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Episode 100: Special: MSP owners answer your questions Oct 12, 2021

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In this week’s special episode As a thank you for listening and supporting this podcast, Paul has pulled out all the stops to pack this milestone episode full of value Previously a few MSPs have appeared on the show to reveal their secrets, but this week’s 100th episode features a panel-full of successful MSPs joining Paul. Justin, Will and Richard will be answering listeners’ questions and discussing how they grew their MSPs Also on this week’s show, your chance to win a special prize. Thanks to Datto, you could get your hands on one of five $100 Amazon giftcards Featured guests Justin Esgar from the Virtua Consulting Group With a bachelor’s degree in Business Administration from the University of Rhode Island and over 15 years of industry experience under his belt, Justin Esgar has combined his eclectic tech interests under the Virtua Consulting umbrella. Virtua specialises in helping small and medium-sized businesses and non-profit organisations analyse, design, and install technology solutions. The software development group Virtua XYZ brings together Justin’s various programming projects, including the Your Computer Inventory service for IT consultants. Finally, Justin organises and cheerleads for the business-focused ACES Conference and associated online community. Connect with Justin on LinkedIn. Richard Wingfield from Envision Design Richard grew up in a small town in Texas as the son of a general contractor and obtained a Bachelor’s degree in Architecture from the University of Texas in 1983. He entered the architecture industry at a time when computer technology was first coming of age and by the early 90’s he had become a computer expert in his field. With a penchant for systems and solutions and a love of design, he moved on to become a member of the first Apple Solution Professionals Network and later to work for Apple as a Business Development Executive. As the owner at Envision Design, he has spent more than 25 years helping business owners integrate technology into their practices. As a father, business owner, and head geek at Envision, he is still a geek at heart and loves helping people and continually learning new things in this fast paced ever-changing world. Connect with Richard on LinkedIn. Will O’Neal from Mid-Atlantic Computer Solutions Will was a born IT hobbyist, early on trading his window washing skills for time on the neighbour’s Atari 800 computer. Fast forward a few years and Will’s career saw him managing most of the Macs on Capitol Hill in various Congressional offices. For about 2 years, he was the CTO for a weekly newspaper called Legal Times, where he managed the technology for 60 writers, editors, and graphic artists. From there, Will learned software & hardware repair, networking, and dabbled in sales with a mentor who really broadened his skill set. He continued with that mentor through three company changes, and Will credits him for setting him on this path. Mid-Atlantic Computer Solutions is 20 years old 2022, and he’s just now getting started learning about technology, sales, and marketing. Connect with Will on LinkedIn. Show notes Out every Tuesday on your favourite podcast platform Presented by Paul Green, an MSP marketing expert Paul asked for MSP’s questions in the MSP Marketing group on Facebook, members of the MSP Marketing Edge and on his LinkedIn profile Paul mentioned the book Unstoppable Referrals by Steve Gordon In this special show, sponsored by Datto, Producer James Lett told you about the chance to win one of five $100 Amazon giftcards. Find out more and enter, (before midnight UK time October 17th). The October 12th milestone 100th episode will be sponsored by Datto and will feature a special panel of industry experts including Will O’Neal, Richard Wingfield and Justin Esgar On October 19th Paul’s special guest will be Alex Robinson from Novus Digital, talking about changes to Google and how it might affect your website Got a question from the show? Email Paul directly: hello@paulgreensmspmarketing.com Episode transcription Voiceover:Every Tuesday for MSPs around the world, this is an MSP Marketing Podcast special. Episode 100. Paul Green:Hello, and welcome to episode 100 of the MSP Marketing Podcast. Whether you’ve been listening from day one back in 2019, or if this is your first episode, thank you so much for putting me on your device, and giving me a little bit of your valuable time to bang on about marketing for MSPs. You can probably tell, I love this. I adore every single second of this, and I hope that you get so much value out of this, and it helps you to grow your business. Now, to celebrate episode 100, we considered pulling together some of the greatest minds in the world of MSPs. There are so many good experts who’ve been on this podcast in the last hundred episodes. And then we thought, “Do you know what would be really cool? If we got some ordinary MSP owners.” People who are there on the coalface, day in day out, but also people who are actually pretty good at marketing themselves. And who also think in a really good way. Paul Green:So my friend, Justin, pulled together a couple of these people for me. I’m going to introduce you to them in a second. Before I do, to celebrate this hundredth episode, we’ve got a big giveaway. James Lett:Hey, this is producer James. Over the last 100 weeks, some of our prizes have been designed to benefit your work life, but this gift is definitely a treat for your personal life. We’ve teamed up with Datto to give you the chance to win a $100, or your local equivalent value, Amazon gift card. A thank you for listening and supporting this podcast, but even better still, we’ve got five of them to give away. All the details you need are later on in the show. Paul Green:Well, that sounds fantastic. So let’s meet the people joining us for this special hundredth episode. Voiceover:Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast, special. Justin Esgar:What’s up everybody. I’m Justin Esgar from the Virtua Consulting Group. Richard Wingfield:Hi, I’m Richard Wingfield with Envision Design. Will O’Neal:And I’m Will O’Neal with Mid Atlantic Computer Solutions. Paul Green:And I’m so grateful to all of you coming onto this podcast. If only we could have recorded what we’ve been talking about the last 10 minutes, because I don’t know about you, but I’ve enjoyed the last 10 minutes immensely. It can never go in the podcast, due to the swearing and the inappropriateness, and some of the stories that you’ve just told me, but this is going to be a blast. So thank you. So you guys all know each other, is that right? Will O’Neal:Yes, we do. Justin Esgar:Yeah. Will O’Neal:Everyone’s connected through Justin, somehow. Paul Green:So Justin, we’ll start with talking about you and your story, because this is actually your second appearance in the podcast this year. You were, I think it was episode 75 you appeared in, and you were a really popular guest. And then you offered to help me put this together, so thank you so much for that. Justin Esgar:Yeah, of course. Paul Green:Just give us an idea of your story, and give us the short version, Justin. What’s your background, what’s your story? Justin Esgar:The short version is I was 12 years old and I was enamoured with Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. And now I’m 41 years old and I don’t have their money, but I’m working on it. Building a giant consultancy as best I can, doing IT consulting, doing consulting for consultants. I put on a conference for consultants. We just released our first piece of hardware, which we’re trying to sell to consultants. So I’m all about helping other IT consultants and MSPs. Paul Green:Thank you. Richard. Richard Wingfield:So my story is, I have a degree in architecture and I got out into that profession. I’m old enough that I was in that profession when computers hit that profession, and by default or raising my hand too often, got into technology. Got hired at some point by Apple, worked for them for a bit. Was there when Steve Jobs reorganised the company and was part of the layoffs. And when that was done, I realised in the past I was doing two full-time jobs and only getting paid for one. I was doing architecture and IT, and thus Envision was born. And I’ve been doing IT consulting for 25 plus years now. Paul Green:Richard, you need to change your intro to Steve Jobs fired me, because that’s a great headline. Richard Wingfield:Me and 14,000 other people on that day, or whatever it was. Justin, can we have that T-shirt please? Justin Esgar:I’ll definitely make a shirt. Richard Wingfield:And Will, tell us your story. Will O’Neal:So I am doing the only thing that I’ve ever done, which is IT consulting in one form or another. And I’m doing what I love every single day, that is supporting small businesses and their use of technology. Paul Green:That’s great. Thank you. So Justin, you completely smashed the brief. The brief was, pull together interesting people who would love to be on the podcast, who think the right ways. You guys think as business owners, as well as technicians. And also, I know that you guys are actually slightly better at marketing than most other people, which is really good. So what I’ve been doing over the last couple of weeks is, I’ve been pulling together questions. So I have a Facebook group, it’s the MSP Marketing Facebook group. And we’ll put a couple of posts in there, had some questions. I’ve asked my clients on the MSP marketing edge, they’ve given me some marketing and business growth questions. Also on my peer groups. And just from people I’ve been talking to on LinkedIn and various other channels. Everywhere I’ve been, I’ve collected questions. In fact, we’ve got more questions for you than we can possibly throw into one podcast. Paul Green:So we’ll see what we can do. And along the way, we’ll have some fun as well. So we’re going to start with a question from Kyle Stidom. Kyle, apologies if I’ve pronounced your name wrong. Kyle is an MSP owner in Colorado, and he’s asked a great question here. And Justin, we’ll start with you for this. What are some of the key strategies that you would use if you’re entering a brand new market? So Justin, I know you’re in New York, obviously the world’s best city. You don’t need to go into another market, but let’s say you decided you wanted to go into… What’s the next city along from New York? Justin Esgar:Well, actually we did enter a new market, because last October we actually purchased another Apple consultancy in Iowa. So it rolls into that. Kyle, your answer isn’t necessarily buy another computer, but it was a little eye-opening because, as one can imagine, people in Iowa think and speak differently than people from New York, right? I don’t know if this is true necessarily about a new market, but you have to establish yourself as the leader, and get your name out there. And then fill up those reviews and put out good content that people can see, that if you’re going to go into this new market, you have to go in there, guns blazing, “I’m the big dog. I know what I’m talking about. Here’s why you should trust me.” Especially if you’re going from a big city like New York, to a smaller city, you want to go in there and say like, “This is who I am. This is what I do. This is why I’m the expert.” Justin Esgar:I’ve done the New York thing, I’ve done the 24/7 pressure of New York City, and now I’m ready to take on Boise, Idaho or whatever. No offense, anyone from Boise, Idaho. I would say that’s the best way to do it. Do the research. And then on top of which, there’s all the standard stuff you do, right? Join BNI, which I think you guys have BNI in the UK, right Paul? Paul Green:Oh, God. Yeah. It’s huge here. Justin Esgar:So join BNI, things like that. Join the chamber of commerce. Talk to everybody you know, carry business cards wherever you go. Go to events, go to meetup.com. Look for events. Look for the people that you want to be helping. Don’t go to events for other IT professionals. If you want to do graphic design, go to the Maryland graphic design user group, and just establish yourself as a leader there. Paul Green:So Richard and Will, have any of you extended into a new market. I mean, obviously Justin did it through acquisition, but have you done it the organic way, where perhaps you’ve launched in the next city or the next town or something? Will O’Neal:Well, I did it the wrong way. The wrong way is to find a partner who promises they know what they’re doing, and then really doesn’t know a single thing about what they’re doing. My foray into another city was an abject failure, a very slow painful failure. Just because at the time I was running a very successful, the market was booming, the economy was booming, and there was a calling for another city. There was a partner built in, and there was just nothing but complete and total lack of understanding or knowledge once we got in there. So we landed three customers and lost three customers, all within a very short amount of time. And that scared me off from going into another market. The market that I’m currently in is very large and completely untapped for the type of support that we can do. Paul Green:And Will, without going into too much detail, and certainly without naming names, can you tell us why that didn’t work? So what was the lack of knowledge that you had which stopped you from really getting into that marketplace? Will O’Neal:The lack of knowledge was the person who wanted to start the business, promised that they knew what they were doing. They had a general understanding. Red flags were thrown. I said, “Let me send a tech to help you on this first job.” And he said, “No, I’ve got it.” And went in there and made us all look like complete and total fools, just did not know his stuff. Paul Green:So actually, your big lesson from this is pick your partners carefully. Will O’Neal:Yeah. Pick your partners carefully, and vet the entire process. Paul Green:And was it geographically so far away, that you couldn’t stay in close contact with them? Will O’Neal:It was 500 plus miles. Paul Green:Yeah. There does come a point, doesn’t it? Where you’ve just got to get in the car and you’ve got to drive and you’ve got to meet with someone. Will O’Neal:Yeah. The visit was scheduled for 3:00 in the afternoon. There was a $99 Delta flight that morning. I said, “I have a tech on the plane. You can pick him up on the way.” And was told, “Nope, not needed. I know what I’m doing.” Richard Wingfield:Ouch. Paul Green:Sounds awful. Yeah. Don’t do that again. Definitely don’t do that. Justin Esgar:I think going off that, I mean, Will, correct me if I’m wrong. Was it shiny thing disorder? You were like, “Oh, I can do this thing over there. And this guy seems great.” And then it failed. Will O’Neal:I think it was wanting to trust, because the relationship that was there was a good relationship. They saw our success in the DC market and wanted to replicate that into a different market. I knew I can teach and I can train, but I can’t do it for you. Paul Green:Thank you, Will. Appreciate your honesty talking about something which… I mean, no one really likes talking about their failures, but it’s good that you’re able to put it in a public forum like that, because it shows that you’ve learned from it. Let’s move on to another question. So this one is from Andrew Brown. I think we got this one from LinkedIn. Andrew is head of channel and partnerships at B Castle. And he says, “If you were to split your customers into A, B, C, D based on their revenue, which group would you see the most revenue growth from?” So his assumption would be that although your A group would bring the most revenue, your largest growth opportunity would come from your B or your C group. And of course, group A would probably be about retention. Will O’Neal:I would think that you would go with the B group, because the B group is amenable to your services. They know who y…

