Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast

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Episode 90: Grow revenue per seat and reduce overheads Aug 03, 2021

Show notes

In this week’s episode Doesn’t it feel like there are a million things to focus on AT THE SAME TIME to grow a successful MSP? In terms of growth, there are really just three things to focus on. This week Paul looks at the right way to think about your business’s growth Also, how would your MSP cope if you suddenly disappeared… literally, right now? From kidnapping (!) to illness, there are several events that could take you away from the business unexpectedly. Paul explains what you can prepare so the business continues to thrive whether you’re there or not Plus on the show this week, we’ve got an another awesome prize – a physical time-tracker that really could change your life. And Paul’s featured guest could inspire you to create a new revenue stream Featured guest Thank you to John Clark from Solutions Shared for joining Paul to talk about how he created a new revenue stream based around customising Microsoft Dynamics. John Clark is the founder and a director of Solutions Shared Ltd. With a background in software engineering, consultancy, IT infrastructure and Microsoft SharePoint, John started his CRM consulting career in 2008. Over the years, he has transitioned Solutions Shared from being an IT support company that did some CRM consultancy, to being 100% focused on the implementation of CRM for small and medium sized businesses. Connect with John on LinkedIn. Show notes Out every Tuesday on your favourite podcast platform Presented by Paul Green, an MSP marketing expert Producer James Lett told you about the chance to win a Timeular tracker dice and lifetime Pro membership – find out more and enter HERE (closes midnight Sunday 8th August 2021 UK time) You can join Paul in the MSP Marketing group on Facebook Many thanks to Nate Freedman from Tech Pro Marketing for recommending the book Who: The A Method for Hiring by Geoff Smart and Randy Street On August 10th Paul will be joined by Praveen Ramesh from Superops.ai talking about how to create lots of content just by listening to one podcast 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. Welcome to episode 90 of the podcast. Here’s what we got coming up for you this week. John Clark:There are an awful lot of clients out there who may have legacy systems. We’re actually currently migrating someone from Lotus Notes. Paul Green:We’re also going to be looking at the never ending number one goal of your business. It’s about improving the revenue that’s brought in from your clients and reducing your overheads. Paul Green:Oh, and we’ve got a great competition this week as well. A chance for you to win a Timeular Tracker and a Pro lifetime membership. It’s a device that’s completely changed my life over the last couple of years and I think he could do exactly the same for you. More details on that later on in the show. Voiceover:Paul Green’s MSP Marketing podcast. Paul Green:Now here’s a slightly terrifying question that I could ask you? What would happen if tomorrow I turned up at your house first thing in the morning and I kidnapped you? I literally bundled you in the boot of my car, that’s the trunk of the car, I bundled you in there. I take you off to a location. Now don’t worry. I’m not going to kill you or anything. I’m just going to keep you very safely. In fact, I’m going to give you a kind of a luxury holiday. I’m not half bad cook. I’m going to cook some good food for you, give you Netflix, and no computer, and you can just enjoy yourself for a couple of weeks. Actually, if you just look out your window now you see the bush, that’s just moving slightly. That’s me. I’m there in the bush waiting to kidnap you. No, I’m not really. That would be terrifying, but it’s actually a sensible question to ask what would happen if tomorrow you completely vanished for two, three weeks or more? Paul Green:And by completely vanished, I mean, not like a vacation, not like a holiday where you’ve had some time to work up to it and you’ve been able to brief your team on things and get things finished and clear down your work. Literally tomorrow, just like that, you vanish. What would happen to the business? Now, this is actually a real question. I ask my clients this often. In fact, we call it the three month test. What would happen if you had to drop out of your business, just like that, for three months? And the reason I do three months test is a couple of days a week, most businesses can get along just fine. You start to get out to two to three weeks, some key members of the staff will step up and look after things. But it’s over the long period, over a quarter of a year, over three months, what will happen to the business? Paul Green:And of course, we’re not really talking about you being kidnapped. That’s not a real concern at all. We’re talking about injury, illness. We’re talking about you just suddenly not being there for the business. It’s happened to me a couple of times in my business career. When my daughter was born in 2010, she was quite premature. She was born 15 weeks early, and we had no notification of that. We had no advance notice. She literally turned up with an hour’s notice on a Sunday afternoon. And just like that, I was ripped out of my business for the best part of two to three months. That wasn’t planned and actually it became the making of me in the way, because the business kind of did better without me than it did when I was there. And it set me off down a certain route, which was making sure the business was robust and would survive without me. But you’ve got to ask this for your MSP. If you vanished tomorrow, what would happen? Paul Green:Now, if you’re a one man band, even as a one man band, there are things that yoqu can do, there are protections you can put in place to protect the business and protect your clients if something happens to you. You could do an arrangement with another one man band that you each step up if something happens to one of you. If you’re a bigger business and you’ve got a few staff then you’ve got to make sure there’s someone who can take over, someone, one member of your team, who can step up and be the leader. There has to be a leader in every business. And if that’s not you, who’s going to step up? Who’s going to take on the things that matter, making sure your clients are well looked after and making sure that the business continues to operate? Paul Green:Because the last thing you want is to come back from an enforced two or three weeks or months off and find that the business has kind of self-destroyed itself, it’s kind of imploded on itself, that all the work you’ve put in over the years has actually fallen apart very quickly. It’s interesting in our MSP Marketing Facebook group, which you’re welcome to join. It’s a Facebook group with more than 1300 MSPs in there. We talk about all sorts of things. It’s not just marketing stuff. We talk about business growth stuff as well. And back in June, one of our members there, Anthony Cataldo asked a question. He said, “I, like I’m sure many here, run an MSP where I’m the sole director. As we grow, everything still sits on my shoulders for major decisions, paying bills, staff, et cetera. I have good friends who run other MSPs where we’ve loosely spoken about stepping in for each other if ever disaster struck.” And then a short conversation went on, some great suggestions there. Justin Esgar, who’s been on this podcast, in fact, he says, “Make sure someone that you trust knows where the details are. One password does a master key document that you should have entrusted with them. Also document everything and make one called ICE, in case of emergency.” Paul Green:Dave King says, “I have something in place for personal stuff. I set up a one password, family account, invited them all and then shared certain passwords. But also in the central area make a list of important things they need to know if someone happened to me.” Lee Wood says, “I have a team. So one of the key things for any business to survive is access to your cash. Without that it doesn’t matter who runs the day-to-day tech operations. We have a second signatory on the bank accounts who can access the company money in the event of any problem.” Paul Green:It’s a real thing you need to think about this. What would happen if something happened to you? Hey, if you want to discuss this, why not go and join that MSP Marketing group? Just fire up your Facebook app, tap in MSP Marketing at the top, go onto groups, and you’ll see my little picture. Come and join us there. If you’re an MSP, we’ll happily let you join that group where you can discuss marketing and business growth issues. Voiceover:Here’s this week’s clever idea. Paul Green:I have these peer groups that I do. Every other Tuesday, I jump on short Zoom calls with a small number of MSPs and we talk about business growth and marketing. And it’s great for them because obviously they’ve got a bunch of other MSPs that they can bounce ideas off. We can solve problems together. And it’s great for me as well, because it gives me loads of content ideas for this podcast and for my blog and other stuff as well. Paul Green:And we were talking last week, I think it was a couple of weeks ago, about what’s the sort of the ongoing, never ending goal, because when you start your business, the goal is survival and establishing a business that makes it past that I guess that three to five year mark, where they say that most businesses fail. And then once you’ve done that, I think the next goal then is making sure that your business thrives without you having to be there. Because that’s really a proper business. If the business needs you to be there, well, look at what we were just talking about of what happens if something happens to you? If you need to be there in order for the business to thrive, that’s not really a business at all. It’s just a well-paid job. Paul Green:So that’s the kind of the next goal. And that’s where many of the MSPs I’m working with, they’re at that stage, that stage of making sure that they can take two to three week holidays and they’ve got enough well trained staff, well systemised business, and everyone’s very motivated and coached well, and when they’re not there, things continue anyway. And in fact, things are almost slightly better when the owner isn’t there. So that’s the kind of the next goal. Paul Green:But then you come on to once you’ve got that and you’ve got a business that is doing really well without you, you’ve then got that thing of what’s next? What’s the ongoing goal? And I think from that point, really, there are only really three things that you should be working on, right up to the point that you sell that business. And those three things are number one, getting new clients. Number two is growing per seat revenue. And number three is reducing overheads. Because the long-term goal for the business is, from your point of view, I guess it’s to give you enough resources, that’s time and cash, to do the things that you want to do with your life. The purpose of the business is to be there for you. The purpose of the business is not for you to be there for it. I know that’s how it is in the early days, but long-term, if you want to be a business owner for 20, 30, 40 years or more, you can’t have a business that’s utterly reliant on you every day. You’ve got to have a business that gives you the lifestyle that you want. Paul Green:And that means plenty of time to do the things you want to do and plenty of cash to do those things as well. You need those two things in abundance. And actually the business that allows you to go and do those things on a daily, weekly, monthly basis is a well run business. It’s a business where there are no crises, where the staff and clients aren’t complaining all the time because it’s been set up well, and it’s very well systemised. But that’s your goal, three things, constantly adding new clients, constantly growing per seat revenue and constantly reducing and removing overheads. So you’re not just growing your turnover year on year, but you’re growing your net profit year on year as well. The net profit is yours. It’s what you and, if you’ve got any business partners, it’s what you share. Or it’s what you choose to reinvest, or you use it to pay the staff more, or to invest in better tools for the clients. Paul Green:We should never ever be scared of making more net profit. Net profit is awesome. I suspect you don’t have a problem with making more net profit at all, but that’s got to be the long-term goal. Let’s make the business more efficient. Let’s standardise more. Let’s do strategic reviews with every client so we can add more seat revenue and protect the clients better and generally just be better as a business, and serve our clients better. All of these things go very well together. Paul Green:So whichever stage of business growth you’re at right now, do you know what I’d love to have a chat with you about this. I mentioned that MSP Marketing Facebook group. Go and join that, if you’re not a member, go and join that. And just let us know. Pop a post in there. Tell us what stage of business growth you’re at. I’m in there every day. And I’d love to have a chat with you about currently where you’re at with your MSP and what you’re aiming for in the next few years. Voiceover:Paul Green’s MSP Marketing podcast. Paul Green:Once a month here on the MSP Marketing podcast, we find a cracking prize to give away, and you are going to love what we’ve got to give away this month. James Lett:Hey, this is producer James. This is the third prize we’ve given away and it is life-changing. So as Paul mentioned at the top of the show, he’s a big fan of Timeular and their ground breaking 8-sided physical time tracker. With every simple flip of this special dice, you’ll start to discover what you’re really doing every day, to help free up time to work on the business and ultimately transform your MSP and life. This is especially great for those working in teams, but doing so remotely, helping to keep you on track and motivated. As a thank you for listening, right now you can win one of these special dice, plus a lifetime pro subscription to the incredible analytic software it syncs with. 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 close at midnight UK time this Sunday August 8th. So good luck. Enter right now at paulgreensmspmarketing.com/win Voiceover:The big interview. John Clark:Hi, I’m John Clark from Solutions Shared. We work with small, medium, sized businesses. We’re experts in Microsoft Dynamics CRM and PowerApps, and we help them create a system that they can grow the business with. Paul Green:And when I was introduced to you, John, I could see that there’s a potential extra revenue stream for many MSPs here. And in fact, I know that you yourself, you used to be an MSP. You used to own an MSP. Tell us your journey of how you went from primarily being tech support to this very specialist area that you’re in right now. John Clark:When I started my business, it must be about 14 years ago, I was a one man MSP, and I did a lot of business networking, ended up with a pile of business cards. Someone said, “You need a CRM for those.” Looked in the good old Microsoft Action Pack and found Dynamics CRM. Installed it, thought, “This is quite good.” And then basically gradually over the years, we picked up some clients, and we eventually transitioned to where basically our entire business is based around what was called Dynamic CRM. These days Dynamics 365, and more recently, Microsoft PowerApps. Paul Green:So clearly there’s a good marketplace for this, John, and as you say, that…

