You don’t have any momentum. That’s the hardest thing to do. Paul Green:And in fact, if you’ve ever started another business, a second or a third business, and I’ve started a small number of businesses, that day one is so hard. Because all you’ve got to keep you going is energy and drive. You’ve got no momentum whatsoever. And yet, it’s the momentum that keeps you going. If you think about your MSP right now, yes, you’ve got clients, you’ve got revenue, you’ve got marketing, you’ve got referrals, all of these things, they’re momentum. And actually, the goal is to keep the momentum going and turn it into big momentum. Big mo is back again. Big momentum is where you just keep doing stuff. You keep doing stuff daily, weekly, monthly. And that’s the thing that eventually pays off for you in the long-term. Paul Green:The goal for your MSP is to build up big mo with your marketing. And you can’t do this by doing a bit of marketing now and again. You have to do marketing on a regular basis, that means setting up a marketing system. It’s a marketing engine or a machine that’s doing stuff for you on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. And I’ll make some recommendations in a second what those things should be. But instead of just looking at marketing as, “Well, let’s do a bit more of it.” You set this up. You get other people to implement and execute your marketing for you. On a daily basis, that would be posting on social media. On a weekly basis, that would be sending out an educational email. And on a monthly basis, that would be physically shipping, mailing stuff out, in the post, to prospects. Because getting something into their hands is a very powerful thing to do. Paul Green:Now, those are only some basics, but you’ve got there some pretty solid actions, daily, weekly, monthly actions. Keep going with that. And what will happen over time is, you will build up big momentum. Now, big mo only brings the rewards down the line. If you do some work on building your momentum today, nothing’s going to happen. Nothing’s going to happen next week, next month, maybe even till next year. And here’s where many MSPs get this wrong. They give up too early. They put in place the marketing machine, but they don’t leave the machine running long enough. Paul Green:Just before recording this, I’ve come off a Zoom call with some of my peer group within the MSP Marketing Edge. We have peer groups which are available. And one of our members there, John, has a marketing machine that he’s had running now for a couple of years. And we were talking about how that marketing machine doesn’t directly deliver results for him on a regular basis. And yet, he’s getting results from other things on a regular basis. So what I mean from that is, he’s got social media that’s being posted, emails that are going out. I think he’s sending stuff out printed as well. He’s got people phoning his prospects. And that generates good prospects for him now and again, but not all the time. And we were talking about the fact that he’s getting more referrals from his clients. He’s getting more cold leads turning up from his websites. And in general, there is just a lot more sales activity happening in that business. There’s lots more sales coming in. There’s lots more revenue coming in. And all of that is coming from his big mo. Paul Green:To put it another way, the more momentum he builds up, the more luck he seems to have in his marketing. So that marketing machine doesn’t seem to generate direct results for him. But of course it does, because as he’s improving and adding content to his website on a regular basis, that generates attention for him, that generates leads. The more he does on social media, the more it reminds his existing clients to refer him. The more it gets old contacts that he hasn’t spoken to for a number of years to get in touch with him. John’s got enormous momentum going with that machine. Paul Green:And we are always looking for how can we track results? What’s the ROI that we get from something? And yet, we forget that, actually, certainly in what you sell… Which is a very complicated and very dangerous thing for people to buy. They don’t understand technology. They don’t understand what you sell. And they are scared. They are terrified of making a mistake. So in that situation, it’s a very complicated purchase for them. In a situation like that, the more momentum you build up, the more that you are out there doing marketing, the safer you appear to be to them. So if you don’t have big mo going in your business just yet, then my challenge to you is this. Get started by putting in place some of the pieces. Something you can do on a daily basis, something on a weekly basis, and something on a monthly basis. Voiceover:Here’s this week’s clever idea. Paul Green:I’m not sure what it’s like where you are right now, but certainly here in the UK at the moment, and to a certain extent in the US from what I’ve heard, recruitment is a challenge. The cost of living is going up. Salary expectations are going up. And there seems to be a lack of supply of good quality technicians. And all of these things have come together to make it… It’s an employee’s market at the moment, rather than an employer’s market. You also seem to have a phenomenon of… That’s such a difficult word to say, please don’t make me say that again, producer James. Producer James:Once more, please. Paul Green:A phenomenon of people going to job interviews to see if they could get a job elsewhere, in order to get a pay rise with their existing employer. Which is, obviously, deeply frustrating for you if you are looking to recruit someone right now. Because you make a job offer, and they don’t accept it. They take the fact that you’ve made them a job offer at a higher salary, and they use that to leverage themselves a pay rise with their existing employer. How dare they? Paul Green:I view recruitment problems as a marketing challenge. Because if you think about it, the challenge of getting someone to come and work for you, is that really any different to getting a prospect to choose you? It’s just a different form of marketing. And just as with marketing for new clients, like I was just talking about, I don’t believe that recruitment should just be a one-off event. You should have a recruitment machine. You should constantly be recruiting. Now, you may only have one vacancy a year that you need to fill. But rather than waiting for you to have that vacancy, and then doing some urgent hiring of people and putting job adverts out, what if you built yourself up a recruitment pipeline? So that at the point you’ve got the problem, there are people there in your pipeline that you can hire. Paul Green:Let me tell you exactly how you would do that. I believe it can mostly be done over LinkedIn. In fact, this doesn’t have to be a very time consuming thing at all. If you can identify the kinds of people that you would want to work for you. So let’s say a level two technician. You could ask yourself, where else do level two technicians work around here? And sure, they could work for another MSP. But also, ask yourself, what other technology companies around here employ people who are likely to have the same skillsets? And in virtually all areas, you just think sideways. What other kinds of companies around you would employ someone with the same skillset as a level two technician? What kind of companies would have internal IT people that at least it would be worth you talking to? Paul Green:So once you’ve built a target list of companies where these people might be working, you then go and do a bit of LinkedIn stalking. And this is what makes LinkedIn beautiful, because it’s not only a great prospecting tool, but it’s also a great tool to meet potential future employees. So let’s say, there was a company near you and you knew they had an internal IT department of three or four people. You could go onto LinkedIn. You could look at that company. You could look at everyone who works in that company. And you could just try and connect with them on LinkedIn. And in your connecting note, you know how, when you try and connect with someone on LinkedIn, there’s a little note that you can write? You would just say, “Hi, I run a local tech support company,” or a managed services provider, if you think they would know what that was. “I’m always looking to connect with like-minded individuals in the area and I’d like to add you to my network.” Paul Green:So you don’t mention jobs or recruitment or anything at that stage. The goal, at this first stage, is just to connect to them on LinkedIn. Now, some people will completely ignore your approach, and other people will just be interested. They’ll be like, “Ooh,” almost intrigued. “Who’s this person?” So they will connect with you. And that’s when you can then message them. And the message is not to offer them a job or anything crazy like that. You would message them, and you put this in your own words. You would say, “Hey, we don’t currently have any vacancies right now, but it’s always good to know people like you with your particular skill set. Because…

Full show notes at the publisher

Episode 139: A genius idea to free your technicians’ time Jul 12, 2022

Show notes

Episode 139 includes: How to get the most out of your techs’ time The importance of thinking like a prospect, not like an MSP Plus on the show this week why you should write your own book and how to do it Featured guest: Thank you to Cassandra Morgan from White Whisker Publications for joining Paul to talk about how MSPs can write their own book. Cassandra Morgan is an award-winning author, writing coach and speaker residing in Toledo, Ohio. Her works span several genres including Fantasy, Paranormal Cozy Mystery, Sweet Romance, and Gothic Fairytale Horror. She lives with her husband, six cats, and any number of foster kittens where she thrives on coffee, courage, and kitten cuddles. Connect with Cassandra on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cassandra-morgan-09b7b9126 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/ Register for a free copy of Paul’s book, Updating Servers Doesn’t Grow Your Business http://mspmarketingedge.com/podcastbook/ Right now you can watch the extended interview with this week’s featured guests on the YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDRSdM8tZbEBEL1Sh4Z-t3PXKbsW7b4BC To dig deeper into this episode, Paul joins Sophie Law on the complimentary YouTube show ‘Another Byte’, from this coming Thursday: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDRSdM8tZbEAXxJRY5vU4LWldRNLjZZng Thank you to Andrew Moon from Orange Nomad for recommending the book It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work by Basecamp’s creators David Heinemeier Hansson and Jason Fried: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Doesnt-Have-Be-Crazy-Work/dp/0062874780 https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewmoonorangenomad In next week’s episode, Paul will be joined by brand and marketing expert Mike Verret to talk about how MSPs can be better at talking about themselves: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mike-verret-7027211 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. This is Paul Green’s MSP Marketing podcast. Paul Green:Oh, hi there, and welcome back to the show. Here’s what we’ve got in store for you this week. Cassandra Morgan:They’re like, “Well, I don’t know what to write. What am I supposed to write?” And they kind of get overwhelmed with the entire big picture of the book. Paul Green:That’s Cassandra Morgan. She’s a published author and expert at helping other authors, but she also works for an MSP. So, she understands our world. And we’ll be talking later in the show about how to use books as important marketing tools for your business. We’ll also be talking about the concept of getting your clients and their staff to actually schedule time with your technicians when something’s wrong, which should remove a whole load of frustrations not just for them, but also for you and your team as well. Voiceover:Paul Green’s MSP Marketing podcast. Paul Green:As I’m sure you do, a lot of my friends are also business owners. They’re just people I’ve met over the years or perhaps they’re school dads that as I’ve got chatting to them at the sports day or the cake bake or whatever, I’ve realised that they’re people just like me. They’re business owners. They might not necessarily work in the same world, but there’s a certain series of things that us, as business owners, have in common. Things like worrying about our staff, cash flow, the nightmare of winning new clients, retention, all of those kind of things. And so I don’t know about you, but I do tend to find myself socialising more with other business owners, rather than wage slaves, people who are employed. Paul Green:And a couple of weeks ago, I was out with a couple of business owner buddies of mine. And we were talking about our accountants, our CPAs. And each of us had various things that we had to complain about with our accountant. My accountant Rob is actually fantastic. Well, he’s a really good strategic accountant, because you’ve got two types of accountant. You’ve got strategic accountants and you’ve got compliant accountants or compliance C accountants. Strategic accountants are giving you good advice. So they’re laying out things that you could do, strategies you could take. They’re laying out options for you. There’s a bit of tax planning going in there and they’re very good at that. And that’s when they come alive and they get really excited. And that’s Rob, my accountant. He’s really good at that. Paul Green:What Rob is not so good at is the compliancy side. And I’m sure Rob wouldn’t be too offended if he heard me talking about this. In fact, he probably will because I know he listens to this podcast now and again. But getting the actual forms filed at the times they need to be done is not Rob’s superpower. So actually, he’s built a team around him to try and take that away from him, which is the right thing to do. And we were discussing this, me and my business owning buddies, a couple of weeks ago and really getting ourselves caught up in knots because what you’ve just heard there, me describing the two types of accountants you can get, well, that’s the end of my accountancy knowledge. Paul Green:I’m not particularly good with figures. I know how to read a profit and loss statement thing. What do you call it? A balance sheet? I know how to read all of those things. Although, I’ll be honest, Rob does a lot more of that than I do. So I know how to read these things, but accountancy and numbers and all of that kind of stuff, it bores me. I don’t get excited by that at all. I get excited by this stuff, by marketing stuff. And my two buddies had similar blocks. They didn’t really understand. In fact, actually one of them said to me, this is the exact phrase, he said, “I don’t really understand what my accountant does.” Now, listen to his phrase there because there’s a marketing lesson in this. “I don’t really understand what my accountant does.” Paul Green:If we step back from this and look at this from a pure marketing lessons point of view, you’ve got here three prospects, three people who’ve got money and want to buy the service. And they’re talking about how happy or unhappy they are with their current supplier. And then, you can hear from the very words that they’re using that these are uneducated prospects. “I don’t really know what my accountant does.” That was the exact phrase that he used. We are uneducated prospects. When you sell to people who are looking to buy from a new MSP, they are uneducated prospects. Now, this is not an offensive phrase of course. This is a fact that I am uneducated about accountants. I don’t really know how to tell if an accountant is good or bad. All I can do is figure out, does my accountant make me feel good or does my accountant make me feel bad? Notice my use of the word “feel” there. Feel is very important. It’s an emotional thing. Most B2B buying decisions are made on emotions. They’re not made on thoughts. They’re very much made on emotions. Paul Green:So, I hijacked the conversation at this point and I told my business owner friends exactly what I’m telling you now. In fact, I think I said to them, “Oh, that would make a good podcast subject. Writing it down into the list.” And hence, it’s here today. But the concept there is sound. Anytime you are buying something that you really don’t understand, so I’m going to suggest non-technology stuff, things that you don’t really understand at a deep level, that’s a great research time for you to realise what it’s like being an ordinary business owner or manager buying from you. In fact, there are added complexities to this because really an accountant, a CPA, it’s not that difficult to purchase. As we say, we need someone to fill in the paperwork, make sure all the figures add up, do whatever they do and then give you a bit of advice. But that’s it. Paul Green:Whereas of course, what you do for business owners is so much more. It’s all of their technology. It’s all of their telecoms potentially. It’s certainly their cyber security. And these are all areas that are changing very quickly. Accountancy changes, but quite slowly, even though new laws are coming in. There’s no huge revolutions in accountancy every seven to 10 years. But there are in our world. Technology changes every seven to 10 years. It’s a complete revolution. It’s happening to us again right now and will always be happening. And that’s partly what your clients are paying you for. They’re paying you to keep on top of this stuff so that they don’t have to, because they’re not interested in it. They are uneducated prospects and they’re quite happy being uneducated. So the next time you are coming to buy something that you don’t really understand, stop and think, how do I feel right now? What am I thinking? What are the fears that are holding me back? What’s stopping me from going with X decision instead of Y decision versus Z decision? What are those factors? Paul Green:Capture that. Journal it. Write it down because one of the greatest marketing weapons that you can have at your disposal is the ability to think and feel like the people you’re trying to influence. As a marketer, I’m very lucky that I went through journalism training when I was just 19. And one of the very first things they taught me at journalism college was how to look at everything, the whole world, through the eyes of my reader, and later on when I got into radio, through the ears of my listener. And being able to put myself in someone else’s point of view I now realise is an immense superpower, but most other people don’t have that. So at a point that you’re buying something you don’t really understand, it’s a great refresher for you on how scary it is to buy something that you don’t know everything about. It’s a great marketing superpower and if you can develop it, it’s going to give you a huge marketing advantage. Voiceover:Here’s this week’s clever idea. Paul Green:Have you ever had that thing where someone submitted a ticket and all over the ticket, it screams urgent? They’ve even written it in capital letters. “Urgent! This is broken. It’s the end of the world. We can’t do anything with this. It’s urgent. Please fix this.” And so, one of your technicians jumps on the phone and calls them back immediately because it’s urgent. We’ve got to get this fixed. And when they speak to the person who submitted the support request, that person says, “Oh yeah, I haven’t got time to talk about it now. Could you call back later?” Have you had this happen to you? How frustrating is that? What was urgent to them earlier suddenly becomes reclassified as other urgent crises take over their day. Paul Green:I was talking to my peer group the other day. In my MSP Marketing Edge service, we run some peer groups and I physically meet up in real life with a group here in the UK once a month. And we were talking about how do you get around that problem, because not only is that disruptive for the technician, it’s kind of disruptive for the user as well. Because if you’ve had an urgent support request, but you need more information before you can do something about it, then everyone’s just waiting around waiting to talk to people. We came up with a really good idea, and I wish I could remember specifically whose idea this was so I could give them a credit. Instead of giving your user the opportunity to just submit a ticket, what if they submitted a ticket laying out all the details of the problem and then they had the opportunity to access the live calendar of your technicians to actually book an appointment in? Paul Green:Now, think about this from the user’s point of view and I apologise for using the word “user.” It’s a horrible word and I have said on this podcast before that the word “user” is a terrible word to use, but you and I know what I mean by user. So, we’ll just use it in this inside podcast. You think about it from the point of view of the user. They’ve got an urgent problem. What they perceive is urgent anyway. They go and submit a support request and then instantly, up comes the live calendar of your technicians today. It might be, let’s say, nine in the morning and they can see when today or tomorrow they can talk to the technician. And in fact, booking some time into the live calendar gives them certainty that this will be dealt with in an hour’s time or something like that. I think it’s a beautiful thing to do. And you could just use calendly.com or Microsoft Bookings, which is part of 365. It’s very simple to implement this. Paul Green:But what a beautiful way to ensure that everyone’s time is completely maxed out. They have the certainty of knowing they’re going to be talking to the technician at a certain time. And your technicians, well, it’s so much more efficient for them to have it booked in that they’re going to call someone at this time and that’s when they’re going to deal with this problem. In fact, it’s a bit of a deadline for them. And deadlines are good because deadlines drive action. If a ticket’s opened at 9:00 AM and they know that they’re going to be speaking to that person at 10:30 AM, then they’ve got an hour and a half to look into that problem, maybe even fix it if that’s something they could do before that. And I appreciate we need to triage tickets and it’s all got to be done properly, but actually, that’s a very beautiful, very elegant way of making the most of everyone’s time. Paul Green:So, question for you. How can you implement this? It’s a beautiful and simple idea. Is it something you could put in place today? Could you just go in and hack your PSA in some way? What’s the simplest way to get this implemented in the next few days? Voiceover:Paul’s blatant plug. Paul Green:Understand this. The only true silver bullet in business is action. The most successful business owners are those who systemise the process of getting things done. That’s on page 39 of my book, it’s called Updating Servers Doesn’t Grow Your Business, and you can get a free paperback copy shipped to you. There’s no postage cost to pay, no shipping cost at all. You don’t have to put your credit card in. It’s nothing like that. I would like to start a business relationship with you just by sending you a free copy of my book. All you got to do is go and fill in a form at paulgreensmspmarketing.com. Click on Book in the navigation at paulgreensmspmarketing.com. Voiceover:The big interview. Cassandra Morgan:I’m Cassandra Morgan. I am an award-winning self-published author and the HR manager for an MSP. Paul Green:And I’m so excited to have you on the podcast, Cassandra, because you understand our world because you work within an MSP, but you also bring us a subject we haven’t explored in detail before. And that is the subject of publishing your own book. I believe, and I know that you believe as well, that this can be a very powerful marketing tool for MSPs. So, we’re going to talk about that in just a few minutes. Let’s first of all explore your background and what makes you an authority on creating your own book.…