Full show notes at the publisher

Episode 99: How engaged are your MSP’s staff? Oct 05, 2021

Show notes

In this week’s episode What gets your staff into work every day – passion or pay? Sometimes it’s a combination but maybe it’s more one than the other. This week Paul helps you identify their motivations, which can make it easier to grow your MSP Also on this week’s show, do you know how to truly measure success every day? Paul has two simple but hugely powerful things you can do to make sure you set the context for measurable success Plus there’s an extremely valuable conversation with Paul’s featured guest, all about improving your email deliverability. And news of a big prize for next week’s 100th episode Featured guest Thank you to Adrian Savage from Deliverability Dashboard for joining Paul to talk about how to improve email open rates. Adrian Savage is a dad, a geek and an entrepreneur. He left the corporate world 10 years ago and now specialises in email deliverability: how to avoid the spam folder and double your open rates. He’s helped many well-known names improve their email performance and is also the founder and creator of Deliverability Dashboard, which quickly and simply shows how well your emails are performing and how you can get even more people seeing and opening your emails. Connect with Adrian on LinkedIn. Show notes Out every Tuesday on your favourite podcast platform Presented by Paul Green, an MSP marketing expert In discussing how engaged your staff are, Paul mentioned Gallup’s Q12 Employee Engagement Survey Thank you to Praveen Ramesh from SuperOps.ai for recommending the book Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein The October 12th milestone 100th episode will be sponsored by Datto and will feature a special panel of industry experts including Will O’Neal, Richard Wingfield and Justin Esgar 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 to Episode 99 of the show. Here’s what’s coming up for you this week. Adrian Savage:It’s the one biggest behavioural change that people need to make. By having that much higher open rates, you’re going to be helping your overall reputation. Paul Green:We’re also going to be looking at some questions that you can ask your staff to determine how engaged they are at work. None of us want disengaged staff so this is a great way of finding out who’s really engaged and actually who’s actively disengaged. Plus, next week is Episode 100. We’ve got a great show, a very special episode put together for you, and we’ve got a big giveaway as well. I’ll give you more details on what you can win later on in the show. Voiceover:Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast. Paul Green:If you’re a long-term listener to the show, you’ll know that I’m really into my productivity things. I love gadgets and methods of working which help you to get the most out of every day, and this isn’t about working as much as you can. It’s actually quite the opposite. It’s about having a good work-life balance. And in fact, in last week’s episode, I’ve just listened back to it myself, I was talking to a guy at a talk I did, and we were talking about work-life balance and whether or not his business goals were in line with his vision for his life. And it kind of made me realise I didn’t really talk to you last week about the tools. Paul Green:There are two tools in particular, that you can use to add some context to your life every single day. So, the first of those tools is your vision board. I’m sure you’ve heard of a vision board before. You get a whole load of pictures of things that you want to do in the future, intangible things. You don’t know exactly what they are or when you’ll do them, but you put pictures of them up on your vision board. Paul Green:So, I’ve got a vision board here in my office, in my home office. There’s a picture of someone scuba diving on that. There’s people sitting in a lovely cafe in some kind of Spanish harbour because that’s the lifestyle I’d like to lead. There’s a picture of a very, very nice Spanish villa with a pool. That’s going to be mine in the future. There’s a kit car. And I don’t mean one of those funny-looking Morgan things. I mean like a proper kit car that someone has built. I have no mechanical abilities whatsoever. So, I quite fancy building a kit car. What a great way to learn as a retirement project. Then I’ve gotten on there I’d love to do more TV presenting. That was fun. I’d love to be a fiction writer. So, I’ve got a picture of Roald Dahl and there’s a whole series of things in there about the money that I want, the passive income in the future, and the giving back. I want to set up a charity that has a very specific aim, but all of that’s on my vision board. I look at that every day. And in fact, sometimes when I’m just sitting thinking, thinking about things that I need to do with the business, my eyes will fall on the vision board. Paul Green:But the other tool is a more practical tool. It’s something I read every single morning. It’s a list of my current goals and I’ve got them written down here. In fact, I have a book here. It’s literally a book I keep by my bedside. It’s locked away in a bedside cupboard and it’s got in there my goals. So, every single morning, once I’ve had a shower and actually put my contact lenses in so I can see, I read my goals. I’m not going to tell you what my goals are, but I’ll take you through some of the categories. I sit down once a year with my best friends, and we did it just a few months ago. We sit down and we figure out what do we want to achieve in the next 12 months. We talk primarily about business, but we also talk about some personal stuff as well. Paul Green:So, for example, I have nine goals that I’m currently working towards. Remember, the difference between a vision and a goal. A vision is an intangible thing in the future. It’s somewhere you want to go, but you don’t yet know the details of it, whereas a goal is a very specific thing. It’s a tangible thing. You know what it is that you want, and you know when you’ve got there. In fact, you may have heard of the acronym SMART as in SMART goals, which stands for specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. So, I start my goals book, which is literally a book with some pages, and my goals are written down. I started with the dates that I want to achieve these goals by. By the 26th of August 2022, I will have. That’s what I’ve written at the top. Let me read that again. By the 26th of August 2022, I will have. Paul Green:Now, that’s the date that me and my friends are next sitting down. We’re going to sit down and have another goal session on that date. We’ve already planned that date in for next year. And I’ve then got some health goals, some business goals, some business acquisition goals, property, personal, and then some balance habits that I want to try and stick to. Paul Green:So, my first is health because health is the most important. If you don’t have your health, nothing else really matters, right? So, I’ve got on there a weight goal. I’ve still got a little bit of weight I want to lose. I lost loads during the last lockdown. I want to lose a little bit more and then maintain that weight. That’s one of my goals. There’s a running goal on there for me because I have got out of the habit of running. Last year, I did a thousand miles. A thousand miles. Isn’t that insane? I was never a runner before, but I did a thousand miles last year. This year, I’ll probably scrape about 350. So, I want to get back to running at least 50 miles every month. Paul Green:And there’s also on there a balance, a health habit about how many hours I work. So, I try very hard to work no more than 30 hours a week. Now, I will often do a little bit more than that, but as a sole parent, it’s just me and the 11-year-old here, I want to make sure I’ve got plenty of time to give her the best possible childhood that I can give her. Then I’ve got my business goals. I’ve got on there a goal about how many members of the MSP Marketing Edge I’m working towards. Of course, that’s a private goal, but it wouldn’t be too difficult for you to figure out. We want to jump up to the next stage on that. And then I’ve got a profit goal as well. Paul Green:And then we go into other things. So, for example, I am buying businesses at the moment. I’ve got on here an acquisitions goal. How many of those security and alarm companies that I’m acquiring, how many I want to buy in the next year. There’s a property goal of how many more buy-to-lets I want to buy. There’s a personal goal about refurbing my house, and we want to build an extension and do some work on it. I want to get that done because that’s been dragging on. And then I come to my balance habit goals. And I figured out over the last few years that I’m at my happiest if I read for 30 minutes a day, if I get at least seven to eight hours sleep. I’m happy if I cook properly once or twice a week. I really like cooking. I have to force myself to do it. And of course, I batch up four or five different portions so they can go in the freezer for the nights I really don’t fancy cooking. Paul Green:Then I’ve got on there some personal ones, just about things like making sure that I enjoy some personal time when my daughter’s at school or away with her friends. Things like not forgetting to do the things I really love, like going to the cinema. And I know it sounds crazy that I’ve written these things down, but here’s the thing. Every single morning, once that shower’s done and those contact lenses are in, I read this book. I read these goals. And what these goals do is they set a context for the day. Everything I do throughout the day, it’s at the back of my mind, asking myself, “If I do this, will it get me closer to the goals I want to achieve? If I do this or don’t do this, is it going to move me closer towards or further away from the goals that are very important to me?” And I know they’re important because I read them every day and I agree with them every day. These are the things that I want to achieve. Paul Green:As my daughter gets a little bit older, I’m going to share this book with her. I’m not going to let her read it every day, but I’m going to show her what I’ve done, what I’m working towards, and the context that that’s set me every day. She’s not quite ready for it yet. She’s going to just started secondary school. But I think in a few years’ time, particularly when she gets nearer exams, I’m going to help her learn to set goals for her life, to have a vision for what she wants to achieve in her life, and then tangible goals that she can work towards. And of course, I’ll encourage her to have a goals book that she reads every day. Paul Green:So, do you have this goals book? Do you have the vision board? These are two incredibly useful tools to help you start every day with great context and make sure you’re always, in some tiny way, always working towards the things you most want to achieve. Voiceover:Here’s this week’s clever idea. Paul Green:There’s a really cool employee engagement survey which has been running for years and years and years. In fact, 2.7 million people have been through that survey, and just by asking them a set of questions, it’s been able to ascertain whether or not they are engaged, not engaged, or actively disengaged in their work. Paul Green:Now, let me explain what those three different categories mean. So, engaged employees, they’re the ones who treat the business like it’s their own in a good way, not in a bad way. They’re your very, very best staff, your partners, essentially in the business. And they’re the ones that you would trust with absolutely everything because they are the ones that seem to answer that emergency text at 9:30 at night when it genuinely is an emergency. They’re the ones you can trust in almost every situation. They’re highly involved in the business. They’re enthusiastic about it. And as I say, psychologically, in their hearts, they’re stakeholders, they’re owners of the business, regardless of their actual ownership stake. Paul Green:Now, the vast majority of staff do not sit within that engaged category. A few of them do, and it depends on how many you’ve got within the business. I find that the fewer staff you have, the easier it is for all of them to be engaged employees. But the bigger you get, the more often you find that your staff are not engaged. And not engaged means that it’s not bad. They just don’t have the passion and the engagement that the engaged employees have. So, they turn up to work, they do their job, and then they go home. And their engagement needs are not being met by the business that they’re working in, by the work that they’re doing. So, they bring their time and they give you their time to do the work, but they don’t really bring a lot of energy and passion into their work. Paul Green:Now, if you’ve ever worked for a large corporate organisation, you’ll see dozens and dozens of those people. In fact, the vast majority of people working for the large corporates are not engaged. They’re turning up for the salary, but there’s just no passion for what they do. Don’t know about you, but I’d rather work with engaged people rather than not engage people, and all of my team who’ve been hand-selected and I’ve either worked with them for years and years, or they’re just the right kind of people, they’re all fully engaged with what we’re doing, and that’s how we’re able to move at such speed. Paul Green:So, you’ve got engaged as a category of people. You’ve got not engaged, and then you’ve got actively disengaged which is the final category. I have a different definition for actively disengaged. I call them internal terrorists because these people are actually working against you. In fact, they’re not just unhappy at work, they are resentful about their unhappiness, and they’re acting out their unhappiness. In fact, they potentially undermine what their engaged co-workers are accomplishing every day. Now, I’ve seen people like this. You’ve seen people like this. And by the way, if you have someone like this, just fire them. Get HR advice, but really, they’ve got to go. Paul Green:All of this comes from a company called Gallup and they regularly do what’s known as the Q12 Employee Engagement Survey, and just go and google that. Go and google Gallup Q12 Employee Engagement Survey. Now, they don’t really talk to businesses like ours. They’re talking to bigger businesses so you’ll typically see when you look at their results from the regular Q12 survey, I think they do it quarterly, you’ll see that they often have higher levels of not engaged than you would expect to see in small businesses like ours. Paul Green:But there are some very interesting questions in there. I don’t suggest that you ask your staff these direct questions, but they’re the kind of questions you might want to ascertain with your team. So, for example, I know what’s expected of me at work. You ask someone that question and I’m guessing Gallup gets them to rate it on a score of 1 to 10. I know what’s expected of me at work. Can you see how important that would be for someone to know what is expected of them? Paul Green:another one, the next one in fact is I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work right, followed by, at work, I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day. These are great questions. They directly strike at the heart of the engagement of the person that’s working with you. Another one, in the last seven days, I’ve received recognition or praise for doing good work. Question five, my supervisor or someone at work seems to care about me as a person. Number six, there’s someone at work who encourages my development, and the next one, at work, my opinions seem to count. Paul Green:Now, I’m not going to re…

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Episode 98: Should MSPs buy cold data? Sep 28, 2021