Full show notes at the publisher

Episode 89: The holy trinity of Monthly Recurring Revenue Jul 27, 2021

Show notes

In this week’s episode You’re listening to a podcast for MSPs, so you’ll know all about glorious ‘monthly recurring revenue’… but do you know how best to grow it for your business? This week Paul shows you the 3 core areas to focus on Also, do you have your ‘scatter work’ under control? On the show Paul explains what ‘scatter work’ is, why it’s inevitable and how to get it under control so you have more time for the important stuff Plus on the show this week, your clients will increasingly be turning to you to help them be more data compliant. Listen to a fascinating conversation with a data security expert about how you can benefit from this opportunity Show notes Out every Tuesday on your favourite podcast platform Presented by Paul Green, an MSP marketing expert Find out more about Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Edge Paul’s special guest was Kevin Coppins, from Spirion, talking about how best to deal with your client’s data security compliance Many thanks to Ernest Murry from Genuine Technology Group for recommending the book Leadership and Self-Deception from The Arbinger Institute On August 3rd Paul will be joined by John Clark from Solutions Shared, talking about creating a new revenue stream based around customising Microsoft dynamics Please send any questions, ideally in audio-form (or any other feedback) to 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 the show. Here’s what we got coming up for you this week. Kevin Coppins:Guess what? Next month, a new compliance law is passed; a new regulation comes forward. Paul Green:We’re also going to be talking about the holy trinity of monthly recurring revenue: three things that you should do at the same time, to grow the average revenue per user per month. And we’ve got a book suggestion from an MSP just like you. I’ll play that to you at the end of today’s show. Voiceover:Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast. Paul Green:There’s a certain type of working, which seems to plague MSPs more than any other kind of business owner that I’ve ever worked with. And that type of work is known as scatter work. What’s scatter work? It’s kind of a word I’ve made up, but it describes where you’re trying to get things done, and you can’t ever really deeply focus in and settle into a task, because you’re being constantly interrupted by other people: be that phone calls, messages, emails, that urgent knock on the door when, “Uh, something has gone wrong, and we need you.” All of these things, all these constant interruptions, what they do is they break your flow, and they prevent you from doing big, important things; which is kind of annoying, because as the boss, as the owner of the business, that’s your job, is to do big, important things. Increasingly more and more, scatter work stops MSPs from doing the things that matter, the small things and the big things that make the massive things happen. Paul Green:And the goal for you, the challenge for you, if you like, is to reduce the amount of scatter work, and increase the amount of focused chunks of time that you can spend working on things in the business. This is something I work on almost constantly with the MSP clients that I do work closely with in our peer groups in the MSP Marketing Edge. And it’s a challenge. It’s a real challenge, because the very nature of your business is reactive; you’re there waiting almost, for people to have problems, so that you can fix those problems. The trick I find is to schedule specific time in your diary to do focused work. So you almost kind of give up part of your day and accept you’re going to have that scatter work approach; you’re going to be open to interruptions, you’re going to deal with the emails, and zing over to this ticket and zing to that and zing there, that kind of horrendous scatter work. But you put time aside in your diary for that to happen. Paul Green:And then you have other time in your diary that’s for focused work. And that’s when your phone goes on to “do not disturb.” That’s where you log out of Teams. In fact, where you log out of your PSA as well; you have no access to tickets, you have no access to the random chat that’s happening between your team. You have a sign on your door that says, “I will shoot you between the eyes if you interrupt me for any other reason than the building is on fire.” Slightly extreme sign, maybe, but you get the idea. You need to have two to three hours a day as a minimum, where you’re working on big things. Now, sometimes that might involve doing little tasks, sometimes that might involve doing big tasks. But you are working on big things; and the big things are the things that grow the business. Paul Green:Remember, there are only really three things that you can do that will grow your business. You do things that get you more new clients, things that get your existing clients to buy from you more often, and things that get your existing clients to spend more when they buy. So if you’re doing some kind of work on your marketing that is going to attract more people to your website, that’s going to get more of those people then, to inquire with you to book a 15 minute video call with you, to enter your sales process. Or you’re doing some work that’s going to improve the amount of revenue that someone spends with you; you increase that. In fact, we’re going to talk about that shortly, the holy trinity of monthly recurring revenue. All of these things are big things that you should be spending time on; but you have to do this kind of consciously. Paul Green:You can’t do it unconsciously. It’s far too easy to lose time in the day. And we, all of us, or most of us anyway, suffer from this phenomenon where we believe that we can get things done a lot quicker than we actually can. Do you find this on a daily basis, that you sit down to do a task, and you think, “Uh, it’ll take an hour.” And three hours later, you’re still doing it and you haven’t quite finished it, and you’ve got a bit lost in it? Well, that gets worse and worse and worse, the more the scatter work is allowed to infiltrate your life. So that’s my recommendation. Segment your diary; give the scatter work time to interrupt you; to all those little bits that need to be done. Paul Green:Give your staff some time. I’m a big fan of you having a call once or twice a day, where your staff can just call you or dial in. And it’s a group call or whatsoever, particularly if you don’t sit in the same office as your tech team. So they have access to you at specific times of the day, but they can’t just call you or WhatsApp you throughout the day, because that’s not a particularly efficient way to access you and your time. You’re the boss; you’ve got many more important things to do than to help them to answer a question that really they know the answer to, but it’s just easier for them to pick up the phone and ask you than it is to go and look in IT Glue, or whatever it is that you’re using. Paul Green:So segment your diary; find some time every day, two to three hours every day, to work on the big projects. Do you know what? Even if you could do that just three days a week, you’re going to make some major leaps forward in the next few months. All you need is that diarised time, and the focus to make sure you protect it. Voiceover:Here’s this week’s clever idea. Paul Green:So because marketing isn’t just about getting new clients, it’s, as I was just saying, it’s about growing the average revenue per user per month. Let’s talk about the holy trinity of monthly recurring revenue. These are three things that you need to do simultaneously, in order to grow your monthly recurring revenue. And I’ve talked about each of them individually in the podcast in previous episodes. This, as far as I’m aware, is the first time we’ve put all three together. Let me tell you what they are, and then we’ll go into a little bit more detail on each one. Paul Green:The first of them, is you’ve got to do something called the profit matrix. I’ll explain that in a second. The second thing, is you need to be doing strategic reviews, or quarterly business reviews, as they’re sometimes known as. And the third thing is, you need to be constantly adding new services. These are the three things you need to be doing at the same time. Paul Green:So the profit matrix then, is literally a grid. You’ve got your clients down one side, you’ve got your services on the other side. It doesn’t matter which of the axes they go on. And you fill in that profit matrix according to which services they buy. So client number one buy services A and C and G, so you put a little mark in the corresponding square where service A and client one match up, and you do the same for client two and client three, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Essentially, you strip out information that’s in your PSA, and you create a nice visual summary of who’s buying what; or actually, more importantly, who’s not buying what. Because that’s the power of the profit matrix; it’s a visual, instant summary of who is not buying what within your business. Paul Green:You want to see which services are not being bought by which clients. And that information works better offline, by the way, because the temptation is to do a spreadsheet for this, and maybe even to put that spreadsheet up on a big screen in your office. My experience is that actually, that’s never as powerful as making it physical; put it on a giant whiteboard or something that’s on a wall in your office, and make someone in charge of keeping that up-to-date. That’s a much more powerful way of seeing who’s buying what within the business. Paul Green:So once you’ve got your profit matrix, you then use that to shape your strategic reviews. Now, these are also known as technology reviews or quarterly business reviews. It’s where you sit down with your clients, and you go through a specific process with them, looking at their plans for the future, how they think they’re going to grow, what’s coming up, what’s new, what fears they’ve got, all of that kind of stuff. They’re forward thinking reviews. And the idea is that over time, you put together a technology roadmap for them. So this is a real partnership thing. Paul Green:We talk a lot, don’t we, about being someone’s partner, and how MSPs want to partner with clients. But you’ve got to back that up with action as well; partners plan together, and you can put together a three-year technology roadmap with them through their strategic reviews, and then you can review those technology roadmaps when you meet with them in the future. This is a beautiful way of not only securing that partnership with them, and hooking those clients in long-term. They are not going anywhere when they are making strategic plans with you. But also, it’s a way of getting them to commit to spend in the future. Paul Green:If they’ve got big plans to grow their business in the next couple of years, and you’ve identified with them, that actually they don’t really have the technology capacity to implement those plans, you can get them to commit to the required spend on the infrastructure they need. And you can talk about this stuff a year or two years before they need to go and spend it, which is great, because they’re going to budget for it. They’re going to actually put that into their own growth plans, because they know that spend is coming up at some point. This is great; it gives everyone confidence and security about what’s going to happen with that client’s technology in the years ahead. Paul Green:So we’ve got our profit matrix. We’ve got our strategic reviews. The final part of the holy trinity of monthly recurring revenue is to be constantly adding new services, because you need to constantly have things that you can sell to people. And there are a number of different ways that you can do this. You can, for example, do better versions of things you already sell. So you will have a backup solution. Why not offer a better backup solution? Now this could be the existing backup solution you’ve got, but you might, for example, and remember, I’m not a technician here, but you might, for example, throw in a NAS box as well. So they’ve got their online backup, their Cloud backup, somewhere away from their office, but also they’ve got a local copy, sat in their office for immediate recoveries. And you could sell that to them as an enhanced backup solution, because it’s faster, and it gives them two copies or three copies, or whatever they’ve got of their data. So it’s a safer, faster solution. Paul Green:Now you might think, “Ah, that’s a bit overkill, Paul.” But here’s the thing; it’s not up to you to decide what your clients buy. Your job is to educate the clients, and then to offer them a range of options. And it’s up to them to decide what it is that they want to buy; completely up to them. Some people will always buy the better solution, because there is a better solution available. It’s not our place to decide whether they should buy it or not; it’s completely their decision. People hate to be sold to, but they love to buy. Paul Green:So, put these three things together: the profit matrix, the strategic reviews, and constantly adding new services. And you will grow the amount of recurring revenue you generate per user, per month, and watch as your net profitability goes up alongside your monthly recurring revenue. Voiceover:Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast. Paul Green:So every couple of weeks or so, we are giving away cool stuff here on the podcast. And next week, we’ve got another great prize that you could win. James Lett:Hey, this is producer James, and this prize could have a transformative effect on how you work, what you work on, and go on potentially to change your business and your life. We’re going to give away one of the most effective time-tracking tools from Timeular; they’ve developed the world’s first eight-sided, physical tracking dice, that automatically tracks activities when flipped; and you can win that, plus a lifetime pro membership, just by listening to next week’s show, episode 90 out on the 3rd of August. Voiceover:The big interview. Kevin Coppins:Hi. I’m Kevin Coppins. I am the President and CEO of Spirion, headquartered in sunny St. Petersburg, Florida. Thrilled to be here today, and hoping to go ahead and spend a little bit of time discussing how data privacy and data compliance is relevant not just to the big companies, but to companies around the world. Paul Green:Absolutely. And thanks for coming on, Kevin. I want to talk in particular, about how we can use compliance to generate more revenue, to drive more revenue into MSPs. Because compliance is something that people need; there are many more laws that have been passed. In fact, you were telling me just before, was it something like there have been more privacy regulations passed in the last two years than the previous hundred? So the clients of MSPs have a need for this kind of stuff; but obviously, we want to sell them more solutions, and solutions that help them to sleep better at night. So tell us what’s been happening with privacy relations over the last few years. Kevin Coppins:In 2019, 10% of the world’s population was covered by a privacy regulation, and by 2023, 65% will be covered by at least one. So when you think about that, you can take a step back and say, “All right, well, what does that really mean to me? What does that mean to my clients?” When you think about compliance and you unpack compliance, it really gets down to doing the right thing in the first place, and then being able to prove that you did. I think that cuts through a lot of the noise, when you start reading through the 9 million page regulations coming from all the various legislative bodies around the world, and just say, “What are the fundamentals of what I…

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Episode 88: Special: How this MSP built his business Jul 20, 2021

Show notes

In this week’s special episode Have you ever wondered how you’re going to generate millions in revenue for your MSP? In this special episode, you can hear how one owner did it Jamie Warner of eNerds joins Paul to explain exactly how he grew his MSP organically to over A$9 million in revenue Also in this special episode find out how he commercialised a solution to fix an internal issue, and created a new customer experience (CX) platform Show notes Out every Tuesday on your favourite podcast platform Presented by Paul Green, an MSP marketing expert This week Paul hosts a special episode featuring Jamie Warner, CEO of eNerds and Invarosoft. The show takes a deep dive into how Jamie built his MSP to over $9 million in revenue Paul mentioned the book Unstoppable Referrals by Steve Gordon In discussing marketing concepts, Jamie mentioned the book Purple Cow by Seth Godin, all about getting noticed DeskDirector and Helpdesk Buttons were mentioned while talking about the growth of CX platforms On July 27th Paul’s special guest will be Kevin Coppins, from Spirion, talking about how best to deal with your client’s data security compliance Please send any questions, ideally in audio-form (or any other feedback) to hello@paulgreensmspmarketing.com Episode transcription Voiceover:Fresh every Tuesday for MSPs all around the world. This is an MSP Marketing Podcast special. Paul Green:Hello, and welcome to another MSP Marketing Podcast special. These are our most listened to episodes and no wonder we have an amazing guest for you today. I’ve got a guy from Australia who’s going to tell us how he did it. Now, over the last 21 years, he’s built up, with his brother, from scratch a business that’s now doing around about 7 million US dollars a year. It’s an incredible story that he’s got for us today. He’s also going to tell us how he’s along the way become the owner of his own vendor. How he saw a problem and actually launched his own solution for that problem as well. It’s a fascinating story, and I’m delighted to welcome you to the subject of today’s very, very special episode. Jamie Warner:Hi, Paul. Thanks for having me. My name is Jamie Warner, and I’m the CEO of eNerds and Invarosoft. Paul Green:We’re going to talk about both of those businesses today. I want to start, Jamie, with the eNerds story. Thank you so much for joining me on this podcast. eNerds has got to be one of the best names I’ve ever heard for an MSP. Did you come up with that yourself? Jamie Warner:Yeah. Well, look, I started the MSP when I was 22. At that point in time, eNerds as a name sounded pretty cool. I’d just finished a marketing degree and I was trying to think of something that would cut through the noise of all the sort of bland names that were out there. eNerds is the one that we settled on and we’ve been living the nerd dream ever since. Paul Green:I love it. Absolutely love it. You started the business, I think you said it was around 21 years ago. I guess we’re looking at around roundabout the turn of the century. What was it that made you want to start a … I guess you wouldn’t have called it an MSP back then. It would just be a tech support firm, wouldn’t it? What was it that took you with your marketing degree and made you want to get into this world in the first place? Jamie Warner:Well, I was always struggling to figure out what I wanted to do. I guess the entrepreneurial flame was there through my parents. My parents actually ran a recruitment business and I was looking at how they got their IT support. Now it seemed like it wasn’t the best service experience. I had a friend that was quite technical and I thought, “Well, why don’t I have a crack at starting an IT support business?” Yes, they weren’t call MSPs then. It was just IT support. It was really to flex my entrepreneurial muscle of wanting to do my own thing. It started from there. Paul Green:Does your brother have a tech background? Jamie Warner:He didn’t either. When I first started, he was still at university and had about six months to go. Eventually, he came on board after he finished uni and said to me, “Well, I don’t really even like business or marketing.” Even though he just completed the same degree, and started to become the head technical person of the business and is now our CIO. Really probably starting an MSP with not a lot of experience and very different from most of the MSPs that are out there that are fundamentally started by a technical person. Paul Green:Well, that’s what I was going to say. It’s really rare to talk to the owner of an MSP who isn’t a technician. I mean, obviously you’ve been doing this for 21 years. Through the power of osmosis, that technology has rubbed off on you, hasn’t it? You’ve got that technology knowledge now. But in those first few years, did you find that it held you back or did you find that it actually gave you an advantage over your more technical based competitors? Jamie Warner:I always liked technology. Talking about in those days servers with hot swap drives and power supplies and UPSes, all that sort of stuff, I didn’t know most of it. I had to learn through osmosis, learn through the process. I mean, I would sit there in sales meetings and people would talk to me about all this technology that they wanted us to support and I just basically said yes to everything. Then we’d come back and have to Google or ask somebody what they were actually talking about. It was a bit weird. The reality is, you do obviously get better at selling if you know what you’re talking about. But it just goes to show that really it’s not about you, it’s about the customer. If you keep saying yes to everything or acknowledge and listen, then you can actually get a certain distance ahead. At that point, you do need to learn and become a good consultant. Definitely became a great consultant in that space, and that’s when the business really started to go places. Jamie Warner:But was it an advantage? I think it is an advantage to be non-technical because I was never in it. I could never be in it. If you’re not in it, you’re generally working on it. I was by default, always thinking sales and growth, and that’s probably the small advantage I had. Paul Green:Let me just ask a couple of practical questions on that one, Jamie. There you are starting this business from scratch. You don’t do tech stuff, your business partner, your brother doesn’t do tech stuff. How did you actually win your first couple of clients and service them? Jamie Warner:If you recall, he was at university for the first six months. I did have a technical people around me on an ad hoc basis. Around the time that Tristan, my brother came on board, I did hire someone that I always wanted to work with. I knew him prior to starting the business. He was one year older, but he’d been working in IT. That he’s 23, I’m 22. He’d been working since he was 17. He had quite a big track record, knew everything about everything, SMB, IT related, networking, all that sort of stuff. I did get him on board. Pretty much all the money of the company went to paying this guy’s wage. At that point in time, he became the anchor of the business not long after my brother started. That’s who mentored my brother. He stayed for a couple of years. Through that relationship, my brother was able to harness and learn his skills. But let’s be honest, I would send out my brother on jobs and he’d be like, “But I don’t know how to do it.” Jamie Warner:I said, “You’ll be fine. It’s fine. You’ll figure it out. Just go on the internet and search it.” I’d be throwing him in the deep end. Really, he copped the hardest part of that journey in the early days, I have to say because maybe being ignorant and young and just trusting your older brother, he’d go out and have a crack. Now, it’s jumping in the fire obviously, but he was able to learn fairly quickly. It wasn’t a long time he had to do that. When this other chap came on board, that’s when his skill set started to really accelerate. We built the early part of that business around that particular first employee. Paul Green:That’s so funny. I can imagine you just sending your brother out with, I guess it would be a PDA back then, wouldn’t it? And say, “Just go and Google it. It’ll be fine. It’ll be fine.” Jamie Warner:I don’t even know if Google was really being used then quite frankly. It was probably AltaVista or something. Paul Green:Yeah. But you can’t use that as a verb, can you? Just AltaVista it. It’ll be fine. It’ll be fine. Was the goal always for you to build up something big? Because as we said at the start of the podcast, you’re doing, I think, it’s 9 million Australian dollars, which is around about 7 million US dollars. It’s a fairly sizable operation. Was that the goal? Did you always want to build something that was going to stand on its own two feet and have a certain impact, or were you just making it up as you went along? Jamie Warner:Yeah. I mean, you’d think I’d have a very strong plan after doing a business degree. It was probably making it up as we went along, to be honest. I didn’t really know what I was getting into. Didn’t understand the model. What did I want to do as a vision? I don’t think vision was that clear. We got clearer in the future when we engaged coaches and all those sorts of things. Probably 5, 6, 7 years into it, we started to be a little clear. But at the start, it was really just trying to have a business, I think was the key. The funny thing is, the one critical decision I think I’ve made well at the start was to identify that an ad hoc approach was not going to be a sustainable business model. I actually used my father to get a quote from the really, really big IT support company in Australia at the time, and realised that they were actually charging monthly fees for their services. Jamie Warner:For a while I was thinking, “I just don’t know how you’re supposed to sell block hours and support packs and then all your costs are monthly wages and rent and electricity, al this sort of stuff.” It just seemed a complete disconnect between the two things, especially when the ad hoc revenue wasn’t very much on an average basis. You couldn’t force people to use these packs of time. Adjusting it to a monthly model, really set us away. That probably gave me a better insight into the vision of what we could build. Prior to that, I was a bit circling going, “Well, I don’t know what I want to do here.” I’m a pretty simple person in terms of the way I think about things. Once I realised it’s all about monthly, I went, “Okay, well, if I just sign up X dollars a month in monthly support, then I can cover all that cost and I can keep building.” I remember when we had our first sort of $300 a month, I was like, “Wow, someone’s paying us $300 a month.” Jamie Warner:The other chap I had, by the way, who had never seen that model before was like, “Nah, that’ll never work.” I said, “Well, it better bloody work because if it doesn’t, I can’t see where this business is going.” It worked and I got $1,000 a month. Then I went, “Wow. If we can get $1,000 a month, maybe I can get $10,000 a month.” Then we eventually hit 10. Now, all these years later, we’re actually at about $250,000 a month in that monthly support. That’s the metric that I’ve always been focused on, and it enables you to have a better vision about what you want to build. Interestingly, if you fast forward to 10 years, we were very much in it. Like most of the MSPs you see today, we were absolutely getting flogged around 2008, 2009. Jamie Warner:I remember sitting there with my brother saying, “Look, I don’t know if we’re ever going to make squillions out of this thing because it’s clearly taking a while to grow.” We were starting to scale. We went from 900K to 1.6 to sort of 2.1 to 3 million all in a space of three years. Which it’s not rocket ship compared to other businesses. But as an MSP, it wasn’t too bad, especially organically. We were getting busy, but we were busy, personally busy. The vision changed to being, “Well, okay if we’re not going to make squillions, let’s try and build something that actually doesn’t require our effort and time.” The vision 12 years ago, 13 years ago, it was very much to build an asset that you have as opposed to a job that you have. it’s the whole E Myth thing. I started to break out of that concept of seeing the business as my job and seeing the business as an asset that I just want to run. Because I had that mindset, it started to happen. Jamie Warner:It’s like the law of attraction. You tend to just start to do the things to get there. That’s obviously what we’ve got now. It’s evolved and interestingly, a lot of MSPs are, “I don’t want to get bigger. I don’t want to do that.” There’s more money and it is easier. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. It actually gets easier as you get bigger. Paul Green:I completely agree with you having done it a couple of times. Not quite to the scale at which you’ve done it, Jamie, but having done it with a couple of businesses, it’s so much easier when you don’t have to be involved with something yourself. I think the thing that many MSP owners struggle with is how to get started on that. You obviously had made that big mental decision. This is what we’re going to do. We want the business that’s going to thrive without us having to be here, so we’ve got the choice of whether to be here or not. But from a practical point of view, how did you actually get started on that? Jamie Warner:If I was to give one piece of advice, it’s, it is to have a sales growth mindset, first and foremost. Which I can completely appreciate is difficult if you’re technical, because virtually everything you do can suck you back into the business. A customer has a technical something’s burning, an S1, a severity one issue, or it could be I need to get back to them with an advisory quote. Or whatever it happens to be, it’s so easy to just get sucked in because we’re basically professional services businesses just in technology. Therefore, mindset wise, I would put it to the market that 95% of them just sit there thinking about servicing client rather than growing their business. They’re thinking job, not asset. Trying to get that through your head is probably the first thing. If you’re going to be sales and growth focused, you still need to be focused on operations and all that sort of stuff. But maybe if I could metaphorically explain it, that growth and sales mindset wise should be the platform by which everything’s based on, not technically servicing your clients. Jamie Warner:Because if you have the basis of that, and that’s your underlying primary goal, then you will grow. If your underlying primary goal is to do technical stuff and keep changing your stack and worrying about vendors, then that’s what you’ll be good at, and you won’t be good at growth. Because my mindset could only be that of sales and growth because I’m not technical in that way, then obviously you start to do the things over and over to grow and succeed. Very early on, we were trying to be more efficient around how we sell. Even just at the procurement level, we found out that there were quoting tools that can enable you to speed up that whole process. Through pure sales efficiency alone, of being able to pump quotes out faster, order things faster, that’s when we grew from 900K to 1.6 million in one year. We didn’t sign up any more clients ordinarily. We just were faster at getting through those quotes. I made a particular effort personally to do that. Jamie Warner:Now at our size, I have all these people that do the roles that I used to do. On the procurement side, that’s where the efficiency counts. But in terms of the growth side, it was always a focus of working on my support proposal. On how I present myself, on how I can sign up new business. That’s all I cared about. Once I realised, as I said earlier, the whole monthly model of signing up supp…

