Show notes
In this week’s episode If the limit of your prospect’s technical knowledge is them taking a screenshot on an iPhone, how can they understand the technology solutions you’re trying to sell to them? It’s all about making your services feel relevant to them. And this week Paul talks about how you can do this Also on the show this week, how do you feel about attending physical networking meetings? If it’s Covid-safe for you to attend, Paul explains how to get the most out of them And there’s some great advice from Paul’s featured guest about using YouTube as part of your marketing mix. Plus there’s a great book recommendation all about virtual selling Featured guest Thank you to Sam Sheridan from Sheridan Computers for joining Paul to talk about how you can use YouTube to win new clients. Sam grew up in Bolton, UK and has always had a passion for computers. Before the internet was made publicly available in 1993, he was brought up around the world of dial-up connections, modems, and bulletin boards. Sheridan Computers has been providing IT support and consultancy to small and medium businesses for twenty years. Connect with Sam on LinkedIn. Show notes Out every Tuesday on your favourite podcast platform Presented by Paul Green, an MSP marketing expert You can join Paul in the MSP Marketing group on Facebook Thank you to B.J. Ferguson from Keyfactor for recommending the book Virtual Selling by Andy Springer, Dave Shaby, and Mike Schultz In next week’s episode on February 1st, Paul will be joined by Jeff Pugel from Ignition, talking about how to start selling based on value, not price 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 we’ve got coming up for you this week. Sam Sheridan:So I’m currently standing at about 2000 subscribers. I use YouTube to get new clients and I’m here to tell you how you can do the same. Paul Green:That’s Sam Sheridan. He’s an MSP owner, just like you, and he’s been using YouTube to win himself new clients. Later in the show, Sam’s going to join us to tell us how he uses YouTube and give you an idea of how you could do the same thing. Plus, we’re going to be talking about networking. No, I don’t mean making all the computers talk to each other. I mean, going out and physically meeting people. Should you be doing networking right now, and if you are doing it, how do you max it out to make sure you get the best return on investment? Voiceover:Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast. Paul Green:Have you ever wondered why your clients and prospects, the ordinary business owners and managers you speak to, have you ever wondered why they are not terrified of ransomware? Because I know the MSPs I’ve spoken to, many of them are terrified of it. They’ve seen attacks. They know how difficult it is to stop and undo attacks once they’ve started, and yet the end clients don’t seem to be aware of it. They don’t seem to be terrified of it. They should be terrified. I did a webinar with IT Glue at the back end of last year, and I can’t remember the stat now, but someone told me a stat that it’s small businesses that are more likely to be breached now than big businesses. Because of course big businesses have all the tools in place, or the protection, and it’s small businesses that typically don’t have the protection. Paul Green:They should be terrified, these guys, so why aren’t they? Well, a lot of it is that it won’t seem to be relevant to them. You’ve probably heard me talking before about a part of our brain called the reticular activating system, and this part of the brain acts as a sensory filter. So rather than us having to consciously deal with every piece of sensory information which comes into our noggins, instead, the reticular activating system decides whether or not it is relevant to us. The greatest and simplest way to test this for yourself is to think of a new car. I’ve recently taken delivery of a new car, and the second I decided what it was I was going to get is a Tesla. The second I decided that, I could see those cars everywhere. Paul Green:As I was driving around, in my peripheral vision, I would suddenly jerk my head off to look the other way, and there would be one of the cars that I just decided. Now those cars were always there before, it’s just I didn’t perceive them, so my eyes saw them, but I didn’t perceive them because the reticular activating system decided they weren’t relevant to me. What I don’t see are all the nasty, horrible, ugly cars that I would never want to drive. I mean, actually I physically see them, but I’m never aware of them. I never perceive them because the reticular activating system has decided they are not relevant. This is what’s happening with ordinary people. They don’t see news about ransomware. They see it, but they don’t perceive it. Their eyes flick over it. They perceive it is not relevant to them. You see it, because every time you see the word ransomware, there’s a little trickle of fear. I mean, we all know the fears that go with that. Paul Green:You see it, you read it, you take it in. It’s why it seems to you that ransomware is everywhere. That in fact cybersecurity breaches are everywhere because you are physically perceiving those. But the ordinary people that you serve and that you want