Show notes

In this week’s episode Is is possible to buy cold data and turn it into clients for your MSP? This week Paul deep dives into what type of data you could buy and how best to use that data for prospecting Also on the show this week: When you achieve your business goals, will that give you the lifestyle you most want? Put another way, are your business goals aligned with the vision for your life? Paul explains why they need to be linked And there are TWO recommendations for the same inspirational leadership author this week, both from Paul’s featured guest Jonno White and fellow MSP John Clark Featured guest Thank you to Jonno White from Clarity for joining Paul to talk about how to deal with conflict and difficult people within your MSP. Jonno is the Founder and Principal Consultant at Clarity, a consultancy based in Brisbane, Australia. Jonno is also the author of a new book – ‘Step Up or Step Out: How to deal with difficult people even if you hate conflict’ and he is passionate about investing in people to become everything they’re meant to be. The book is also available at a special price on the Clarity website. Connect with Jonno on LinkedIn. Show notes Out every Tuesday on your favourite podcast platform Presented by Paul Green, an MSP marketing expert In discussing his experience with buying cold data, Paul mentioned Selectabase who are a reseller of Experian data Paul mentioned The Checker as one tool for scrubbing cold data Check out Paul’s in-depth guide on using cold data Find out more about Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Edge Register for a free copy of Paul’s book Paul’s featured guest Jonno White mentioned one of his favourite leadership authors, Patrick Lencioni Thank you to John Clark from Solutions Shared for recommending the book Getting Naked, A Business Fable by Patrick Lencioni On October 5th Paul will be joined by Adrian Savage from Deliverability Dashboard to talk about how to increase the chances of your emails being delivered 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 there. And welcome to Episode 98. Here’s what we got coming up in this week’s show. Jonno White:I thought I was doing the best thing for me and for them but ended in a lot of pain for me, and a lot of pain for them. And that had me starting a search going there must be a better way to deal with someone when it’s really difficult for both of us. Paul Green:We’re also going to be talking about whether or not your MSP should buy cold data. Is it a good way to reach prospects by literally buying their contact details? Plus, we’ll have another book suggestion at the end of the show. And if you haven’t read my book on MSP marketing yet, I’ll tell you how you can get your hands on a free copy. Voiceover:Paul Green’s MSP marketing podcast. Paul Green:There’s very little that I do outside of the MSP world these days, but now and again, I get perhaps a speaking engagement or a chance to consult with someone outside of our world. A few weeks ago, I did a talk to a group of dentists in Birmingham, in the UK. I used to work with dentists more than five years ago, and I don’t really know a huge amount about their world now, but the organisers of this event wanted someone to come and talk about work-life balance and achieving things and marketing and all of that kind of stuff. And I do enjoy doing a talk like that. So I went along and I did my couple of hours and it was really good fun. And during the break of my session, I was talking to one of the dentists that had been in the audience and he was telling me just how busy he was and how he had no time whatsoever for anything because he was just doing dentistry, dentistry, dentistry all day and night practically. Paul Green:Can you think of anything worse than spending all day and night getting covered in the powdered bone of other people? It’s just weird that is. Anyway, he was saying how busy he was, but it was all for a purpose. He was saying it was all to build a new life for him and his family and to invest in property and to build up assets. And he was very much focused on building something huge for his family. And I asked him something which challenged him. The challenge was this. I said, “So everything that you’re doing with your business right now, doesn’t that fit into the vision that you have for your life?” Now, what I meant with that was essentially was his business goal aligned with his life vision? You see not many of us think enough about this, but if you think about your life, you probably have things that you want to do in the future. Paul Green:And they may be intangible things. We call these a vision for the future. For example, I’d love to scuba dive and I don’t mean two weeks doing a PADI course on holiday. I mean, properly scuba dive, like become an expert at it, an absolute master in warm oceans somewhere. And to have the cash and the time to be able to do that for a number of months every year, that means I’ve got to have business assets, which A, allow me to work anywhere and B, allow me to have an income stream whether or not I turn up at the business. So when I look at my business goals, I’m very much focused on what I’m doing here, does it tie me to the UK or does it allow me to travel? And does it generate for me, if not now, then in the future, can it generate for me, income streams, which will pay me to go and do something else, something I want to do with my life. Paul Green:And nine times out of 10, most of my business goals, they do match up to that life vision. And this is what I asked that dentist. I said to him, “So the things that you’re doing now, that the growth that you’re trying to get within your business now, does that match up to the vision for your life?” And he didn’t actually have an answer for that because he hadn’t really thought about a longterm vision for his life. I mean, he was in his early forties, certainly at that point where you start to think about the long-term future and he’d got some material stuff. He’d got his Porsche or whatever car he’d got, but beyond having a few material things and a few more extra properties, there was no vision for his life. And I suggested to him that that weekend, he went home and talked to his wife and talked to his kids. He’d got one older child and one younger child, so perhaps just the older child. Paul Green:And talked about what do we want to do with our lives? What’s our vision for the future? I suspect that his kids would like to see more of him. And it’s just a guess, but it didn’t sound like he was at home a great deal. And also there’s being at home, but you’re home physically, but not home mentally, aren’t you? You’re familiar with that I’m sure. It’s where you’re in the room, but your mind is somewhere else. We’re terrible for that as business owners. And I suspect that this busy dentist did this all the time, that when he was there with his family, his mind was elsewhere. So I suggested he do that with his partner and they just look at their life vision, what do they want to achieve in the future? What kind of lifestyle do they want to live? Paul Green:Whether you believe that we have more lives or not, let’s assume that we only have one life now, right? This is the one life. So shouldn’t we maximis e it? Shouldn’t we do the most that we can to enjoy our life? And that’s not just about work. That’s about making sure that everything is in balance. I love the concept of the happy balance where you make sure you have enough cash, you make sure you have enough time, you make sure you’ve got your family, you make sure that you’re having some fun. And finally, the final ingredient of the happy balance is meaningful work. And if you have a way out of whack balance where perhaps you’re working far too hard, or maybe even you’re not doing enough and you’re kind of a little bit bored, that’s when we as people stop being fully rounded people. You’ve got to get your version of the happy balance absolutely right for you. Paul Green:So if you haven’t done this before, go home, talk to your other half, your life partner, not your business partner, your life partner. What’s the vision for your lives? What would you like to do more of? Is it traveling? Is it just walking the dog more? Is it scuba diving? Hang-gliding? Golf? Whatever it is that you guys want to get into. Where do you see yourselves in the future with your lives? And then look very, very closely at your MSP. The goals that you’re pursuing in your MSP, do they really match up to where you want to go with your life? Voiceover:Here’s this week’s clever idea. Paul Green:Every now and then one of my clients in the MSP Marketing Edge will ask me, “Hey, is it really possible to buy cold data and actually turn that into clients?” And the short answer to that is in the short term, no, not really. It’s unlikely. If you do get someone who becomes a client straight off the back of cold data, you will be the exception rather than the rule. However, in the long term, yes, you can. I do believe you can turn cold data into clients, but you need to warm up the data. Because if you think about it, there are so many conditions that have to be right for anyone to switch from their incumbent MSP over to you. They have to be so frustrated with their incumbent, that they’re prepared to go through the perceived pain of switching. Paul Green:And we know that a lot of people stay with their MSP because of something called inertia loyalty. This is the thing that keeps someone in a situation that they’re 100% happy with because they perceive it’s far more work and it’s much more difficult to move from their incumbent MSP to someone new. So it’s perceptually easier for them not to act. So a prospect has got to be so frustrated with their incumbent MSP that they’re prepared to go through the pain of switching. Wouldn’t it be great if you could meet dozens of people who are at that exact stage? So you can, that’s the reality, but it’s not really the correct stage to start trying to build a relationship with them. It’s not too late by this stage, but you’ll be in competition with everyone else that they’re talking to. Paul Green:So I believe you have to build a relationship with people before they get to that stage. Because the other factor that has to be right is they have to decide that their business matches yours. This is about them and not you. And this is where your new marketing skills come in. Before they ever pick up the phone or fill in a form or hit live chat, or book a Calendly with you, they’re going to make a decision about your business based on your website, your social media presence and your overall digital footprint. Paul Green:Now what makes this situation even more difficult is that the people you want to reach are not educated buyers. And I don’t mean that they’re unintelligent. Of course they’re smart people, but they’re uneducated about technology. They’re uneducated about what it is that you sell. They don’t know what they don’t know. So they’re not making cognitive decisions to switch from one MSP to another. They’re making emotional decisions. In fact, the vast majority of prospects that are looking at you are making emotional decisions about whether to buy from you or not. So can you see now why buying some cold data and sending a couple of emails to that data is just not going to tick all the boxes. It’s not going to help you build a relationship with someone or help them to realise that you are the answer to all of their problems. Paul Green:What we’ve got to do is get the right message in front of the right person at the right time. And of course you can cut through this with advertising, Facebook advertising, Google ads, that puts you in front of the right people at the right time at the point they’re ready to buy. But I believe for most MSPs, it’s better to have a long-term approach to marketing. And that’s about building multiple audiences and then building relationships with those audiences using multiple touch points. So let me tell you about a four-step process that I’ve used several times in business. And I’ve taught this to hundreds of hundreds of MSPs. It’s not a quick win, but it can turn cold data into clients. You’ve just got to put the work in. Paul Green:So there are four steps to this. And the first step is to go and buy the right quality of cold data. If you’re offered a suspiciously cheap database and you don’t really know the company that’s selling it, walk away. It’s probably a very old distressed database that’s been sold thousands of times. Here in the UK, I’ve bought data a number of times from Selectabase. They are a reseller of Experian data and I’ve found their data to be pretty good and the customer service to be excellent as well. In the U S I don’t really have anyone that I can recommend right now. I’ve bought several sets of data from the US and it’s all been a bit rubbish. So in fact, if you have a data broker in the US that you can recommend to me, please do drop me an email, hello@paulgreensmspmarketing.com. Paul Green:Now, step two, once you’ve got some of that data, you have to scrub it. So this is an optional stage. Personally, I don’t bother doing this because we spend good money on good quality data. But if you’ve acquired some data, perhaps you’ve scraped it off Google or acquired it off LinkedIn or some other way, then you would clean that data before you start emailing it. There are a number of reasons why you do this primarily to do with email deliverability and costs. So if you’re emailing people and you get lots of bounces because the email addresses are dead or the person behind the email address is dead, that can have an affect on your email deliverability long-term. So scrubbing is literally a process of getting someone like a virtual assistant to look at the email addresses. You could run them through a tool. There’s a number of tools. There’s one called The Checker, which you could have a look at, or at the very least you could go to the the domain name of the company in the email address and just see if there’s actually a website at that domain name. Paul Green:If you’re in the UK, you could even go to Companies House and see whether the person is still active within that company. There are a number of different things you can do, but don’t you do it yourself, get a virtual assistant to do it for you. Now, step three is where you start to email people, and there are loads of different ways to do this. So a lot of it rotates around your CRM, your customer relationship manager, like MailChimp for example, and how much work you’ve already done on it. So every MSP should have a core CRM that they’re using to build up their prospects, but you’ve got to protect that core CRM. So you’ve got a couple of different options for you. Option one, if you’re at the very beginning of your CRM journey and you don’t yet have a CRM, then your option is just to add the cold data to your CRM. Paul Green:Now, I don’t recommend this for most people because there is an inherent danger in doing it. For example, if you buy 1000 email records and import them into your CRM, and then you email them the first time and a proportion of people hit the spam complaint button, there’s the potential your CRM will say “Hang on a second. This person’s just imported data. They’ve had complaints. This is a spammer.”And they’ll just put your account on pause. And that’s why most people who choose to do this use a second CRM, which we call a burner CRM. So this is your second option. You have a second CRM. You import your cold data into that. So let’s say your main CRM is ActiveCampaign. And then you buy MailChimp as a burner CRM, as a second CRM. So what you do is you import the cold data into your burner CRM, and you send them emails and the…

Full show notes at the publisher

Episode 97: Should your MSP run Google ads? Sep 21, 2021

Show notes

In this week’s episode Of course you’d love to appear at the very top of Google when a ‘hot buyer’ is searching for a new MSP. In many cases you’d need to use Google Ads to achieve this… but are they really worth it? This week Paul dives into the pros and cons of Google Ads for MSPs Also on the show this week, it’s the second half of Paul’s masterclass on PR. Listen for 10 practical killer ideas for generating free publicity Plus, what is a ‘buyer persona’ and how can your MSP use one to out-smart the competition? All this and more is answered by Paul’s featured guest this week, Stormie Andrews Featured guest Thank you to Stormie Andrews from the Yokel Local marketing agency for joining Paul to talk about how to outsmart the competition by creating a fictitious buyer persona. Stormie’s passion is to make it much easier for organisations to attract their ideal clients by understanding how their prospects think in order to experience what it’s like to achieve ridiculous growth. Stormie is a recognised Member of the Year from the American Marketing Association, named as a Top 50 Tech Visionary by Intercon in 2020-2021, and his book, “The Worlds Best Buyer Persona System“, became an Amazon Hot New Releases Best Seller when released in July of 2020. Connect with Stormie on LinkedIn. Show notes Out every Tuesday on your favourite podcast platform Presented by Paul Green, an MSP marketing expert In discussing the benefits of Google Ads, Paul recommended listening back to Episode 88 for a conversation with an MSP who uses Google Ads heavily Listen back to Episode 96 for part one of the conversation on PR and getting free publicity Find out more about Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Edge Many thanks to Kevin Coppins from Spirion for recommending the book Predictable Success by Les McKeown On September 28th Paul will be joined by Jonno White from Clarity to talk about how deal with difficult people when you hate conflict Got a question from the show? Email Paul directly: hello@paulgreensmspmarketing.com Episode transcription Voiceover:Fresh every Tuesday for MSP’s around the world, this is Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast. Paul Green:It’s really great to have you here. Here’s what we got coming up on this week’s show. Stormie Andrews:Often times people approach me wanting to outsell, outgrow their competition, the best way of doing it is outsmarting the competition. Paul Green:We’re also going to be finishing off something we started in last week’s podcast about the difference between PR and paid advertising and why your MSP really needs to pursue more PR and try and get more free publicity. We’ll finish that off today and I’ll also tell you about a service, which will give you a press release every single month. Something that you can just send out to the local media without having to do any work at all. All of this is coming up later in the show. Voiceover:Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast. Paul Green:The question of whether or not your MSP should run Google ads, those pay per click ads, where you only pay when someone clicks on the ad, the question of whether or not you should run them is a really interesting one. Because at first glance, the surface answer appears to be no, but when you look a little bit deeper, there’s a bit of a maybe in there and maybe even a yes, depending on a series of different factors. Let me start at the beginning, so Google ads have been traditionally just the most wonderful way to reach people who are ready to buy or nearly ready to buy what it is that you sell. And in fact, it’s the ads that’s made Google rich and famous and rich beyond their wildest dreams. Certainly Larry and Sergey, the original founders of Google who are now tucked away in their probably very well-protected mansion’s counting their multiple millions, if not billions of dollars, they got rich on advertising revenue. Paul Green:If you boil it down, Google’s very innovative company with lots of products and lots of different things, but their money was made through advertising. They back in the very late 90s, early noughties, figured out a way to make advertising relevant. And these days we take it for granted, but you go back 23, 24 years, and most of the advertising then was kind of spray and pray. You literally put an advert in your local newspaper or on your local radio station or in a magazine or something and you hoped that the right people would see it, which was fine for people who were selling, bathrooms, plumbers, those kinds of things. But what about IT support? If you were advertising in a magazine, how did you know that the people who were reading that magazine were decision makers, the fact is you didn’t. Paul Green:Google for the first time ever, actually I don’t think they were the first, but they were the first to do it at scale. They ensured that when you type something in, whatever someone typed in, you could ask for your advert to be shown. And essentially it was like an auction, well, it still is like an auction system. So you would say if someone types in, let’s say, for example, IT support, please show my advert and I am willing to pay this amount of money if someone clicks it. The idea being that someone who has typed in IT support your town say, is more likely to be a relevant prospect. And then because there were lots of people who were willing to do this, it became a bit of an auction. So if you were willing to pay $2 per click and your competitors were only willing to pay $1 per click, then you would appear higher. Paul Green:Now, there are a whole series of other rules that Google introduced over the years, such as quality score and click through rate and all sorts of things like that. I’m not an expert at Google ads, but I know that these rules are there and they made it more complicated over time. But for a while there, for a good five, 10 years or so, Google traffic was cheap and you were paying cents, literally cents per click. I have a friend who built up a training company off the back of cheap Google traffic. And he said to me, a few years ago, he couldn’t pull off the same trick again today because he was spending tens of thousands of pounds, he’s British, tens of thousands of pounds a month, driving traffic from Google, but he was generating hundreds of thousands of pounds of revenue off that cheap traffic. Paul Green:Well, these days it would cost him more than the revenue he could generate from it, Google has changed the game so much, and this is what makes Google frustrating because we know that if someone types in, new IT support company in your town into Google, you just love to be in front of them at that exact moment, but the price, the price is so high these days. Google made a series of changes a few years ago, which limited the number of adverts. Do you remember there used to be quite a few adverts up at the top, and then you’d have adverts down the side of the search results and then there’d be more adverts down in the bottom? Well, they got rid of all of that and now you’ve just got three adverts up at the top and the adverts look like organic listings. How did they pull that trick off? They did that in front of us and no one really noticed. Paul Green:So Google restricted the amount of advertising available, that of course, drove the price up even more because it’s basic economics there, where demand for something is high and supply is low, the price goes up. It’s pretty much all I remember from my economics A level, that one. So Google has been very clever at pushing that price up and making everything very expensive, well done, Google, but the downside is for us that it is quite expensive to advertise for new clients. And then you’ve got to bear in mind as well, there’s a lot of wastage. I have a few clients that do Google ads, one in particular who put himself through a Udemy course, you know Udemy, the online platform where you can go and learn pretty much anything? He did that course, it was about 20, 25 hours and he then self optimised his own Google ads. And he’s done very well from it, but there’s a lot of wastage and he gets a lot of clicks, but he wants business owners, managers, the same people as you. Paul Green:And he will get a lot of people clicking through and it’s like, can you help me? I’ve cracked my iPad screen and it’s some bloke at home, and that’s not really what he wants. But here’s the thing that client in particular, in fact, some of my other clients who also do Google ads and swear by it and you’ll have heard Jamie Warner say the same thing, if you go back to episode 88, which was a special episode, featuring an MSP called Jamie Warner, it’s an excellent episode to listen to. All of these people, they maintain their Google ads, despite the cost and despite the noise and you know why they do it? They do it because now and again, you get a genuine good lead. And you’ve got to look at it this way, let’s say you spend $5,000 a month on Google ads, let’s just say, and let’s say that you get one decent lead every three months and that decent lead converts into a client, what’s a new client worth to you over its lifetime? We call this average lifetime value. Paul Green:And actually for most MSPs, the average lifetime value of a new client is really high because they might be paying you one, £2000 a month and they’re going to do that every single month for at least five years, if not 10 years because you’re really good at keeping the clients, right? So even if someone is only spending a thousand dollars a month and you keep them for 10 years, that’s £120,000 worth of business. And sure, you’ve got to stick around for 10 years to collect that, although you could sell that contract onto someone else when you come to exit the business. But you get the idea £120,000 and let’s say that did cost you 10, $15,000 to generate that, that’s actually not a bad return on investment. Okay, you have to keep them for a year to get your cash back, but I reckon off that five, 10, $15,000 you spend, you’ll get other clients as well, it’s just they won’t have come through the pay per click. Paul Green:You can’t necessarily track them back to that Google ad, but it got them onto your website in the first place. And maybe then they subscribed to your newsletter or started following you on social media or connected to you on LinkedIn or read what was on your website. And maybe one day they picked up the phone and they can’t remember, they clicked a Google ad, they probably not even aware it was an ad because it looks so much like an organic listing. This is the right way to think about Google ads. If you have the cash to spare, you should absolutely set yourself up with some Google ads so that you have a presence. It’s all about dominating the digital footprint when someone goes looking for IT support companies, and there are lots and lots of little details. Paul Green:You should definitely get a company to do this for you, or as my client did go onto Udemy, buy the training course, there are lots of them there. I think it’s the best selling one is the one that you want to go for, it’s had literally 20, 30,000 sales and put yourself through that and learn what actually makes the difference with Google ads about keywords, negative keywords and all of that kind of stuff. But I do think if you’ve got the cash to do it, you should do it. There’s two reasons why you probably wouldn’t do it. One is if you’re in a super busy area or the other is if you’re in an area where actually there’s just not a lot of people, and this is something Jamie Warner mentioned back in episode 88. He was saying, if you’re in the middle of nowhere and there’s just not that much Google activity happening, then it’s kind of not worth being on Google. It’s one of those things, the only way to find out is actually to try an advertising campaign and set a big geographical area. Paul Green:I think the reverse applies, that if you’re in a massive city, if you’re in Los Angeles where there’s about 500 MSPs in Los Angeles, I don’t know if that’s an accurate figure, but it’s certainly what it feels like. I know Los Angeles is the area we could sell literally 30 times over with our MSP marketing edge. We have one MSP that has it, and we have a very long waiting list for Los Angeles. So if you were there and you were trying to rank highly and make sure your advert was shown for the search term, IT support Los Angeles, there’s a lot of competition for that. So in that instance, it might just not be worth it. But for the vast majority of other areas in most Western market, it’s got to at least be worth an experiment, give yourself three months, set a budget for three months, get someone to do it for you, or get educated to do it. Try it as a three-month experiment. It’s only got to generate one client and it’s paid for itself many times over. Voiceover:Here’s this week’s clever idea. Paul Green:Last week on the show, we talked about the theory of PR, public relations or getting free publicity. And if you haven’t listened back to that, it really would be worth perhaps before you listen to this bit, just nipping back one episode and listening to what I was talking about last week. Today, I’ve got for you some practical stuff, some actual things that you can do to get yourself free publicity. And the first thing to do is to write a press release. So I taught last week about story suggestions, that’s all the press release is, it’s your way of suggesting a story to your local media. And writing a press release is actually easy, press releases are a tool, that’s all they are, they’re a tool of public relations. Now, writing a press release and sending it out in itself, won’t get you media coverage. But if you can create a press release, that’s used as a tool to communicate a great story to a journalist, that is a different matter. Paul Green:It’s like when you’re just selling stuff in the business, if you’ve got something that people really want, it doesn’t matter if your website isn’t quite right or your marketing, your sales literature isn’t particularly effective. If people want it, then sure, those things will diminish your sales, but they won’t affect the basic demand for these things. And it’s the same with PR, if you’ve got a relevant story that’s packed with standout ability, journalists will want it. Now, if you can’t write a press release particularly well, it might make it harder for you to communicate the story, but ultimately if it’s good enough, journalists will want it anyway. So the most reliable way to communicate a story to a journalist is to send out a press release and then follow that press release up by phone. I mean, you can call them by phone before, but most of the time they’ll just say, “Hey, send me an email, send me a press release.” Paul Green:So I found, and I did actually run a PR company for a couple of years, so I’ve been both sides, I’ve been the journalist and I’ve been the PR person, that didn’t enjoy doing PR. But the best thing to do is send out the press release and 24 hours later pick up the phone, or maybe even just a few hours later, pick up the phone, call them and say, not just, “Hi, did you get my press release?” Because I hear that a thousand times a day. But I sent over a story suggestion to you, summarise it in three seconds, is that something I can help you with? And nine times out of 10, they’ll go. No, or they won’t know what it is, but do you know what? Just that little follow-up phone call, which not many people do can be quite helpful at flagging things up to the journalist. So you need to be able to communicate in a written form and journalists like to see written versions of the story you’re suggesting just because it makes it easy for them to write their version of the story. Paul Green:So whether you’re putting together a press release or even just emailing over in a basic way, these are the basic elements that you need. The first is an attention…