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Episode 87: How to launch a new security bundle Jul 13, 2021

Show notes

In this week’s episode With all the security news over the last few weeks, you’ve put together a new security bundle and now you want to launch it to your clients and prospects. It’s great you’re excited about the new stack you’re selling, but how do you get others to care about it? Especially when they’re “uneducated” about security matters, compared to you. This week on the show Paul gives some great advice on educating clients and prospects so your offering sells itself Also, do you get stressed about recruitment? If you’re finding it hard to attract the right kind of future employees, here’s a different way to look at recruitment Plus Paul’s special guest this week is an expert in turning OK businesses into highly sellable businesses. It’s an awesome approach because it can make your MSP even more profitable and enjoyable to run, whether you want to sell it now or not 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 Paul’s special guest was the business guide Steve Preda, bringing his book to life called ‘Buyable: Your Guide to Building a Self-Managing, Fast-Growing, and High-Profit Business’ During the conversation Steve mentioned the great books ‘The E-Myth Revisited‘ by Michael Gerber and Traction by Gino Wickman Try Steve’s buyability assessment Many thanks to Nancy Sabino for recommending the book The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking by Susan Cain On July 20th Paul presents a special extended podcast with featuring Jamie Warner, CEO of eNerds and Invarosoft. The show will take a deep dive into how Jamie built his MSP to over $9 million in revenue Please send any questions, ideally in audio-form (or any other feedback) to hello@paulgreensmspmarketing.com Episode transcription Voiceover:Fresh every Tuesday for MSPs around the world. This is Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast. Paul Green:I’ve got a cracker for you today. Here’s what’s coming up in the show. Steve Preda:If you really want to tap into where most of the money is, then you want to have a business which becomes a product in itself. Paul Green:We’ve also got a great book suggestion from another MSP owner, and we’ll be talking about how to launch a new security bundle, the best way to take whatever it is that you want to sell and launch it to your existing clients and new prospects. Voiceover:Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast. Paul Green:I don’t know what it’s like where you are right now, but many of the MSPs that I work quite closely with in our peer groups are saying right now that recruitment is a real issue, as in a real, real issue. Certainly here in the UK, we’re seeing lots and lots of people kind of going for job interviews without really having the intention to switch, which I think is quite a cruel thing. They’re almost using it to get a pay rise at wherever they’re working right now. So they’re saying, “Oh yeah, I went for a job interview. I was offered the job. It’s five grand more than I’m getting here. Oh, if you can match that, there’d be no need for me to leave.” And of course because everyone knows that right now recruitment is a bit of a nightmare, and we all know how much it costs to actually replace an employee when they leave, lots of companies are doing that. So that’s a bit of a trend that’s happening. Paul Green:There’s also just a general dearth of people out there. This might just be a unique UK thing because we’ve got this thing called the furlough scheme, which is coming to an end soon. And it’s basically where the government has allowed you to put people on furlough. And it’s been going on for some time, it’s been going on pretty much since the pandemic started and it’s coming to an end and there’s going to be a whole series of redundancies, and oh, it’s just going to be all difficult. And all of this is just coming together and making recruiting really difficult right now. And for difficult, read expensive. The MSPs I work with who do recruit people, are either having to do lots more advertising than they’ve previously been doing, or they’ve had to go to head hunters, recruitment agencies, and actually do that. And you know how expensive that can be. Paul Green:What’s it like where you are right now? Actually genuinely I would be interested to know. You can drop me an email, hello@paulgreensmspmarketing.com, I’d love to hear what recruitment is like in your neck of the woods right now. But whenever I have these conversations, it always strikes me that recruitment is like many business problems and can actually be solved with great marketing. Because if you think about recruitment, it’s no different to marketing. General marketing is where you’re trying to attract the attention of people who could go on to buy from you, build up some kind of relationship and trust with them, before you ask them for something in return for your service. The thing you’re asking them for is money. Paul Green:Now when it comes to recruitment, you’re actually asking someone for something far more valuable than money. You’re asking them for their time. You’re asking someone to put their complete trust and faith into you and your business, and in return you’ll give them some money every month, all being well. And in return, you’ll treat them well and you’ll train them and you’ll develop them and all of this kind of stuff. And I’ve always looked at being an employee and having a job as a really risky thing. Maybe that’s just a business owner mindset. Do you feel the same way? But recruiting people into your business is hard and it should be hard because the employees, although it looks sometimes as though we are the ones that are taking the big risk, you and I know we’re not really. We’re the ones taking the smaller risk, because no matter what the employment laws, we really hold all of the cards. Paul Green:If we don’t want someone to stay with our business, in the long-term, they’re not going to stay with our business. We will always find a way, legally of course, but we’ll always find a way to get rid of bad staff. I think the employers really do hold all of the cards regardless of the laws that protect employees. And I’m not saying you should be a bad employer at all, far from it, I’m saying you should be an absolutely great employer. The point I’m trying to make is that recruitment is a marketing problem because it’s exactly the same set of circumstances. You’re trying to talk to complete strangers, pre-qualify that they’re suitable for you, build a relationship with them and then get them to commit to you in some way, except in this case, it’s with a job rather than just giving you money for a service. Paul Green:So if this is a marketing problem, why are we approaching recruitment with short-term thinking? Because if you’ve been listening to this podcast for a while, you’ll know that I’m not a fan of short-term marketing. You’ve got to be in it for the long-term. You’ve got to build audiences with people, build a relationship with them and then be there at the exact moment that they are ready to take action. Recruitment should be exactly the same thing. Here’s how I see it. You should be building up pipelines of people. Do you want first, second, third-line techs? Then build yourself up a pipeline of those people. Now the first-line, they’re easy. They’re the ones who want to get into the game, want to be trained by you, want to perhaps switch over from something else that they’re doing, which isn’t quite first-line, but they’re certainly interested in it. Paul Green:You want to find those people and interview them and have a whole collection of them. So the second you have a first-line vacancy, you’ve got a whole pool of ready people. Maybe they’re at college right now. Maybe they’re in unrelated jobs. Maybe they’re just people that are good people and you’re thinking, ooh, the clients will love this person, all I’ve got to do is train them to be a good first-line tech. And it’s ever so easy to train people, it really is. In fact, this is why they say, and they’re right, that you should hire for attitude and not aptitude. If you hire someone with a great attitude, you can always train them to have the skills that they will need, especially a first-line tech. I know I’m not a tech myself, but I’m sure even I could be trained to be a first-line tech. I’d be a slow one and you’d fire me eventually, but even I could do that. So first-line techs are really easy. Go and find great people and just build up a relationship with them. And we’ll talk about how you do that in a second. Paul Green:Now, your second and third line techs, that’s where it starts getting a little trickier because these are people who are doing the job that you want them to do for you, but they’re doing it for someone else right now. So where do you find those people? Well, I think you start by looking on LinkedIn. What are the big companies in town that are employing these people? In fact, which are the businesses in town which are diametrically different to your business? So it could be that, let’s say, for example, you’re a small MSP, go on LinkedIn and look at the big MSPs. Who are the second and third-line techs working at the big MSPs? Because there are going to be some of those people who feel lost, they feel like they’re just a cog in the machine because they’re working for a big business. So it could be that down the line, they will happily switch over to a small MSP because they want to be a big fish in a small pond. Paul Green:Or it could be the other way round. If you’re a big MSP, you do this to small MSPs. You’d make contact with their second and third-line techs. You don’t have to just look at other MSPs, you could look at who else is employing second and third-line support? Who are the big employers in your town? Are there any software development companies around? Who are the big players and who have they got? And all of this information is going to come off LinkedIn. In fact, I think LinkedIn is just your greatest weapon. Not just in general marketing, but in trying to recruit people as well. Because you can go and look at all sorts of people and you can send them a message, and the kind of message that you would send them is very simple. Paul Green:You would say to them something like, “Hey, I hope you don’t mind me reaching out to you. I run so-and-so IT. We’re not currently looking for anyone, but I want to build up my… Now we wouldn’t use the word pipeline, so what’s the word would you use? I want to build up my connections with people that might want to have a look at job opportunities in the future. I hope you don’t mind us connecting. If you’d rather we didn’t do it on LinkedIn, then drop me an email.” And you give them like a private email, perhaps a Gmail or something. People will feel a lot more comfortable emailing you at a Gmail address than they will at your company business address. But you could do that to, I don’t know, 20, 30, 40 people in your local area. In fact, this is the building audience stage, you should be constantly connecting to potential future employees. Not just people who apply for your job, but this is potentially years before you even have a job, it’s building up your pipeline. Paul Green:So it’s fairly easy to find people. And you might only find that something like 1 in 10 people actually reply to your message or actually connect to you. That in itself is a prequalification, isn’t it? If they’re not willing to connect to you on LinkedIn or even have an early stage conversation with you, that’s great. You’ve just saved yourself a hell of a lot of time and hassle and grief there. But here’s the next thing. Once we’ve built that audience, even if it’s just two or three people to stay in touch with, how do you build a relationship with them? Well, the good news is because this is recruitment and ultimately they’re going to have to trust you, and you’re going to have to trust them, you can do this the old-fashioned way. Go out for a coffee, go out for a beer if that’s appropriate. Have a meal together now and again. Just stay in touch. Paul Green:I think meeting someone for a coffee is the right thing to do, and you do that whether it’s first, second, third, anyway kind of job. Just meet up for a coffee. See if you click. See if you get on with each other. If you think about it, the people that you employ, are people you spend more time with than any other people. Do you know that really important person in your life, the person you love? You spend less time with them than you do with your paid employees. This is crazy, but this is the way the world works, unfortunately. So you might as well see whether or not you click with these people before you even start to think about working with them. Nine times out of 10, eight times out of 10, yeah, you click. It’s going to be okay. Great. Paul Green:Well, the next stage is just getting to know each other a bit. Go out for a coffee once a month or every other month, just keep in touch with them. Share the news about your business. Nothing confidential, of course, just keep them up to date. Essentially treat them like the future employee they could be. It’s a scheduled task. Something you can do once a month to drop them a WhatsApp or an email, hey, just checking in. How are things going with you? This is what we’re doing here. And for those that you know are going to be job hunting at some point, because they’re unhappy with their current employer, then you can sort of just update them on when you might be looking for a job or even just keep talking about their goals. Paul Green:And the idea is that when one of your team walks in and says to you, “Can we have a little chat?” You don’t have to be stressed. You don’t have to worry. You don’t have to bang your head repeatedly against the desk because someone’s just created you a whole ton of work that you didn’t want. It’s okay. You’ve got a pipeline. When you’ve got a pipeline, everything’s okay. You just work your pipeline. You send out your WhatsApp messages, hi, all right, so the moment is here, we’ve got a vacancy. Dave’s going to be moving on to something better. Is it worth us having a chat or is this not the right time for you? And they’ll soon tell you, because that’s the thing with the pipeline. It doesn’t mean you’re guaranteed an employee, a future employee in there, but it’s a great place to start. It really is. And if you’ve got to know them, and they’ve got to know you along the way, this is a very clever thing to do. Voiceover:Here’s this week’s clever idea. Paul Green:I can imagine just how excited you are. You’ve spent months pulling this together. You’ve looked at vendor versus vendor. You’ve been in your peer groups. You’ve been on your Facebook groups. You’ve asked all of your connections, which are the best security products? You’ve tried two or three, you’ve put them together, and now you’re ready to launch. You’ve got your brand new security bundle. Now what do you do with it? Because you’ve got this bundle, you’ve got all the right tools, but what’s the best way to actually get it in front of the clients? This is a surprisingly common question for me. When I start working with MSPs and they’ve got this new bundle together and they’ve put together the right, should we call it a security stack? Is that the right thing to call it? Let’s call it that. So you’ve put together your right security stack and you’re ready to launch it. What do you do? Paul Green:Now the worst thing that you can do is say to your clients and your prospects, “Hey, we’ve got a new security stack.” Because do you know how much they care? They don’t care at all, do they? Remember ordinary people don’t really care about cybersecurity in the way that you do and in the way that I do. I mean, they do care if they get hacked, they don’t want all the hassle and the pain and the expense, but it’s ju…