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Episode 138: Why your MSP needs a Business Mom Jul 05, 2022

Show notes

Episode 138 includes: Why every MSP needs someone in a “motherly” role Who should your phone person be calling and what should they be talking about Plus on the show this week, an international MSP expert shares the global differences between MSPs Featured guest Thank you to Shoaib Laher from As.a.Service for joining Paul to talk about the challenges facing MSPs around the world. Shoaib founded As.a.Service after spotting a niche in the MSP market with a particular focus on the US based MSPs. When he’s not making clients happy during the week, Shoaib is a “borderline obsessive” golfer and a Dad to twins. 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/ Paul advised listening back to the last few episodes on hiring a ‘phone person’ (where to find them and their technical set-up): http://mspmarketingedge.com/podcast/episode136 http://mspmarketingedge.com/podcast/episode137 On the subject of cold-calling, Paul suggested you listen back to episode 133, that features an interview with a cold-calling expert: http://mspmarketingedge.com/podcast/episode133 You can join Paul in the MSP Marketing group on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/mspmarketing/ Right now you can watch the extended interview with this week’s featured guests on the YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDRSdM8tZbEBEL1Sh4Z-t3PXKbsW7b4BC To dig deeper into this episode, Paul joins Sophie Law on the complimentary YouTube show ‘Another Byte’, from this coming Thursday: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDRSdM8tZbEAXxJRY5vU4LWldRNLjZZng Thank you to Nick Rubright from New Reach Marketing for recommending the book Your Life Isn’t for You by Seth Adam Smith: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Your-Life-Isnt-You-Selfless/dp/1626560951 https://www.linkedin.com/in/nick-rubright-29225047/ In next week’s episode, Paul will be joined by Cassandra Morgan from White Whisker Publications to talk about how MSPs can write their own book: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cassandra-morgan-09b7b9126 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. This is Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast. Paul Green:Hello, and welcome back to the show. Here’s what’s coming up for you this week. Shoaib Laher:It’s not news to them. You know, they are wise to the fact that they are behind the curve, but instead of going, “Oh God, what are we doing wrong?” MSPs are seeing it as an opportunity to offer services that we don’t before. Paul Green:That’s Shoaib Laher from As A Service. He’s running an outsourced help desk for MSPs all around the world. And I’m going to talk to him in this week’s show about the differences in MSPs, in lots of different countries. They are subtly different. And Shoaib will tell us what those differences are later on. We’re also going to be talking about the need for a business mom. I believe every MSP should have a business mom. What is this person? And what’s that role actually all about? I’ll reveal all later on in the show. Voiceover:Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast. Paul Green:So over the last couple of episodes of the podcast, we’ve kind of done a mini series without me really intending to. Because we’re talking about where to find a phone person, someone who can make outbound phone calls on your behalf so that you don’t have to. Two weeks ago, in episode 136, we talked about where to find a phone person. And then in last week’s show, 137, we talked about their calling setup. Today, it’s almost the most difficult thing. Who should they call and what should they say? Well, actually there’s some very easy answers to those questions. Let’s start with who they should call. Because the temptation is to say, everyone. Just call absolutely everyone. But you know, that’s cold calling. And I know we’ve had people on this podcast. In fact, Brian Gillette, a sales expert just a few weeks ago, talking about his system for cold calling, and that’s fine. Paul Green:And that probably suits people like Brian. But for ordinary people like you and me, cold calling is just horrendous. No one wants to do cold calling. It’s just a horrible thing to do. So instead it’s always better to start with warm calling. What’s warm calling? It’s calling someone when you’ve got an existing relationship with them. And that existing relationship could be as simple as they get your emails, or they’re connected to you on LinkedIn. But these are the first people that your phone person should call. Literally get them working through your CRM, your customer relationship manager. Get them working through your hundreds or thousands of LinkedIn connections. And that’s the greatest place for them to start. In fact, that in itself could keep them busy for a number of weeks or months. And when we say warm connections, yes, I know that’s not particularly warm. But it’s a lot warmer than just calling someone that you found on Google. So I would certainly start there. Paul Green:Now, when they run out of those people, and they will run out of them at some point, the next thing they should do should be to work through groups of potential prospects in your area. So for example, let’s say you are targeting CPAs, accountants, you would get someone, and this could be the phone person, or it could be a virtual assistant researching on their behalf. You would get them to Google all of the CPAs in your area, find out who the decision makers are, get their phone numbers and call those people. Because once you’ve made two or three phone calls to a CPA, it then becomes really easy to just make more phone calls to the same kind of person. This was a trick I learned back in my last business where we only worked with veterinarians, vets, dentists, and opticians. Paul Green:And my phone people, it was kind of easy to train them, what those people were like. We’ve discovered for example, there’s no point trying to call dentists, unless it’s lunchtime or it’s the end of the day. Because they’re always drilling people’s teeth. Whereas veterinarians typically have a burst of activity in the morning, and then will have more time available from mid-morning, through to the afternoon and so on. So you get to learn what people’s working patterns are like. So if you were targeting CPAs, it would make sense to call all the CPAs in one go. And then you could repeat that for all of the lawyers, and then all of the manufacturers, and so on, and so on, and so on. The reality is you will never, ever run out of people to call. There’s always another lead or another prospect out there somewhere. Paul Green:Now talking about leads. One other thing that you could do to generate slightly more warmed up people to call is just spend money on traffic. In fact, you might spend money trying to send people to your website, to download your guide or get your buyers guide or join your email list. But you’re giving away some kind of ethical bribe, which is a thing you give away, like a book that you give away to people in order to persuade them to join your email list. Or maybe the smarts move is to spend money building up your LinkedIn connections. And maybe you say right, we’re never going to call anyone that’s completely cold. What we’re going to do instead is we’re going to do a whole ton of marketing work to try and build very early, very low level relationships with people and then we’ll call them. Paul Green:So you might attempt to connect to, let’s say 20 people a day. You might make two or three new connections a day and that’s enough. That’s enough for your phone person. They can call those new connections a week or so after you’ve connected to them. And with that and call backs and just your other databases that might be enough to keep a part-time remote phone person busy, working just two to three hours a day, two to three days a week. So the final question then is what should they say? Well, this is where hiring the right person absolutely comes in. Because I’m not a big fan at all of telesales scripts. Now I do give a telesales script to my MSP marketing edge members, because I want them to have like a framework, a guideline. In fact, that’s what it is. It’s not really a script as such. Paul Green:It’s a framework of how you’d want the call to go. But if you give a tight script to a telephone person, then they’re going to stick to the script. And what they’re going to lose is their natural ability to have a conversation with someone. Don’t get me wrong. You don’t want your telephone people sitting on the phone for 20 minutes, having a good old natter with someone. But you do want them to be warm. You want them to engage. And critically, you want the person that they’re calling to engage with them. You see, you have to remember that people only buy when they’re ready to buy. And because they are uneducated buyers, they don’t know much about technology. They’re not making a decision with their brain. This is not a cognitive thing. They are making a decision with their emotions. Their heart is picking your MSP or rejecting your MSP. Paul Green:So if you can get your phone person to engage with them on the phone right at the very beginning of this process, the chances of you actually turning them into a client is dramatically higher. Which is really, really exciting. So I guess what I’m saying here is hire interesting people who like chatting on the phone. And then don’t load them up with a script. Load them up with some open questions. For example, let’s say you get a call. Let’s say someone calls you and they jump straight into a pitch about their business. You don’t care. You’re not interested in that. Maybe you just put the phone down on them or maybe you’d be one of those people that just doesn’t listen and carries on doing some of the job before you tell them, actually I’m not interested. Now compare that experience to if someone phones you up and gets hold of you and they actually then start asking you about your favourite subject. And what’s your favourite subject? Paul Green:Well, it’s you. It’s you and your business. And that’s the key to this. Load your phone person with open questions they can ask about their business, and not necessarily about technology. You know, you could jump in with, hey, how are things going for you guys at the moment? Where are we? We’re in the summer. So you could say, what’s summer trading like for you. Do you see an up and down throughout the year? I mean, you wouldn’t ask this as the opening question, but these are the kinds of exploratory questions where you get someone talking about their business. The goal is engagement. And a good phone person is going to listen to the answers and ask follow up questions. That’s why it’s dangerous to give them a script, because they won’t be listening. They’ll just be waiting for the talking to stop so they can ask the next question. Paul Green:You want to get them to eventually work their way, within two to three minutes, to asking this direct question, which is, hey, do you guys have an IT support company or an IT support partner that you use? Actually, just one note on using the word, partner. I know, in our world we’re all very keen on using the word partner. And partnerships are absolutely what we should be striving for. But when you say the word partner to ordinary businesses out there, it can be a little bit confusing. Especially right at the beginning of the selling process, of the relationship building process. So I would just stick with, hey, do you guys use an IT support company? Or what kind of IT support do you guys have? What your phone person is attempting to do after they’ve got them a little bit engaged is that they are attempting to find out if they’re currently using someone, and then they’re attempting to find out when the contract’s up and what they think of their current IT support. Paul Green:And there’s a really good question you can ask to find this out. This is the question on a scale of one to 10, where one is appalling and 10 is amazing. What score would you give to your current IT support company? And if they answer 10, nine or eight, there’s no opportunity for you here. Politely end the call, move on. You could keep in touch with those people, put them on your email list. But there’s not a huge amount of opportunity there for you. Now if they answer seven, six, or maybe even five, there’s a huge opportunity for you there. Because that’s a level of dissatisfaction. That’s actually a relatively low score. And it indicates that there’s some distress there. That there’s not perhaps the levels of happiness that you would hope to see in a relationship with a client. And then of course, four or below is urgent. Paul Green:There’s some deep, deep levels of distress. And from here, your phone person can follow up with an open question again, such as wow, that’s a really low score. I don’t hear people scoring their IT company that low that often. Can I ask, what is it that’s caused you to give them such a low score? That’s that open question. It’s a great question. Let me say it again. What is it that’s caused you to give them that low score? Because it could be a short term thing. They might have just had a major crisis this week, but actually long term it’s not affected the relationship. Or it could just be long term. And your phone person’s looking out for people saying things like, oh, you know that the service levels have gone down. They don’t really seem to pick up the phone that often. It’s quite hard to get hold of someone. Paul Green:Basically people leave MSPs with their emotions just as they join new MSPs with their emotions. Very few people leave your MSP or indeed any MSP because of big things. They don’t sit there and say, oh the tech stack wasn’t right. They just didn’t have the right tech stack. Ordinary people don’t talk like that. What they do is they say things like, it seems to take ages to get through to anyone, or they never pick up the phone. It’s the little things that kill clients, not the big things. So it’s the little things that your phone person is looking for, because they need to leverage that to book that 15 minute appointment with you. Paul Green:Listen, we’ve been talking about this for three episodes now. It’s such an important resource that you can have within your MSP. And remember something I said earlier, people only buy when they are ready to buy. The phone person gives you an unfair advantage of finding out when that is so that you can start a proper conversation with them at exactly the right moment. Voiceover:Here’s this week’s clever idea. Paul Green:Before I set up my MSP marketing business in 2016, I owned another marketing agency. And that was kind of like a proper marketing agency with an office and staff. In fact, at its peak, we had 15 staff in that building. And one of the most important people in that business was Miranda. Now Miranda’s role, she was actually a phone person. She was the senior of, I think we had a team of f…