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Episode 96: Why your MSP should do PR, not advertising Sep 14, 2021

Show notes

In this week’s episode Do you know the difference between PR (publicity) and advertising? It’s to do with cost vs credibility… and former journalist Paul explains in this week’s podcast Also on the show this week: Three classic book suggestions you may not have heard of before, but you absolutely should read And what data is hiding within your business? The chances are you already have access to some powerful information that, once identified, could go on to help you make better business decisions Featured guest Thank you to Colin Knox from Gradient MSP for joining Paul to talk about how to unlock and use the hidden data in your MSP. Colin has spent the past 20 years deeply embedded in the technology field and is now the Founder & CEO of Gradient MSP, focused on giving vision and voice to MSPs both small and large. Colin is a technology innovator, passionate leader, and professional speaker focused on advising entrepreneurs how to grow, expand, and mature their businesses. Connect with Colin on LinkedIn. Show notes Out every Tuesday on your favourite podcast platform Presented by Paul Green, an MSP marketing expert Paul recommended the following classic marketing and business growth books: How I Raised Myself from Failure to Success in Selling by Frank Betcher Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill Success Through a Positive Mental Attitude by Napoleon Hill Register for a free copy of Paul’s book Many thanks to Stephen De Tomasi from Amigo Technology for recommending the book Work the System by Sam Carpenter On September 21st Paul will be joined by Stormie Andrews to talk about how to outsmart the competition 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, hello. Welcome to this week’s show. And here’s what we got coming up for you. Colin Knox:A lot of those owners are very stuck in the business, they’re still trying to get things going, and there’s a lot of opportunity to be able to leverage data to make better decisions moving forward. Paul Green:We’re also going to be you’re looking at PR or public relations, free publicity, and we’re going to look at it in the context of that versus paid advertising. One of them has a higher credibility than the other, and you should be doing much, much more of it. I’ll explain what that is later on in the show. Plus if you’re the last MSP on earth not yet to have a free copy of my book on MSP Marketing, I’ll tell you how you can get a copy posted to you completely free of charge. Voiceover:Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast. Paul Green:Talking of books, I’ve recently been reviewing all of the books on the very important books bookshelf in my bedroom. I had some new bedroom furniture built earlier on this year, and I took all of my favourite marketing and sales books literally the books which are the ones I recommend to MSPs I work with. And I moved them onto a special shelf in my bedroom. And I know that makes me a bit sad that I can lie in bed at night and kind of just look over at the bookshelf and look at the books, but they really are the books that are giving me the best ideas or just it sets an explosion off in my brain of ideas and creativity. They’re wonderful books. And I’ve been reviewing them recently because we’ve been setting up a new resource for our members of our MSP Marketing Edge service, where we’re recommending the very best reads for them. Paul Green:Now, I don’t want to recommend all of the books on my favourite bookshelf because they’re not all 100% relevant to MSPs. So we’ve given them a curated reading list as it were, these are the, I think it’s about 10 or 12 books that you really should read to get a good grounding in marketing for your business. And there are three books on there which they’ve not gone in my curated list, but they’re great books. And they’re actually really, really old books, I’ve got them here now. So they’re not particularly thick books, they’re kind of a couple of evenings read each of them. And as I say, they are quite old. Two of them are by the same author and I’ll check the publishing dates, but I think they’re well over 100 years old. Paul Green:But the one I’m going to start with first of all is a book called How I Raised Myself from Failure to Success in Selling, and this is by a guy called Frank Betcher. Now, I’ve just looked on the inside, this was first published in 1947. 1947, that’s crazy. And this is a really old fashioned book about selling. In fact, it’s been years since I’ve read it, but I seem to remember that the author was selling insurance and it’s literally the story of how he made himself as first a salesman, and then as a business owner just through selling. And why I like it is despite it’s old fashioned approach and selling insurance back in the 20s, 30s and 40s really was knocking on the door and seeing if someone would answer and trying to get in and sell them insurance, that was how it was done back then. But what I like about this is just the sheer amount of persistence that this guy has got. I mean literally he’s had doors slammed in his face, he’s been chased off yards by dogs. I’m sure there’s some kind of gun incident in there as well, but the guy just keeps going and keeps going and keeps going. And what he demonstrates for you is this pure enthusiasm to just do what it takes to succeed. Paul Green:So I think if you’re going to read this book, it’s not really about selling. Sure, you’ll pick up some stuff about selling, but it’s old fashioned selling. We don’t do door knocking or anything like that these days, we certainly shouldn’t be really. But if you want to read a book that’s just a raw account of persistence, and just keeping going despite all of the odds and how this guy takes himself from being nothing to being one of the highest paid salesman in America, it really is an interesting read. Paul Green:So I think it’s one of those that it’s quite good to read, not necessarily for the techniques he talks about, but just the sheer motivation and the fun of his journey. Now, the next two books are written by the same author. And you may have heard of this author before, his name is Napoleon Hill and perhaps his most famous book is called Think and Grow Rich. Now, let’s just have a quick flick through this and see when this was first written, because of course it’s out of copyright now. It’s such an old book. Oh, okay. Here we go. 1937 this was first published. So you can find this for free online and just Google Think and Grow Rich and there are various PDFs of it knocking around, or you can actually buy copies. I like paper books, so I got this one off Amazon, it didn’t cost me a huge amount of money. Paul Green:Now apparently, and I only found this out recently, but apparently these days Napoleon Hill is a little bit of a controversial figure in that people are debating whether or not he did meet the people that he claims to have met because Napoleon Hill claims to have met people like Andrew Carnegie, Henry Ford, the real industry titans of the 20s, the 30s. And he interviewed them about what made them successful. And in fact, he was the first person to coin the concept of a mastermind group, literally where you find a bunch of people and you create a group, it was almost like what we’d call a peer group today. A group of people that you can use to help you make big business decisions. Paul Green:And his first book Think and Grow Rich was their advice, it was the advice of these self-made people, and it’s their advice of how they made it. And although the language is a little bit out of date and in some places it’s a little bit turgid, it still is worth a read. Now there is another book from Napoleon Hill which is less talked about, but I absolutely love this, it’s called Success Through a Positive Mental Attitude. And this was actually written by Napoleon Hill and a guy called W. Clement Stone. Of course, both of these people are dead now, but I met someone around about 10 years ago who at the beginning of his career had worked with W. Clement Stone. And again, another self-help author and he was a businessman as well. And he wrote a great autobiography, which is called The Success System That Never Fails. So this book just like Think and Grow Rich and pretty much like the first one as well, How I Raised Myself from Failure to Success in Selling, they’re about mindset more than anything else. Paul Green:And I think if you, as you’re reading them, you place them in your mind as, “Hey, these are historical texts.” When Napoleon Hill first wrote Think and Grow Rich, you couldn’t access the kind of stuff that we can access today. You look at anything on the internet, you want to go looking for positive quotes or information or advice or how to be more positive or how to change yourself, literally we can access that stuff like that. But back in the day, they really couldn’t access this kind of stuff. This kind of stuff just wasn’t routinely around. And it was books like these that became the first kind of self-help manuals as it were for ordinary people to read and to realise that actually they didn’t have to be stuck in whatever difficult situation they were in. They could pull themselves out. They could literally pull themselves by the bootstrap and take action and change their lives. Paul Green:And if you look at, what, I guess you would call the American Dream, which really is the Western Dream, isn’t it? Which is that anyone can improve themselves. No matter where they start from, they can improve themselves and make themselves the person they want to be. And the vast majority of people believe that these days, because we see it all around us all the time. A lot of that started with these books. So I think if you’re looking for a boost, a motivational boost or a mindset boost, these are a great place to start because these are literally the great granddaddy of the books and the stuff that’s being written today. Go grab these books. They’re really cheap on Amazon. They’re probably on Audible as well, and they are a fairly entertaining read. Voiceover:Here’s this week’s clever idea. Paul Green:So I want to talk to you now about PR or public relations, getting free publicity. And this has always been one of my favourite subjects to talk about. And that’s not only because I started my career as a newspaper reporter and then went on to be a radio journalist and a presenter. In fact, I did 13 years in the media in total, but if you get your PR right, you can get journalists in your local media and local news blogs, and other places where the kind of people that you want to reach hang out, you can get these local journalists who significantly and positively affect your reputation locally, but also directly generate leads for you. And the best of all, this really doesn’t have to be expensive. In fact, this shouldn’t cost much at all, which is just wonderful. Paul Green:So we all know that local print newspapers are just dying really, really quickly. But despite this, there is still a hunger for local news. I’m sure in your market place, there are lots and lots of different news and media outlets, it’s just maybe they’re not the same as the ones that were there 20 years ago. Of course, all of our attention has moved online. A lot of the media outlets struggled to move online fast enough and to be as good as rivals that were set up, but there’s virtually no marketplace where you haven’t got, even if it’s just a local journalist who set up their own blog, or here where I live in, in Milton Keynes in the middle of the UK, what once was dominated by the local newspaper, the citizen online now, the local news is dominated by the local community radio station, which is called MKFM. And it’s crazy that a community not-for-profits business is actually doing a better job of online news coverage than a proper newspaper was. And certainly their website is a lot easier to use. Paul Green:So there are always audiences because there’s always a hunger for local news. People want to know what’s happening. And this actually gives you more opportunities than 10 or 20 years ago, because in most news businesses, there are now fewer journalists producing more content to faster deadlines. So in 1993, when I first started in newspapers, we had one edition of the newspaper to do a week. We literally did nothing on Thursdays and Fridays. And then we wrote the whole newspaper on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays, and it was probably still Thursdays. That was it. I look back now and I think that was actually quite a good life. These days, you’d have to keep the website updated 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And you’d probably have fewer staff to do it because there’d be less advertising money coming in. Paul Green:So what this all means is that the people who give the media the right kind of stories in the right kind of way are much more likely to get valuable free publicity. So let’s start by looking at the difference between publicity and advertising. So PR is any kind of communication really between your business and the public. If you write a letter to apologise to an unhappy client or even an email, in a way that’s public relations. And there is always the risk that that letter could end up on social media or on someone’s blog or on a website or something like that. If you sponsor the local scout troop or a local school to do a litter pick, that’s public relations. Paul Green:Now, publicity is just one element of public relations where your communication is done through the media. And it’s called free publicity because the media talks about your business for free. If you have to pay in any way, it’s called advertising. Now, the advantage of advertising is that you have very high control over what’s said about your business because you’re paying for that message to be published. But that control comes with a very high price, it’s got very low credibility. And this media savvy world, where we all have commercial messages thrown at us every day, every second of every day, we’ve learned to ignore most of the paid advertisements. We know that when we see an advert, the person has paid to place that message. Publicity is exactly the opposite. It’s got really high credibility because it’s a journalist saying things about your business and you can’t pay them to do that. But of course, it has very low levels of control. You can influence what a journalist says, but you can’t control it. Paul Green:So how do you actually get free publicity? Well, there are five unbreakable rules? In fact, the reason that many businesses get it wrong is because they try and over-complicate stuff. You just keep it very, very, very simple. The first rule is to know your target audience and deliver to it. Journalists, whether they’re local journalists writing for local people or they’re journalists in specific vertical or niche that you’ve got, they’re ultra focused on their audience. If the people they’re creating content for want to know about a specific subject, that’s what they’ll write about. If you turn it wanting to get publicity about something else, something that’s not really of interest to their target audience, they just simply won’t be interested in you. So you need to understand exactly what your target audience is interested in and ensure that your story suggestions fit within that. If you get that right, it becomes a lot easier to persuade journalists to run your stories. Paul Green:Unbreakable rule number two is that you’ve got to be so different, you naturally catch the attention of journalists. Any business that enjoys a certain degree of commercial success has differentiated itself from its competitors. It’s the concept of the USP, the unique selling proposition. And it’s no different when you pursue free publicity. So your stor…