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Episode 86: MSPs: Look at your business as a potential buyer would Jul 06, 2021

Show notes

In this week’s episode One day you’ll want to sell your MSP. It might be years away, but it’s a good habit to start to look at your business now, in the way your potential buyer will in the future Want to get even more traffic to your website? An SEO expert joins Paul to reveal what else you can do to optimise your on-line presence Speaking of your website, have you heard about ‘exit intent pop ups’? And are they right for your website? They could help generate more leads… Paul explains more Plus, how about an amazing prize for life?! In the show this week you can win a lifetime membership to the MSP community The Tech Tribe Show notes Out every Tuesday on your favourite podcast platform Presented by Paul Green, an MSP marketing expert In talking about the importance of running your business as if you were trying to sell it, Paul mentioned the great book Built To Sell by John Warrillow (and his podcast) Register for a free copy of Paul’s book Paul mentioned Google Optimize when discussing the benefits of testing an ‘exit intent pop up’ Producer James Lett told you about the chance to win a lifetime membership to the Tech Tribe – enter HERE (closes midnight Sunday 11th July 2021 UK time) Paul’s special guest was Joey Donovan Guido from Cuppa SEO Web Design and the author of A Holistic Guide to Online Marketing, talking about how to get more traffic to your website In the conversation, Joey mentioned BrightLocal (that could help you with citations) plus Google My Business Many thanks to Christian Fleming from Northstar IT for recommending the book Zero Negativity by Ant Middleton On July 13th Paul will be joined by the business guide Steve Preda, talking about how to make your MSP self managing, fast growing, and highly profitable Please send any questions, ideally in audio-form (or any other feedback) to 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 the show. I’ve got another cracker for you this week. Here’s what’s coming up. Joey Donovan Guido:Getting one or two more points can really help your visibility on Google. Paul Green:We’re also going to be looking at something called exit intent, popups on websites. I’ll explain what they are and whether or not you should be using them. We’ve also got a great competition in this episode. It’s a chance for you to win a lifetime membership to the Tech Tribe. More on that later in the show. Voiceover:Paul Green’s MSP marketing podcast. Paul Green:I’m going through a process at the moment, which is teaching me so much about how people view our businesses and what people see on the outside of our businesses. I sold a business five years ago and one of my primary goals was to go and acquire other businesses. Because I did the standard 10, 11 years of hard slog, the starting it in your bedroom, in your spare bedroom on your own and working it to, well when we sold it, we had 15 staff and over a million a year in revenue and that’s million UK Sterling, but it was hard work. And once you’ve done that once, you don’t really want to do that again. So for a number of years, I’ve been plotting and planning to do what’s known in mergers and acquisitions as a roll-up. Paul Green:So a roll-up is where you go and buy lots of the same kinds of business, and you put them together into a group. And the idea is that you buy three, four, five businesses. Put together, they are worth more, and they’re generating more net profit than those individual businesses before they were combined. Paul Green:I’ve picked a sector that I don’t know anything about. It’s kind of like burglar alarm security, fire alarms, security cameras, those kinds of things, a mix of both domestic and commercial. And right now we’ve got about seven businesses in our pipeline. I’ve used my marketing skills to generate a whole series of acquisition targets and we’re actively talking to them. I reckon we’ll make our first purchase in about the next two to three months, which is very exciting. Paul Green:What it’s reminded me is how other people see your business, how outsiders see your business. And there are both marketing and indeed exit lessons in this. So as I say, I’m buying in a sector, I don’t really know, by the way, the reason I’m doing that is so I can’t get dragged into running that business. Paul Green:So I’m really good at marketing. You’d think I’d go and buy marketing companies, but because I’m good at marketing, I could far too easily get dragged into running a marketing business. Whereas I know very, very little about security and cameras and that kind of stuff. It’s virtually impossible for me to be dragged into the operations. And in fact, it means I’ve got to acquire businesses with great people and great operations. And then I can use my marketing superpowers to improve those businesses and grow them. Paul Green:We forget, when we’re busy running the business every day, the people on the outside see the business completely differently to how we do. You know, it’s fascinating for me talking to business owners who’ve been running their business since, in some cases, the ’80s or the late ’90s, or, the last 15 years. And because it’s their everything, because they’ve literally put sometimes 20 to 30 years worth of hard work into these businesses, and they’ve been through all the ups and the downs and the number of staff that left, and the customers they’ve won and lost, and the improvements in their sector and all of these kinds of things. It’s this massive emotional, traumatic roller coaster. And so they view the business in a completely different way. Paul Green:Sometimes quite often, in fact, it’s owners who’ve run out of energy, they’ve run out of steam. The business has plateaued. There’s at the core of very, very good business there, but perhaps not a business that’s in growth or that they even enjoy. Some of the owners I’m speaking to, they love the money that the business generates for them, but they don’t love the business anymore. They’re not in love with their child. And you can see how someone else coming in, a clean pair of hands, a fresh pair of hands, someone with energy and vigor is going to do a lot more with that business than the original owner would. Paul Green:But they see the business completely differently to how I see the business. And I think there’s a great marketing lesson in that. We do get so caught up in our own businesses. We forget that the people that we’re trying to sell to, the prospects that you want to sell to, they’re not viewing the business through your eyes. They don’t see it the way that you do. They don’t know that you’re great at what you do. They don’t know about your weaknesses in the way that you do. What to you is everything, it’s every waking moment, it’s there at the back of your head, every single time on holiday, on a day off, it’s there at the back of your head. You’re constantly thinking about how to improve it, how to get better, how to be more efficient, how to make more money. To them, you’re just another supplier. You’re just someone else. Paul Green:Now, don’t get me wrong. You’re a critical supplier. We all know that IT is a key supplier. It’s a core service, but it’s not as important to them as it is to you. Paul Green:Once they’re comfortable that you’re not going to destroy their business, you’re just a key supplier. That’s it. They’re not thinking about things the way that you are. They don’t have the context that you do. They haven’t seen all the years of hard work that go into it. They don’t know how much hard work you’re doing in the background on preventative measures to stop them from having problems in the first place. Paul Green:People don’t view your business through your eyes. They view it through their own eyes. Reminds me of one of my favourite sayings. It’s something I read in a book somewhere. I cannot remember the book, but essentially it goes like this, “To influence what John Smith buys, you must look through John Smith’s eyes.” And John Smith in this example is the person that you are hoping to sell a new managed services contract to. Paul Green:Now this doesn’t just hold true for marketing and for prospecting, it holds very much true when you come to exit the business as well. See me looking to buy a business, it’s been fascinating seeing how these owners value their businesses and what they think they’re worth. And pretty much to a T all of them overvalue the business. They’ve kind of not cooked the books as much as they’ve presented their accounts in the most pleasant way as they can with their accountant. But you know, you do any kind of due diligence and you soon find out what a business is actually making in profitable terms. And it’s off the back of that, that you can put in a decent offer. Paul Green:We’ve had a couple of offers in already and predominantly buying a business is not really a financial thing. It’s an emotional thing. The owners that want to sell businesses, that even if they’re they’ve plateaued and they’ve lost their love for them, they still don’t want to see that business fail. Paul Green:I’ve had people asking about, “What can we do as part of a deal to make sure our staff are protected? What can we do as part of a deal to make sure that you don’t change the name?” for example, so that their name staves above the door in a metaphorical sense. Paul Green:Selling the business to a buyer when you’re ready to exit is really no different to selling the business, to prospects along the way to picking up new clients. You’ve got to look at it through their eyes. And you’ve got to ask yourself, “What do they see here? What do these people want? What do these people need? What do these people fear? And how can I give that to them?” Paul Green:If you’re thinking of exiting anytime in the next 10 years, there’s a book that I highly recommend you read. It’s called Built to Sell by John Warrillow. In fact, he does a great podcast as well. It’s the Built to Sell Podcast. I’m not sure if it’s still going, but he knocked out a good couple of hundred episodes of that. And it’s all about preparing your business ready for the eventual sale. What I like about the book is that the process of preparing the business for sale is exactly the same process to make the business thrive without you having to be there. And to me, if you can fix the business and get the business ready to sell, there’s a double win in that. Voiceover:Here’s this week’s clever idea. Paul Green:I bet this has happened to you. You’ve been on a website, you’ve been looking at some stuff and then you’ve gone up for the back button. So your mouse has moved up to the top, left to go to the back button and suddenly a pop-up window opens. Now, this is called an exit intent, pop up. Exit intent means that someone is intending to exit the website. So the website is tracking that their mouse cursor is going up to the back button. I’m not quite sure how that works in a mobile device, but it does work in that as well. But essentially the website only shows something when it thinks that you’re starting to leave or you’re intending to leave that website. Paul Green:So here’s my question for you. Should you be using an exit intent pop up on your website? Now we’ve been using one for the last, but the last five, six weeks or so as part of our ongoing experiments to get more people, to join our list. Paul Green:So I want to be growing our email list, our email audience. And one of the ways that we do that is we give away a free book. You can go get it yourself at PaulgreensMSPmarketing.com. And when we send people to the website, if they haven’t opted in and they haven’t already given us their contact details to join that list and get a copy of the book, then when they do that exit intent, we’ve been doing a pop-up. That pop-up has been basically saying, “Hey, before you go, would you like a free copy of this book on MSP marketing?” Paul Green:Now I hate exit intent popups. I should say that I find them intrusive. In fact, all popups, I find intrusive. They annoy me, but here’s what we found over the last five to six weeks or so. That exit intent pop-up has converted really well. Paul Green:Now, I don’t have the exact figures in front of me cause I have a guy, James, who does all this stuff for me, and he’s across that kind of detail, but I’m pretty sure it’s a roundabout 10 to 11%. And that means for new visitors, for people who’ve never visited the site before, who come in around about 10 to 11% of them do opt into our mailing list once they see that exit intent pop up. So do you know what? That’s a great conversion rate. And even though these popups are annoy me, here’s my thinking on this. We’re not showing the pop-up to them when they first visit the site. So we’re not annoying them initially. There’s no pop-ups and things moving and all this stuff that humans hate, and actually Google hates as well now. In fact, it’s core web vitals has some scores for all of those kinds of things. Paul Green:But what we are doing is, at the point that someone’s thinking of leaving the site, we just offer them this free book. We’re not asking them to do much other than, “Hey, here’s a free book. Fill in your details here, and you can get a copy of that.” And at that kind of 10% conversion level, that’s really worth doing. Paul Green:Now, we’re doing some more experience now to try to improve that conversion rate and get it up from 10% to 15%. But here’s the question. Should you do this on your website? The first question to ask yourself is what’s your most wanted outcome? What’s the thing you want people to do more than anything else when they visit your website? It could be to join your mailing list, or it could be to book a 15 minute video call with you. Paul Green:I think for most MSPs, that should be your most wanted outcome, because ultimately you’re trying to find people who, they’re kind of at the research phase. They’re unhappy with their incumbent MSP. Perhaps they’re ready to move on or make some kind of change in the near future, and you want to get those people booking a meeting with you. You want to get them on a video call either with you or with a colleague. And after 15 minutes you’ll know whether or not they’re going to make a great prospect and they’ll have an emotional idea of whether or not it’s worth moving onto the next step with you. And the next step, of course, being a proper sales meeting, whether that’s in real life or whether that’s over a video call. Paul Green:So should you do an exit intent pop up on your websites? The real answer to this is you should experiment with it. Have a go at it. You can use something like Google Optimize to do a split test, although to do a split test where you have the same page or versions of the same page and you’re alternating traffic between one page or another sometimes called a/b split testing. I mean, you need big numbers. You need big traffic to get really robust things for this. Paul Green:I would just pop one on your website and just try it. You can just Google exit intent pop up. There are about 30 or 40 different ones that you can try. And if you want to recommendation of what we’re using, just drop me an email. Hello@PaulgreensMSPmarketing.com. I’ll happily tell you which one we’ve been trying out. Paul Green:But maybe you should just try it. Try it, see if people book appointments off it. Or maybe try it just to drive traffic to your data capture and see if people sign up. I think the thing with your website is, once you’ve got it up to a basic standard and it is good enough, and you’ve got lots of social proof and you’ve got pictures of real people and videos and testimonials and all of this kind of stuff, once you’ve got those basics done, then you can start to do experiments. Try different things. Try these popups. Try split tests and all sort…