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Episode 137: How to start an MSP YouTube channel Jun 28, 2022

Show notes

Episode 137 includes: How (and why) your MSP should dominate YouTube The technical set-up to give your phone person Plus on the show this week, which tools do MSPs always get wrong Featured guest Thank you to Ben Spector, Zomentum’s Product Manager and MSP consultant, for joining Paul to talk about how to choose the right tools to run your MSP. Ben is a former MSP owner who sold and exited his business in late 2020. Since then, he’s been working in two capacities. First as Product Manager with Zomentum, leveraging his previous experience running an MSP to shape Zomentum’s development roadmap. Second as a mentor to other MSP owners, delivering tactical support to help solve their operational challenges, focussing mostly on their tools, systems, and processes.. Connect with Ben on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benspector1/ 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/ Paul advised listening back to last week’s episode about finding a great ‘phone person’: http://mspmarketingedge.com/podcast/episode136 Find out more about Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Edge: https://www.mspmarketingedge.com/ Register for a free copy of Paul’s book, Updating Servers Doesn’t Grow Your Business http://mspmarketingedge.com/podcastbook/ Right now you can watch the extended interview with this week’s featured guests on the YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDRSdM8tZbEBEL1Sh4Z-t3PXKbsW7b4BC To dig deeper into this episode, Paul joins Sophie Law on the complimentary YouTube show ‘Another Byte’, from this coming Thursday: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDRSdM8tZbEAXxJRY5vU4LWldRNLjZZng Thank you to Neil Renwick from MSP Dark Web for recommending the book Launch by Jeff Walker: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Launch-Internet-Millionaires-Anything-Business/dp/1501226614 In next week’s episode, Paul will be joined by Shoaib Laher from As.a.Service, to talk about the challenges facing MSPs around the world 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. This is Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast. Paul Green:Hello there and welcome back to the podcast. Here’s what we got coming up in this week’s show. Ben Spector:I’ve had the privilege of speaking to 2, 3, 400 MSPs, and the problems are almost universal. The underlying tools are always a problem. Paul Green:That’s Ben Spector from Zomentum. He’s going to be joining me later on in the show to tell us how you can increase the sales coming into your MSP. We’re also going to be looking at YouTube and specifically answering this question. Should your MSP start its own YouTube channel? Voiceover:Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast. Paul Green:On last week’s show, we talked in detail about where to find a phone person in case you haven’t heard that episode yet. Just nip back Episode 136. We talk about why you need someone making outbound phone calls in your business. Essentially their job is to phone up leads and prospects to try to find if this is the right time to talk, that’s their main job. So they’re making those calls on your behalf so that you don’t have to do them. And the outcome that they are working towards is booking a proper 15 minute video call with you. Paul Green:So put it another way. The phone person is doing the hard work, the donkey work if you like of picking up the phone, dialling, picking up the phone, dialling, being told to get stuffed. All of the things that makes people like you and me not want to pick up the phone, they’re doing all of that on your behalf. And their goal is to book in one, two, maybe three appointments a week with you. So you are absolutely maxing out your time. Paul Green:Now their calling setup is a critical part of getting this right. And it’s what I want to talk about on today’s podcast. You see, as I recommended last week, this is a great, flexible home working job for a back to work parent, a back to work mom in particular, and you want to set up something that gives them maximum flexibility, but also sets them up for success. And you also want to make sure that you can keep an eye on what they’re doing because in my experience of hiring and firing many phone people over the years, both in this business and my previous business, they do tend to be the hardest people to manage. Paul Green:I think generally someone whose way of making a living is making phone calls, often cold calls for other people sometimes those can be, let’s just say, difficult people to manage. So you do need to keep an eye on them and check that they are doing what they’re supposed to be doing. The easy answer to this of course is letting them use your VoIP system. So you could just set them up with a soft VoIP attachment, they could just use their computer couldn’t they, but they’re on your VoIP system. Paul Green:What that does mean of course, is that they’re calling from your number and not some mobile number. I don’t know about you, but when I get a call and it’s not a local company that’s calling, it’s just some random number or it’s a mobile number, I don’t answer. It’s just easier not to do that. So I think making phone calls from at the very least a number with your local dialling code is important, but preferably your own number will be even better because anyone that misses a call and calls back, they’ll be coming through to your office. So that’s pretty important. Paul Green:I think it’s also critical that you record these phone calls as well. This should just have recording enabled by default, a couple of different reasons for that. First of all, you yourself as part of your quality control, you can listen back to some of those phone calls at random. And it’s a good thing to do certainly in the first couple of weeks when you’ve got your phone person is just delve into the recordings, listen to one at random and just double check that you are comfortable with how your business is being represented by someone else on the phone. Paul Green:I mean the big picture is here. It doesn’t really matter. These are not clients that someone’s calling on your behalf, they’re leads and prospects. And I promise you very, very little damage is going to be done to your overall business reputation just by someone making phone calls on your behalf. At the same time it’s just worth having a listen and just double checking, seeing what they are saying. Paul Green:The other benefit of recording phone calls in this way is that you can use some of the calls for coaching. Coaching is where you help someone to get better at their job. And it works really, really well with recorded phone calls because the basis of good coaching starts with evidence. I learned this when I worked in radio and again, coaching worked really well in radio and I put myself through a coaching diploma because it was easy for me to sit down with the radio presenters that I was managing. And we could actually sit and listen to a piece of their show. Paul Green:We used to call these snoop tapes. Never really thought where that expression came from, I guess because you’re snooping on something, but all radio stations, certainly where they have live output these days, there’s a little tape running, well there’s two tapes running. There’s one tape that records everything. It’s not really a tape anymore. It’ll be a hard drive Paul, not even a hard drive Paul, it’ll be an SSD. Paul Green:Anyway, you’re recording all of the output and that’s kind of like the legal record of what the station has broadcast, but then most presenters will have their own little tape that they’re running as well. And that’s for them to listen back to the show. In the old days it was cassette tapes. What would you use these days? I’m so out of touch with radio, anyway, the point being, you had a little bit of audio you could listen to and it was really easy for you as the coach and the person you’re coaching to discuss three critical things based on that recording. Paul Green:The first thing is what’s gone well. It’s really important to look at what’s gone well in any kind of performance. And remember a phone call is a type of performance. The second thing to look at is what hasn’t gone so well. Now you will hear a thousand things that need to be fixed in every single phone call, but you have to tackle them one at a time because the third thing you say to the person that you’re coaching is, “What are you going to change tomorrow?” Or, “What are you going to change later on today?” And the idea is that out of every coaching session, they walk away with one more thing to go away and improve, to go away and work on. Paul Green:But just one thing, especially when they first started with you the temptation is to give them a thousand things to work on. But actually if it’s something, just one thing that they have heard and picked up on the call, they might say, “Ah, I was too quiet there.” Or “I didn’t hear his question properly,” or “I should have asked for a clarification.” It’s them hearing themselves making a mistake and realising how they could have done it better, that’s the power of coaching. Paul Green:Coaching is not really about telling them what they should be changing. It’s about helping them to hear for themselves where they made a mistake and where they could improve their performance. And that’s quite difficult to do with a bit of technical work with your technicians, but with a telephone person like this, it’s simple because every single call can and should be recorded. So that’s it. The call set up really should be very, very simple. Paul Green:Oh, actually I suppose there’s one more thing that we should discuss, which is how do they access your calendar? Because remember the goal here is to get them booking 15 minute appointments on your behalf. What’s the easiest way for them to access your calendar? I think something like Microsoft Bookings, which is part of 365 or of course Calendly, which is the paid alternative. Well, there are hundreds of other alternatives, I’m sure. I think one of those things is the best way to do it. Paul Green:Instead of mucking around trying to have shared calendars and just being difficult like that complex situations, keep it really simple. Use a service that’s already set up and designed for other people to insert things into your live calendar. And of course the beauty of that is you can set rules within Bookings or Calendly. So you can set times of the day, you can do things like if they book a 15 minute appointment, it actually blanks another 30 minutes after that appointment. Paul Green:So you assume that if the appointment goes well, that 15 minutes could become a 20, 25, 30 minute chat. You don’t want to be sitting stressed and anxious because you’ve got another event coming up in your calendar. And of course the other thing you can do with these Bookings and Calendly is send automatic emails to the person so you can get that appointment into their calendar. That’s as important as getting it into yours. So I think that’s the easiest way to give your phone person access to your diary, use an automated tool like that. Paul Green:Do you know, I think there’s one more part of this, one more part of this puzzle to solve and that’s who should your phone people be calling and critically, what should they say? So do you know what I’ve just decided we’re going to do another part on this next week, a third and final part on how to find and train the perfect phone person for your MSP. Next week I’ll tell you who they should be calling and exactly what they should be saying. Voiceover:Here’s this week’s clever idea. Paul Green:I’ve been working with MSPs full time since 2016. And there’s a question that I’m starting to be asked more and more, but it’s only been in the last couple of years yet this question relates to something that’s actually been around as a marketing channel since 2005. What’s the question? It’s this, “Paul, should I start my own YouTube channel?” And the short answer to this is yes, absolutely you should. Every MSP should have a YouTube channel. And why? Because YouTube isn’t just the world’s most popular video streaming platform. It’s also the world’s second most used search engine. Paul Green:What’s the world’s first most used search engine. Well it’s Google of course. And who owns YouTube? It’s Google of course. Let’s just have a look actually, let’s just look up some YouTube stats. If I just type in here YouTube stats and we’ll go to Hootsuite. Here we go blog.hootsuite.com, 23 YouTube stats that matter to marketers in 2022. Right, we’ll have a bit of that. So YouTube has 1.7 billion unique monthly visitors. I didn’t know that 54% of YouTube users are male, not kind of relevant. In the U.S. 62% of users access YouTube daily, visitors spend an average of 19 minutes a day on YouTube. Paul Green:That’s interesting, isn’t it? And YouTube is the world’s… Oh no, I didn’t know this. Not only is YouTube the world’s second most used search engine. It’s also the world’s second most used website after Google, which is the first one and every minute, 694,000 hours of video are streamed on YouTube. That’s a lot of video, isn’t it? And you could argue from that, “But Paul, if we create our own YouTube channel, number one, are we just adding to the noise? Number two, what are we going to put on there? And number three, how are we going to get people to watch it?” Those are the kind of the follow up questions that come from that. Paul Green:Well, let’s just address that first one. Are you creating more noise? Yes. In a way, but does it really matter? On Netflix they keep adding new programs every single day. And although some programs come off, most of them stay on Netflix. Does that make Netflix less valuable as it adds more programs? Is it adding more noise? As a society, as a species we are creating content at a phenomenal amount and I can’t find the stat. I’m sure I could, if I looked hard enough, but something like 90% of all the content that’s ever been created has been created in the last five years or something like that. Paul Green:It’s a stat, the numbers are probably a bit different, but you get the idea for that stat and we are creating an amazing amount of content. Does that just mean you’re just adding to that noise then if you create a bit of your own content? I don’t think so. Not really. I think in fact you have to, but content marketing is one of the most robust ways to reach people these days. You know, the people that are buying from you never forget those ordinary business owners and managers, they don’t know what they don’t know. Paul Green:They really know very little about technology. So you have a huge opportunity to both educate and entertain them, edutainment. And you can do that particularly through video. So yes, I think you should start a YouTube channel and there’s a couple of different ways that you can fill up that channel. The easiest and probably the least impactful way is to go and get other pe…

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Episode 136: How to find a phone person for your MSP Jun 21, 2022