to serve, they’re not perceiving it. They aren’t aware of this stuff. It’s just simply not on their radar. And this is why selling them cybersecurity stuff is really difficult as well, because if something isn’t relevant to someone, they’re less likely to take action on it. You can educate them as much as you want about cybersecurity, but if they perceive it’s not going to happen to them, then they’re not going to take action on it, or they’re certainly less likely to take action on it, depending on the trust relationship that you’ve built up with your clients. Paul Green:It’s like being burglarised, or burgled as we call it here in the UK, when a house gets burgled, then suddenly all the other houses start to put up burglar alarms. They start to invest in security and cameras and stuff like that, and they do that because suddenly it’s become a lot more real to them. When your neighbour is burgled, you think, “That could have been me. We could have been burgled. What could we do to stop that? Well, we’ll go and get a burglar alarm.” And that’s the point at which it suddenly becomes more real to these people. So the question is then, how do we make cybersecurity more relevant to your clients so that it becomes more real to them? In fact, how do we make general protection, disaster recovery, how do we make that more real to them? Paul Green:Well, someone told me a clever thing that they do, and I can’t remember who told me this, so if it was you, just drop me an email, please, so I can pin your name to this story in my head as I tell it to other MSPs. But what they do is when they’re sat with a client and they’re doing a quarterly business review or a strategic review, and they’re talking about disaster recovery in any aspect, what they’ll do to make it real is they will suddenly stop the meeting and they will say to their client, “Right. Come with me, please. Leave your laptop, leave your mobile phone, come with me.” And they’ll just go outside the building. And just say they’re trying to sell them a better disaster recovery option, some increased backup, say. So they will go outside the building, and as you can imagine, the client’s thinking, “What the hell is going on?” Paul Green:They’ll go outside the building, and they’ll say to them, “There has been a fire in your building.” Not really. It’s just the scenario. “There’s been a fire in your building. Luckily all of your staff are safe, but you’ve just managed to get out with what you’ve got now. So you haven’t got your laptop. You haven’t got your phone. What do you want to do?” And they’ll say, “Right. Okay, well, everyone’s safe, so we need to ring the insurance company.” They’ll say, “Great. Where is the file for that?” And they’ll say, “Oh, it’s on my laptop, or the number’s on my laptop.” And they’ll say, “Okay, well, your laptop was destroyed in the fire.” And you can see where this is going, can’t you? Paul Green:There are some pieces of information that are backed up, or they’re on their email or they’ve got it on a text message or something somewhere, but you keep going with that, you keep pushing and pushing and pushing, and eventually you will find information that is not there, that sat on a laptop that’s never been backed up offsite, that is gone. And that’s what you’re looking to do. You’re looking to make them realise, in this exact moment, if this scenario happened, as unlikely as it is, if it happened, you would lose this amount of information. You would lose your ability to do this. It’s gone, completely gone. And as you can imagine, when you’re dealing with some stick-in-the-mud business owner who isn’t ready to take action on buying a better disaster recovery solution, that makes it a lot more real to them. You can do exactly the same thing from a cybersecurity point of view. You could take in a ransomware laptop. Paul Green:Another of my clients has a great thing, which is he keeps a laptop that’s been infected with ransomware, so he’s taken out the wifi card or whatever he’s done to stop it ever connecting to the wifi anywhere. But he has a laptop with ransomware and he can show the business owners that he’s talking to what ransomware actually looks like. That’s very clever, that is, because that makes it more real. What else can you do to help your clients protect themselves? That’s what we’re trying to do here. We’re trying to help them protect themselves. They’re not going to do that unless it’s relevant to them, and the only way to do that is to make it more real. What can you do? Even extreme things like this to make this kind of stuff feel more real to your clients and prospects. Voiceover:Here’s this week’s clever idea. Paul Green:The last few years have been very difficult for networking meetings when you’re actually getting out and meeting other business owners. Obviously, the plague pretty much put an end to networking meetings for a long period of time, and some of them went virtual. Some of them did okay virtually. I don’t think there’s many networking meetings that truly thrived on a virtual basis rather than a physical meeting basis, but certainly in some areas now networking meetings are a thing again, certainly here in the UK. Well, at time of recording, there were meetings still happening in the