Full show notes at the publisher

Episode 85: MSPs: Avoid commission-only sales people Jun 29, 2021

Show notes

In this week’s episode Few MSP owners enjoy selling. And so inevitably at some point, everyone considers getting in a sales person to replace themselves. This is the right way of thinking for the long-term… but you absolutely never ever want to hire a commission-only sales person. Paul explains why in today’s podcast Also on the show this week, how do you go about getting free publicity and what do you do with it when you get it? Listen as Paul (a former journalist) helps you get the most out of the traditional ‘press release’ There’s also a fascinating conversation with an E-Learning expert – it’s an area of huge growth and you’ll discover how your MSP can benefit Show notes Out every Tuesday on your favourite podcast platform Presented by Paul Green, an MSP marketing expert Paul spoke more back in Episode 72 about why and how to use a ‘phone person’ Find out more about Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Edge (that includes monthly press releases) Set up a Google Alert to help you track media coverage Read more about the research surrounding the future value of the E-Learning market Paul’s special guest was Derek Morgan from Nexon Asia Pacific talking about how to train your clients to buy more (find out more at Clip Training) Many thanks to Bob Layton from Digital Defense for recommending the book Smarter Faster Better by Charles Duhigg On July 6th Paul will be joined by the online marketing consultant Joey Donovan Guido, talking about how to get more traffic to your website Please send any questions, ideally in audio-form (or any other feedback) to hello@paulgreensmspmarketing.com Episode transcription Voiceover:Fresh every Tuesday for MSPs around the world. This is Paul Green’s MSP Marketing podcast. Paul Green:Thank you so much for giving me your ears for the next 20, 25 minutes or so. Here’s what we’ve got coming up in today’s show. Derek Morgan:Users can actually go onto that platform and easily search and find the answers to the questions that they’re after. Paul Green:We’re also going to be talking about why your MSP should be sending out regular press releases to your local media and to news blogs. Plus we’ve got another book suggestion at the end of the show, and we’re going to be telling you about a competition we’re doing next week to win an incredible prize. Voiceover:Paul Green’s MSP Marketing podcast. Paul Green:There’s a question that about two or three separate people have asked me over the last couple of months, and my answer has always been an emphatic 100% no. What’s the question? It’s should I get a commission only sales person for my MSP? And the commission only sales person varies from someone that’s physically out there doing the selling to someone that’s bashing phones trying to book appointments for you. I truly believe that commission only sales people are utterly not the right route for your business no matter how tight your resources. Paul Green:Let me explain why. Now, the theory goes that if someone is that good at sales then a commission only deal, particularly where there’s no cap on that commission, should be highly attractive to them. And I guess on paper it does work that way. But here’s the thing, in real life anyone that’s actually any good at selling at all can very quickly get themselves a proper sales job where they get a good basic and some good perks on top of a great commission structure. Let me put that another way, the best sales people wouldn’t work on a commission only basis because they know that they have a greater worth than that. Paul Green:It’s not just about them committing to the company, the company has to be committed to them, and paying them a good salary is the way that the company commits to them as well as training and terms of work and all of that kind of stuff. Commission only sales people, in my limited experience because I haven’t worked with a lot of commission only sales people, but I’ve seen it go wrong for lots of people. Commission only sales people tend to be very, very motivated to achieve whatever it takes to get them commission, even if actually that doesn’t help you to achieve your overall goals. Paul Green:Let me give you an example. Supposing you had someone on commission only who’s job was to book you 15 minute video calls. So they’re phoning, they’re literally making outbound phone calls to your databases, your email list, your LinkedIn connections, any other followings you’ve got. And their job is to book 15 minute phone calls with you, or video calls with you. That’s actually a pretty good strategy by the way, to get someone doing that kind of outbound phoning for you. But if you pay someone on a commission only basis, so you pay them for the 15 minute phone call, guess what, they’re going to do everything in their power to book 15 minute phone calls, even if that’s with the wrong people. Paul Green:In fact, what you’ll find is you’ll end up doing a whole series of video calls with highly unqualified prospects. There’ll be influencers within the business, not decision makers. There’ll be people who aren’t even either. There’ll be people who are completely outside of your normal parameters of success. You’ve asked for a minimum of five or ten users, and you’re talking to a one-man band. There’s nothing wrong with that, but you don’t necessarily want to try and support a one-man band because the profit just isn’t there. Paul Green:Commission only sales people are very, very driven just to earn commission. They don’t care about the business long-term. They don’t care that the reason you want a 15 minute phone call is so that you can actually get yourself a proper brand new client. They don’t care about that. So maybe then you’d think, “Okay, perhaps I should then do the commission only basis based on us getting a new client.” Well the problem with that is you getting a new client is very much out of the hands of the commission only sales person. Paul Green:If they’re booking phone calls for you or video calls, then all they’re doing is setting up for you to talk to a potential client. Again, they’ll just set up anyone because it’s a numbers game to them. Now you and I don’t really want to waste our time on 15 minute phone calls with people unless they’ve been qualified in some way. That’s certainly the case most of the time. But your commission only sales person is just going to throw the numbers game at it, get you on a video call with as many people as they can. Paul Green:And of course, you and I know that booking those kind of wrong calls, it’s not going to result in great clients. And in fact, your commission only sales person just isn’t going to see any commission off the back of that. They’ll do a huge amount of activity and they will burn out or move on to do something else very, very quickly. I think it’s exactly the same if you use a commission only sales person to do all of your selling. I’ll tell you exactly what will happen there, they won’t sell what you want them to sell, they will go and sit in front of a prospect and the prospect will say they want X, Y, Z. And your commission only sales person will go, “Yeah, we can do that. No problem whatsoever.” And then come back and talk to the technical people. Paul Green:Why? Because they only get paid when they make a sale. It’s absolutely the wrong kind of person you should have out there representing the company. Do you know what as well, they’ll do anything to get someone to sign, not caring what happens in the long-term. But the real net profits in running an MSP come from looking after the client in the long-term. The longer you look after someone, the more revenue they contribute and typically the more net profit they contribute. Your relationship gets stronger and stronger and stronger, and it’s how you build your business. A commission only sales person is basically wham, bam, thank you Mr. Or Mrs. New Client because they just want to get that person through the door and get some money out of them because that’s the way they’re going to get their commission. Paul Green:So what’s the answer then? What’s the answer if you cannot afford to have sales people because you just don’t have the cash resource? Well, I’d steer well clear of commission only. I would go for starting small. So for example, you look at the outbound marketing. Most MSPs don’t do any kind of outbound telephoning at all. You don’t have to take on someone full-time. We spoke back in episode 72 of the podcast about why you should hire a proactive phone person to work a couple of hours a day, couple of days a week, probably from home, probably in school hours just making outbound phone calls for you. Paul Green:Because in most MSPs the hard selling function, the actually sitting in front of a prospect and selling is something that you should probably retain anyway. You’re only probably doing one or two of these a week, at the most. And even with an outbound phoner doing this for you, you’re not going to get a massive, massive number of new appointments, you’re going to get a small number, hopefully, of high quality appointments. So I think you should retain the sales function yourself and you should just hire someone to do the difficult work, which is actually picking up the phone, calling your audiences and booking your 15 minute video calls in the first place. Paul Green:And how do you recompense that person? How do you pay them? Pay them for their time. Pay them an hourly rate. In fact, I would take the commission structure completely out of it. It’s really tempting to pay someone a commission structure and to try and work out a complicated deal which pays them some commission on day one and some commission six months down the line, or rewards them with monthly recurring revenue or something like that. Do you know what, for someone that’s just making outbound phone calls for you, just pay them for their time, pay them well for their time. Paul Green:Pick someone who’s got skills, someone who’s warm and friendly on the phone and then pay them for their time. Pay them for making those calls and setting up those video appointments for you, because then if they win it’s brilliant, they feel good and that’s their reward. If they don’t win, doesn’t matter, they still get paid, there’s always tomorrow. Because you know, you have good days and you have bad days when you’re doing that kind of prospecting. I think you can find a really, really good person, a quality person and reward them in so many different ways than giving them cash commission. Give them training, give them development, give them an interesting job to do working with adults and give them a good hourly rate. This is so much better than trying to pay someone commission only. Voiceover:Here’s this week’s clever idea. Paul Green:Let me take you back to the year 1994. James the producer, could you put some kind of special effect in there? Yeah, that’s it. We’re going back in time, back in time. It’s 1994. I mean, fresh faced, skinny, slightly geeky looking 19 year old newspaper reporter. I’ve just got my first job. It’s a journalism apprenticeship on the Daventry Express newspaper in the small town of Daventry in Northamptonshire here in the UK. One of my core jobs every day is to read the press releases. And oh my goodness, we had a lot of press releases. They would turn up literally 20, 30, 40 of them would turn up in the post every day, because of course this is ’94 isn’t it, it’s pre-email, pre-internet and all that stuff. Paul Green:We’d have even more turning up by fax. I used to hear, I was based on the first floor and I could hear the fax whirring away on the ground floor and I’d go down and there would be pages and pages and pages of fax. And by the way, if you don’t know what a fax machine is, it’s kind of like email but with paper. I miss fax machines in a way. Do I? No, I don’t. No. They seemed quite cool at the time. Anyway, you get the idea. We had hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of press releases coming into this newspaper every week, and this was a tiny little inconsequential newspaper in the middle of nowhere. Imagine what national and international newspaper must have had back then in terms of the amount of press releases coming in. Paul Green:Let me back step a second and tell you what a press release actually is. A press release is a communication between a company or an organisation or a council or something like that, and it’s a communication to a media outlet. It’s, if you like, a story suggestion. They’re telling them a piece of news or something that they want to release. And back in the day, back in the ’90s and through really much of the ’00s, probably up to about 2010, that was the standard way that companies communicated. They didn’t really put stuff on their own websites or communicate with their own audiences until it was something special like a shareholder’s meeting. Paul Green:Nine times out of ten they issued a press release, and issuing a press release was a formal, official thing to do. As a news outlet, and this was the same when I was in the newspaper and then when I went on to have a decade long radio career, as media outlets that was a source of stories. It wasn’t our only source, but it was a big source of stories for us because we’d sometimes just pick up press releases and just run that story as a piece of news. Or sometimes it would give us an idea for a different kind of story and we’d go and put something together. Paul Green:I’ll tell you a little bit of a secret about those press releases though, probably nine out of ten of them just went in the bin. Yeah, we didn’t have recycling back then, they went straight in the bin. So probably, and maybe it was less than one in ten, one in ten feels generous. But less than one in ten press releases ever actually made it into the newspaper or onto the radio stations that I worked at. That often surprises PR people, it often surprises business owners and managers like you. But the reality is that media outlets are so swamped with press releases and story ideas, and that’s still the case today it’s just they all turn up by email or by some other means. Paul Green:They’re still so swamped that they don’t need to use all of the things that come in. And actually, half of the things, many of the things that come in just aren’t news worthy at all. By news worthy I mean they’re just not of interest to the end audience. Now, why am I telling you all of this, and why did I take you back to 1994? In fact, James the producer, let’s have the music to come back to 2021. Oh yes, I love it. I love this music. The reason I’m telling you all of this is that even though press releases were a tool of the past, they’re still very much valid today. Paul Green:In fact, I give a press release to my clients every month and I say to them, “Just send this out to your local media. Just send this out because it’s a story suggestion.” You never know when a media outlet is going to be looking for a piece of news and they will potentially pick you, pick your story. It doesn’t happen most of the time. As I said, nine out of ten press releases, story suggestions, go in the bin. But it does happen more often than you think. Paul Green:Now, what kind of story suggestions do you send out? Well, let me give you the actual headlines of three of the most recent press releases that we’ve written for our MSP Marketing Edge clients. The one from June said, “Who’s watching your cameras? New scary hacking threats for town name businesses.” This was us taking a story about the internet of things being hacked. You may have heard that there was a fish tank of a casino in Las Vegas that was hacked at some point. I think that was a couple of years ago, but it’s only just come out and we did the story about that. Paul Green:Because you have to remember when you’re doing a press release is the journalists and the ultimate end audience that you’re speaking to, they really aren’t on top of our wor…