Show notes

Episode 136 includes: Why every MSP needs a phone person, and the best way to recruit yours 3 rules to maximise your personal time Plus on the show this week, what it really means to be a serial entrepreneur Featured guest Thank you to Al Alper from CyberGuard360 for joining Paul to talk about the new ways to sell cyber security and what it means to be a serial entrepreneur. Al Alper is Founder and CEO of Absolute Logic, Inc. and CyberGuard360. He is a serial entrepreneur, having founded several successful companies where he saw exits through acquisitions by companies such as CIT. Absolute Logic and CyberGuard360 are his 5th and 6th ventures. Al lives in Wilton, CT with his wife, Janice, where they raised three children, Kaitlin, AJ and Alexandra. In his spare time, he volunteers on several local community Boards and Commissions, and many non-profits. He enjoys a myriad of sports including skiing, windsurfing, boating, racquetball and more. Connect with Al on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alperal 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/ Paul mentioned a few time trackers you may find helpful: https://timeular.com/ https://clockify.me/ Find out more about Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Edge: https://www.mspmarketingedge.com/ Register for a free copy of Paul’s book, Updating Servers Doesn’t Grow Your Business http://mspmarketingedge.com/podcastbook/ Right now you can watch the extended interview with this week’s featured guests on the YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDRSdM8tZbEBEL1Sh4Z-t3PXKbsW7b4BC To dig deeper into this episode, Paul joins Sophie Law on the complimentary YouTube show ‘Another Byte’, from this coming Thursday: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDRSdM8tZbEAXxJRY5vU4LWldRNLjZZng Thank you to Heather Harlos, Head of MSP and Channel Marketing at JumpCloud, for recommending the book Radical Candor by Kim Scott: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Radical-Candor-What-Want-Saying/dp/1509845356 https://www.linkedin.com/in/heatherharlos In next week’s episode, Paul will be joined by Ben Spector, Zomentum’s Product Manager and MSP consultant, to talk about how to choose the right tools to run your MSP: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benspector1/ 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. This is Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast. Paul Green:Hello, my friend. And welcome to episode 136 of the show. Here’s what we got coming up for you this week. Al Alper:A business as a serial entrepreneur is your mistress and you never leave it. I see a hole in some space and I feel compelled to fill it. Paul Green:That’s Al Alper from CyberGuard360. He’ll be here later in the show to talk about his journey as an MSP owner and why he started his own cyber security vendor. We’re also going to be talking about your personal time. It’s the most finite resource that you have and far too many of us waste our personal time on things that really don’t matter. I’ve got for you this week, three rules to maximise out your personal time. Voiceover:Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast. Paul Green:One of my beliefs about every MSP’s marketing setup is that you must, must, must have a phone person. Now, what does a phone person do? Well, it’s kind of obvious, really. They make phone calls for you or to be more specific, they make outbound phone calls to your leads and to your prospects. Essentially, they are working your network for you. They’re working your marketing funnel for you so that you personally, as the business owner, don’t have to do this, because it’s not fun work. I don’t know that many business owners in general, never mind just MSPs, who enjoy picking up the phone again and again, and again, and yet there is a real value in picking up that phone. You can go back in this podcast and listen to a number of guests we’ve had who make their living making phone calls or their business makes phone calls on behalf of MSPs. Paul Green:And the wonderful thing about having a phone person making those constant outbound phone calls is that you seem to get lucky with your timing more often. Because a core marketing problem that most MSPs have is that people only buy when they’re ready to buy. But you don’t know when that moment is. So by making lots of outbound phone calls, 20, 30, 40, 50 a day, the chances of you stumbling across someone who is ready to buy, well, that just goes up dramatically. Huge amounts in fact. There’s a core three step strategy I recommend to all MSPs. Step one is to build multiple audiences of people to listen to you. Step two is to build a relationship with those audiences and you do that through content marketing. And then step three is to commercialise that relationship. You’ve got to get the right message in front of the right person at exactly the right moment. Paul Green:And your phone person is your secret weapon in doing that. So every MSP should have someone, but what kind of person do you use? Should you hire an agency for example? Well, there are some good agencies around. But I’ll be honest, there are more bad agencies than there are good agencies. It’s very, very hard to get it right when you hire an agency. And of course it’s going to cost you a lot more money, because you are paying for someone to manage your phone person for you. And of course they need to make some profits on top of that. They’ll have higher overheads than you would if you just hired your own person. Should you perhaps hire a telemarketing professional? Someone who’s been doing it for some time? The problem with telemarketing professionals is they may have learned some really bad habits over the years, which they’re going to bring into your business. Paul Green:It depends where they’ve learned to be a telemarketing professional. If it was in some kind of boiler room where they have to pick up the phone near 100 times an hour or they get fired. The kind of, these places do exist where they have to put their hand up to go to the toilet. It’s insane. These are normally the ones with the robo dialers, so they disconnect a call and the robo dialer tries a number of people until it connects someone else and then connects through. You know when you’ve been robo dialed, don’t you? Because you pick up the phone and there’s a slight pause before you’re connected to a human. If they’ve learned telemarketing in that environment, you don’t want that person, you really don’t. Because what we are talking about here, when we’re talking about a phone person, is not really selling. Paul Green:That’s why I’m not calling this telesales. I’m even vaguely uncomfortable about calling it telemarketing. That’s why I prefer the term, it’s just a telephone person. What we’re talking about here is someone phoning people on your behalf so that you don’t have to do it, because you’ve got many other more valuable things that you need to be doing with your time. They’re phoning on your behalf and they’re just asking some open questions. They’re trying to find out if this is indeed a good time to talk or whether or not we need to call back in three, six, nine months, maybe further in the future. So I believe the best person to hire is your own person. And I genuinely believe the best kind of person for this is a back to work parent. Obviously someone who is comfortable on the phone, you want a back to work parent whose ideal job is literally sitting on the phone for hours and hours, and hours. Paul Green:It’s your idea of hell. It’s my idea of hell. But if they want to do that, that’s great. And actually if they can make money just sitting phoning other people, not even trying to sell them something, just asking them questions with the outcome being to book a 15 minute call with you if and when they find someone at the right point. Hell, if there’s someone who wants to do that, go and find them. If they’re a back to work parent, that’s great. Because you know what? You’ll get as much outcome from them in the five to six hours a day that they can work as you would from a full-time person. I really believe that. I love hiring back to work parents, because you can get really highly trained people with a very positive attitude who will cram in eight to nine hours worth of work in six hours a day. Paul Green:And they will love it, because someone has trusted them to return to the workplace. So where do you find this person? Where do you find your back to work parent? Well, I would avoid job boards. I wouldn’t put job adverts out there, because these kind of entry level jobs, and let’s be honest, this is a lower paid entry level job. Although you will get a better type of person and a better quality of person if you pay more. These kind of entry level jobs can attract very inappropriate applicants. If you’ve ever put something on a job board, particularly a job board where they can press a button and just apply for a job at the push of a button, you get hundreds and hundreds of very low level people applying. They clearly haven’t read the advert. Some of them aren’t even in your country. It’s incredibly frustrating. Paul Green:And that’s why I think job boards are to be avoided. A better place to post is on social media. And I don’t necessarily mean on your MSP’s Facebook page or Twitter account. But what about if you were to leverage the social networks of the people who work with you? What if you and your team all posted on your personal social media networks that you were looking for someone? You could either link to a job on your website or you could just say, hey, we’re looking for someone to make outbound phone calls. There’s no selling involved, it’s appointment setting, flexible hours, work from home, perfect for a back to work parent. Is this you? Do you know someone? Is there a friend of a friend that we should be talking to? And then you give them the contact details. Now that would be great coming out on your own team’s personal social media accounts, because you’re much more likely to reach real people. Paul Green:You almost want to reach the people who aren’t quite ready to go looking for a job yet. And the fact that something’s come up and it’s a friend of a friend, of a friend, makes them think, ooh, this is a good opportunity. I’m going to make the most of this. I’m going to go for this. Maybe that would be a better way to find really authentic candidates. You can also of course advertise it on social media platforms directly. Facebook has a huge jobs offering. It’s a very effective way of reaching people. But again, you’ve just got to be careful of the very low level applications, especially on Facebook, where much of it can be automated. If they can tap a button, then they’re going to waste your time. Now the initial interviews, when you do those, I would do them on the phone. In fact, I would try very hard not to see what this person looks like or anything like that until you’ve spoken to them on the phone. Paul Green:Why? Because that’s their principle communication tool. They are here to speak on the phone on your behalf. So your initial interview should be on the phone. Have a chat with them, see how engaging they are. If you are bored talking to them after five minutes, guess what? They’re not going to be very good performers when it comes to generating you more leads. And then of course, if you like that initial phone call interview, you could set up a video interview or even a face-to-face interview down the line. But I truly think that first phone interview is the most important thing. Paul Green:How they stand on the phone and their ability to perform and communicate well on the phone is really important. It’s really hard you know, communicating just over audio. And I say this to you as I’m communicating to you over audio, but I’ve had a number of years of experience of doing radio. So I do things like play with my voice and do different intonation. And we’ve got the privilege of production where producer James, say hello. James:Hello. Paul Green:Producer James will do amazing production things and make me sound sexy by doing, this is my voice. And then make me not sound so sexy by doing, this is my voice. Thanks. You can stop that now. But you get the idea. We can do all of this in audio and it’s completely controlled. They can’t do all of that on the phone and their ability to communicate by audio alone, it’s a rare skill. It really is. So if you can find that person that engages you in that first phone call, go for that person. Don’t overthink it. Oh, by the way, when you do set up that initial phone interview, get them to phone you. So you agree the time and you get them to phone you. And that is a test to see if they do indeed ring at the time that they’re supposed to. Paul Green:A phone person is a much needed and valuable part of your overall marketing strategy. Even if you just get someone for two to three hours a day, you’ve got to get them into your MSP. It’s the only way to really work your funnel, work your network and find out the exact moment that some of your future prospects are going to be ready to buy. Voiceover:Here’s this week’s clever idea. Paul Green:You’ve got three resources available to you, time, energy and money. Two of those are finite. They run out eventually. One of them is infinite. Which one of those three resources do you think is infinite? Is it time? Is it energy? Or is it money? We’ll just play some elevator music for a second while you decide. The answer is that time and energy are finite. Your energy’s finite, of course. I mean, I don’t know how old you are, but I’m 47. And if I get to the end of the day and I’m trying to record this podcast, yeah. It’s not going to happen. Paul Green:Just haven’t got the personal energy for it. I tend to have to record in the mornings or at lunch times, maybe early afternoons at a push, because that’s where my energy levels are highest. That was not the case 20 years ago. 20 years ago I could do anything pretty much for about 18, 19 hours of the day. As we get older, our energy levels get lower. Goodness knows what it’s going to be like when we’re all 70. Anyway, energy is a finite resource, so of course is time, which is what I want to talk about today. Time is a finite resource. Paul Green:There’s a certain amount of it. And when it’s run out, it’s run out. This doesn’t mean by the way that money is the infinite resource. There is more than enough money in the world. It’s just you don’t have enough of it yet. Anyway, back to time. You’ve probably heard it said before that you have the exact same amount of time as everyone else, including someone such as Elon Musk. It’s just that Elon Musk achieves more with his time than perhaps you do with your time. So Elon’s not lucky enough to have more time than you. I mean, okay, he probably spends more of it working than you do, but there’s still the finite pot of time for Elon. Even he needs to stop and sleep at some point. What’s Elon doin…

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Episode 135: Mop up old prospects with a sales week Jun 14, 2022