Full show notes at the publisher

Episode 95: Special: An MSP web traffic explosion Sep 07, 2021

Show notes

In this week’s special episode There’s no point having an amazing website… if no-one ever sees it. Getting the most out of your website is Paul’s main theme in this week’s special episode Listen for 10+ free or low cost ideas to attract more traffic to your site. So you can turn the visitors into leads, prospects and clients This deep dive into increasing web traffic touches on many tactics, including social media, reciprocal promotions, client referrals, public relations, promotional items and paid for advertising Show notes Out every Tuesday on your favourite podcast platform Presented by Paul Green, an MSP marketing expert In this special episode Paul mentioned Google Analytics as way to find out how much traffic you’re currently getting The service Stannp was mentioned for sending automated physically printed materials Register for a free copy of Paul’s book You can join Paul in the MSP Marketing group on Facebook On September 14th Paul’s special guest will be Colin Knox from Gradient MSP, talking about how best to deal with your client’s data security compliance 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 an MSP Marketing Podcast special. Paul Green:Hello, welcome to a very special episode of the MSP Marketing Podcast. This week, we’re doing a deep dive into a subject that many people don’t talk that much about web traffic, because getting your website set up is almost the easy part. And there’s loads of places you can go for help getting your website perfect. But actually you’ve got to get traffic to your website. And then you’ve got to turn that traffic into leads, and those leads into prospects and those prospects into clients. And that’s the difficult, ongoing bit. If the website is the marketing engine of your business, then web traffic is the fuel. And without fuel, your website is an expensive and useless lump. So most MSP owners don’t invest nearly enough resource into driving enough web traffic. The days of setting up a website and people just getting to it, just visiting it, they ended, I don’t know, 20,21 years ago, the turn of the century. Paul Green:These days, your website will just sit there unvisited. So the trick is to focus on quality and not quantity. You don’t need 10,000 unique visitors every single week. You just need 50 to 100 highly targeted, relevant people every single week. The people who are most likely to go on to become great clients for your MSP. Now, as a side note, if you don’t know how many unique visitors your website currently gets, or even how many pages they view or anything like that, then install Google Analytics. It’s free, of course. It is a bit hard to read, but it gives you an insight into what’s happening in your website. And there are a lot of much more user-friendly alternatives to Google Analytics out there. If you just go and Google some, you’ll find them. Obviously, there’s a cost for that, whereas Google Analytics doesn’t cost you anything. So in no particular order then, I’ve got sort of 10, 11 plus traffic-generation techniques that are going to give you the best traffic to your website for your least investment in time and money. Voiceover:Social media. Paul Green:Facebook, Twitter, maybe Instagram, certainly LinkedIn. These are some of the most important ways of driving traffic to your website. With so many people regularly using sites like Facebook and Twitter and all of these, you’d be a fool not to use them to your advantage. All it involves is a little time and effort. Now, once you’ve set up all of your social media accounts, you just need to attract friends, or followers, or contacts. And to do this, you just get involved in what interests them and give them information that they’ll find useful. Post about stuff that relates to your business. You could give IT support tips, you could talk about your latest achievements, case studies, cybersecurity scares, all of that stuff. Now make sure that you link all of your social media sites back to your website and also link your website to your networks. Paul Green:You could even add in some kind of newsfeed widget. Have you seen that? It’s where the updates from your social media is shown in your website. The only thing is if you’re going to do that, make sure you only connect the social media accounts that you update regularly. Nothing dates your website faster than someone seeing that your last tweet was may last year. Now don’t use social media as a way of pushing promotions and offers, because that’s not really what it’s about. It’s about building a relationship with people and people will lose interest with you quickly, if you’re just pushing and selling all the time and do make sure as well that if anyone comments on any of your content that you go back and comment on it as well. In fact, one of the great ways to drive more traffic to your social media profile, and then in turn to your website, is for you to comment on other people’s stuff as well. Voiceover:Reciprocal promotions. Paul Green:Now setting up reciprocate cool promotions, which are also known as referral partnerships. Setting these up with another business can hugely increase traffic to your website and it can be very good for credibility with someone else’s audiences as well. All you got to do is find another business in your marketplace who has the same clients as you, but isn’t in competition with you. You can see why you would want to do that, because you can then help each other out in a variety of different ways. So, for example, you could run cross promotions. Literally they could promote something that you’re doing, perhaps some tripwire offer. A tripwire is, is where you get someone into the business by selling them something low cost just to get them in the habit of buying from you. And then, of course, you could promote their tripwire offer to your audience. Or you could just add each other’s contact details to your newsletters, to your websites. You could formally refer each other. Paul Green:For example, if you found a web design agency or a physical security company, like an alarm company, the things that people might ask you for referrals from, and you promote them, they promote you. You refer them, they refer you. And this can be a very, very smart way of doing it. Another way of doing this is to drive traffic to each other’s data capture. So, for example, if you’ve got a book, like we give away a book called Email Hijack to the clients of our MSP Marketing Edge service, and they can adapt that and put it on their website and gate it, which means that people have got to go through data capture to get their hands on that book. Well, you could set that up on your website. And your strategic referral partner could set up some data capture on their website. And then you email your list. So you email your email database to promote their book and they email their database to promote your book. Paul Green:Do you see what we’re doing here? So we’re not swapping data or anything dodgy like that. All we’re doing is telling our audience about something that is available to them. That can be a very smart way of doing it. Voiceover:Competitions. Paul Green:Running a competition on your website and on your social media networks as well can be a fantastic way of building up your website traffic. So give away something valuable or something that your clients or your prospects might find useful. Don’t just default to an iPad, because everyone just gives away an iPad. We’ve started doing competitions in this podcast. Producer James actually sorts them out for me. And he’s just approaching people and saying, “Hey, look, this is our audience. This is the kind of giveaway that we’ve done in the past. Have you got something big and exciting, please?” And some of the vendors say no to that, “That’s fine. Thank you for your time, anyway.” And some of the vendors say yes and they put together unique, big prizes, and it’s wonderful for us giving those away. And, obviously, we use this, in part, to drive people to listen to the podcast, but also in part to drive traffic to our website. Because to enter the competition, you have to go onto a specific page on my website. Paul Green:So we promote that in the podcast. We promote it on social media and we get quite a lot of traffic to that page for the week that we run the competition. So you can create quite a buzz about your competition on your website, on your social media platforms. You could even take out adverts to promote your competition as well. You just got to be careful not to attract the professional compers. So there are all sorts of forums out there full of professionals who swap tips on where competitions are. That’s why giving away an iPad is not a sensible thing to do, because it will attract compers, not the prospects that you want to attract. We only give away stuff that would be of interest to the average MSP owner. Just make sure you drive traffic back to your website for people to enter that competition, because that’s a critical part of this. You could even build something in where the more people they tell about this, the more entries they get into the competition. And there are some WordPress plugins and some Facebook plugins that you can find to do that. Paul Green:I’m not sure if business owners and managers would go for that. Consumer’s word, but we’re not interested in consumers. But it’s one of those things that it might be worth experimenting with. Voiceover:Client referrals. Paul Green:People trust what their friends and their peers say a lot more than what strangers say, which is why client referrals are so, so powerful. So to encourage your existing clients to spread the word about you and actually be a source of traffic to your website, you could set up a formal referral program. Maybe you offer them a discount, or a reward, or some incentive when one of their friends books an appointment with you. They don’t even need to buy, they just refer this. Now I don’t know, would this work? I’m not convinced certainly here in the U.K., British people, don’t like to feel they’re being bought. So maybe you could make it win-win, you know how like if you refer Dropbox, you get a bit of extra whatever it is, a bit of extra storage and they get a bit of extra storage. Paul Green:Maybe you’ve set something like that up. So the referrer and the referee get rewarded. I certainly wouldn’t reward people for a purchase. I would just reward people for the referral. So if they refer someone to you and that person visits your website or downloads your book or whatever it is, then that’s the thing that should be rewarded. I got to be honest. I think that you don’t need to reward people for referrals. There’s a great book about this and I’ve mentioned it a few times in the podcast. It’s called Unstoppable Referrals by Steve Gordon. Go and read that it talks about putting together a referral pack. And, of course, that referral pack, which could be a book, could be a pack of materials, but that would be hosted on your website. And therefore referrals turn into website traffic. Voiceover:Write articles, blogs, and contribute to forums. Paul Green:There are thousands of blogs, forums, discussion groups out there about every niche and marketplace imaginable. Now, by writing engaging articles, you are demonstrating your expertise and giving people a good reason to visit your website, to view those articles. There’s also positions you as an expert, which is great, because everyone prefers to work with an expert. Experts write, experts present. They do things like podcasts. They do videos, but especially they write. So if you’ve got a blog on your website, if you haven’t got a blog, come on, get a blog, Google loves blogs. It loves it when you add new content every single week and when you post relevant articles to it. Now there are some services out there where you can buy unique blog content. There’s a few tech services. I don’t do one of these, because we’d have to do customised, bespoke content for every single client. Because you can’t put one article on hundreds of different websites. Otherwise, Google would recognise that as duplicate content. That wouldn’t be a good thing at all. Paul Green:But if you’re not a writer yourself, just find a writer on Fiverr or Upwork or other places like that. You can easily find writers. There are more writers than there are writing gigs. So it’s very much a buyer’s market. Then, once you’ve created some content, you can find forums, and it might be Facebook groups, it might be LinkedIn groups, it might be Reddit, dare I say. Reddit, I think is a bit of the wild west, but there are all sorts of places out there where your potential clients are hanging out. Are there Facebook groups for business in your local area? Are there LinkedIn groups for business in your local area. There most certainly are? Are there on Reddit? Are people discussing the vertical that you’re in? Are there other groups, are there news groups. Anywhere that anyone who could both you, go and find where they could be. Paul Green:And once you do that, you get involved in these and you start to make your mark. So you do this by adding value, you contribute, you write useful answers. You give good ideas, you don’t sell, you never sell. And then over a period of time, as you start to build a reputation in that group, you can start to just drop in your latest article. Or maybe if someone’s asking you a question about something, you write an article answering that question. That would be great, because you’ve then got a valid reason for posting that answer in there. So you can include links to your websites by doing this, just make sure it’s always relevant to the discussion topic. And some forums also allow you to create a signature. And, of course, in your signature, I would just have a link straight back to your web address. Paul Green:Essentially in forums and stuff, you should write things which provide knowledge, which gives advice about specific technology, relevant subjects. And at the end, squeezing the link for your website for the reader to find out more. This also strikes me that you could also approach your local news blogs, your local media outlets, newspapers, magazines, radio stations, local TV stations, if you’ve got them, and you could write content for them as a trusted expert. And that would send some great traffic to your website. You could show them your contributions to the forums and the content that you have written on your website, even though you haven’t written it yourself. And that would be the way that you show them that you can actually write and you would be a useful contributor for them. Voiceover:Public relations. Paul Green:Moving on from this. Then public relations or PR is actually a very effective way of getting news coverage for your MSP and getting some traffic to your website. So send press releases to your relevant media, either your local media or the media in your vertical, on a regular basis. And this will help you to create a steady flow of website traffic when they publish the stories. This also builds trust and shows that you’re an authority, because people perceive that journalists pick the highest authority figures to interview and to feature in their media titles. And the reality is they don’t. I was a journalist myself for 13 years. You pick the most convenient people. And often the most convenient people are those who are sending out press releases on a monthly basis. So being seen in these titles is great, but you must give the journalists solid reasons to publish your story, including your website address. Paul Green:So that starts with making sure that your press release, which is a story suggestion, is actually newsworthy. Now, if you send out a press release, explaining that you provide or you…

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Episode 94: Are you the most expensive MSP in town? You should be Aug 31, 2021