Full show notes at the publisher

Episode 84: You’re still doing those technical tasks??? WHY? Jun 22, 2021

Show notes

In this week’s episode It’s not in any way about being lazy – but you do need to stop personally working on so many tasks. If you free yourself from jobs that someone else can do for you, then you can focus your valuable attention on growing your business… and actually enjoying life. This week on the show Paul explains how you can do this Also on the show this week, you may have noticed that LinkedIn has changed its rules around connecting with people. Paul’s joined by an expert special guest to look at what’s changed and how this might affect your MSP Plus, how’s your About Us page on your site? It’s the second most important page on your site. And this week Paul gives you some great practical advice on how to make it as good as it can be Show notes Out every Tuesday on your favourite podcast platform Presented by Paul Green, an MSP marketing expert Find out about the physical time tracking tool Paul mentioned called Timeular Register for a free copy of Paul’s book Paul’s special guest was Nate Freedman from Tech Pro Marketing talking about the new restrictions applied by LinkedIn Check out the unofficial LinkedIn automation tool Dux-Soup Find out more about LinkedIn’s other native content hosting solutions, for example Newsletters Paul was looking forward to his future conversation with Praveen Ramesh from Superops.ai all about marketing and LinkedIn Many thanks to Rebecca Finken from Traction 4 Success for recommending the book Who Not How by Dan Sullivan & Dr. Benjamin Hardy On June 29th Paul will be joined by Derek Morgan from Nexon Asia Pacific talking about how to train your clients to buy more Please send any questions, ideally in audio-form (or any other feedback) to hello@paulgreensmspmarketing.com Episode transcription Voiceover:Fresh every Tuesday for MSPs around the world. This is Paul Green’s, MSP Marketing podcast. Paul Green:I am delighted to be back with you, and we’ve got a cracker of a show for you this week. Here’s what’s coming up. Nate Freedman:In the older days when LinkedIn was maybe a little more lenient, you might be able to get 700 connection requests in per week. Paul Green:I also got another book suggestion for you towards the end of the podcast. This week it’s from Traction expert, Rebecca Finken. We’re also going to be talking about what makes the very best about us page on your website. Voiceover:Paul Green’s MSP Marketing podcast. Paul Green:Let me ask you a really stupid question. Are you busy? Have you got too much on? Have you got too many things that you have to do? Do you get to the end of the day, each day, and you’re like, “Whoa, where did today go? How was it already whatever o’clock? How is it that I haven’t achieved enough today? Haven’t got half the things done that I wanted to get done on my task list.” Is this you? Does this happen to you on a regular basis? Now the chances are high that if that is you, the things that you’re spending your time doing are not necessarily critical tasks, they’re not necessarily important things that build the business that drive the business forward. Paul Green:Maybe you’re stuck doing levels of support that perhaps are a little bit under you, and it’s okay as the owner of the business to say that line one support is a little bit underneath you, or maybe you’re just being caught up doing admin stuff, other things. You’ve heard me say many times on this podcast that you should only do what only you can do and that you should operate your business and your life with a spirit of DOA. That being an acronym, not standing for dead on arrival, but instead standing for delegate, outsource, automate. Paul Green:And I think every business owner reaches a point where they’re just so busy, they’re too busy and they’re busy doing the wrong things. We kind of pride ourselves as business owners, don’t we, on being busy? You meet someone when you’re out networking and it’s almost a badge of honour if, “Oh, I worked 18 hours yesterday and I only slept three hours and there’s blood gushing out my eyes, I’m so tired.” People do do that. It is like a badge of honour. It’s almost like it makes you a proper business owner if you work 18 hour days now and again. Paul Green:I tell you what it also makes you, a really awful parent, and a really awful husband or wife or girlfriend or boyfriend or whatever it is that you are. Because when you throw yourselves, even if you do 12 hour days on a regular basis, you are not a normal human being when you get home, you are as far from a normal human being as you can possibly be. The goal is that you spend as much of your time as you can only doing the things that truly, truly only you can do. And this starts with eliminating the small tasks that someone else can do for you. I call these red tasks. And the reason I call them that is because I’m tracking my time and I’m still using my Timeular tracker that I was talking about last year. In fact, I first introduced that to you in episode 41, back in August last year. I’m still using it and I colour code every task that I do. Paul Green:So I have a very simple traffic light system, really. If it’s a task that I want to do more of, in fact, I can do unlimited amounts of it’s a green task. As I’m recording this, this is a green task, creating content. I can do as much of that as I want to. When it’s a yellow task, it’s something like talking with clients, talking with my team, that kind of thing, things that need to be done, and actually it’s important that they’re done, but I don’t want to do too much of them. I’ve got to get a balance of yellow tasks. And then I’ve got red tasks. Red tasks are things like reading email, moving pieces of paper around, doing admin, dealing with accounts inquiries, that kind of stuff, essentially things that someone’s got to do them somewhere, but does it really have to be me? And I have spent the last year trying to eliminate those red tasks from my life. And I’m doing a pretty good job of it. Paul Green:Of course, I still have some red tasks that I need to do, but increasingly that’s getting a smaller and smaller and smaller pot because I’m identifying them and then finding other people that can do those tasks for me. Here’s how you can do exactly the same thing. It’s a fairly simple process. There’s a bit of pain involved because you’ve got to be honest with yourself and truthful with yourself. Sometimes that’s quite hard, isn’t it? But it does start with tracking your time. And I do recommend the Timeular tracker, just because it’s got a physical element to it. You have an eight sided dice that you turn when you move from one task to another. If that’s not really your thing, then just get behind of a hundreds of time trackers out there, go and find the one that works best for you. It’s like all software, isn’t it? Don’t obsess over all the different options, find one you like and stick with that one. Paul Green:But critically, you’ve got to measure everything you do for at least a month. And I mean everything. Every little, oh, I’m just going to do this, every little, oh, I’m just going to do that, every little thing you do in the evening, every phone call that you take, every bit of traveling, everything, you have to log everything that you do in your working life. And you have to categorise it as a green task, as a yellow task, or as a red task. Now, the reason I ask you to do this for a month is you’re looking up to build a picture. What does your average working day or week or month look like? It could be that you jump on the help desk, a couple of afternoons a week, just to take the pressure off your team, get some projects finished, that kind of thing. That’s okay. That’s a choice to do that. Paul Green:And even though those are red tasks, or you might put that as yellow, because you’re choosing to do it, but even though those are yellow tasks, that’s okay it’s scheduled time. You’re making a conscious choice to do it. I’m looking for the little red tasks that turn up and kind of steal your time. The invoice that falls over, the payment that isn’t made, the problem with the supplier, the vendor’s sales person that’s on the phone, that email that urgently needs your attention, say your staff, all of those kinds of things are red tasks. They come in, they interrupt your day. So track your time for a month, track what the red tasks are. Maybe you could make a list of them. Maybe you could spot a trend. Paul Green:Trends are wonderful in data because trends are your friends. I’ve just made that up. I’m going to use that again in the future. Trends are your friends because they tell you what’s actually happening in the business. One of my MSPs, I worked closely with recently admitted that he will go into his PSA and review the tickets to find problems that he can fix and to find things that perhaps haven’t been dealt with very well by his staff. Now he’s got some great staff. He’s got some average staff, as many people do, but he’s busy all day long. And basically he’s made himself busy by going in and checking the tickets. He shouldn’t need to check the tickets, other people are dealing with them for him, but he can’t stop himself from doing it. And I suggested exactly as I’ve just suggested to you go and log your time for a month and see exactly how often you’re doing that. Paul Green:Imagine if he was spending two to three hours a day checking other people’s tickets and then meddling with them. Imagine, now it’s okay to do that as part of a ticket review, and to do that with the team, but to sit there at your desk and spend two to three hours a day, which is essentially a third of your working day, meddling with your teams work, that’s not a great investment in your time is it? Because even if you just stopped that, because in that instance, you don’t even need to delegate the work to someone else they’re already doing it. If they’re not doing it well enough, that’s a training issue or you need a service desk manager or something like that. But imagine if you just stopped doing that instantly, suddenly you’ve got 10, 15 hours a week to invest into something else. Paul Green:You can invest it into growing the business, or doing your marketing, or going home and spending more time with your kids, or with your wife, or hang gliding or whatever it is that you want to do. Do you see where I’m coming up from this? You’ve got to know where you spend your time before you can eliminate it. So once you’ve got the time and you’ve spotted the trends, then you just pick off a red task. And you know what? Don’t try and do it all in one go, try and do one a day, or if that’s too much try and do one a week. I’ve been delegating out my red tasks fairly slowly. It’s been more than every sort of two or three days. When I get annoyed, when I realise I’m doing a red task again, why is it someone else doing it? Then I’ve found someone either on my team or I’ve gone and found a bit of outsource help that can do that for me. Paul Green:Right down to, I don’t read my emails anymore. I read a small selection that’s been curated for me each day by my virtual assistant, but that takes me about 10 to 15 minutes. I don’t handle any invoices at all now. I wasn’t doing a great deal of it before, but and I still make the payments because I’m a bit of a control freak when it comes to actually paying money out the bank account, but I certainly don’t handle the paperwork or zero or any of that. We’ve got a much better bookkeeper that can do that. In fact, he can do a much better job than I can. Do you get the idea? It’s all of these little things that just strip the fun out of the day. Track your time, look for the trends, and then look at eliminating a single red task every week. In just five to 10 weeks or so, your working day is going to be completely different. It’s a revolution in how you spend your time. Voiceover:Here’s this week’s clever idea. Paul Green:You know what it’s important page on your website is right? It’s your homepage, predominantly because that’s where the majority of your traffic enters your site. But what’s the second most important page? It’s the about us page. In fact, those two are the most highly trafficked pages on your website. Go and look at your Google Analytics and you’ll see that most of your traffic is on your home page and or your about us page. Why do people go to the about us page? What is it that draws them there? Maybe before they inquire or before they take it any further, they just want to know about the people behind the business. Because people buy from people. They really do. They don’t buy from brands and companies. Okay, when you’re talking about Ford cars and Givenchy perfume, or however you say it, I don’t know. When you talk about that, yes, people are buying a brand, but they’re actually buying into a lifestyle. Paul Green:You’re buying into a Ford because it’s a lifestyle. The marketing has made you feel a certain way about a Ford. When it comes to actually doing the deal, it’s the sales person that you’re dealing with if there is a salesperson. That’s where people buy from people. But in our world, in our world of selling B2B, people really do buy from people. So we should make sure the about us page on your website is absolutely smoking. It’s absolutely as best as you can possibly make it. It’s so important to get that right, because if you don’t engage with them on your about us page, you’re never going to get them to inquire. And if they don’t inquire, they’re just the web visitor, they’re not someone who could actually go on to become a prospect, and opportunity, and eventually be a client paying off your mortgage for you. Paul Green:So here are in no particular order, a number of things that I believe you’ve got to have on your about us page. The first thing is there’s got to be images of you, you and your team. If that what will be better than images is a video. Let’s see a video of you and your team in action. Remember with your video, your message has got to be more about them than it is about you. People aren’t really interested in you, and right up until the point that they’re ready to buy from you, they’re interested in what you can do for them. So if you’re going to have a video, don’t make it all about us. It’s called an about us page, but it’s not really an about us page, it’s kind of using you to talk about the website visitor, about the prospect. Paul Green:So your video should, perhaps it could feature clients. That would be even better. Because when you get the clients, your clients talking about your business, that’s more powerful than anything. But certainly whether you do a video or not, you want some photos, really nice professional photos of you, maybe your team as well, maybe even you and your family. I love it when you’ve got an owner of a business and they put a photo of them and their family, their other half and their kids on their website. Because it makes you real. It makes you human. One of the big goals with marketing it’s to try and form connections with people. And you’ve got to throw in as many things out there. You’ve got to put as many things on your website as you can, to try to connect with people. Paul Green:So you’re a mum or a dad, you’re a parent, put that on there. Instantly you connect with all the other parents. So you live in so-and-so area of your town and you love your town, your city, put that on there. Even if you don’t love it, you could just make it up a bit. So you play golf or you like going to watch the racing or whatsoever, put that on there. You’re in BNI, put that on there. Anything, anything that helps you connect to other people is something that potentially gets them engaged with your business through the website. Now, the other thing that should go on there, I’ve mentioned having a video of your customers talking about you, but fairly high up on your about us page you should have some testimonials. Or better than testimonials are…