Show notes

Episode 135 includes: How to earn an extra 100k by running a sales week Why repeating yourself in sales conversations is a good thing Plus in the show this week, how will mergers & acquisitions change over the next year Featured guest Thank you to Harry Brelsford from SMB Nation for joining Paul to talk about what mergers and acquisitions might mean for MSPs in 2022. Entrepreneur Harry is the founder of SMB Nation (www.smbnation.com) from Austin, Texas. He oversees the popular SMB Nation workflow including marketing analytics, content and events (webinars, workshops and multi-day conferences). He holds an MBA in Project Management from the University of Denver (and numerous certifications such as MCSE, MCT, CNE, et al) and is the author of 23 books on technology and business topics. His 20 years of SMB technology experience were supplemented by teaching 12+ years at night as an adjunct professor at Seattle Pacific University and other higher-learning institutions. Harry is a board member at Moonshot Equity Partners and an in-demand speaker at industry events. An active entrepreneur, Harry is the force behind the Pocket MBA, Telephonation, Cloud Nation and XPmigrations.com. His latest startup The CannaTech Group. Connect with Harry on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/harryb 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/ You can join Paul in the MSP Marketing group on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/mspmarketing/ Right now you can watch the extended interview with this week’s featured guests on the YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDRSdM8tZbEBEL1Sh4Z-t3PXKbsW7b4BC To dig deeper into this episode, Paul joins Sophie Law on the complimentary YouTube show ‘Another Byte’, from this coming Thursday: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDRSdM8tZbEAXxJRY5vU4LWldRNLjZZng Thank you to Simon Marcil from Propel Your MSP for recommending the book They Ask, You Answer by Marcus Sheridan: https://www.amazon.co.uk/They-Ask-You-Answer-Revolutionary/dp/1119312973 https://ca.linkedin.com/in/smarcil In next week’s episode, Paul will be joined by Al Alper from CyberGuard360 to talk about the new ways to sell cyber security: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alperal 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. This is Paul Green’s MSP Marketing podcast. Paul Green:Ooh, fancy seeing you here again. Here’s what we got coming up in today’s show. Harry Brelsford:2022. It’s still a healthy M&A environment, but these things are like windows. And sometimes the windows open and sometimes the windows close. We’re coming into a economic period where that window may start to close. Paul Green:That’s Harry Brelsford, he’s the founder of SMB Nation. And he’s joining me later on in the show to talk about a number of things, including murders and acquisitions. Did I say murders? I mean, mergers and acquisitions. I’m thinking a bit too much American Psycho there. He’s also going to be talking about the opportunities for MSPs in the current cannabis tech in the US. And we’ll be talking about the potential distractions of having side hustles. Paul Green:It’s a great interview and it’s coming up later in the show. We’re also going to be talking about why it doesn’t matter if you have the same sales conversations again and again and again with all of your prospects, because those sales conversations aren’t really for you. It’s an important part of the process for them to decide that they really need to sign your contract. Voiceover:Paul Green’s MSP Marketing podcast. Paul Green:Right. Question for you. What are you doing next week? Have a look in your calendar right now. Have you got any big meetings planned in, any major project work, or is it just another normal week for you? If it’s just another normal week, let me suggest an activity which could actually put 100,000 in the bank. Over a period of months and years, but still 100,000 in the bank. Paul Green:What I’m going to suggest is that next week you declare to be sales week. Now in reality, every week should be sales week. You should be pushing sales and just generally pushing prospects and moving things forward all the time. But I know that life gets in the way of the things that you should be doing. What if you declared next week to be sales week and you focused a set of activities every single day next week on finding leads, turning those leads into prospects and turning those prospects into qualified opportunities? People who really, really could go on to buy from you. Paul Green:The easiest way to get started with sales week is to look back at all of your previous sales opportunities. In fact, you could do this now. It would take you, what, 20 minutes to pull together a list of people to target next week. Go back through all of your notepads. Who are all the people that you’ve spoken to, that you’ve had conversations with about their technology? And you can go back five, maybe even 10 years. In fact, if the average client stays with an MSP for three, to five, to seven years, you absolutely should be going back right now to those people that you were talking to three, to five, to seven years ago, because you never know, they might be ready to make a switch again. Paul Green:Look through your notepads, look through your emails, look through your sales system. Look through your CRM. Pull out all of those business cards, hiding in drawers in your desk. Any data you’ve got anywhere. Who are all the people that you have spoken to in the past, who did a bad thing? They chose someone else. They chose not to go with you. There’s bound to be a ton of them. You’ve just got to find out who they are. And then next week you could target them in a sales week. Paul Green:The first job then is to pull all that data together. Get all of that different data, stick it into either a spreadsheet or a basic CRM. Don’t overthink that. I mean, don’t turn that into next week’s activity. That’s just a basic thing to get yourself organised. But once you’ve got that data pulled together, next week you can target it. And there are a number of things that you could do. Paul Green:You could perhaps send an email to those people. And I don’t really mean a broadcast email from a CRM. I mean a one-on-one email. You could just drop them an email along the lines of, “Oh. Hi, Scott. How are you? Can you believe it’s been seven years since we spoke? Yeah, that’s right back in 2014, you were looking for a new IT support company. And we had a few meetings. You chose to go with someone else at the time, which is fine.” Would you say that as a line, does that make you sound a bit bitter? Maybe. Paul Green:Hey, put that into your own words. “But you went with someone else, you loser. You picked the wrong MSP and I’m just wondering, how are things right now? Are you still happy with the guys that you chose or are you entering that process? Again, of looking at someone else? Loads has changed for us in the seven years and I’m sure it has for you too. It would be great to reconnect.” Paul Green:Now let’s say you had 50 people that you’ve previously spoken to. You are not a stranger to them. You’re not their friend. They don’t know who you are, but you are not a complete stranger to them. Even if they sat in a room with you seven years ago, there will be a vague memory of that. If you dropped all 50 of those people more or less the same email, but you email them individually. Which is, what, half an hour’s work at tops? The numbers game alone says that a small proportion of those people will email you back. Now, even if that was one or 2%, that’s okay. Because one or 2% are 50. Well, that’s just one people, one people, one person. One person emailing you back. That’s okay. One person emailing you back is engagement. Paul Green:I reckon actually of 50 people you’ve had a previous engagement with, you’d get two, three, maybe even five of those people emailing you back. And one or two of them, it might be a case of, “Hey, yeah. We remember you not really interested in talking right now.” But then there might be someone else. In fact, you will ask yourself, “Why would someone email back?” Either because they’re being polite or because they are ready or nearly ready, willing, and able to have a sales conversation with you. Paul Green:I would definitely email those people. What you should also do and in fact, this is the most productive thing you could do next week is of course, to just pick up the phone and call those people. You could just call those 50 people off the bat, or you could take those 50 people you emailed and call the 45 who didn’t bother to reply to you. That would be potentially a good thing to do as well. Paul Green:The other thing you could do is send them something in the post. Perhaps send them a printed newsletter, send them some literature. You could write something and get it printed. It doesn’t have to be anything clever. You could just take a copy of something that you’ve seen, print something you’ve seen on the web and just put a little Post-it Note on the top saying, “Hey, it’s been years since we’ve spoken, but I saw this and I thought of you guys.” Anything you can send to someone to reengage them is a good thing. Paul Green:But don’t think you can just send an email, or just make one phone call, or just send one thing in the post during your sales week. You’re probably going to have to do a number of different things to get these people to talk to you. The goal here is to cross off those 50 people and to say, “Right. I know because I’ve spoken to 10 or 20 or 30 of them, I know that those are not my opportunities right now. Therefore, I’m going to focus all of my attention on the 20 people that I haven’t yet been able to get hold of.” Paul Green:You take 50 prospects who are qualified. They’re qualified in that you wanted their business a number of years ago, and we can assume that they have moved on in some ways. They could be even bigger businesses now. That’s what makes them qualified. Let’s assume they understand what it is that they’re buying because you are not their first MSP they’ve bought from at least one before. This is a really hot list for you. All you’ve got to get right in this, well, there’s two things really. The first thing is you’ve got to get the timing right. And the second thing is that you’ve got to get the engagement right. Paul Green:The timing is completely out of your hands. Now might be a good time to talk. Now could be the worst time to talk. They might just have picked a new IT company a couple of weeks ago and that would be awful timing, wouldn’t it. But there’s only one way to find out. And that’s just to hit all of them and attempt to have a conversation with all of them. Paul Green:If you could have next week, 3, 4, 5 decent conversations with old prospects, even if nothing comes out of it next week, what a week that’s going to be. What a week that sales week is going to be because you’ll have had three, four or five conversations and you don’t normally do that. That sales week can be great for your self-esteem. It can be great for your sales process. Paul Green:And do you know what? I wouldn’t put money on it. Well, no, go on I’ll bet you a Snickers. I bet you a Snickers, that if you work 50 old prospects, next week, there will be an opportunity you uncover. And it might not be an amazing opportunity, but you never know. It might be a piece of work that could lead onto some proper manage services, some proper monthly recurring revenue. Paul Green:If you do work that 50 and you don’t get anything out of it, genuinely, all 50 are dead, drop me an email and I will send you eight Snickers bar. Whereas if you do work those 50 and you get something out of it, yeah, you can send me a Snickers. The address is on the website if you want to send me one. Go on make next week a sales week. Target some old prospects really throw yourself into it. It only needs to be a couple of hours a day. And that could be enough to potentially when you a brand new client and hundreds of thousands of long-term lifetime revenue. Voiceover:Here’s this week’s clever idea. Paul Green:Talking about prospects, have you ever noticed that when you’re sitting down with a company that could potentially become a client, they always seem to give you very similar stories? When you are asking them about their business in a sales meeting, you ask them open questions. Don’t you? You ask them things like, “Tell me about your business. What do you guys do? How do you do that? What are the things that make you successful? Where do you sit in the marketplace?” All of those kind of things, they tend to be unique. Paul Green:But when you ask them questions, like tell me about your technology. How do you keep ransomware out of your business? Talk me through how you back up all of your data. What would happen if you were to lose internet access for 24 hours? Who has access to what data within the business? How do you think your clients would react if they knew that their data had been leaked in some kind of cybersecurity incident? And all of the other questions that you ask. Paul Green:I suspect, if you are like most MSPs, that the answers you get back will be the same. They don’t really understand what cybersecurity is. Certainly when you probe, you realise that they don’t understand. They know that they’ve got a backup yet. They couldn’t tell you how that backup actually works. Or when the last time was someone checked it or verified it. You get the same answers again and again and again. And you know what? That’s normal, completely normal. Paul Green:In fact, let’s use Pareto’s Principle. Around about 80% of the answers that you get back from the prospects you’re talking to is going to be the same kind of stuff. They may not be using the exact same words, but the themes of what they are saying are exactly the same. And this is normal. In fact, it’s to be expected. Paul Green:Now, this doesn’t mean that you can coast your way through these sales meetings. It doesn’t mean that you can switch off mentally and stop listening to them. You’ve got to listen to them. If anything, you must listen because later on in that sales meeting, and this is a powerful tip if you don’t do it, you can repeat their language back to them. Paul Green:One of the quickest ways to bond with someone during a sales meeting is to take the exact words that they say, the exact words in the exact order they say them and repeat those words back to those people. That’s a very powerful concept in a sales meeting. No, the fact that they are saying the same things as all the other prospects is a good thing because that sales meeting isn’t really for you. That sales meeting is for them. Paul Green:It’s for them to go through an emotional process of realising that your MSP is the best choice for them. And you cannot get them to make a cognitive decision about this. Most B2…

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Episode 134: The 2022 marketing power of the 1922 marketing tactic Jun 07, 2022

