Show notes
In this week’s episode Your MSP could be standing head and shoulders above the competition on LinkedIn thanks to something called Creator Mode. This week Paul explains what it is, how you can get started, and use it to make the most out of LinkedIn’s Newsletters feature Also on the show this week: How do you comfortably sell cyber security solutions without feeling sleazy? Paul’s featured guest is a total expert on this with some amazing advice Plus, why you should be focusing on the long-term decisions for your MSP… and there’s a book recommendation to help make swift changes within your business Featured guest Thank you to Jennifer Bleam from MSP Sales Revolution for joining Paul to talk about how you can simplify your cybersecurity sales process. Jennifer is an award-winning speaker and a respected leader in the IT channel. She has coached over 1,000 MSPs on marketing and sales best practices, based on her real-life success as an MSP business owner. Jennifer also grew a channel-only cybersecurity software firm from start up to acquisition in less than 2 years. Part of her role included coaching MSPs on how to sell cybersecurity to small and medium sized companies. Jennifer trained with Sandler Training and attended CharTec Sales lab. She founded MSP Sales Revolution to help MSPs master the art of cybersecurity sales quickly, easily, and profitably. Connect with Jennifer on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bleamjennifer 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 the books Eat That Frog by Brian Tracy and Built to Sell by John Warrillow: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Eat-That-Frog-Important-Things/dp/1444765426 https://www.amazon.co.uk/Built-Sell-Creating-business-without/dp/1591843979 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 guest Jennifer Bleam on the YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDRSdM8tZbEBEL1Sh4Z-t3PXKbsW7b4BC Get a copy of Jennifer’s book ‘Simplified Cybersecurity Sales for MSPs’: https://www.amazon.com/Simplified-Cybersecurity-Sales-MSPs-Formula/dp/1646492315 To dig deeper into this episode, Paul joins Sophie Law on the complimentary YouTube show ‘Another Byte’, from Thursday 31st March 2022: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDRSdM8tZbEAXxJRY5vU4LWldRNLjZZng Thank you to Jeff Pugel of Ignition for recommending the book The 5-Day Turnaround by Jeff Hilimire: https://www.amazon.co.uk/5-Day-Turnaround-leader-always-wanted-ebook/dp/B07S85FTZW In next week’s episode on April 5th 2022, Paul will be joined by Tony Capewell and Neil Renwick from MSP Dark Web, to talk about how their dark web scanner can benefit your MSP: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/tonycapewell Subscribe to Paul’s YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/mspmarketing 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:Thank you so much for making the choice to listen to this podcast. My name’s Paul Green, welcome to episode 124, and this is what we’ve got coming up for you this week. Jennifer Bleam:How to sell cybersecurity it’s, obviously, a hot topic. How do we sell it? How do we have that conversation with our clients, with our prospects? And how do we do it in a way that doesn’t make us feel sleazy or slimy? Paul Green:That’s Jennifer Bleam. She’s arguably one of the world’s leading experts on selling cybersecurity. We’re in a very unique position now, where the clients that you are protecting really should be buying more cybersecurity services from you, but perhaps they don’t understand the true horrors that await them out there. Jennifer has got a fascinating interview for us here on the podcast, plus an extended interview on YouTube, which I’ll tell you about later in the show. We’re also going to be talking today about LinkedIn creator tools. LinkedIn is desperate for you to use them, and there is some huge algorithmic advantages for you of doing what LinkedIn wants. I’ll tell you exactly what the creator tools are and how you can leverage them later on in the show. Voiceover:Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast. Paul Green:Every other Tuesday, I have a series of short Zoom calls with my clients. They’re peer groups that I run as part of my MSP Marketing Edge service. And we were having a discussion with one of our members about a specific decision. I can’t remember exactly what the circumstances were, but the question that he was asking was whether or not he should make a short-term decision on this thing, or whether he should make a long-term. And so, I asked him to explain exactly what that meant. And he said, essentially, I’m paraphrasing here, of course, he said, “If I make this short-term decision, I’m doing something which will pay off for us in the short-term, but in the long-term it doesn’t add anything to the business. Whereas if I choose the other option, it’s more expensive. There’s less of a short-term benefit for us, but in the long-term that’s the better thing to do. It creates the better business.” Paul Green:And myself and the other peer group members, all of whom are non-competing MSPs, we all pretty much universally said, “Well, go for the long-term.” Based on your goals, you want