Full show notes at the publisher

Episode 83: Get other businesses to refer clients to your MSP Jun 15, 2021

Show notes

In this week’s episode One of the easiest ways to get new clients is to find other businesses that have the same clients as you, but aren’t in competition with you, and form a strategic partnership. Paul tells you how to do that in today’s podcast Also on the show this week, we all know web traffic can be increased with better Search Engine Optimisation, but is it really something you can do yourself? Plus listen for a special interview with an MSP who increased the scale of his business by acquiring 10 other MSPs within the last 5 years. It’s a fascinating conversation and there could be elements that you could copy within your business Show notes Out every Tuesday on your favourite podcast platform Presented by Paul Green, an MSP marketing expert Here’s the blog post Paul mentioned on the subject of ‘Can I DIY my own SEO?’ Try a Udemy course if you’d like to try to learn more about SEO Find out more about Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Edge content service, that includes a book that you can call your own Paul’s special guest was Ian Maclellan from Cloudstream Technology talking about how he bought 10 MSPs in 5 years, plus the revolutionary connectivity solution Neutrino8 Many thanks to Andrew Eardsley from MSP Easy Tools for recommending the book Eat That Frog! by Brian Tracy On June 22nd Paul will be joined by Nate Freedman from Tech Pro Marketing talking about the new restrictions applied by LinkedIn Please send any questions, ideally in audio-form (or any other feedback) to 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. Hello. Welcome to episode 83. Here’s what we’ve got coming up for you this week. Ian Maclellan:Over the last five years, I’ve bought 10 MSPs, I’m very happy to give guidance if anyone wants to try this. ‎Paul Green:That’s Ian Maclellan. An MSP owner, who’s going to be on the show later on today. We’ve also got Andrew Eardley another MSP. He’s going to be back later on towards the end of the podcast to suggest a great book suggestion for you. We’ll also be talking about how you can set up joint ventures with other companies that have exactly the same clients as you, that aren’t in competition with you. The goal is to get them to refer brand new clients to you. Voiceover:‎Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast. ‎Paul Green:Now here’s an interesting question. Should you DIY your SEO? Should you take your search engine optimisation for your MSP’s websites and do it yourself or should you hire an agency to do it for you? Now there are a number of different factors that come into play here. The first is one of my favourite phrases. You should only do what only you can do, and anytime you find yourself doing anything else, you should DOA it. You should delegate it, outsource it or automate. So if you look at it, just from that point of view, then no, you probably really shouldn’t do your own SEO. Take some cash and go and get someone else to do it, or make a member of your own team do it. I say, make, I mean, encourage a member of your own team to do it. There is another aspect with SEO though, which should also come into play, which is that SEO is an incredibly detailed and technical subject. ‎Paul Green:And I only realised this about four and a half years ago, just after I’d sold a marketing agency. And I was kind of kicking around without a huge amount to do. And a friend of mine had purchased an SEO agency and he was in the middle of selling it onto another agency and his managing director left and he needed someone to just sort of babysit it for about four to six weeks. So that’s what I did. For about four to six weeks, I drove about an hour and a half every day to go and sit in this agency and just keep it ticking along really until the sale could go through. But during those six weeks, I couldn’t stop myself from learning about SEO, because I was literally sitting in an office with a whole bunch of people, technical experts at SEO who taught me all sorts of bits and bobs. ‎Paul Green:Now, I don’t consider myself a technical expert at SEO in any way, because the main thing I learned, and this is the main lesson for you, is that SEO is such a detailed technical subject that you have got to be on top of so many little things. So yes, in theory, you can do your SEO yourself. But my question to you would be, why would you want to? Why would you want to do that? I mean, I’ve just Googled the phrase, “Can I DIY my own SEO?” And I’ve come up with a great blog post, which I will link to it in the show notes on my website. And it’s called DIY SEO, A Basic Four-Step Guide That Anyone Can Follow. And for a basic four-step guide, my goodness, it’s a long, long guide. There’s thing, after thing, after thing. I mean, the basic four steps are, do keyword research. That’s the first step. Then create pages that are optimised for search. Then you’ve got to fix your website’s technical issues. And the final thing is to build some links, but this is a very, very long page. ‎Paul Green:You look at all the things that you’ve got to do, and you kind of ask yourself, “Have I got time to do these things properly?” Well, maybe that’s the question that you should be asking yourself. Have you got time to do your SEO properly? The other thing to remember is that you can actually do damage with SEO. You can do some bad links, for example, you can build bad links. Links are literally links from other people’s websites to your website. And links even these days are considered to be good. They’re good for your Google Juice or your Bing Juice if that’s a thing. Is Bing a thing still? Well, it is I think if you’re using Edge because it’s quite hard not to use Bing if you’re using Edge. Anyway, good links are links that come from sites with a good authority, but there are bad links as well. And they come from other sites. Sites that don’t have a good authority. Sites that perhaps are link farms, link farms still exist. A link farm is a bad thing. You don’t want to go anywhere near it. ‎Paul Green:And that’s the problem with SEO, it’s a constantly moving target. The game is changing all the time. And I learned this sitting in that building with those people, they were on blogs every day, reading about the latest thing that Google had changed or the latest piece of advice or the latest this, or the latest that, that was what they did full time. Literally they dedicated their entire lives. And we’re talking people who dedicated their entire working lives to very small parts of SEO. None of them were real generalists. There was one guy and all he did all day was citations. I still can’t remember what citations are. I think they’re mentioned in directories all over the web or something like that. I have no idea, but you get the idea. So look, if you’re going to do your own SEO, your DIY SEO, there’s two things I think you need. The first is time because it is quite a resource-heavy thing to do. So if you’re already too busy to look at your general marketing, then maybe reconsider whether doing your own SEO is a smart thing to do. ‎Paul Green:But the second thing is you really need to do some training and I recommend you go onto Udemy. That’s U-D-E-M-Y.com. It’s a great place for training courses, experts upload their courses there, and then they charge you a fairly reasonable fee to go and access those courses. Now, I don’t have a specific recommendation for you, but go and search for the best selling SEO course. If it’s a bestselling one and it’s got high ratings, then it’s likely to be a very good course indeed. Just one thing on Udemy, never buy it at the first price you see. Udemy has a very elastic pricing system. If you go back and look at the same course two or three times in the same browser, you’ll see the price starts to change. Sometimes it goes up and sometimes it goes down, go and look at it in your browser and then go and look at it incognito. At some point, you’ll discover that course for sale for, it can be as little as 20% of the original course, they’re constantly doing tests and trying dynamic pricing of what does it take to get you to buy the course? ‎Paul Green:Because if you think about it, it’s a prerecorded video course. There is virtually no cost of sale in there other than what they’re going to give to the person that created the course in the first place. So, go and have a look at that, get the best price for it and throw yourself into training at a very detailed level for your SEO, or just get someone else to do it, which I think it will be my preferred plan. Voiceover:Here’s this week’s clever idea. ‎Paul Green:Now this is a very clever way to get new clients. You go and find other businesses in your area or in your vertical who have exactly the same kind of clients as you do, but aren’t in competition with you. And then you put together some kind of agreement where you refer people to them and they refer people to you. Now, this is a thing, it’s a real thing. It’s called a joint venture, a JV. It’s also known as a strategic referral partnership. And if you drive this and put together something in your town, you could put together a very, very powerful referral network between a whole bunch of noncompeting businesses. Because just think about who else has exactly the same clients as you? Well, if you’re in a geographical area and you just deal with general businesses, there’s loads of other businesses that want the same clients. You’ve got things like SEO companies, search engine optimisation, you’ve got web design agencies. You can also look at business coaches. You could say, “Well, what about lawyers? Lawyers have got lots of business clients. What about accountants?” ‎Paul Green:If you stop and think about it and look at all the kinds of businesses that are dealing with the kind of clients you want, there’s loads of them. So how do you get those people to refer to you? There’s a couple of different ways that you could do this. The easiest, if you like the least committed is to do a kind of a data swap. It’s not really a data swap because you don’t give each other data, that would not be advisable. But what you do do is you mention each other to your clients. So let’s say for example, you had on your website a book that you were giving away, it was a book about, let’s say, email security or data security, and someone could fill in the form on your website and you would post them a copy of your book completely free. So essentially that’s an enhanced version of data capture. Someone’s filling in the form, you send them a book and then you’ve got their contact details. ‎Paul Green:So you could go out to a web design company, an SEO company, whoever, and you could say to them, “Hey, we’re giving away a book about data security. Would you tell your clients about that please? Would you tell your prospects about that? All they’ve got to do is go to our website and they can request a free copy of our book. Hey, if you do that, we’ll do exactly the same thing for you. So what giveaway have you got on your website?” And if they didn’t have a giveaway, you just say to them, “Hey, how about we just send our clients to your website too?” So you get the idea there. You’re essentially kind of endorsing each other. They’re endorsing you and your book. You’re endorsing them as a noncompeting business. And obviously you want to check it out first and check that they’re good at what they do, but in principle, that’s a very sound thing to do. The winner in that situation will always be the business that has the better data capture. ‎Paul Green:And I mentioned having a book to give away and I’m going to give myself an early blatant plug here. If you go onto my service, mspmarketingedge.com, we have a book it’s called Email Hijack. And the idea behind that is you put your name on the front as if you’ve written the book and then you can use it for data capture. In fact, there are many things you can use it for, but it’s a very smart piece of data capture to use. In that situation, if someone was sending their traffic to your website to get a free copy of your book, you’re going to get a lot more data out of that, a lot more of their people joining your list than they will get of your people joining their list. So that’s the kind of the easy way to do it. I think the way to really do it is to set up a proper strategic referral partnership. Now you could choose to bring together a number of noncompeting companies in your town or in your vertical to be this partnership. ‎Paul Green:So go find one accountant, go find one lawyer, one coach, one web design agency, one marketing company, one of everything where you all share the same clients. If you’re a member of something like BNI, I mean, this would be a perfect thing, wouldn’t it? You wouldn’t have every member of the BNI in there because the plumbers and the electrical engineers, this isn’t relevant to them. But certainly those of you that share the same B2B clients you might outside of your BNI chapter, you might set up this strategic referral partnership. If you’re not part of that, then just work your network, who do you know who’s a really great accountant in your area? In fact, you don’t really just want the great accountant, you want the really great, well-connected accountant because of course you’re looking for people with their own big networks. ‎Paul Green:The whole point of this is that when someone’s sitting with our accountant and they’re saying, “Oh God, we’ve had such IT problems the last few weeks,” that your strategic referral accountant partner says, “Well, do you know what? We work really closely with an IT support company. These are their details. Here’s a copy of their card or whatsoever. Give them a ring, tell them that I sent you.” In the same way that when you’re talking to one of your clients and they mention, “Oh, we are looking for a new accountant.” You pull the accountants card out of your pocket and you hand that over and you say, “Look, we’ve been working with this guy and we refer business to each other. It’s worth you having a chat with him.” A strategic referral partnership. It’s a very, very clever way to get business. You’re not going to get massive amounts of clients out of it, but people do like referrals, don’t they? They like asking other people they trust, who they would recommend. ‎Paul Green:When someone is referred into you the proper way, the chances of them becoming a client of yours is so much higher than if they’ve just come in through your digital marketing channels. This doesn’t mean that digital marketing isn’t important, of course it’s important because there’s so many more people potentially finding you through digital marketing. But do you know if you can get someone, even if it was just one or two businesses a year, referred to you through your strategic referral partnerships, through your JV, that’s going to be a great source of new clients for your MSP. Voiceover:‎Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast. ‎Paul Green:When I mentioned the MSP Marketing Edge just now, I forgot to mention that it’s only available to one MSP per area. We’ve got more than 470 members all across the world and when they sign up, they completely lock out their direct competitors. The first step for you is to see whether or not another MSP has beaten you to your area. Just go onto mspmarketingedge.com. You select your country and just pop in your postcode if you’re in the UK or your zip code, if you’re in the States and it’ll show you whether or not your area is free or whether or not a competing MSP has beaten you to it. That’s mspmarketingedge.com Voiceover:The big interview. Ian Maclellan:Hi there. And this is Ian Maclellan. I’m the owner of Cloudstream Technology in the UK. And over the last five years, I bought 10 MSPs. ‎Paul Green:And it’s a question that I’m being asked repeatedly by lots of MSPs all o…

Full show notes at the publisher

Episode 82: Should you do a QBR with unhappy clients? Jun 08, 2021

Show notes

In this week’s episode There are good times and bad times to talk strategically with clients. In this week’s show, Paul wants to make sure you don’t find out it’s a bad time the hard way. You’ll discover the best times to do strategic review meetings Also on the show this week, a great piece on offline marketing. Sure, online tools are easy (Facebook, Google, email etc), but there are a load of other offline tools that are just as powerful Plus listen out for a fantastic interview with an MSP with a pretty unique pricing model and a book suggestion that could transform your MSP Show notes Out every Tuesday on your favourite podcast platform Presented by Paul Green, an MSP marketing expert In talking about strategic reviews, Paul mentioned vCIO Toolbox and Managed Services Platform as example tools Listen back to Episode 12, all about the concept of the ‘impact box’ Find out more about Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Edge Here’s just a selection of the ‘video greeting cards’ on Amazon that you could send in your impact box Register for a free copy of Paul’s book Paul’s special guest was Ernest Murray from Genuine Technology Group talking about his unique pricing and bundling model Many thanks to Luis Giraldo from N-able for recommending the book Value-Based Fees by Alan Weiss On June 15th Paul will be joined by Ian Maclellan from Cloudstream Technology talking about how he bought 10 MSPs in 5 years Please send any questions, ideally in audio-form (or any other feedback) to hello@paulgreensmspmarketing.com Episode transcription Voiceover:Fresh every Tuesday for MSPs around the world, this is Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast. Paul Green:Well, hi there. It’s great to be back with you. Here’s what we got coming up on the show this week. Ernest Murray:We do not have a per user price and we do not have a per workstation price. Paul Green:We’ll be talking about the offline marketing tools that you should be using. Almost everyone talks about online marketing tools these days, I find that the offline ones can be more effective. We’ll talk about that soon and towards the end of the show, Luis Giraldo from N-able, he’s going to be here with a great book suggestion for you. Voiceover:Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast. Paul Green:If you haven’t found yourself in this situation yet you will at some point, and that’s that you’ve booked in a quarterly business review or a strategic review as I prefer to call them. You’ve booked it in with a client, it’s been in the diary for a number of weeks and it’s coming up in a couple of days time so you think, “Well, I’ll just have a quick check of their tickets, see what kind of issues they’ve been having lately.” And you look at the tickets and your heart sinks because actually they’ve got a problem and it’s a problem that you guys just haven’t dealt with very well. Paul Green:For some reason the ticket’s just gone on longer than it should have done, the client’s getting annoyed, the staff were getting annoyed, and it’s actually something that you could have sorted out quite quickly but it’s created a problem. And clearly for whatever reason, and it happens, don’t beat yourself up, but for whatever reason you just haven’t dealt with that issue in a timely manner. You haven’t communicated well or there’s just generally been some kind of problem with that client. Paul Green:Here’s the question, should you still do the strategic review? Should you do strategic reviews with unhappy clients? Now, let’s look back at the whole purpose of a strategic review. I mean the whole point of sitting down with your client on a semi-regular basis, and the reason I don’t call them quarterly business reviews is because I think quarterly is overkill for the vast majority of clients. You’re dealing with 200, 300 seat clients, then yes, sure, quarterly is absolutely the right thing to do. Paul Green:But for the vast majority of your clients with 20, 30, 40 seats, quarterly is a bit overkill. You might do that twice a year or even once a year. That’s why I renamed it a strategic review. Other people call it a technology review. It doesn’t matter what you call it, the whole purpose of this is sitting down with your clients and looking at the future. That’s the point of this meeting. What we don’t want to do is be looking back at tickets and problems and all of that kind of stuff, we want to focus them on their favourite subjects, which is their business and themselves, and the future. We want them thinking about all the plans that they’ve got coming up. We want them talking about their expansion plans, what they’re going to do to grow, how are they going to adapt their business and how they’re going to improve it in the future. Because the more that they can tell you about the future of their business, the more you can integrate your MSP and the technology solutions you provide into future plans. Paul Green:In fact, the very best strategic reviews involve some kind of software such as managed services platform or vCIOToolbox or one of the other many pieces of software out there that will let you actually formally review what they’re doing now, where they’re going in the future, and beautifully produce a technology roadmap, an actual plan of how and what they’re going to invest in in the future. Isn’t that beautiful? Paul Green:Can you see the power of that? Of you and your client agreeing a year or two or three years worth of technology investment? I mean, there’s no other sector that can do this. That can sit down with… Well, very few sectors that can sit down with their clients and say, “Hey, let’s plan out the upgrades that you’re going to make in the next couple of years,” I think that’s just a beautiful thing to do. So bearing in mind that’s the real purpose of the strategic review, how do you stop current ticket problems from destroying that meeting? Because if you walk into that meeting and all they’re doing is they’re bringing in, well, this person’s unhappy that person’s unhappy. What’s the issue here? Why can’t we solve this? What’s the communication? You’re not going to agree a technology roadmap with someone at a meeting like that, are you? Paul Green:If the meeting starts with problems and starts with issues it’s going to be really, really difficult for you to push that forward and get them focused on the future because they’re going to be caught up in the now. Here’s the answer and it’s beautifully, beautifully simple. There are two versions of this answer. The first version is just for every client, it’s a routine thing that you do. Routinely you call or email every single client a week before you do your strategic review. And that email or that call, go whichever is best for you, whichever you prefer. All you do with that email or that call is you say, “Hey, what’s going on? Is there anything we need to get sorted before we meet?” In fact, it’s a good chance to remind them what the purpose of the meeting is, that you don’t want to make this a backwards review or a current situation review, that this is about their business looking forward. Paul Green:You can drop them that email or just make that call and say, “Hey, is there anything that I need to address or my team needs to address before we meet next week?” Essentially, it’s like a broom email, isn’t it? Here’s the broom, can we sweep up? Here’s the brush, can we sweep up any problems that we’ve got before we meet in a week’s time? I would do that with every client. And you might find that the phone call is more effective for that than an email because email is just another email, isn’t it? You meet them in a week’s time, you send an email today and it takes them three days to look at it and then they come back with a problem and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, it takes, it’s just not a very efficient way to do it. Paul Green:Whereas if you just pop in a quick call to them, A, you can reconfirm the meeting, you can reconfirm where you’re meeting because I always recommend you take them out to a restaurant or something like that but also you can ask them what current issues have you got. Now, the other way of looking at this is how do you then deal with the issue of where there is a big problem. Well, again, you pick up the phone. For this one you absolutely have to pick up the phone and you say to them, “Hey, we’re meeting next week. I’ve just been talking to my team, we’re not doing very well at the moment, are we, with this current issue. So I’m going to personally take control of this today. I’m going to get this resolved today and I’ve got a huge apology for you when we meet next week.” Paul Green:Essentially you’re jumping and you admit that you’ve screwed up. Because I don’t know about you, but when the business is screwed up if the very first thing you say to a client is, “Hey, we screwed up. I’m really sorry.” Then it can’t get any worse from there, if that makes sense. I always do this myself. In fact, when my clients have issues, whatever that issue is I always apologise even if actually the issue isn’t us, it’s them. There’s some misunderstanding or they can’t log in because, whatever they can’t remember their password or whatsoever, I always apologise for that and take responsibility for the issue. Because guess what? The second you take responsibility for something and you apologise and you say you’re going to fix it, whether it’s your problem or their problem then immediately the situation starts to get better. That’s just a basic of customer service. Paul Green:So you ring them up, you acknowledge you’ve screwed up, you say you’re going to take personal charge, whether you do or not, and you tell them that this will be resolved. And then at the strategic review, the very first thing you do is you address that issue. You say, “Hey, look, that problem we had last week, as you know it was resolved within 24 hours. I’m so sorry we’ve done on an investigation, this is what happened. This is what we’ve put in place to make sure it won’t happen again. Please accept my apology.” In fact, let’s say there was a particular user that had been really put out, you might have a little gift to give to that user and it could just be something minor. It could just be a bit of chocolate or I don’t know a bottle of wine or something like that, but you give that to your client at the strategic review and you say to them, “I’m so sorry. Could you apologise to Jason? Tell him we’re really sorry you had this issue and here’s a bottle of his favourite wine to apologise for him.” Paul Green:And essentially you have just drawn a line. And you can actually say, “Okay, let’s put that to one side now, let’s focus on the most important thing which is your business over the next two to three years.” And that’s how you can stop those current ticket problems, those current issues from destroying your strategic review. It’s beautifully simple but you have to take some proactive action to make sure it doesn’t derail that critical event. Voiceover:Here’s this week’s clever idea. Paul Green:All businesses love online marketing tools and for a very good reason primarily they’re free. It’s free to do Google, it’s free to do Facebook, it’s free to send out emails. Actually, it’s not really free, is it? But it’s certainly low cost. Google organic is free until you realise that you’re on page 17 of the search results and then you have to start putting resources in whether that be cash for SEO or your own time to do essentially this messier work, create some content or whatever. But most people love online marketing tools because they are relatively free, relatively low cost, they’re relatively easy, and it’s just a very easy thing to do. Paul Green:And that’s what makes them not so effective because certainly if you look at how much marketing the average business does today compared to, I don’t know, 15, 20 years ago. The average business today is doing a hell of a lot more marketing but spending less money on it. Because 20 years ago you had to pay for expensive adverts in newspapers, radio, magazines. You had to get in directories, you had to print stuff and post stuff and that was expensive. The vast majority of businesses didn’t do a massive amount of marketing, they relied a lot more on networking, word of mouth, that kind of stuff. Paul Green:Whereas these days when people think of marketing they think of sending emails and they think of doing social media, all of that kind of stuff. Now don’t get me wrong, I think the online marketing tools are beautiful and of course you should be adopting these and embracing them and using them and you should be putting out a piece of social media every day and sending out an educational email at least once a week, of course you should be doing that, but you should also be using offline marketing tools. Paul Green:Because the thing with the offline marketing tools is not many people are using them. Think about your post, literally the post you get to your house, 20 years ago you would get loads of posts. And I mean, loads. We forget just how much posts we used to get 20 years ago. And how much junk mail did we get? Oh my goodness. Do you remember opening the junk mail and getting annoyed? And you look at an envelope, wouldn’t you and decide, do I even open the envelope or do I just tear it up and chuck it in the bin? Whereas we didn’t get many emails and these days it’s completely the opposite, isn’t it? We get very, very little physical post but we get a million emails a day. And that’s why offline marketing tools are something you should embrace into your marketing mix. Paul Green:Now, there are four in particular that I’m going to recommend to you. They’re all difficult, they’re all expensive, they all require some effort, and that’s why you should consider using them. Because when something’s difficult and expensive and you have to throw some resource into it the vast majority of MSPs are simply not going to bother. This is great. Anytime you’ve got something that your competitors are probably not going to bother with that creates an opportunity hole for you, a chance for you to jump in there and do something that’s difficult and expensive because other people won’t. It gives you some huge standout ability. Paul Green:Let’s start with the first of the offline tools. Oh, and by the way, all of these that I’m recommending to you I have MSPs that I’m working with who are using these. I would never put something on this podcast unless it had actually been field-tested by real MSPs somewhere around the world, and all four of these have been used and are being used by MSPs that I work directly with. The first of them is something called an impact box. Now, you may have heard this mentioned elsewhere as a shock and awe box, I just prefer to call it an impact box. And I did talk about this, in fact, I did a special thing on this in the podcast. I think it was back in episode 12 which was around about February last year, February, 2020 if you wanted to go and have a look at that and immerse yourself in an impact box. Paul Green:But basically it’s exactly as it sounds, it’s a box of stuff you might put in there, a printed mug with your MSP’s name and logo on it and your website address. You might put in there a pen or a mouse mat or other merch and you might decide with your impact box to go high. You might put in there a wireless mouse or something like that and decide that that 20, 30 pound or dollar cost is worth it for the impact. So you put some merch in there, you get me, I’m down with a YouTube is calling them merch. You put some merch in, you put some edible stuff in there, some chocolate or some sweets or biscuits. You might put some teabags, you might put some coffee sachets, you might put alcohol in there, you have to be quite careful when you’re sending out alcohol. Know your target prospect well. You might put in there… Well, I’ll tell you what else you would definitely put in there, you would put your p…