Show notes

In this week’s episode Do you feel uncomfortable about submitting a quote in a proposal or increasing your prices? Many MSPs worry about this, but this week Paul explains why you should always be the most expensive MSP in town Speaking of proposals, how do you stop wasting time submitting proposals to people you never hear from again? This week’s featured guest talks about the importance of capturing your prospect’s ‘story’ before and during the process of creating a proposal And live events have finally returned! Heard about DattoCon 21? It’s back, bigger and better, for 3 days in October. Now as a hybrid event, you can win either a place at the event in Seattle or VIP places for the virtual experience – just for listening Featured guest Thank you to Reuben Swartz from Mimiran for joining Paul to talk about how MSPs can create better proposals. A software engineer to who accidentally became a sales and marketing consultant. He built Mimiran, the CRM for solo consultants who love serving clients but hate selling, the CRM he wished he’d had when he was trying to use tools built for his much bigger clients. When not working, Reuben is probably trying to keep up with his wife, his twins or his dog. Connect with Reuben on LinkedIn. Show notes Out every Tuesday on your favourite podcast platform Presented by Paul Green, an MSP marketing expert Paul recommended the productivity app TextExpander Producer James told you about the chance to win access to the huge DattoCon 21 event. Find out more and enter, (before midnight UK time September 5th). While talking about creating better proposals, Paul’s guest recommended their ‘fill-in-the-blank’ template on the Mimiran site Many thanks to Jamie Warner, CEO of eNerds and Invarosoft for recommending the book Monetizing Innovation by Madhavan Ramanujam On September 7th Paul will be hosting a special episode all about increasing web traffic 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 there and welcome back to the show. Here’s what’s coming up for you this week. Reuben Swartz:MSPs, for various reasons, often write some of the worst proposals, and then they complain that sales is hard and that the customer only compares people on price. Paul Green:We’re going to be talking this week about why you should be the most expensive MSP in your town. There’s just too much competition in the middle of the market. And frankly, you don’t want to be the cheapest in town at all. Later on, we’ll discuss why you should be the most expensive and exactly how you can do it. Plus, we’ve got such a great giveaway this week. Producer James is going to be here later on telling you how you can win an in-person or a virtual VIP place at the huge DattoCon 21 event happening this year. Three days of sessions, networking, and insights, just for MSPs. You’re going to love it. And we’ll tell you how you could win a VIP place later on in the show. Voiceover:Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast. Paul Green:I’m a little bit of a productivity geek. You put some technology in front of me that’ll help me save time or get more things done, or just generally make life easier, and I’m seriously up for that. And a couple of weeks ago, I started using something called TextExpander. Now there are dozens of services that do exactly the same thing. Some are free. TextExpander costs, I think it’s about $4 a month, something like that. But the basic idea with TextExpander is wherever you are in your computer, whichever program you’re using, you can just use a couple of basic keyboard shortcuts to copy and past in some common texts. So, for example, I have a number of standard replies when I’m setting up guest interviews for this podcast. Cause I actually do that myself. I handpick our guests, and I email the guests. Paul Green:So if now I’m setting up a guest interview and they asked me, what are, fairly standard common questions about the format of the show and all of this kind of thing. Whereas, previously, I’d have to go and find that either in a notepad somewhere or find it on an email. Now I just type in Z-I-N-T, the int as an interview, “z-int” and in my email, I hear this little sound. In fact, I’ll play you the sound. So that’s the sound of TextExpander, and it means that it’s just found the thing that I’ve typed. So I typed “z-int”, and it’s now pasted in that text. And what’s really cool is you can use some scripts with it as well. So if I copied the person’s name, and then I fire “z-int,” it will actually insert that person’s name for me. Paul Green:Can you see how this is just saving me so much time? Anything that you type over and over again, you can create as a keyboard shortcut. I absolutely love it. Even down to now when I sign off an email. So I always type “cheers, Paul,” at the end of an email. I don’t know why I do that. I’ve been doing that for about 15, 20 years. It’s just something I do. And for years and years and years, by force of habit, I’ve just typed. Cheers, Paul. Now I don’t. I type “Z.,” and that instantly brings up “cheers, Paul,” and then adds another couple of return breaks as well. And I really need to set up the script where it will send the email because I’m going to use that in an email so I can set it up so that it will press the keyboard shortcuts of whatever it is on Gmail, to actually send that email as well. Paul Green:Now I know that’s only saving me, let’s say, three seconds every single time I send an email. But if that saves me a minute a day, that’s five minutes a week, that adds up to a couple of hours a year. Over the lifetime of me running my business, that’s going to save me hours and hours and hours, maybe a day. And I know that sounds ridiculous, but actually, it’s the little thing isn’t it? It’s the compound effect. If you’re saving a little bit of time here and a little bit of time there, that’s a very smart thing to do. So do have a look at TextExpander. We’ll put a link to it in the show notes. There is pricing for teams. So you can actually share it with your team, which makes me think for a support team, that would be a very sensible thing to do. Obviously, you have to pay a little bit more than that, but it’s completely cloud-based, and that’s why you can share it out amongst your team or just use the personal one or get a free one. There are all sorts of free ones out there. There are plenty. If you just type in TextExpander alternatives, then you’ll find them there on Google. But do have a look at this. If you ever find yourself typing the same thing over and over again. Voiceover:Here’s this week’s clever idea. Paul Green:Now, this might sound crazy, but I believe that you should be the most expensive MSP in your marketplace. Premium people are attracted to a service they believe to be independent, bespoke, and high quality. And that’s how you should be positioning your business, because yes, the best clients expect to pay more for quality products and great service. By being more expensive, you could actually win more business as people will want to be with you, and they will want to stay with you, the right kind of people, not the penny-pinches, but you don’t want the penny-pincher clients. You really don’t. Paul Green:Now thinking outside of our world, some dentists are very good at this. They seem to charge very, very high prices. And those that charge the highest prices often have a waiting list to join their dental practice. And they have very loyal clients who don’t leave because they know that there’s a waiting list to get in. And the dentists do this by offering the highest quality. So they have longer appointments, they have more equipment, they have better products, they have better offices. And so, because of all of this, they get the very best clients in town who are willing to pay a little bit more for the best. They don’t get those low-value, hassle clients who query the bills, who moan a lot and just aren’t particularly compliant. No one wants those clients. In fact, if you have some of those clients now, then you absolutely must actively change your marketing, your packaging, to scare those low-quality clients off and simply attract a better quality of clients. Paul Green:Now, one pleasant side effect of charging a little bit more for a premium service and being the most expensive in town. It means that your gross profit margins are likely to be higher, which is going to give you a much better chance of a better net profit. Because of course, the net profit is what’s left at the end. Isn’t it? It’s your money to take out of the business once you’ve paid tax on it. So there’s no downside to being the most expensive. The only thing that’s going to stop you from doing it is fear. But Paul, what if we’re too expensive, what if we’re too expensive and we put people off? Well, the good news is you can just nudge your prices up to do this. You don’t have to instantly put your prices up and be the most expensive, just like that on day one. What you can do is just nudge it up. I’m talking here about being more expensive for new clients. Paul Green:So take your prices right now, whatever they are per-user or per seat, or per device, however you do it, just add a couple of quid, a couple of dollars on. And then when you win the next client, add a few more quid on, and the next client add a few more on. The market will soon tell you when you’ve reached what is acceptable in your marketplace because depending on where you are will depend on what that is. Some areas, you can get away with charging a lot more than you can in other areas. The only way to find out is to be constantly nudging your prices up, but never, ever be scared to be the most expensive in your marketplace. It is really the route to better clients who stay longer, pay more, and ultimately, they make you more money. Voiceover:Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast. James Lett:Hey, this is producer James. This is the fourth prize we’ve given away, and live events are back. This podcast has nearly reached its 100th episode, and the prizes are getting bigger. Your MSP could be getting so much out of this month’s prize. You will be inspired at DattoCon 21, a huge three-day event between October 11th, and 13th and wherever you are, you’ll enjoy a valuable experience. Be that in-person in Seattle, or if you can’t travel or you’re in the UK, elsewhere in the EMEA region, Australia, or wherever you are in the world, the virtual aspect is going to be exceptional. There’ll be loads of experts, fellow MSPs, local champions, new developments, insights, and chances to network. The first-ever hybrid DattoCon is due to be the biggest and best yet. And, of course, you don’t need to be a Datto customer to attend. As I thank you for listening, right now, you can win either an in-person place at DattoCon being held at the Washington State Convention Center in Seattle or if you can’t make it in person, two VIP virtual places. So this is what you need to do. Just go to this special page paulgreensmspmarketing.com/win. Pop in your details and click enter. A winner will be drawn at random at some point after we closed at midnight UK time this Sunday, September 5th. So good luck. Enter right now at paulgreensmspmarketing.com/win. Voiceover:The big interview. Reuben Swartz:Hi folks, Reuben Swartz here. Founder of Mimiran the CRM for solo consultants who love serving clients but hate selling, which I accidentally built because I thought for the longest time that the last thing the world needed was another CRM, but it turns out that we do. I’m also the host and Chief Nerd on the Sales for Nerds podcast. And I’ve done a lot of work with MSPs, and I guess I’m a technical person myself. I think I get that notion of some of us have a little bit more interest in technology than the sales and marketing that we need to actually build a business around that technology. And Paul, I’m just really happy to be here. Thanks for having me. Paul Green:No, it’s a pleasure. And thank you for coming on, and you have a much, much better podcast name than I do. Sales for Nerds is just such a great podcast title. It really is. Reuben Swartz:Oh, thanks. Paul Green:I’m going to steal that. I might make this MSP Marketing for Nerds. Reuben Swartz:There we go. Paul Green:There we go. It’s a sister podcast. So there are literally 15 different things that I could talk to you about. And we’re going to have to get you back on the show in 2022 to address another sales issue for us, another sales area. What I wants to talk about today, though, is proposals because I know this is one of your specialist areas and most MSPs or many MSPs really struggle to get across what they want to get across in their proposals. Do you find that? Reuben Swartz:I have seen a lot of really bad proposals in my time, and I’ve written some really bad proposals in my time, I have to admit. And I think MSPs, for various reasons, often write some of the worst proposals. And then they complain that sales is hard and that the customer only compares people on price. And gosh, this is just awful. And I hate this, and it doesn’t have to be that way. Paul Green:And is it just MSPs that have terrible proposals, or do you see this widespread across a number of different sectors? Reuben Swartz:It’s pretty bad for most people. I think a lot of us learn the wrong lessons about what our proposal is. And I know I did when I started. And so one of my mantras now is, a proposal is a story, not a brochure. A lot of us tend to write brochures that happened to have the customer’s name and logo on the front, and we call it a proposal. And then we wonder why they’re not so eager to sign. We’ve got to create a story starring the customer. And I think for MSPs, a lot of times, there’s so much technical detail on jargon in there, and you might be very comfortable with that as an MSP, but the whole reason you’re there is because the customer’s not comfortable with it. So I’ve seen 10, 20 page proposals filled with tech specs and all kinds of nonsense. You can read through it. And even if you understand all the technology, it’s still not clear how you are solving the prospect’s problem. So if you’re handing over that kind of brochure to somebody, and you’re wondering why they’re not signing, make sure that you’re starting from their perspective and telling their story. Paul Green:One of the things I talk about on this podcast a lot, and certainly when we’re looking at things like websites and other types of marketing, is how you’ve got to connect with people at an emotional level. Would you argue that proposals are exactly the same? Reuben Swartz:Absolutely. I think we like to think that we’re rational creatures, and especially if you’re a techie-based person, we like to think that we’re rational, and it’s not that we’re irrational. It’s just that we have to use emotion if we’re going to change how we do things. We all have a million things on our to-do list. I call it eating more broccoli. We all know we should eat more broccoli and less chocolate or whatever. But unless we go to the doctor and they tell us we’re going to drop dead of a heart attack or something like that, unless we’re worried about something emotionally, it’s really hard to change because we have so much going on. And I think, especially, if you’re just showering people with tech specs and not connecting with their story, you’re not going to get them to make a change. Reuben Swartz:So when we tell the story in the proposal, we want to understand not just the technical pain and not just the business pain, but the real-life pain behind that. And that’s where the emotion lies. It might be that their systems go down every once in a while, and that cost them X thousands of dollars or euros or pounds or whatever it might be. But the real issue i…

Full show notes at the publisher

Episode 93: Should your MSP’s logo go on your car? Aug 24, 2021

Show notes

In this week’s episode Want your MSP to stand out in the crowd and really be noticed? There is a solution that involves your car and a LOT of vinyl plastic. Check out Paul’s brilliant tried and tested method for making a lot of noise and being seen in the marketplace Also, did you know your MSP needs a Star Wars-esq opening scrolling story? Okay, maybe not literally yellow text fading into the distance, but Paul explains how creating the right backstory can set up your MSP for increased growth Plus on the show this week, Paul’s featured guest explains exactly how he grew his MSP and navigated some very challenging times Featured guest Thank you to Nick Moran from Powernet for joining Paul to talk about how he grew his MSP to have offices in 3 cities and 85 staff. After co-founding Evolve IT back in 1993 and merging with Powernet in 2019, Nick still looks the same as he did at 18(!). He loves his music, kebabs and travelling with the family. Connect with Nick on LinkedIn. Show notes Out every Tuesday on your favourite podcast platform Presented by Paul Green, an MSP marketing expert Producer James told you about a forthcoming chance to win access to the huge DattoCon 21 event Many thanks to the business guide Steve Preda for recommending the book High Output Management by Andy Grove On August 31st Paul will be joined by Reuben Swartz from Mimiran, talking about how to create better MSP proposals Got a question from the show? Email Paul directly: hello@paulgreensmspmarketing.com Episode transcription Voiceover:Fresh every Tuesday for M`SPs 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’ve got in store for you today. Nick Moran:Once that client lift and they outsourced direct to the vendor, we have to look for a new revenue opportunity. Paul Green:We’re also going to be talking about your backstory today, your origin story, how you came to be the owner of the business. This is a nice follow-up to something we did in last week’s show about whether or not you should build your brand because your backstory can actually form an important part of your marketing, of the packaging of your business. We’ve also got some news this episode of another giveaway. In next week’s show, we’ll be giving away a fantastic prize and producer, James, will be here later on to tell you all about it. Voiceover:Paul Green’s MSP Marketing podcast. Paul Green:Should you put your MSP’s logo on your car, so your branding on your car? If you can, 100%, yes. Do it, do it, do it. Now I’m a little bit biased in this because in my earlier career, before I started doing marketing and getting involved with MSPs, we’re talking in the past century, I worked in radio. In fact, I did 10 years in radio and the last few years, I was running the radio stations. One of the greatest marketing tools that we had as a radio station were our promotional vehicles. Paul Green:Now, you may have heard of these before because this was a concept which went worldwide in the 1990s, but at all the stations I worked at, we had promotional vehicles called Black Thunders. Did any of your local radio stations have Black Thunders? They were basically black four by fours, as we call them here in the UK, or SUVs as they’re known in the states and we’d have two or three of them, and we’d plaster them with our radio station logo. They were completely stand out. They were the ultimate look at me vehicle. In fact, it used to be really cool driving around in those because people would wave at you and they’d honk their horn. You get stopped by the police quite a lot, normally because they want to see if there’s someone famous in the car, which there very rarely is. Paul Green:Anyway, those vehicles were worth their weight in gold. The reality is there were just too knackered, overused vehicles, but we just got them out everywhere. We would have them out on the road, literally from six in the morning till seven, eight o’clock at night. We would park them up in all sorts of places. If we were at an event, they were at an event and they were our main marketing tool. Most of the stations I worked at were quite small and didn’t have big marketing budgets. Whatever money we did have, we just put into things that would get us out there. The vehicles were a critical part of that. We only had two promotional vehicles at my favourite station, the one I worked at in Peterborough in Cambridgeshire. We only had two vehicles, but we made it look like we had five, or six or seven. We worked those vehicles, and worked them, and worked them and worked them. I realised, at the time, just how it was to wrap your vehicles, to put branding on your vehicles. Yes, you need to do this if you possibly can. Paul Green:Now, I appreciate you may only have one vehicle in your business, which is yours and you might not want to drive around with the name of your business plastered all over your personal car and I get that because actually, for a couple of years, my company car was one of those promotional vehicles and I had all of that promotional stuff all over. What’s really cool when you’re working is not cool at the weekend when people are approaching you and coming and asking for a car sticker. I used to get quite a lot of abuse as well. People would leave bits of kebab on my car when it was parked in the street. It was a bit of a random thing that was. Paul Green:Anyway, you might choose not to have that as your own personal vehicle, but if you have any business vehicles at all, wrap them. By wrapping them, I mean, you don’t just put your logo on you. Literally, you get the whole car wrapped. This costs you a couple of thousand pounds or dollars, but it is worth every inch. You get the most impactful designer you can find. You get them to design an incredible design and you wrap it and you have it so that they cannot ignore those vehicles. Even if you’ve only got one of those, that will have an impact. If you’ve got two or three or more, incredible, absolutely incredible. If you have any vans or any vehicles at all that are involved with the business, or even if you’ve got the guts to do this with your own personal car and show it to your family, then just get it done, but you’ve got to go for impact. Paul Green:When you have promotional vehicles like these or you wrap and put branding on your vehicle, you cannot be subtle about it. You’ve got to be very, very overt. It’s got to be in their face. Oh, and don’t forget as well, when you wrap a vehicle, it’s not just what goes on the front and the sides and on the back, you’ve also got the roof. In fact, if you think about it, if you’ve got vans and your engineers, your technicians are taking those vans to office buildings, well office buildings aren’t just single story buildings. There are people on floors, two, three, four, and five. Some of those people will look out the window and they’ll see your company vehicle. Wrap the top of the vehicle. In fact, you could be very clever and you could have a message put on the top of the vehicle Like someone in this building is benefiting from IT support from your company name. You could probably put that in fewer words, but you get the idea. Wouldn’t that be cool? Imagine what impact you can have in your local area with branded vehicles. Voiceover:Here’s this week’s clever idea. Paul Green:Last week on the show, we were talking about your brand and whether or not you should be investing time, and energy and cash into developing your brand. Pretty much, the answer I gave was no. Unless you’ve got a really, really big business and you’re buying in a lot of marketing resource, I wouldn’t worry too much about your brand because the brand is the emotional feeling that people get. Instead, focus the small amounts of time and cash you’ve got us on doing practical, direct response marketing that actually gets people talking to you and gets leads into the business. Paul Green:However, there is easy piece of branding that you can do, and you can put this within your packaging, within your marketing, and that is getting your backstory, right. Your backstory is your story, or the business’s story. It’s how you got to where you are today. Now, I don’t mean some kind of turgid account of facts and dates. We established the business in 1972 as a one-man band. Then in 1981, we moved to so and so building down the road. A particularly interesting thing happened in 1986. No one wants to read that, they really don’t. In fact, this is boring and it’s only of interest to you and maybe to your family. Paul Green:No, a powerful backstory is a very carefully put together tale. It’s a story and it’s created in such a way that it triggers an emotional response in your clients and in your prospects. Let me give you an example. Maybe you’ve heard of Stelios. Stelios is a UK entrepreneur and he founded a company called EasyJet, which is an airline. It’s a budget airline. He’s actually the son of a wealthy shipowner. He’s got, I think it’s Cypriot roots. Get this, this will be nice to happen. In the early 1990s, his father gave him 30 million pounds to set up a shipping business. That was called Stelmar Shipping. Then Stelios later, he built it up and he sold it for about a billion pounds, which is nice work. I wish my dad would give me 30 million pounds to go and set up a shipping business. Paul Green:Anyway, he launched EasyJet because while he was running the shipping business, he was flying around a lot. He traveled a lot and he had to use the old big legacy airlines. Every time he was on a plane, Stelios would sit there and think this is just crazy. I’m being served up food that I don’t want and yet I had to pay for it as part of the ticket. I’ve paid 400 quid for this trip. There should be a budget airline where the earlier you book, the less you pay and that’s what Stelios did. In fact, he went on to create not just EasyJet, but arguably he created the entire modern budget airline industry that’s now worldwide, where you simply pay for what it is that you want, cheap flights with no frills. The earlier you book, the less you pay. Now, that’s a real backstory because it explains why Stelios was motivated to set up the first modern budget airline. He was really frustrated with the way that the big airlines were doing things and he believed that people shouldn’t have to pay for things that they didn’t want. What’s the backstory for your MSP? Paul Green:What’s the back story that paints a picture in the minds of the reader and it tells them why they should trust your business? I mean, it could be something as simple as your name is passionate about IT and has been for as long as he can remember. As a child growing up in town name, he was fascinated by all sorts of computers and was always playing with them. His bedroom was crammed with all sorts of technology as he experimented with computers, constantly pushing the limits. It was no surprise to anyone when you left school and announced that you dedicate your life to helping businesses get the most out of their IT. That was 20 years ago and today, your name is still in love with IT, computers and technology. He’s the owner and the principal technology strategists of your business name, the leading IT support company in your town, with more than 10 highly qualified support technicians. Paul Green:Now, that is a backstory because you see, even though Stelios was really wealthy before he founded EasyJet, what’s relevant is not really the money side, it’s a man sitting on a plane, getting frustrated and thinking, I’d like to do this better. Maybe you working somewhere and getting frustrated and thinking, I want to run my own MSP, my own IT support company the way I want to do it because I’m passionate about the technology and helping clients, but I don’t think we do a very good job here. I want to do it my way. That would be a great backstory. Even if you only opened your business a couple of years ago, you still have a backstory. It’s unique to you because you had a unique motivation. Get that backstory, put it on your website, sprinkle it throughout your marketing materials. The purpose of a backstory, remember, is to communicate passion. Show passion for what you do and how you do it and clients will not be able to resist you. Voiceover:Paul Green’s MSP Marketing podcast. James Lett:Hey, this is producer James here to tell you about something cool happening on the podcast next week. As this show approaches its 100th episode, the prizes are getting bigger and we’re celebrating the return of physical events in the MSP world. The huge three-day DataCon 21 conference is for the first time, not only a physical event in Seattle, but if you can’t travel or you’re in the UK or elsewhere in the EMEA region, Australia or wherever you are in the world, it’s been equally designed as an awesome virtual experience too. If you’re an MSP, this is the big event, loads of speakers, sessions, networking, and insights to inspire you. As a listener, you could either be winning a place DataCon 21 in person, if you can make it to Seattle between the 11th and the 13th of October or a pair of VIP virtual places. Just listen to next week’s show, Episode 94, out on August 31st. Voiceover:The big interview. Nick Moran:Hi. My name’s Nick Moran I’m the Co-founder and Director of Powernet. Started back in 1993 and I’m an MSP just like you. Paul Green:Thank you so much for coming onto the show, Nick. We’ve got so many things to talk about because you’ve got an incredible business and I want to explore how you started that business, what you’ve done to grow it over the years. Then in the second part of our interview, I want to talk about your marketing. I know you have a pretty good inbound marketing strategy that I’d like us to explore, but tell us about your business. Where are you now? I know physically, you’re in Australia, but where are you now in terms of number of techs, number of clients, that sort of thing? Nick Moran:We’ve been operating now for about 28 years and we’ve got offices in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane, but we pretty much look after small to medium businesses throughout Australia. We’ve got about 85 staff, probably three quarters of them are technically based. Paul Green:In terms of running the business day-to-day, you said you’re the co-founder. Do you have a management team that works with you? I guess with 85 people, you’d have to. Nick Moran:We’ve got a CEO that’s been appointed and he’s got a leadership team around him, and myself and the other director are a part of that leadership team. Paul Green:You’ve got it easy. You’re just out playing golf all day. Nick Moran:I wish, I wish. Maybe one day, but yeah, certainly it’s a little bit easier now. Different range of issues than what it used to. Paul Green:I bet. That’s pretty impressive growth and obviously, you’ve taken a number of years to do that. It’s good, steady, solid growth. Tell us the story. How did you get started in the first place? Nick Moran:It’s a little bit interesting and in some ways, I sort of fell into it. I finished high school in 1992. Had a lot of fun in high school, but didn’t do much work. Probably not blessed with too many opportunities straight after it. My dad actually won $7,000 at the horse races and kindly tried to push me into doing something rather than working at the local service station. Pushed me into running my own computer business and with nothing to lose, I said, “Yep, no worries. All right, let’s do it.” It took off from there. Paul Green:That’s awesome. I’m guessing back in… So what are we talking? ’92, ’93, was it mostly residential? Was it just break, fix work? Did you have a shop? Nick Moran:First thing I did was I got a really small shop and it was literally, I was just sitting behind a desk. I’d advertise in the local paper. Someone would come up and I’d try to sell them a computer. If they went ahead with…