UK. But if you are going networking right now, well, should you, I guess that’s the first question. Should you be going networking right now? I believe if you are safe to do so, and if you feel safe to do so, absolutely you should be going out networking. We as human beings are very social creatures. It is what we do best, and even though we have the world’s most advanced set of tools for video calls and digital communication and all of that, I do believe you really cannot beat physically meeting up with people. Paul Green:There’s a huge value in that, because we get such greater communication from when we meet people in person. You’ve probably heard that stat, and I don’t know what the exact numbers are, but that communication is only partly the words that we’re saying. In fact, this is the downside of me doing an audio podcast. You can’t see my body language right now. If you could see me, I’d be waving my arms around and I’m moving around, and that’s how I speak when I’m standing in front of humans and actually talking to them. But you miss all of that out when you’re on a video call. In fact, your brain, your sort of limbic system that makes judgment calls on things, it finds that a lot harder to do on video calls than it does when you’re actually seeing someone in real life. Paul Green:So yeah, if you feel safe, get out there and go and do some networking meetings, especially if you haven’t been out for a while. Conversation that happened in my MSP Marketing Edge Facebook group a couple of weeks ago, and this is a Facebook group which is only for our active members, so we have some very, very focused conversations on marketing, and one of our members was asking about BNI. You’ve probably heard of BNI. It’s Business Networking International, and they’ve got chapters or groups that meet all over the world, or certainly they meet when they can meet. And the discussion was, basically, is it worth doing it? Not only did BNI for a couple of years back in, oh, I don’t know, it was about 2007 to 2009, something like that, when I ran a general marketing and public relations agency. And it probably didn’t work so well for me, but I think one of the reasons it didn’t work for me is that I wasn’t an MSP. Paul Green:Because I think BNI can work very, very well for MSPs, depending on the makeup of the group. If, for example, your group is quite heavily made up of business to consumer members, then obviously that’s not as much value to you if it’s made up of predominantly business to business members. You’re not going to get referrals, because that’s the whole point of something like a BNI or a networking is for you to get referrals. You’re not going to get referrals from a group like that if they’re just meeting consumers rather than meeting business owners and managers. But based on the discussions in that Facebook group, there were a few basic guidelines that we came up with. One of them was that if you do join BNI, especially BNI, but also any networking group, and if they offer training, do the training. The BNI training in particular is really good, and it should be, it’s been running for, I don’t know, 20, 30 years or something, but it’ll teach you good networking skills. Paul Green:And actually it’s just generally good for building your confidence, meeting strangers in strange places and talking about your business, and indeed, their business. Another guideline was, if you do go to a regular thing where you have a weekly slot, because a lot of these networking organisations like BNI, you can talk for, I think it’s about 30 seconds each time, and this will differ from organisation to organisation, don’t just stand up and talk about your business, because no one cares about your business, really. People care about their business and themselves, but they care a little less about other people. So in which case, don’t talk about your business. Educate people. Entertain them. Edutain them. Pick something that’s happening in our world right now and give them your version of it. What are your thoughts on it? What’s happening? What are the takeaways from it? What are the lessons? Paul Green:The more that you can educate and give, give, give value, ironically, the more you get back. It’s weird how that works. You talk about yourself and you give them essentially the tools to refer you, and they don’t refer you, but you talk about things from the world of technology, of which there are a thousand things happening every day, and they’re much more likely to refer you. It is kind of weird how something like that goes. Now, BNI has a slogan, or certainly had a slogan back in the day, of “givers gain.” The idea being that the more you bring to your group, your chapter, the more you’ll get out of it. And I certainly found that to be correct, and many of the other BNI members I’ve spoken to have found that to be correct as well. Put another way, you get out what you put in. Paul Green:So if you do go and join any kind of networking group, don’t just make the commitment in your head to, “Oh, all right, I’ve got to turn up Tuesday mornings at 7:00 AM and have a great big fat cooked breakfast.” That’s not the only commitment you make. You’ve also got to commit your…
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