to go for the long-term, because that particular person is looking to do another 10 years in his business before he sells it. And he got me thinking about short-term versus long-term decisions. When we own a business and we start a business, we go through different growth phases, and we can all remember what it’s like when you get started. In fact, you may still be in that startup phase. That startup phase can last quite a few years. That startup phase is where you first establish whether or not you can actually do this thing, whether or not you can run your own business, and cope with all the different things that you need to do. Paul Green:But essentially once you’ve proven that to yourself, the next thing, the drive, is to make a good living out of it. And I think once you get out of that and you start to take on staff, and you start to establish a proper business. And a proper business is a business that survives without you, and eventually you get it to a stage where it thrives without you. It’s around about this phase, it’s almost once you’re out of startup, that you need to actually start with the end in mind. And I think that was a quote from someone like Brian Tracy that said that. Brian Tracy’s a self-development author. He’s very, very good actually. You should read his books. I think his best book was Eat That Frog, which is about procrastination. It’s about stopping procrastination. Do you procrastinate? Will you get back to me on that one? Yeah. Paul Green:Anyway, I’ve sidelined myself. Brian Tracy, one of the things that, I think it was him, was famous for saying was, “Start with the end in mind,” so you imagine where you want to be, the outcome that you want, and then you work backwards from there. And I think once you’re out of the startup phase of your business, that’s a great way to look at your decision making. Let’s say it takes you two to three years to establish a business, to make a good living from it, to get your first couple of staff, to start to put in place marketing systems that persistently and consistently deliver new leads for your MSP. That’s the point you’ve got to start taking the long view, the five, 10, 15, maybe even 20 year view. What do you want to do with this business in the long-term? Paul Green:For most MSPs, if you ask them to look 10, 20 years in the future, it’s either about funding a very specific lifestyle that normally involves gravel drives and big cars, or it’s about exit. It’s about making sure… Well, it’s all really about lifestyle, isn’t it? Because when we talk about exit, it’s about freeing up your time, and making sure that you’ve got enough income to maximise that time and really enjoy it. That’s what we’re talking about with the long-term view. With every decision that you make, you’ve got to look at this and ask, “Is this going to help me to achieve the goals that I want in five, 10, 15 or 20 years time?” Paul Green:If the goal is to sell your business in 10 years time, who’s going to buy it? Why would they buy it? What’s the most valuable thing to them? I can answer that, it’s monthly recurring revenue. The more monthly recurring revenue you have, the more valuable your business will be, and you can say that in regards to any economy and any kind of buyer. Monthly recurring revenue, especially contracted monthly recurring revenue, is the most valuable asset that you can have within a technology business. Suddenly, you deciding to switch PSA, or RMM, or introduce a new level of cybersecurity sales, or new tiers of things that people can buy, or improving your marketing, or investing in a marketing initiative, or taking on a specific member of staff. All of these decisions, yes, of course, they have short-term impact, but what are they going to do to the long-term? How are they going to affect how quickly you get to the long-term place you want to be? And how quickly they’re going to affect your ability to do what you think you might want to do in the future? Paul Green:It’s all really about options. None of us really knows what’s going to happen in five, 10, 15, 20 years time. And it wouldn’t be fun if we knew, would it? It would be predictable and boring. The way I see it is, you’ve got to think long-term, and you’ve got to give yourself the most number of options in the long-term. What are the things you might want to do in the future? And how can you set up your business for them? I have no intention whatsoever of selling this business. I love this business. I love my team. I love our members. I love everything that we do. This isn’t work for me. This is fun. This is like being a radio presenter again, except I’m at home instead of in a radio station. And I can do this when it suits me. And I can interact directly with my listeners via LinkedIn, and our Facebook group, and stuff like that. Paul Green:I can’t ever see me selling this business. But maybe in 10 years time, I’ll feel differently about it. You know what I’m going to do? I’m going to make decisions, long-term decisions, which will give me options. I’m going to set up this business so it can operate without me. In fact, so it can thrive without me. I then have the choice to be involved in that business. And at the moment, I