Full show notes at the publisher

Episode 92: Is it a waste of money to build your MSP’s brand? Aug 17, 2021

Show notes

In this week’s episode Do you want to be the Nike, Apple or Tesla of the MSP world – a brand that people want and talk about all the time? This week Paul talks about branding for MSPs and what you should focus on In a related subject, how do you stand out in a vast ‘field’ of other MSPs? The answer is to be a purple cow, and Paul explains what it is, and how to use it to grab your prospects’ attention Plus Paul’s brilliant guest this week explains how you can sell co-managed IT and work alongside your clients’ internal IT departments Featured guest Thank you to Greg Jones from Datto for joining Paul to talk about how MSPs can to sell co-managed solutions. Greg Jones is Business Development Director for Datto within the EMEA region. He has worked in the IT sector for the past 20+ years, providing clear and visionary management approach to the development of IT in many sectors/organisations. Greg started his career in IT for the public sector after securing a senior IT management position within the local authority he then went on to private consultancy whilst working with many cutting-edge technologies for public and private sector. Greg is extremely passionate about the MSP landscape & loves working with business owners / Partners of Datto to drive strategy and growth. Connect with Greg on LinkedIn. To access free business advice from a panel of 40 industry experts (including Paul), you can email mspofficehours@datto.com Show notes Out every Tuesday on your favourite podcast platform Presented by Paul Green, an MSP marketing expert In discussing how to make your business stand out, Paul mentioned the book Purple Cow by Seth Godin Find out more about Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Edge Greg Jones mentioned the free MSP business advice available by emailing mspofficehours@datto.com Many thanks to Joey Donovan Guido from Cuppa SEO Web Design for recommending the book Essentialism by Greg McKeown On August 24th Paul will be joined by Nick Moran from Powernet, talking about he grew his MSP in a dramatic way 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 to another episode of the show. Here’s what we’ve got coming up for you this week. Greg Jones:Many MSPs have worked with organisations that have some form of internal IT department or an IT champion within the business. Paul Green:We’ve also got a book suggestion from SEO expert, Joey Donovan. That’s going to be at the end of the show. And we’ll be talking about your brand. Now I’m a direct response marketing person. I don’t really do brand building. So we’ll talk today about whether or not your brand is important. Is it just about your logo or is it about how someone feels when they are thinking about your business? That’s coming up later in today’s show. Voiceover:Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast. Paul Green:So tell me, have you read the book Purple Cow by Seth Godin? It came at a roundabout, I think it’s about 2003, so around about 18 years ago. Actually, I was on holiday in San Francisco. I think it was San Francisco, or it was at LA? I think it was San Francisco in California. And I picked it up at a Borders bookshop, and I thought it was amazing. And I’d read it about two hours later, because you know what it’s like when you’re on a holiday, on a vacation, you can just pick up a book and sit and read it in a bar or something like that. And it was such a good book. And Seth Godin is a great author. It’s worth you following his blog. He blogs daily at sethgodin.com. The whole concept of Purple Cow is, if you look in a field and there are a hundred cows and they’re all black and white, it’s very difficult for any one cow to stand out. Paul Green:But if one of those cows was purple, that cow is going to completely stand out, and that cow is going to get more than its fair share of attention compared to the other cows. That’s what a purple cow is. And the challenge for you is to make your business a purple cow, because when someone’s looking at switching to a different MSP, there are hundreds of MSPs to choose from, aren’t there? I mean, how many direct competitors do you have just in your town? What about in the next town or the next area? What about national players that are advertising in your area? There’s an absolute plethora of choice for ordinary business owners and managers to pick from. Far too many MSPs. Oh, and do you know what? As well, everyone’s marketing looks the same. If you don’t believe me, just go and look at 10 or 20 websites of you and all of your direct competitors. Paul Green:In most marketplaces, most MSPs have exactly the same website. Yeah, sure it looks different and it’s got different words, but essentially it’s saying the same things. There’s no pictures of people. There’s lots of pictures of tech, and servers, and network cables and stuff like that. It’s not very human. It’s written about technology and it’s not written about business growth. And yet that’s what people buy from you. They don’t buy technology, they buy things that allow them to grow and run their business. So being the purple cow is about standing out. It’s about being remarkable. Because the reality is that 80% of what you do is exactly the same as what most MSPs do. So what we’ve got to look at is the 20%. What’s the 20% that makes you different, that makes your business remarkable? Is it the way that you support people? So all MSPs offer support, but do you do it in a way which is more convenient for people? Paul Green:Do you offer 24/7 support using an outsource partner? What do you do that’s different? What are the little things that makes your business better, just simply better than all of your competitors? And then you’ve got to look at not just the products, but the packaging, because it’s all very well being different and better, but no one knows about that at the point they’re thinking of buying from you. How can you make your marketing, your packaging better? How can you make that remarkable? If you can weave being remarkable into every single part of your business, this is how you stand out. This is how you become a purple cow. Now I’m trying to recap a book that I read 18 years ago, and I flicked through it before this podcast. I didn’t read it in full again. But you need to read this book. It really is a great book and it will help you understand why it’s so difficult for you to generate leads and why it’s so difficult for you to stand out, because you’re the same. In their eyes, most MSPs are samey, samey, samey, and samey kills sales. Paul Green:Read this book by Seth Godin, become the purple cow, and then you will be the standout MSP in your area. The rewards will be absolutely plentiful. Voiceover:Here’s this week’s clever idea. Paul Green:So if you need to change the packaging and improve the packaging, part of that of becoming a purple cow is looking at your brands. Now your brand is not your business’s name or your logo, and it’s not really you or your staff. Unfortunately, your brand can’t be as tangible as that. No. Your brand is, get this, it’s the emotional and psychological relationship that you have with your clients and prospects. It’s a completely intangible thing. What that really means is your brand is the emotional reaction that someone has when they come into contact with your business. So look around you now, have a look at the logos that you’re surrounded by. Maybe you see a logo on your phone or on your computer. So let’s say you’ve got an iPhone. What do you feel about Apple? When you look at an iPhone and when you see the Apple logo, what do you feel? Paul Green:So me, I’m a complete Apple fan boy. I’ve got an iPhone, I’ve got an iPad, I’ve got a Mac. I’ve had several of these. We have an Apple TV. The only thing I don’t have is an Apple Watch because I’m just not a big fan of smartphone watches. But I am an absolute Apple fan boy. And so when I see an Apple thing, or if I even walk past an Apple store, I feel good feelings. Yes, I know I’m overpaying for tech and I’ve convinced myself that I won’t get a virus on my Mac. But it’s the emotional reaction, that’s the whole point. Whereas when I see the Microsoft logo, I feel distress. I mean, it’s been years, it’s been nine years since I switched from PCs to Macs, but I feel, I know Windows pays your mortgage, but when I think of Windows, my emotional response to it is, eh, that it’s difficult, that it’s a distress thing. Paul Green:But we have a PC in our house again. My daughter got a secondhand gaming PC. And Windows 10 is actually really great. I mean, the last time I used Windows, it was Windows 8. But Windows 10 is great. But it still throws up random boxes, and blue screens of death and all of this kind of stuff. Maybe Windows 11 will fix that. Anyway, when you see those kinds of logos, how do you feel? However you feel, that is the brand. If you look at a logo and you think, oh, that’s cheap and nasty that is, then that’s that brand to you. Now, typically well-built brands mean the same things to most people. So the vast majority of people, certainly the customers of Apple, when they look at the Apple logo, they have very positive thoughts. They’re so positive that, well, this is one of the reasons why Apple is one of the world’s most valuable brands, the products it makes is only part of the overall experience. Paul Green:But the brand isn’t just the logo. Please don’t think that I’m saying it’s just about the logo. It’s so much more than that. The logo just represents your brand. So how important then is building a brand for most MSPs? Realistically, not that important at all. It’s got to be done. There’s got to be a certain amount of it, but it’s not that important. Let me qualify that. So having strong brand is important, but there are so many more better marketing activities that you could do that would make a bigger difference to the business, in terms of winning new clients, keeping clients and getting them to spend more. Because building a brand is a long-term activity. In fact, it’s happening right now, whether you’re working on it or not. Just being in business means that you build a brand in the minds of your clients and your prospects, but because it’s a long-term thing, it doesn’t get clients in today. Paul Green:Having a great brand where everyone thinks that you’re the best IT support business in town, well, that’s no use to you at all if your order book is empty, is it? And since most business owners don’t spend enough time on marketing, the time that you do have to spend on growing your business should really be invested into activities that get you new clients, get existing clients to buy again and increase your average spend. If you only have a few hours a week to spend on marketing, don’t worry about the brand. Focus instead on generating new leads on tightening up your client retention on making your consultants and technicians better salespeople. These are the things to do. So the brand is important, yes. And if you run a big, big business, you should be investing some time and energy into building your brand. And that might be doing community work. It might be on other marketing activities. I’m never going to come up with a list of suggestions for you to build your brand because I’m not that kind of marketer. Paul Green:Go and employ a marketing agency to do that for you. But if you’re like most MSPs that I talk to, and it’s just you and a handful of people, 5, 10, 20 people in the business, working on your brand is just not as rewarding, ultimately as actually building the business and getting new clients in today. Voiceover:Paul’s blatant plug. Paul Green:I wonder if another MSP has beaten you to it already. What am I talking about? It’s my core service. It’s called the MSP Marketing Edge, and we only supply it to one MSP per area. We give you a ton of stuff, marketing tools, marketing content, and an extraordinarily large amount of business, growth, advice, and direct support. And it’s an absolute steal at just 99 Pounds a month in the UK, or $129 a month in the U.S. and everywhere else in the world. Oh, and we’ve made it completely risk-free as well, because there’s no contract and you can cancel any time. But as I said, it’s only available to one MSP per area, because it wouldn’t work otherwise. So the first thing for you to do is check whether or not your area is still available. And you can do this at mspmarketingedge.com. Voiceover:The big interview. Greg Jones:Hello, my name is Greg Jones, Business Development Director at Datto within the EMEA region. I’m one of the product evangelist of Datto, but more importantly, my role is about supporting the MSP community. Before Datto, I spent many years on the MSP side of the fence in a number of different roles, from Sales Director, Head of Technical Services and Chief Technology Officer, and then prior to that in local and central government for many years. Paul Green:It’s an absolute delight to have you on the show, Greg. Thank you so much for joining us. What I want to talk about with you today is a subject we’ve never addressed before, because it’s so completely different to what we normally talk about on the podcast. I want to talk about selling co-managed IT. Or if we define that another way, where you’re selling your services to someone that already has an internal IT support function. Now, the reason I say this is completely different to normal marketing is that you’re selling to people who understand our world. So they understand technology, they attend events, they read the things that we read. Whereas of course the people you’re normally selling to, business owners and managers, they don’t know what they don’t know about technology. So Greg, have I got that completely right? Is it the case that when you’re selling co-managed IT, you have to approach it from a completely different angle? Greg Jones:Yeah. Absolutely, Paul. We are seeing a huge uptake in the co-managed environment at the moment. And that is relatively a new name in terms of co-managed or co-mixed. However, it has been around a long time. Many MSPs have worked with organisations that have some form of either internal IT department or an IT champion within their business. However, there is huge opportunity on the back of the current health pandemic, and we are seeing explosive growth within a number of our partners. So real big opportunities at the moment, Paul. Paul Green:Now one of the MSPs I worked a few years ago described to me how they support co-managed IT departments. And they described it as like a donut, where you had the internal IT person in the middle, and they were either helping them above, which was with strategic advice, or they were helping them below, which was of course help desk support, and then they were helping them at the sides of the donut with some other sort of consultancy and projects as well. So essentially they were sitting as a protective ring around the internal IT team. Is that a good analogy? Greg Jones:Yes, it is. Also if an organisation has an internal department, but they’re needing cover around maybe holidays or sickness, that each side of the donut analogy then becomes the full donut really. Or as I say at the moment, we’re seeing lots of even smaller organisations looking at co-managed environment right up until the enterprise space, really. And that’s really come off the back of the health pandemic, because many organisations are now starting to realise that they, coming out on the back of the health pandemic and COVID, they are more profitable and they are more productive through the use of the correct technology within the business. Interestingly, when we actually look at many organisations now, the ones who are more profitable, more successful were the ones before going into thi…