Show notes

Episode 134 includes: Why you should start using this 100 year old marketing tool How to create ‘evergreen’ content for your website Plus on the show this week, the benefit of being a vigilant MSP owner Featured guest Thank you to Len Herstein, author of Be Vigilant!, for joining Paul to talk about what complacency is, why it’s so dangerous and what MSPs can do to identify and fight it. Len has over 30 years of experience in business and brand marketing. Prior to founding his marketing and events company (ManageCamp Inc.), Len innovated, managed and grew brands for major consumer packaged goods marketers, including Campbell Soup Company, Coca-Cola, and Nabisco. Since 2015, Len has served as a reserve deputy sheriff with the Douglas County Sheriff’s Office in Colorado. Connect with Len on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lenherstein 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 discussing printed newsletters, Paul mentioned the ‘No BS’ newsletter and series of books from the direct response marketing expert Dan Kennedy: https://www.amazon.co.uk/B-S-Direct-Marketing-Non-Direct-Businesses/dp/1599185016 https://marketingsecrets.com/programs/newsletters Find out more about Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Edge: https://www.mspmarketingedge.com/ Right now you can watch the extended interview with this week’s featured guests on the YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDRSdM8tZbEBEL1Sh4Z-t3PXKbsW7b4BC To dig deeper into this episode, Paul joins Sophie Law on the complimentary YouTube show ‘Another Byte’, from this coming Thursday: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDRSdM8tZbEAXxJRY5vU4LWldRNLjZZng Thank you to Tony Capewell from MSP Dark Web for recommending the book Retention Point by Robert Skrob: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Retention-Point-Membership-Subscription-Associations-ebook/dp/B07CZXD289 https://uk.linkedin.com/in/tonycapewell In next week’s episode, Paul will be joined by Harry Brelsford from SMB Nation to talk about how about what mergers and acquisitions might mean for MSPs in 2022: https://www.linkedin.com/in/harryb 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. This is Paul Green’s MSP Marketing podcast. Paul Green:Hi. Hello, and welcome back to the show. Here’s what we got coming up for you this week. Len Herstein:How do we build vigilance into our lives so that we don’t have to be paranoid, so that we don’t have to be on edge all at time and worried about losing everything. Paul Green:That’s Len Herstein, he’s the author of a book called Be Vigilant!. And he’s going to be joining me later on in the show to talk about the dangers of being complacent. Any point you find yourself thinking, we’re doing quite well. Maybe at that point, you are at danger of complacency. Len’s going to help you to identify if your MSP’s at risk of this, and what you can do about it in our interview later on in the show. We’re also going to be talking about creating something called evergreen content. I love evergreen content because you create it once and it lasts forever. That’s why it evergreen. I’ll tell you exactly what it is and how you can use it later on in the show. Voiceover:Paul Green’s MSP Marketing podcast. Paul Green:I’ve been spending money over the last couple of months, in fact, I’ve been subscribing to some new stuff. And it may surprise you that the things that I’ve been subscribing to, despite the fact it’s 2022, I’ve been subscribing to 1922 products, because what I’ve actually been subscribing to are newsletters, physical print newsletters. I’ve got a load here. There’s only two or three subscriptions that I’ve taken out. But both of these subscriptions, or all of these subscriptions, what makes them distinctive is they’re not digital. There is an element of digital that goes with them, a digital backer, but primarily I’m buying printed newsletters. So I’ve got a couple here. I’ve got this first one. This is a UK specific one. This sounds really boring to most people, but as business owner, your ears might be pricked up by this and you might think, ooh, that sounds good. It’s called the Schmidt Tax Report. Paul Green:It’s been going for 28 years and every month they send you out a printed newsletter. How many pages is this? It’s getting off. Oh, here we go. 24 pages. So a 24 page print newsletter every month in just black and red, and it’s about tax. It’s about money. It’s about property. And it’s cost me about 80 pounds a year, which is about a hundred dollars a year. And frankly that’s bargain, because every, I’ve only been a subscriber for about three months, but every issue that I read, there’s something in there, there’s some little nugget in there that makes me think, ooh, I could do that in the future, or that could save us thousands in tax. So, 80 pounds a year, a hundred dollars a year, that’s nothing. So, that’s that one. Paul Green:And then I recently subscribed to, well, I think I’ve possibly resubscribed to something I used to subscribe to years ago, you may have heard of a guy called Dan Kennedy. So he is the grandfather, the great-grandfather of direct response marketing. He’s an American guy and he’s been around for, I don’t know, 30 years or so. And Dan Kennedy has a series of books. In fact, I’m sure we’ve talked about him on this podcast. His books are called the No B.S. Range, and you just go and type No BS, N-O B-S, into Amazon. And you’ll find all of Dan Kennedy’s books, and I can recommend all of them. Over a number of years, in fact, I can’t remember when I finished my subscription, but we actually talking about 10 years ago, I used to subscribe to his No B.S. Magnetic Marketing Letter, which was another physical newsletter. In fact, I’ve got a copy of it here, because I’ve actually just resubscribed to it. Paul Green:What’s happened is that Dan Kennedy actually sold his business, well, he sold it about three times now. He’s sold it to someone who sold it onto someone else who has just recently sold it to a guy called Russell Brunson. And Russell Brunson, you may have heard of him. He is the co-founder of a piece of software called ClickFunnels, which allows you to build marketing funnels. So things like up sales, down sales, those kind of things. It’s not really relevant to MSPs because you don’t sell a thing, you’re selling us a service and it’s a very considered purchase. But if you were selling, I don’t know, eCommerce stuff, or you were selling the kind of service that could be commoditised, then ClickFunnels would be a very sensible piece of software to look at. And we’ve definitely talked about Russell Brunson on this podcast before. He has a series of books, things like Dotcom Secrets, Expert Secrets, there’s a trilogy of Russell Brunson books, which are worth reading. Paul Green:So he bought Dan Kennedy’s company about six months ago, something like that. And he has recently relaunched Dan’s No B.S. newsletter, and also launched his own, or relaunched his own, which is called Marketing Secrets newsletter. So I very happily subscribe to these because again, it’s not a huge amount of money. This is a little bit more than the Schmidt Report. This is an international one and it comes from the US to my home here in the UK. I forget how much I pay, but it’s worth it to me, just to get these print things in my hand, because here’s the thing. I subscribe to lots of digital newsletters, lots of email stuff. I’ve got a constant stream of things coming into my email inbox. And I’m sure you are exactly the same, but there’s not that much stuff that comes into my mailbox. Paul Green:So actually when the latest edition of the Schmidt Tax Report, or this behind the scenes Marketing Secrets Letter lands on my doorstep, it’s actually quite exciting for me. And I rip it open and I put it to one side and I think, right, I’m going to read that maybe on the toilet later on today. And don’t knock toilet reading. We all read on the toilets, but these are not huge things, even the 24 page tax one, you look at that initially and you think, oh, I’m never going to read that, but it’s not written for accountants and CPAs it’s written for ordinary business owners like you and me. So there is a real power in this 1922 marketing tactic, physical print newsletters. Now these are ones that I subscribe to. So I pay money to get these. And I feel that they’re worth every penny I spend on them right now, but I recommend to all the MSPs I work closely with that they do a print newsletter not to charge for it, but as a way of keeping in touch with your hottest prospects. Paul Green:If you talk to someone today, and they’re not quite ready to switch from someone else to you just yet, but you think there could be something in the future, there’s something that might be there in six, 12, 18 months time. Wouldn’t you want to take every single effort to keep in touch with that person? And the answer is yes, of course, you would. And of course you should put them on your email newsletter and connect them on LinkedIn, and call them every now and again, just to see how things are going. But I believe one of the greatest marketing tactics you can use to keep in touch with someone, to keep your name and your business top of their mind, is to send them a physical printed newsletter. Paul Green:Yes, it’s difficult. Yes, it’s hard work. Yes, it’s expensive to get all that content together and put it into a newsletter and turn it into something you can print that actually looks high quality and doesn’t look rubbish, and then to put it in an envelope and to post it out to them, it’s difficult, it’s expensive, and that’s why 99% of MSPs don’t do it. And when 99% of people aren’t doing something and hear someone like me who lives and breathes MSP marketing every single day of my life, it should really move up to the top of your priority list. Now you don’t want to be sending out a printed newsletter to everyone that you’re in contact with. That would be an expensive exercise, but you take those very best prospects and it’s absolutely worth sending them out, even if it’s just a quarterly newsletter, that will be better than nothing. Obviously every other month will be even better and monthly would be even better than that. But what a powerful thing to do. Paul Green:And do you know what these days? You don’t even need to create your own newsletter, just to give myself an early blatant plug, for example, our MSP Marketing Edge service. One of the many that we give our members is a printed newsletter. They can literally just put their MSP company name on it, tweak any articles if they want to, and then they can print it and send it out. And it’s very, very simple, and we provide it in all sorts of different formats as well. So whatever you want to do with it, it’s nice and. Easy and you can check that out by the way at mspmarketingedge.com. Paul Green:If you are not subscribed to any print newsletters, go and subscribe to one. In fact, go and have a look at that Russell Brunson one, just look up the Russell Brunson Marketing Secrets letter. I’m sure there’ll be a link to it on ClickFunnels.com. Go and have a look at that. Subscribe for a few months just so you can experience the excitement of a physical print newsletter landing on what doorstep and then ask yourself, wouldn’t it be cool to have that kind of effects on your prospects? Voiceover:Here’s this week’s clever idea. Paul Green:I think it’s time for me to admit something that I’ve never admitted on this podcast before. And that admission is that I’m really, really bad at gardening. In fact, as I stand here recording this episode, I have a home office, and where my home office is, I can look out on the back garden of my house, and we have a lovely garden. It’s reasonably big. It’s very mature. It’s very beautiful. I bought this house years ago and the couple that lived here before spent about 15 years making the house and the garden perfect for them anyways, certainly deco wise, we need to do some work in here, but the garden is beautiful. It’s very mature and there’s always something beautiful to look at pretty much all around the year. Paul Green:Now I don’t have either the skill nor frankly, the inclination to keep the garden looking beautiful. So I have Warren and Mick who come every Thursday for a couple of hours. They mow the lawn, they put stripes in the lawn, so it looks nice, and they just keep the garden looking nice. And they have learned over the two odd years that we’ve been working together, they’ve learned not to ask me too many questions, because early on, they were saying things like, oh, do you want us to tie back your clematis or whatever it was? And I’m like, oh thanks, but don’t know what that is. So you just do what you think is best. And in fact, the other day we were talking about a patch of the garden that needs just a bit of enhancing. And they said to me, oh, we thought we could put in some evergreens. I was so excited and said, oh right evergreens, like in marketing. And they looked at me like I was slightly deranged, which is why I just left them to it. Paul Green:Evergreen to me, yeah, apparently it’s a gardening term, it’s got something to do with plants. But evergreen to me is a marketing thing. An evergreen piece of marketing is something that you do once and it lasts forever. And these days when we talk about evergreen content, we really means something that can go on your website. So if you think about your website blog right now, you might have two different types of content. You might have an evergreen piece of content and you might have an up-to-date, almost news type of content that will go out-of-date. So let me give you an example of each of those pieces of content. Paul Green:So if we take, say cyber security, an evergreen piece of cyber security content would be, these are the, or this is a good habit to get into when looking at your email. And that general habit might not be to do with specific scams, but just in general, looking out for phishing emails or things that just don’t look or feel right. Now, we don’t know what kind of scams are coming up in the next five to 10 years, but it’s fair for us to assume that phishing and gem really trying to get people to click on things and download things that they didn’t really want to, is going to be a continuing trend going forward. So that would be a good piece of evergreen, because although when we say evergreen lasts forever, it last forever, forever, but five to 10 years is good enough. I think in a thousand years that’s not going to be relevant to anyone, but we evergreen five, 10 years that will do us. Paul Green:So, that would be a good piece of evergreen cybersecurity content, whereas a piece of topical content would be something like this is the big scam that’s tricking people on their email right now. And that would be a specific tactic that’s being used by cyber criminals right now. Now because i…

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Episode 133: MSPs: Overcome common sales objections May 31, 2022

Show notes

Episode 133 includes: How to combat most of the reasons prospects give for not buying The importance of understanding your prospect’s emotional motivation Plus on the show this week, the MSP sales expert who thinks you can actually enjoy cold calling Featured guest Thank you to RevOps specialist (and the creator of the Feel-Good MSP) Brian Gillette, for joining Paul to talk about how you can actually feel-good about cold calling and selling. “I work with clients ranging from solopreneurs to multi-million dollar companies, and I love my job. As a former actor, I’ve had tons of different jobs—I’ve sold TVs, burritos, houses, business loans, managed services, and plenty more.I live in Pasadena, CA with my wife Sam. When I’m not working as a consultant, I am a freelance voice actor for audiobooks, corporate training, and commercials.” Connect with Brian on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brian-gillette-27884b128 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/ Register for a free copy of Paul’s book, Updating Servers Doesn’t Grow Your Business http://mspmarketingedge.com/podcastbook/ Right now you can watch the extended interview with this week’s featured guests on the YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDRSdM8tZbEBEL1Sh4Z-t3PXKbsW7b4BC To dig deeper into this episode, Paul joins Sophie Law on the complimentary YouTube show ‘Another Byte’, from this coming Thursday: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDRSdM8tZbEAXxJRY5vU4LWldRNLjZZng Thank you to Jennifer Bleam from MSP Sales Revolution for recommending the book Tiny Habits by BJ Fogg: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Tiny-Habits-Changes-Change-Everything/dp/0358003326 https://www.linkedin.com/in/bleamjennifer In next week’s episode, Paul will be joined by Len Herstein, author of Be Vigilant!, to talk about what complacency is, why it’s so dangerous and what MSPs can do to identify and fight it: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lenherstein 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. This is Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast. Paul Green :It is a delight to be back on the podcast again. Welcome to the latest episode. This is what we’ve got coming up for you this week. Brian Gillette:We did not have money for marketing, and my job was to find money without spending any. And we took a company from 700,000 to over $2 million in annual in just 3 Years. Paul Green :We’re focusing completely on sales in this week’s episode of the show. That’s Brian Gillette. He’s the best a man can get. Singer:“Gillette, the best a man can get” Paul Green :And he’s going to be joining me later on to talk about improving your sales. We’re also going to be talking about how to understand prospects’ pain points. If you can identify their pain and understand what it really means to them, then of course you could influence them at a deeply emotional level. And that’s ultimately what good sales is really all about. Voiceover:Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast. Paul Green :Most MSP owners do their own sales. And when you sit down to talk about sales with them, they’ll very quickly say, “Oh well, I’ve had no training at all. I’ve just kind of picked this up along the way.” Now I personally think that’s one of the best ways to learn sales. There’s no better way to learn many things than just by jumping in there and doing it yourself. Perhaps medical science is one of those things you wouldn’t want to learn just by doing it. “Yes Mrs. Jones. I will be doing your brain surgery today. I haven’t actually done this before, but I did watch a YouTube video on it.” That’s not going to work. For sales though, it’s absolutely fine, because what’s the worst that could happen? If you muck up a sales call, you don’t win the work. And actually what you tend to find is that most MSP owners are so passionate about what they do, that when they throw themselves into a sales meeting, even if their technique and structure is all over the place, they still win the sale because people buy from passionate people. Paul Green :As you do this over a number of years, you become more sophisticated, you perhaps go on a course or you listen to guests like Brian Gillette that’s going to be on later on the podcast. People that can teach you actual structure and teach you about the things that matter. And over a period of time, you start to notice trends. You notice common themes, things that people tend to do, questions they tend to ask, ways they tend to act in sales meetings. I used to do my own sales a very long time ago. I haven’t done my own sales for, it must be getting on for 8, 9, maybe 10 years or so. I don’t enjoy it. I’m good at it. Of course, I am because I’m a business owner, but I don’t enjoy it. So in any new business, any new venture, it’s the first thing I look at is who can do the sales for me so that I can focus on the marketing? I much prefer marketing to sales. Paul Green :And the difference between those two things by the way, is that marketing delivers you a sales meeting. Sales is where you actually close the sales. So most of what we talk about on this podcast is marketing. It’s actually getting you that meeting in the first place. But I think we do have to touch on sales now and again, hence a special episode like today. Let’s look at the common objections that tend to come up in sales meetings. Now I’m not going to go into specific objections. I’m going to look at trends of objections. For example, one of the trends is that the prospect that you are talking to doesn’t actually trust you as their supplier, as their provider. Paul Green :Now, this is normally an issue where perhaps they’ve gone through your marketing funnel, they’ve gone through your sales process too quickly, or you haven’t done a good enough job of showing them your expertise and stamping your expertise and your authority on them. Maybe you haven’t shown them enough social proof to show that lots of other business owners trust you and therefore they should trust you as well. The way to spot that they don’t trust you is through just general scepticism. You know that they want a solution. You know that they’re going to switch to someone, but they just don’t seem particularly engaged with you. And normally that does come down to the fact that they just don’t really trust you. Paul Green :Another common objection that comes up is that the prospect doesn’t really trust the package that you’ve put together, the solution that you have chosen for them. Now, maybe this has happened because you have baffled them with brands that they’ve never heard of or technical solutions that they just don’t really understand. If you’ve identified, they’ve, let’s say got a cyber security problem and you’ve said to them, “Oh yeah, we’ve got an amazing stack for this. We buy X, Y, Z from this vendor, we buy this from this vendor.” Blah, blah, blah, blah. And you talk about vendors and software and tools and stacks. And as you are talking, you notice their eyes start to blank over and they are literally slipping into a coma in front of you. And what happens is they are disengaging. Paul Green :This is different to them disengaging with you as a provider. They can be very into you and like you as a person, but they can completely disengage with what it is that you are offering to them. And they don’t trust the solution because they don’t understand it, because you’ve made it too difficult, too techy, and they literally don’t understand. And they are not going to take on the mental burden of understanding. They’re going to push that back on you. Because actually as the salesperson, that is your problem. Paul Green :Another common objection is when the prospect doesn’t think that they can afford what it is that you are offering. Now, my experience of most sales is that price is a factor, but it is rarely the factor. It’s just one of the things that needs to be taken into consideration. There are two possible reasons for someone thinking they can’t afford it. The most likely problem is that you haven’t demonstrated enough value. So you’ve hit them with, “Hey, we’re going to do this and this and this for you. And this is the price.” And they don’t understand the true value to them. Paul Green :Remember, people don’t buy services, they don’t buy solutions, they buy outcomes. And that’s what you’ve got to sell to them. You’ve got to sell to them the outcome. Do you know what? What you sell is actually kind of easy to sell, if you take away the complexities of the technical stuff, what you’re selling to them is peace of mind. You’re selling to them productivity. You’re selling to them enhanced collaboration. You’re selling to them everything just being easy. You’re selling to them that they are protected, that you’ve got their back. This is what people buy. And it’s when you really sell them that stuff and not the technical stuff. That’s when they really start to see the value in what it is that you are selling. Paul Green :The other reason that they might throw up affordability as an objection just simply comes down to cash flow. Not all businesses have great cash flows, not all businesses have monthly recurring revenue like MSPs do. So it’s sometimes easy to forget that some businesses might have a kind of a boom and bust cash flow. They might have tons of cash coming in at certain times of the year and no cash at other times of the year. Well, you can work with that, can’t you? Couldn’t you put together some kind of deal where perhaps they pay for half of their services in a lump sum once a year to reduce down the burden of their monthly recurring revenue? Now I know that’s not necessarily the best thing for you, although it’s not a bad thing to get a lump sum of cash coming in now and again, is it? Paul Green :I think this is about understanding and this is where the true partnership starts with your potential clients. It’s about understanding how things work for them and showing that you genuinely care. You care enough to actually get down to the nuts and bolts of how much cash have they got coming in on a monthly basis. And can they afford to do this on a regular basis? Or can we do some kind of deal to make it prepaid for them? Paul Green :I think final common objection that you hear is, and this one is a killer, is when someone says, “Do you know, this is really good? I think we should do this, but not now.” And I think what drives the not now objection or we don’t feel this is the right time. I think what drives that, well, it’s either them not really understanding the urgency, especially with cybersecurity. And we do not want to scare people, but we do want to educate them. And remember, ordinary business owners and managers don’t understand how utterly devastating cybersecurity breaches can be. And if you know that they’ve got a setup which isn’t quite right, that they are leaving themselves open to some kind of breach, then I think you almost owe it to them to help them to understand that. And that’s not just about telling them. You can’t tell someone something like that. You’ve got to help them to understand. Paul Green :That might involve showing them what ransomware looks like on a laptop. I think that’s a great sales tool. Keep an old laptop that’s got ransomware, rip out the wifi card so it can never spread and show them what ransomware looks like. Explain how it got into that client’s machine. How many days they were down, how much data they lost, what their regulator said, all of those kind of things. These things can help to reposition cybersecurity to the people you are talking to. Paul Green :The other reason that they might say not now is because they like you, but they’re just not quite ready to make the change. Essentially, they are trapped in something called inertia loyalty. Inertia loyalty is where it feels easier to stay with their existing supplier, even if that existing supplier is someone they’re not happy with. Put another way, better the devil you know. And you will have seen this before. If you haven’t yet you will, where someone seems to dislike their current supplier, they seem ready, willing, and able to move. They seem to get on well with you. The proposal’s right. The price is right. The package is right. And then you get a phone call from them and they say, “Yeah, we’ve decided to stay with our existing supplier for another year.” It’s very frustrating. Paul Green :And actually what’s happened is that you haven’t overcome that inertia loyalty. I think this is where you have to put in the work. Things like taking them out for dinner, socialising with them. Taking them out for dinner isn’t really socialising with them because it’s a business thing, but building the bond with them and demonstrating to them that you are not just there as a supplier, you want a partnership and you’re willing to work at the partnership. That’s why you do strategic reviews or quarterly business reviews. That’s why you invest a huge amount of time putting in place a technology roadmap for them. You do not want to be a supplier. You want a 5 to 10 year partnership, but you’re not going to ask them to make a 5 to 10 year commitment. You’ll just ask them for a year or a two year commitment or whatever it is that you ask for now. Paul Green :But demonstrating that you are not just another supplier. You are a whole head and shoulders above their current people, being a little bit more expensive so you can offer more quality. Literally showing them, communicating to them at an emotional level about how terrifying cybersecurity is and why they must take urgent action. And then doing something like just taking them to lunch and saying, “Look, we’re going to lunch. We’re not going to talk about my business. We’re going to talk about your business. I want to learn more about you and your plans and where you are going and your frustrations. And we are not going to talk about technology or my business at all. I’m picking up the bill to take you out to lunch at a medium size local restaurant that’s going to be fun and nice. And it’s going to be us talking about your favourite subject, which is your business.” Paul Green :This is how you bond with people. And it’s how you actually overcome seemingly unovercomeable. That’s not a word and I’ve just made it up and I like it. Unovercomeable objections such as this is not the right time. Now you’re never going to overcome all objections. You’re never going to convert all sales. It simply doesn’t work like that. Selling just like marketing is a numbers game, but do you know what? I bet that you don’t get that many sales opportunities. Most MSPs I know only get one, maybe two sales opportunities coming in the door every month or so. So when you do get them in, you owe it to yourself and your team to really throw yourself into every single opportunity that comes along. Voiceover:Here’s this week’s clever idea. Paul Green :Something else that’ll have anot…