love this business, so I choose to stay involved in it. But you know what, maybe down the line I’ll want to spend more time in Portugal, or spend more time doing something else, or I’ll have another business or something. I can’t see that being the case, but I want the options. Every decision I make, it’s a long-term decision. How will this affect us in the long-term? Does it get me closer to that point where I will have the option, the choice, to take a number of different paths. That’s exactly what I’m trying to build here, and I think it’s what you should be trying to build with your business, as well. Paul Green:I must recommend a book. I’m sure I’ve mentioned it on the podcast before, but it addresses this exact thing, and it’s called Built to Sell by John Warrillow. And actually, it’s a short-term look at how to create a business that is incredibly sellable. But the business that’s incredibly sellable is a business which doesn’t need you, the business owner, there every day. It’s a very systemised business, which is very consistent in the way it operates. It’s actually quite a relaxing business to run. Certainly, our business is very highly systemised. We have very few crises. It’s all standard operating procedures, all of that kind of stuff, and it makes it a very relaxing business to run. And I appreciate an MSP. Paul Green:You can’t ever quite get to that 100% relaxed position, because there are always emergencies that crop up. The very nature of your business is to have to be reactive, but you can get 80, 90% of what you do to that point. Built to Sell is set very much in the short-term. It’s about turning your business around to be ready to sell. Once you are in that position, you will discover that actually the business is a lot more relaxing to run. It chucks out a lot more monthly recurring revenue with a lot less input from you. That is a very beautiful business. Built to Sell by John Warrillow encapsulates a lot of the things that we talk about within this podcast. And it is highly recommended. Voiceover:Here’s this week’s clever idea. Paul Green:Question for you, have you yet turned on creator tools in LinkedIn? Because if you haven’t, you really want to do this. Why? Because, LinkedIn wants you to do it. Let me explain what creator tools are, why you’d switch them on, how you switch them on, and how to maximise them. Now, I must first give you a caveat. This episode, of course, is going out at the end of March 2022, and I’m recording it right now. As I’m recording it, it’s 1:23 PM on Thursday, the 24th of February. And the reason I give you that caveat is, A, to prove just how far ahead I work on this podcast. Actually, I’ve fallen behind a bit. We’re normally six weeks ahead. I’m catching up today, producer James, don’t worry. We’ll get it all sorted out. Paul Green:But also because things change quickly, and some of the things I’m going to talk about on LinkedIn, I believe they will be the same, as you are listening to this today. But just in case there’s something new that LinkedIn has snuck in the last month, I don’t want you to think I’m out of date. It’s just that there is a gap between me recording it and us broadcasting this podcast. LinkedIn launched creator tools, I think it was around about November last year, and it’s a series of tools to allow you to create more content within LinkedIn. And there are two tools that are there at the moment. The first of them is LinkedIn Newsletters, and then there’s something called LinkedIn Live. Paul Green:Now, LinkedIn Live is very easy to understand. It’s you going live on LinkedIn doing a video, so like a live video on LinkedIn. You’ve been able to do this on Facebook for years. In fact, I remember when it was rolled out. It must have been around about six to eight years ago, perhaps, maybe not as long as that. And the reason I remember is the feature was released at the beginning of a week, and I was actually coming back from London, and I’d had a few beers and I live streamed my walk back from the train station back to my home. And that, for a number of years, was my most popular piece of content on Facebook. I’ve actually deleted it now, because I’m connected to so many MSPs, and members of our MSP Marketing Edge Service. I don’t necessarily want the first piece of content that someone sees when they’re connected to me on LinkedIn, me being drunk, walking back from a train station. It was very entertaining. I did pop into a kebab shop halfway through, as well. Paul Green:Anyway, the reason that got so many views on Facebook, and became my most popular piece of personal content, was because, algorithmically, Facebook was desperate to push Facebook Lives. That was their thing back then. And whenever companies, like Facebook or LinkedIn introduce something new, they always algorithmically give it more attention. And that’s what’s happening right now with LinkedIn Live. If you go live on LinkedIn, any of your connections who are on LinkedIn as well, they’ll see it coming up in their news feed. In fact, it pops up as a notification saying, “Paul is live on LinkedIn,” and it’s trying to get them to sit and watch you. It’s exactly the…
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