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Episode 91: Remove the risk of buying from your MSP Aug 10, 2021

Show notes

In this week’s episode YOU know you’ll do an awesome job for a potential new client, but how do you convince THEM of this? You need to totally remove the perceived risk of dealing with your MSP. This week Paul looks at risk reversals, also known as guarantees Also, while online ‘gated content’ can help you build your database, which pieces of content should you protect (unless someone enters their details) and which should be made freely available? Plus Paul’s featured guest this week will tell you how you can take one content idea and turn it into multiple pieces of content Featured guest Thank you to Praveen Ramesh from SuperOps.ai for joining Paul to talk about how to create lots of content from just one podcast. Praveen handles all things growth and product marketing at SuperOps.ai. He’s super passionate about helping MSPs overcome their go-to-market challenges, and achieve sustainable growth – that’s the reason you will see him sharing everything he knows about marketing and growth throughout many MSP communities. When not thinking about marketing, you will see him binging videos on productivity and cricket! Connect with Praveen on LinkedIn. Show notes Out every Tuesday on your favourite podcast platform Presented by Paul Green, an MSP marketing expert Register for a free copy of Paul’s book Many thanks to Derek Morgan from Nexon Asia Pacific for recommending the book The Perfect Close by James Muir On August 17th Paul will be joined by Greg Jones from Datto, talking about the co-managed opportunities for MSPs 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, there, and welcome back to the show. Here’s what we’ve got lined up for you this week. Praveen Ramesh:Two to three social media posts, a couple of video posts, and what is the marketing expertise that you would need to produce this content? Literally zero. Paul Green:That’s Praveen Ramesh from SuperOps. He’s going to be here later on the show. We’ve also got Derek Morgan joining us later on with a great book suggestion. And we’re going to be talking about risk reversal. There is a perceived risk of buying from your MSP. What can you do to completely eliminate that risk? Voiceover:Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast. Paul Green:One of the most common practices on websites is to do some kind of gated content. Now, what I mean by gated content is there is a gate. They have to open the gate in order to access the content. So the most classic example of this is where you have some kind of a giveaway, perhaps a guide or a book or something like that. And in order to get that, they have to go through data capture. So they have to give you their name and their email address, and then they can download the book or access it or whatever it is. Paul Green:Now, gated content like that can be a great way to grow your email list. And if you’ve been listening to this podcast for a while, you’ll know that my core three-step marketing strategy for most MSPs is number one, to grow multiple audiences, and that’s where your email audience comes in. Number two is to build a relationship with them, and you do that through content marketing. And number three then is to commercialise that relationship. So having an email audience is very important and that’s why you’ve got to grow it, and certainly it makes sense that you try to grow your email audience based on the traffic going to your website. Paul Green:However, these days it’s so much harder to get someone to fill in their details on your website. I think B2C businesses, business to consumer businesses, don’t have this problem so much. They can just do a newsletter and offer a 10% discount and sign up for the latest offers and discounts. It’s so much easier if you’re selling to consumers, but we’re not. We’re selling to other businesses and B2B data capture has always been hard. I had a business I sold five years ago where we had 12,000 opted-in leads. Every single person had chosen to opt in. And the way we’d done much of it, not all of it, but much of it was through our website where we had data capture. And we were giving away a book. It was a book on marketing. This was a specialist healthcare marketing company, so we were giving away books that were about marketing in those healthcare niches, the verticals that we were in. And that’s how we persuaded over about three-year period 12,000 people to do that. Paul Green:Do you know if I was doing the same thing again now, I don’t think I could get those 12,000. I mean, we spent a lot of money. We spent a couple of hundred grand on traffic and events and all sorts of things to drive those leads. They certainly weren’t free but I think that would cost even more these days because it seems there’s more and more reluctance for people to enter their email address and to do this, certainly on a B2B scale. Now, not saying it’s impossible. I’m just saying it’s difficult. You’ve got to work really hard at it. Paul Green:We have a couple of tools we give to our MSP Marketing Edge members, and one of them is intended to be gated, and the other one is intended not to be gated. In fact, we actually say to our members, “Don’t gate anything. Put all of the content that we give you, all of the videos, all of the guides, we’ve got something called IT services buyer’s guide, all of which could be personalised to your business, put all of these things on your way website and do not gate them”. And then you gate one thing, and that one thing happens to be a book. It’s a book called Email Hijack, and it’s about how an ordinary business owner, how their email gets hacked, and they end up losing $12,000 because they essentially they pay an invoice to the wrong bank account. They pay it to the criminal’s bank account. It’s written to appeal to ordinary people and not techs. So I suggest that that is gated, but nothing else has gated. Paul Green:Why? What’s the thinking behind this strategy? Well, it’s exactly what I do on my website as well and it’s very simple. When someone comes to your website, remember it’s a privilege for someone being on your site. Traffic is hard. It’s difficult. It’s expensive. When you get someone on your website, you don’t want to immediately hit them with a barrier. You want to immediately hit them with your authority and that’s the beauty of having lots of content. If they can see you’ve got a buyer’s guide, you’ve got lots of guides, you’ve got videos, you’ve got plenty of written content, they will see that you are an authority. They’re not going to read and consume lots and lots of it. They’ll consume some of it but it’s more that they see that you are the authority. You’re the IT expert in your area because you’re creating content and these days more than ever before experts create content, which is why if you don’t and can’t create content you just buy some in and put that on your website and sprinkle it across your marketing. Paul Green:So once they’ve seen all of the content that you have available in your buyer’s guide and all of this kind of stuff, that’s the point then where you offer them your most value valuable piece of content, and there’s a gate in front of it. Hence, the book. It doesn’t have to be a book. It could be absolutely anything but it’s got to be valuable. It’s going to be perceived as valuable. People do put a value on books. It might only be five pounds, $5, but there is a perceived value. And we all grow up as kids being told to respect books. You know, you don’t damage books, do you? You treat them well, you treat them properly. They have a perceived value. The exact same information in a PDF has no perceived value. Pop it into a book and it has a high-perceived value. Paul Green:So whatever you do on your website now, you should definitely do some kind of data capture. Don’t just do sign up for our newsletter because no one will. Offer them something. In fact we call this an ethical bribe. Offer them something in return for their contact details, but only gate one piece of content. All of the rest of the content on your website should be free and easy for them to instantly access it. Voiceover:Here’s this week’s clever idea. Paul Green:When someone is thinking of buying from you, there is a high level of perceived risk. You’ve got to look at it from their point of view. Even if they’re with another MSP, in fact especially if they’re with another MSP right now, they don’t know or understand the technology. They don’t know what they don’t know and people who don’t know stuff, who don’t understand it, it creates an amount of fear when they’re thinking of switching suppliers. It’s why you stay with your accountant way past the point you think you should switch. I’ve done it. You’ve probably done it. We’ll do it again because we don’t really understand the accountancy. It’s a bit of a mysterious art, isn’t it? We certainly don’t understand accountants. They’re strange people, they are and so it’s easier for us sometimes to stick with the accountants that we know, even if we dislike them slightly than it is to switch over to someone else. This is called inertia loyalty. Paul Green:And it’s exactly the same thing that ordinary people are thinking about you and about their current MSP. We know these people. We know what’s happening with them. We don’t like the experience particularly, but we understand it. We know it and there is less risk with the devil we know than switching to these new people. Perceived risk. Paul Green:People don’t like taking risks. Some people do, very few people. They’re the kind of the space billionaires who like getting into phallic-shaped rockets and going up to the moon and whatever it is space billionaires do in space. They don’t really go into space, do they? They just go to the edge of the Earth? Anyway, those people are extraordinary risk-takers. The vast majority of business owners and managers out there are actually quite risk averse, especially with something like their technology. They don’t want to take the risk. They don’t want to risk moving over to a new MSP that screws it all up for them. This is one of the things that makes your sales cycles so hard, it makes lead generation so hard. It’s the number one curse of the MSP world is people don’t know what they don’t know, and therefore they are very, very, very slow to switch to a new MSP. Paul Green:Now, there’s lots of things that you can do to combat this. We’ve talked about this in the podcast at length. We’ve talked about things like educating them. We’ve talked about building audiences, building a relationship with them, lots of content, educating, educating, educating. It’s one of the main ways that you can remove the perceived risks is you build a relationship with them. We have less risk when we think we know someone, but there’s also something else that you can do. You can reverse the risk. And we actually call this a guarantee. You can guarantee what you do. Paul Green:Now, I know at this point you’re probably thinking, ah, I don’t want to guarantee exactly what we do, certainly don’t want to put in place SLAs. I don’t want to guarantee that we’ll get fixes done in certain times or whatsoever, and hey, if you’ve got SLAs right now and they work for you, great. If you haven’t got SLAs, don’t introduce SLAs. I think SLAs sometimes are just a weapon you give to your clients in order to beat you with. If your big clients asked for SLAs, that’s fine. That’s a conversation you can have with them. I’m not suggesting that you introduce SLAs as a guarantee. I’m suggesting you just reverse the perceived risk. Paul Green:So what’s the perceived risk? That they move to you and it doesn’t work out and they’re trapped in a bad relationship with an MSP that isn’t very good. That’s one of their perceived risks, so let’s reverse it. Let’s out an output in your sales proposals, and as part of your sales cause let’s say to them, hey, if it doesn’t work out for whatever reason, if we can’t form a good working relationship or you don’t like the way that we do things, we will release you from your contract at any point with just 30 days notice, because I assume you’re signing them not to a contract. That certainly best practices is sign them up to a one, better still a two, or even better still a three-year contract. You’ll find the very best clients will commit themselves to longer contracts, and in fact, the better you are at selling, the longer contracts you’ll get, and the reason you want them on contract is pretty obvious. We want to keep them for 5, 10, 15 years. Paul Green:But here’s the thing. Have you ever had a really bad client who acted like a total idiot and the kind of person that when they phone up all of your staff there’s kind of like the atmosphere drops in the office, everyone’s shoulders slump, and it’s like, oh, “I don’t want to speak to these people”. “Oh, I spoke to them last week. You go speak to them”. Have you had a client like that? And then did you fire those clients? Essentially? You release them from the contract. Wonderful. When you do that, isn’t it. Here’s the thing. You only have those now and again. That’s a very, very small minority of your clients and when that happens, you’re actually quite happy to release someone from their contract. The same way if you completely screw up with the client and it happens sometimes doesn’t it, you get something wrong and something else wrong and he’s wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong and they really unhappy. Again, you wouldn’t just keep them in that contract. If it was really that bad and things, the relationships just broken down, you would release them from the contract. Paul Green:So actually you already have what’s known as an invisible guarantee, which is if our relationship breaks down so badly, that it’s very difficult for us to do work together, we will release you from the contract anyway. That’s nothing formal. That’s our invisible guarantee. Where you have an invisible guarantee, make it the visible guarantee. Reverse the risk, actually make it a sales tool. Make it something that you use as part of your selling process. Do you know I have looked at hundreds and hundreds, probably thousands now of MSPs websites, and I never ever see a guarantee, ever. I can’t think, there might be one or two I’ve seen over the years, but I certainly don’t routinely see guarantees on people’s websites, so that’s a marketing opportunity for you. Where most people aren’t doing something, you can do something and it gives you a marketing advantage. Even with the thousands of people that listen to this podcast, the vast majority will not now go and do a guarantee, it’s just the way of the world. Paul Green:So if you go and instigate a guarantee and make it a big part of your sales proposition, you make it a big part of your marketing, if you are unhappy with what we do at any point, we will release you from your contract and you can walk away from us with just 30 days notice. It’s almost like your delight guarantee because the reality is, even if you do have a bad couple of weeks or a bad month with a client, they’re not going to leave you just like that. They’ll kind of forget that that guarantee exists because, actually remember inertia loyalty, that works in your favour to keep your clients. Inertia loyalty stops people from joining you in the first place, but it also keeps your existing clients with you because even if you’re having a few bad weeks, as long as they can see you’re doing your very best to fix the problem, they’re going to stick with you. It’s in their nature to want to stick with you. Paul Green:So go on reverse the risk for them. Let’s get that guarantee in play in your marketing and in your sales proposition. Voiceover:Paul’s blatant plug. Paul Green:I was talking earlier about gated content and…

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