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Episode 132: Clever cash flow tricks for MSPs May 24, 2022

Show notes

Episode 132 includes: Valuable advice for keeping on top of cash flow The benefit to your MSP of doing a ‘ticket frenzy’ Plus on the show this week an industry expert joins Paul to explain why now is the time to get things done and move your MSP forward Featured guest Thank you to Luis Giraldo, Chief Experience Officer at ScalePad and CEO of Ook Enterprises, for joining Paul to talk about why MSP should focus on growth in the second half of 2022. Luis has founded, scaled and sold various successful IT businesses since 2006. He created SaaS documentation platform Monkey Box in 2013, which was acquired by IT Glue in 2017. He has since held key executive roles with vendors such as IT Glue, Kaseya, and N-able, and is an influential leader in the global MSP space. Luis helms the Partner Success and IT organisations, and brings deep MSP experience, thought leadership, and long-term strategic focus to ScalePad. Connect with Luis on LinkedIn: https://ca.linkedin.com/in/luisgiraldo 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/ You can join Paul in the MSP Marketing group on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/mspmarketing/ Right now you can watch the extended interview with this week’s featured guests on the YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDRSdM8tZbEBEL1Sh4Z-t3PXKbsW7b4BC To dig deeper into this episode, Paul joins Sophie Law on the complimentary YouTube show ‘Another Byte’, from this coming Thursday: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDRSdM8tZbEAXxJRY5vU4LWldRNLjZZng Thank you to lead generation and LinkedIn expert Mark Firth for recommending the book The Almanack of Naval Ravikant: A Guide to Wealth and Happiness by Eric Jorgenson: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Almanack-Naval-Ravikant-Wealth-Happiness-ebook/dp/B08FF8MTM6 https://www.linkedin.com/in/markfirthonline In next week’s episode, Paul will be joined by RevOps specialist (and the creator of the Feel-Good MSP) Brian Gillette, to talk about how you can actually feel-good about selling: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brian-gillette-27884b128 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. This is Paul Green’s MSP Marketing podcast. Paul Green:Hello, and welcome back. This is episode 132 of the podcast, and here’s what we got coming up for you this week. Luis Giraldo:MSPs tend to want to compare notes. And they see what some other larger colleagues are doing that have started to bring in a management layer into their business, and they realise, “Oh, wow. But they’re doing it. How come I can’t do it?” Paul Green:That’s Luis Giraldo from ScalePad. He’s going to be here later in the show to talk about progression and getting things done. In a week’s time, more or less, it’s June. It’s scary, isn’t it? June is the mark of halfway through 2022. It’s going so quickly. So, Luis and I are going to talk about getting things done and moving your MSP forward. We’re also going to be talking later on about doing a ticket frenzy. What if you focused all of the attention of your business on getting a whole load of tickets done? And also looking at the trends, analysing, why did these tickets get stuck and how can we stop them getting stuck in the future? Voiceover:Paul Green’s MSP Marketing podcast. Paul Green:If there’s one thing that’s going to have you lying awake at 4:00 AM worrying about the business, it’s cashflow. Cash is king. Cash is also the thing that kills businesses. No business ever went under because it’s not profitable. You can be unprofitable for years and years. Look at Amazon. Amazon didn’t write a profit for much of its existence, but Amazon has great cashflow. There’s always plenty of money coming in to do the things that Amazon needs to do. Now, if your MSP has good, strong streams of monthly recurring revenue, then cashflow should be less of an issue for you. But of course, on the way to building that monthly recurring revenue, which makes it so much easier to know and forecast how your cash is going to be, on the way there, there are some cashflow techniques, some strategies that you can use to make sure that you don’t ever lie awake at 4:00 AM worrying. Paul Green:Because worrying is such a waste of our precious, valuable time. We don’t have a huge amount of time here on this planet. Why would we want to waste any of it worrying? You can get rid of worrying by, well, through two things really. First of all is through having information, and secondly, by taking action. If you know exactly how much cash is coming in and going out, that’s the information. And then, you can take action on making sure that the cash coming in far exceeds the cash going out. Now, there are a number of things to look at, a number of strategies if you like, for a positive cashflow. I think strategy number one has to be to know your figures inside out. And you’ve probably heard the saying before that if you don’t measure it, you can’t manage it. So, you’ve got to be completely on top of the cash that’s coming in and going out. Paul Green:And there are a number of different ways of doing that. So the easiest way to do that is with monthly management accounts. So you get your bookkeeper or your accountant to prepare some accounts for you every month, and they’re in real time. So if, as we are now, we’re near the end of May, at the end of May or the very first few days of June, you get your management accounts from your bookkeeper which tell you what happened last month. It is as near to real time information as you can get. You could argue that if you’ve got QuickBooks or Xero or some other kind of modern, up-to-date, online software for managing your accounts, then you can access this information in real time yourself. However, what I’ve found over the years is that a great number of MSPs that I work with, and I’m in exactly the same boat, we get a bit lost in accounts. And yeah, sure, we can go and access the information in Xero easily enough. But accessing it is one thing, interpreting it is a whole different game. Paul Green:So if that’s you, then you would perhaps ask your professional advisor to just do these management accounts. You want to look at the things like how much money is being held by the credit card company or the direct debit company depending on which you use. Even if you have all of your fees paid on a monthly basis, your monthly recurring revenue just taken automatically from your clients. Particularly, the credit card companies. They will hold onto a percentage of that cash in case you have any chargebacks down the line. You can do basic cashflow forecasting, especially when you’ve got month through recurring revenue. You know what date you’re taking it out of your customer’s bank account and you know what date it’s going to actually land in your bank account. There’s always a short delay between those two things. So as soon as you know the dates, you can estimate the flow of cash in and out of the business. And once you’ve got that kind of information, that’s when you can start to be really smart. Paul Green:And for example, if you arrange for all of your direct debits, your card payments to be taken out on the fifth of the month, you could then very easily arrange for the vast majority of your bills to be paid on the 25th of the month. So you know you’ve got a clear 20 days or so between you taking the cash, to give it some time to land in your account, and for then those bills to go out. That kind of cashflow forecasting and just doing something as simple as that, it removes a huge number of the worries of cashflow. I think tracking cashflow is a very difficult thing. There are plugins that you can get for Xero, and QuickBooks. And I’ve been doing this a number of years and I know what I’m about to say is a bit technologically backwards, but I’ve always just tracked it with a spreadsheet. I use a Google sheet and I track at every single week how much cash is coming in, how much is going out. Paul Green:Just get the information out of Xero. I know I’m creating work for myself… I mean, actually, I don’t do it. My virtual assistant does it for me. But it doesn’t matter. I can see on a sheet every single week, how much cash is coming in, how much is going out. And that’s why I rarely lie awake worrying at 4:00 AM. Some other strategies then, you should review your overheads. Now, by overheads, I mean the basic bills that need to be paid. Things like your utility bills, your tax, rates on your buildings, any rent, telecoms, internet, all of those kind of things, insurances. Anything that’s a regular payment but is a commodity. At least once a year, you should look at that and just review it. Now, there are companies that will actually take it on and do this for you. There’s one here in the UK called BCR Associates. I used them for many years when I had a business, which had an actual physical office. Paul Green:And what they do is they just take over your utilities, things like your insurance and your electricity, and every six months or so, they price match you, they price check, because it’s a franchise, you see? And so, if they’ve got, let’s say, a thousand companies that they’re looking after, they can go to an energy supplier and say, “Hey, I’ve got a thousand businesses here that will switch to you in one go. What’s the best rate that you can give them?” And that’s how they make their money. In fact, you don’t pay them for this service, not BCR. You don’t pay them directly. They make their money in kickbacks from the companies they switch you to. So you save money, they get a fee, and the energy companies get to grow by a couple of 1000 subscribers. It’s literally a win, win, win for everyone. And I bet in whichever country you’re in, there will be some kind of company that does almost exactly the same thing. Paul Green:So always look at those regular payments, the ones where if you switch to another supplier, it doesn’t really have any effect on the quality of the thing that you buy. You can also go to your core suppliers, your big vendors, and ask them if there’s the option of better terms. Sometimes, if you pay your bills a little earlier, you can actually get a discount. Not always, but it’s worth asking. Sometimes, you can go to them and maybe you’ve got 30 days. You can just routinely ask them for 60 days or maybe even 90 days. Now, what that does is that gives you the ability to keep more of the cash in your bank account for longer. And this should be one of your key goals. You’re going to get cash from your clients faster and spend the cash slower. Keep the cash in your bank account for longer. It just builds up the amounts of money in your bank account and makes everything easier, which makes me think that maybe you should be paid upfront by your clients. Paul Green:So when they join you on a managed service basis, you set up billing at the beginning of the month. And that way, if their billing does fall over for whatever reason, at least you know about it early in the month. Terrible to get to the end of the month, or even worse to get to the end of the month and then they’ve had 30 days to pay. So, it’s kind of two months down the line before you find out that actually they haven’t got the cash to pay you this month. Much better to find out right at beginning of the billing month, because then you can have the conversation with them and see whether it’s just a temporary glitch or whether there’s actually some big cash problem happening in your client. Couple of other things I’d just have a look at. One is to minimise stockholding. I don’t think that’s a problem right now, is it? With the difficulty getting hold of technology. Paul Green:But when supply chains are better and it’s possible to go and buy lots of kits, it’s tempting, isn’t it? To go and buy 20 of those laptops because you can get a deal. But every second a great big chunk of plastic and metal is sat in your stock room and it’s not out on a client’s desk or cash in your bank, then it’s affecting your cashflow. And the other thing to look at is to work to your cashflow timetable. Now, this is a country by country thing. But for example, here in the UK, we charge something called VAT, value added tax. And all businesses, they have to put VAT on what they sell. Certainly in our world, there are some VAT-exempt things, things like school, clothes, and food, and stuff like that. But generally, businesses here charge VAT, and ultimately then, they claim it back on their purchases. Paul Green:So it’s consumers that are the end payers of VAT, but you’ve got all businesses in the supply chain are collecting VAT, V-A-T, on behalf of the UK government. Now, the thing with paying VAT is you pay your VAT every quarter here in the UK. So once a quarter, you send in your VAT return, your calculations to the government, and then you pay them all the money that you have collected on their behalf. Now, if you had a big purchase that you were going to make, it would make sense from a cashflow point of view to leave that right to the end of the quarter, because you can literally then make an immediate impact on your VAT return. The day before, let’s say you had a big purchase… There’s a big thing you wanted to buy. And the day before your VAT return was due, that was when you did the purchase. Paul Green:That would have an immediate effect on your VAT return, and so you would have to pay out less VAT. And there will be something like that in your area. Of course, it’s worth talking to your accountant, your CPA, to see what kind of thing you can do to make your cashflow easier. Now, these are just some of the things you can do with cashflow. I think if cashflow is an issue for you, talking to your accountant, to your professional advisor, should always be step number one. Because in the same way that you spend all day, every day absorbed by technology, they spend all day, every day absorbed by money, and strategies for managing money and keeping more money, and making sure that the money works for you. And I’ve never ever regretted paying my professional advisors, be it lawyers, be it accountants, whoever, to give me good advice on better things that I can do to make it easier to run my business. Voiceover:Here’s this week’s clever idea. Paul Green:Tickets. That’s not something we talk about on this podcast very often, and yet, it’s a feature of your everyday, day-to-day life. When I’m talking to the MSPs in my peer groups, this is part of my MSP marketing edge service, tickets comes up so often, either because someone will say something like, “Oh, we don’t have many tickets in at the moment. There haven’t been many tickets submitted. It’s a very quiet ticket day,” or of course the opposite of, “We are bogged down with tickets right now. It just seems that there are so many tickets we can’t shift. We have so many tickets that we’re pulling over from day-to-day.” And I don’t want to talk about tickets from a technical point…

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Episode 131: MSPs: Make sure you’re charging properly May 17, 2022

Show notes

Episode 131 includes: Why MSPs aren’t charging properly – and why this is CRAZY The pros and cons of making follow-up phone calls to clients after support Plus there’s an opportunity for extra monthly recurring revenue Featured guest Thank you to Max Pruger, Compliance Manager at Kaseya, for joining Paul to talk about a brand new ‘compliance as a service’ revenue opportunity. This interview with Max was recorded back in February 2022, a few weeks before Kaseya announced the acquisition of Datto. Max has been a pioneer in the managed services industry since the late 1990s. He currently serves as SVP and GM of Compliance Manager, VulScan and MyITProcess and is responsible for Kaseya’s go to market strategy for his respective business units. Max began his MSP career at USWeb as a founding member of that company’s managed service division. He has also held the position of Senior Architect at IBM. Max holds a BS in Computer Science from American University and an MBA from the University of Maryland – Robert H. Smith School of Business. Connect with Max on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/maxpruger 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/ Find out more about Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Edge: https://www.mspmarketingedge.com/ Right now you can watch the extended interview with this week’s featured guests on the YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDRSdM8tZbEBEL1Sh4Z-t3PXKbsW7b4BC To dig deeper into this episode, Paul joins Sophie Law on the complimentary YouTube show ‘Another Byte’, from this coming Thursday: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDRSdM8tZbEAXxJRY5vU4LWldRNLjZZng Thank you to Nicholas Ashford from Fordhouse for recommending the book Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Extreme-Ownership-Jocko-Willink/dp/1250067057 https://uk.linkedin.com/in/nicholasashford In next week’s episode, Paul will be joined by Luis Giraldo, Chief Experience Officer at ScalePad and CEO of Ook Enterprises, to talk about MSP opportunities for the second half of 2022: https://ca.linkedin.com/in/luisgiraldo 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. This is Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast. Paul Green:Hi. Hello, my name’s Paul and welcome back to the show. Here’s what we got coming up for you this week. Max Pruger:Secure and compliance go hand-in-hand. And from a marketing perspective, one of the beauties of compliance as a service, it is something that should be done on a recurring basis. And most MSPs are already used to billing on a recurring monthly revenue basis, so it’s a fantastic additional service to add to your stack. Paul Green:That’s Max Pruger from Kaseya. And they’ve been in the news quite a bit recently haven’t they? He’s going to be joining me later on to talk about a new revenue opportunity for MSPs.We’re also going to be talking about follow-up calls to your existing clients. When you’ve done some work for them, is it worth just putting in a phone call just to see how everything’s going, to see if the fix has actually fixed the thing that was broken in the first place? Later on, we’ll talk about the pros and cons of doing that. Voiceover:Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast. Paul Green:You go back about 10 years and I was working with veterinarians, or vets as we call them here in the UK, people who look after animals. And I remember one of the frustrations that many of the owners of the veterinary clinics had was that their staff were very quick to give things away and not charge for it. Because of course, they were in a caring profession. No one becomes a vet or a vet nurse for any other reason than they really care about the animals. There are certainly easier ways to earn the money that they get paid. It’s a very difficult job. Paul Green:But if someone came in with an animal that was ill, into a private clinic, and they hadn’t got money for that treatment, then nine times out of 10 the staff would help the animal, make sure the animal wasn’t in pain, which is quite right. But they would often just let that person get away with not paying, or they would upgrade the animal onto a better treatment plan. And again, they would never actually charge the client. Paul Green:It wasn’t theft. It wasn’t stupidity. It wasn’t them not being aware of it. It was just almost a cultural thing. The cultural thing was, “Hey, do you know? What animal healthcare is expensive. We’ll upgrade you or just do that extra test or do whatsoever, and that’s the best thing for the animal. And don’t worry too much if you haven’t got the money for it.” Now that might not be your experience when you take your animal to a vet. But when push comes to shove, almost every day in a veterinary clinic somewhere there is a treatment being given away for free. It’s more actually that people are just not being charged. So they’re being offered extra services and extra products, but they’re never actually being charged for them. Paul Green:And when I left veterinary and started working in this world with MSPs, I never thought that that would be an issue I’d ever see again. And yet, do you know what? When I challenge MSP owners to look at are they charging properly, nine times out of 10 they’re not charging properly. And maybe this is an issue in your MSP as well. Now I should state that it happens for a different reason in this world. There’s very few technicians will sit there on a support desk, on a call to someone and say, “Yeah, okay. We’ll switch on email filtering for you”, or, “We’ll give you this level of extra protection,” and then think, “Oh, they can’t afford it so I won’t charge them for it.” It’s not quite the same cause. The cause of not charging properly in the MSP world is more to do with complexity. Paul Green:If you think about the number of users that you go up and down every month, the number of new services that are being switched on or switched off. You’re introducing new things, reshaping things, rebundling, it’s constantly changing. Change, change, change, it happens all the time. And change is good, there’s nothing wrong with change at all. I’m a massive fan of change. Because when you change things you create new revenue opportunities. The downside of change is making sure that the admin, that the paperwork, and specifically the payments, making sure that they are keeping up with all of the change. Paul Green:The chances are that you, as a business, you’re paying for something but you are not charging it on. You’re not making sure that the end clients are paying for it properly. And that could be something as simple as licenses, could be seats in software, it could be support tools. And even if you have a system in place, in fact, especially if you have a system in place to make sure that this is checked on a regular basis, I think at least once a month you should stop and ask yourself, “Is our system working correctly?” Go in and do some random checks and just have a look. Paul Green:In fact, what you could do, and this would be a sensible way to get started. If you haven’t done this regularly, I would conduct a review to be sure that you are charging correctly for everything and not accidentally paying for something that you shouldn’t be paying for. I would do a thorough review of everything. I mean, it doesn’t have to take that long. You could do it yourself. You could get one of your colleagues to help you. You could delegate it to a member of your team. But every single user, for every single client, with every single service, just go and check. Paul Green:And what you’re looking for is a trend. If you notice, for example with service one, that actually around about five to 10% of your clients aren’t being charged properly, then that in itself tells you it’s worth doing the review with all of the other services. Because the chances are, if you’re not recording the sales properly or you’re not charging properly for service number one, then it’s definitely going to be an issue across services two, three, four, and five. Paul Green:You can do that review as a one-off thing, but then on a regular basis I would definitely allocate a little of your time or a little of someone important’s time to look at this. Perhaps you could schedule it as a monthly task. It’s only a simple thing to do, but you’ve got to look at it this way. If you are supplying someone with something and not charging them for it, you’re not just losing out on the lost revenue, you’re actually losing out twice. Because you are having to pay money for something and you’re not even having that money covered, let alone the gross profit that you should be making off selling that service. So it’s actually a double whammy. It hits you twice if you’re buying something but not selling it on in some way. Paul Green:Now I guess this leads onto a question of should you backdate charges? If you discover that someone hasn’t been charged properly for a number of months, should you backdate them? Well, that’s a decision for you and your team to make. I guess you’ve got to look at it and say, “What’s fair here?” If you upgraded someone to a different service two, three months ago and you forgot to switch on payment back then, I would say that’s fair. Two to three months is fair to go back and say to someone, “Oops, we made a mistake. We’re just going to put a couple of payments through over the next few months, just to bring you up to speed on that.” That feels fair. Paul Green:What wouldn’t be fair is perhaps if you haven’t been doing it for a number of years. They’ve been receiving something for a couple of years and never paying for it. I mean, don’t get me wrong. You should absolutely make them aware of this, but you got to ask yourself. If someone turned up to you with a bill for a couple of thousand pounds or dollars for something that you’ve been receiving but you didn’t know you weren’t paying for it, would that feel fair to you? No, of course it wouldn’t. And I think being fair with your existing clients and looking at the big picture is always more important than just catching up on something and making a quick buck now. Paul Green:So charging properly does not have to be a difficult thing, it just requires a little bit of time. A little bit of time to get going and do a thorough review. And then a quick check once a month to check that the system is working, that all of your clients are being charged for everything that they buy from you. Voiceover:Here’s this week’s clever idea. Paul Green:I was talking in that last bit about systems. Here’s an interesting question for you. Do you have systems in place to guarantee that your clients are utterly, utterly satisfied with you? I mean, what kind of system would you put in place for something like that? Paul Green:Well, imagine if you had a client that reported a thing, something that was broken. So not something routine, but something just a little out of the ordinary. And perhaps it took a few hours to get it fixed and it caused some disruption for that client. And of course you get it fixed and you ring them and you tell them, “Hey, it’s all working now. This is all sorted out.” And I guess for most MSPs, that would to be the end of it. You’d close the ticket. Maybe there’d be some analysis or some discussion about what caused this problem in the first place, but that would be it. Paul Green:What if you had a customer happiness system, which said when you’ve had a ticket of a certain criteria, a certain impact, that actually a week later, someone calls up that client just to see how everything is going. Now this is not just a call for the sake of calling, because no one wants to have that phone call just for the sake of it. That’s just wasting their time and yours. But what if the purpose of that call was actually just to see how have things been with that problem. “Hey, it’s been a week since we fixed X, Y Z problem. How is it going? Have you had any repeats of this? Has there been an issue at all? Is there anything else that’s frustrating you guys right now?” Paul Green:Essentially it’s like a quality follow-up call a week later. But the purpose of that call is not really to uncover more technical problems, the purpose of that call is twofold. First of all, it’s to make sure that the client genuinely is happy, but second of all, it’s to help the client realize that you care. I mean, you really, really care about them and them getting it right. You care enough that you pick up the phone, and by you I mean the business of course. But you pick up the phone a week or so after they had a problem just to check in with them and see how things are going. Paul Green:Now in an ideal world your best technicians would just do this anyway, but the reality is we are not in an ideal world. We’re in a world where if you want your business to perform in a certain way, you have to put a system in place. Remember what system stand for? System is an anagram, and it stands for saves you stress, time, energy, money. That’s what a system does. You don’t have to hope and pray that people are calling your clients, you can systemize it. Paul Green:You might be in a position where you’ve got account managers within your MSP. I don’t meet that many MSPs with account managers but if you’ve got those, then great. That’s a key job of an account manager, is that kind of satisfaction discussion. If you are like most MSPs that certainly I speak to and you don’t really have account managers as such, you’ve just got your you and your senior team and some of the technicians, perhaps you’ve got a service delivery manager, people with responsibility for clients. Well, in both of these situations you would still put in place a system. Anytime you want anything to happen in the business with regularity, you do not want to leave it to chance. You want to make sure that you have a system that will pick it up because it saves you stress time, energy, and money. Paul Green:As we’re thinking about this, what other customer service things could you systemize? What other things could you put in place that appear to be random, that appear to your clients that it’s just you really caring for them, but actually behind the scenes it’s you operating a thorough and efficient system that’s designed to make them feel very, very positive towards you. What other things could you do? What are the quick wins within the business? What are things that perhaps you’ve done in the past that you thought, “That’s a good idea,” that really you want to make sure the business does every single day, week or month? Go and grab those things, put together a checklist for them, and turn them into a system so that they happen every single time within your business. Voiceover:Paul’s blatant plug. Paul Green:This is going to be the shortest and most to-the-point blatant plug that I have ever done. If you are not happy with your MSP’s marketing, I can help you. Go t…

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