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Episode 81: Is this a safe time to put up prices? Jun 01, 2021

Show notes

In this week’s episode You know you’ve got to do it at some point, but are you nervous about putting up your prices? Especially during these challenging times? This week Paul explains how and when you should make an increase Also on the show this week – you could win an incredible prize. Listen to find out how to win a brand new smart watch Plus listen for a list of the best qualifying questions to ask prospects. And Paul’s special guest talks about how they closed their break/fix business to start an MSP Show notes Out every Tuesday on your favourite podcast platform Presented by Paul Green, an MSP marketing expert Producer James told you about the chance to win a Ticwatch Pro 3 GPS – enter HERE (closes midnight Sunday 6th June 2021 UK time) Paul’s special guest, who he met through the Tech Tribe, was Nancy Sabino from Sabino Comp Tech talking about why and how she closed her IT business in favour of starting an MSP You can enjoy an awesome discount from the Tech Tribe membership because you’re a listener to Paul’s podcast Justin Esgar from Virtua Consulting Group recommended his own book Appitalize on Your Idea On June 8th Paul will be joined by Ernest Murray from Genuine Technology Group talking about his unique pricing and bundling model Please send any questions, ideally in audio-form (or any other feedback) to hello@paulgreensmspmarketing.com Episode transcription Voiceover:Fresh every Tuesday for MSPs around the world. This is Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast. Paul Green:Hello, and welcome back to the podcast. Here’s what we’ve got coming up for you this week. Nancy Sabino:Oh, my God. That was hard. We went from a list of 300 businesses that we worked with on a break/fix basis. We got it down to 10. Paul Green:Plus, we’re going to be talking about the best qualification questions that you can ask your prospects. You’ve only got a finite amount of time on this world, you might as well invest it into talking to the people most likely to go on to become clients of yours. Plus, we’re going to start a brand new thing in the show where we give things away. Every couple of weeks or so, we’ll have a competition with some cool stuff for you to win. Today, we’re giving away a brand new GPS smartwatch. I’ll tell you how you can win later in the show. Voiceover:Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast. Paul Green:Now here’s an intriguing question. Should you or should you not put your prices up? And I appreciate there are so many different factors that come into play when you’re having a conversation like this. I believe that for the vast majority of MSPs, you should. You should put your prices up at least on an annual basis because your costs are going up on an annual basis. But I also appreciate that we’re in very unusual times right now. We’re kind of on the edge of coming towards post pandemic. Maybe that’s a bit early to make a call like that, but certainly, by the end of this year, things are going to be more normal than they’ve been for two years. Paul Green:And we’ve all looked at the weird things that have happened to businesses and economies and all sorts of stuff over the last couple of years. And if you’re exposed to retail and hospitality businesses, you’d be crazy to put your prices up. Those guys are just surviving right now. But if you’re looking after lots of other kinds of businesses or just general businesses, maybe, just maybe, this is a good time to put prices up. I think there are two types of price rise that you need to look at. You need to look at your existing clients completely separately to how you look at your new clients. So for your existing clients, that’s where I think you need to tread a little more carefully with your price rises. I mean, costs do go up. That’s absolutely fine. But the thing with existing clients, you have to take the bigger picture. You have to look at what are we doing here to make sure we retain this client. The longer that the client stays with you, the more opportunity there is for you to sell them something else. Paul Green:In fact, sometimes I discuss with my MSP clients that they can introduce a price increase by stealth just by selling something else to their existing clients and putting a bit of extra margin on that. So rather than actually saying, “Hey, our prices are going up. It’s going up from this to this.” When they sell them an extra service, they bundle extra margin on top and there is their price increase. It’s a stealth price increase. I think you have to look at price increases with your clients and just look at the context of how are they doing right now. If they’re doing really well, then don’t be scared of introducing reasonable price increases. And you must always be reminding them that the cost of doing business and the costs of the amazing services and tools that you buy in, those costs are going up on a regular basis. And therefore that needs to be reflected. Paul Green:Most decent clients understand that you need to make good profit on their work. Otherwise, your financial and mental, your psychological motivation to continue to work for them will drop. And as I say, the best clients think that. The not the best clients, they don’t tend to think that way, they just want everything kind of cheaper. So I think you have to look at each client individually and say, “Who can absorb a price increase? Who are we going to have to increase the prices using stealth and who are we essentially going to subsidise?” Paul Green:In fact, you might go to some of the businesses that you’re looking after that you know who have had it tough over the last year or so. You might say to those guys, “Do you know what? We’re due to put the prices up. We’re going to give you a price freeze for the next two to three years because that’s our way of supporting you and helping you guys get back on your feet.” That would be an amazing thing to do. It would be great for your retention to do that for some of your clients that they’ve been struggling. Paul Green:Now, the other aspect of putting up prices is for new clients. Should you be putting up your prices for new clients? Absolutely you should. Absolutely, because new clients don’t know what the price was yesterday. So someone who you’re talking to today and you’ve put a quotation or a proposal in, they don’t know if you’re charging more today than you were yesterday. In fact, I would say for new clients joining you, you should be nudging the prices up constantly. You sign a new client today, tomorrow you nudge the prices up just a little bit. What’s an extra pound or an extra dollar per user per month? Because what will happen is, the marketplace will find the point you’re too expensive. You don’t really want clients who pick you because you’re cheaper than your competitors. You really, really don’t. The best place to be in any marketplace is at the very top of the marketplace where you’re the most expensive, you’re the highest quality. You will tend to attract the very best clients. Paul Green:People who want to pay bottom dollar, typically, not always, but typically turn out to be nightmare clients. You don’t want to attract those people. You want to repel those people. You don’t even want them inquiring to you. A client who switches from their incumbent MSP to you on price alone is just commoditising what you do for them. And they will never ever be a good client. You’ll always struggle to sell them more stuff and grow their value and add more monthly recurring revenue per user. So don’t let clients come to you because you are cheap or because you’re reasonable. Nudge up your prices, nudge up your quality. In fact, this should be the goal. It should be really. Paul Green:We’re constantly nudging up the prices and improving and increasing the quality so we can justify those prices, but along the way, we become the best in the area. The greatest quality in the area. Let the time-wasters who want to pay very little go to your competitors. In fact, give them the name of your direct competitor, the people who you want to waste their time and send your worst prospects, your bottom dollar prospects to them. Paul Green:You’re looking for clients where price is a factor, but it’s not the only factor. And yes, that means being one of the most expensive MSPs in the marketplace. The very best clients are looking for that partnership. They’re looking for that peace of mind. They’re looking for someone that they can work with for five to 10 years or more. They want people right at the very top because they understand that when you pay for a proper service, you get decent people, good people doing a good job. And anyone, anyone that thinks they can pay 20, $30 or pounds a month and get a top end service and all the protection and all the services, these guys are jokers. I know there’s plenty of them out there. But you really don’t want to waste your time with them. You want clients where price is a factor, not the factor. Paul Green:Now, you do have to demonstrate value. Just because clients are willing to pay a little bit more for a high quality MSP doesn’t mean they don’t want a good deal. Everyone wants a good deal. But the trick is to demonstrate value. You’ve essentially got to justify the price that you’re charging. Now, there are a number of ways that you can do that. My favourite way is to surround them with an abundance of social proof. So before a sales meeting, you’d send them a case studies book talking about a lot of the clients you’ve worked with. You’d perhaps send them over a video of testimonials from your existing clients. Paul Green:All of your marketing materials, especially your website, should have case studies and testimonials all over it. You should have great reviews on Google, on Facebook, on all the other platforms that are important to you. And when your potential future clients see that dozens of other people trust you, it makes you safer. When you’re safer, they’re more willing to pay for it. Everyone is willing to pay the price if it’s safe and if they can see the chances are high they’ll get the value that they’ve been looking for. Paul Green:The other thing that you could do is you could use the good, better, best approach to leverage pricing psychology. So good, better, best is where you offer three options, like a bronze, silver, gold. This can work very, very well because it gives people the perception of choice. They look at the bronze package and the price. Then they look at the silver package, which is a bit more comprehensive and a higher price. And then the gold again is even more comprehensive and has a higher price than the silver. And what this allows people to do is to compare. Because people who don’t understand technology, which is basically everyone that’s buying from you, if they don’t understand it, how can they know that your package is better than your competitor’s package? They don’t know. They can’t compare apples to apples. They’re comparing apples to oranges, which is crazy. And they’re going to make the wrong decision. So by offering them a good, better, best choice, you allow them to compare the packages that you offer. Paul Green:Your bronze package should be the bare minimum of what you would let a client get away with buying. Your gold package should be absolutely the very, very best. And your silver package, the one in the middle, should be the one that you really, really want people to buy. Because eight times out of 10, someone will look at a good, better, best package, and they will go for the middle option because it’s better than the bronze option, but it’s not quite as extravagant as the gold option. Essentially, you put the option that you most want to sell into the middle. Paul Green:The other way that you can do this is just bundle everything into one price. It’s literally an all you can eat, everything you need in one price package. And you just say to them, “Hey, it’s this much per user per month.” however else you price it, and that’s it. “And yes, if you compare this to any of our competitors, we will come out the most expensive, but we’ve put literally everything in there that you could possibly need. And it’s all in there for this price per user per month.” Now, you may actually split the bundles out on the invoice. I always think that’s a good idea to have at least three lines on your invoice. The three lines being support, security, and telecoms. But in terms of that kind of headline figure when you’re trying to hook someone in, then bundling everything together into one price can be a clever way to do it. All of these are just ways that we can justify putting the prices up. Paul Green:But for new clients, you absolutely should be just nudging that up all the time. Keep adding that extra pound or dollar per user per month, or per device per month, however you sell it. And eventually, the marketplace will tell you when you’re too expensive. That’s the point you come down a dollar or down a pound, and you know that you found the top of the market. You can be the most expensive MSP in your market, attracting the very best clients. And the market tells you when you’ve got there. Voiceover:Here’s this week’s clever idea. Paul Green:One of the ways to spot those very best clients or prospects, the ones where price is a factor not the factor, is to ask them the right pre-qualifying questions during the sales process. And you can do this either at your initial 15-minute conversation with them or you can do it when you’re having bigger conversations with them, perhaps meeting them in person. The reason to ask qualifying questions is to ascertain what kind of quality of prospects are they. Because not all prospects are equal. And believe me, your time on this planet is limited enough as it is. You don’t want to be spending more of your time talking to the wrong people. People who are just tire-kickers, they’re just trying to get a price because they need get three quotes because their boss asked them. Or, they’re not really the decision maker, or they’re just not really engaged or interested, or they’re just trying to find something to beat down the price, the renewal price of their incumbent MSP. Paul Green:So what I’m going to give you here isn’t an exhaustive list, but it’s a series of questions that you can ask every prospect to qualify how good they are whether or not it’s worth you investing time and energy and money warming them up and ultimately moving them to becoming a client. And you might want to keep a list of these next to your laptop, or… What am I saying? You wouldn’t print something off, would you? Stick it in your OneNote. Stick these questions in your OneNote so whenever you’re having an initial prospect meeting, these are the questions you can ask. Paul Green:The very first one is, “How did you hear about us?” Now, that isn’t just a kind of a market research question to know how they ended up on your website. You essentially want to know, are they a warm prospect or are they cold? For example, if someone says, “Oh, well my friend, Dave, he uses you and recommended you.” You know that the chances of you winning the business is very, very high because a referral, a recommendation is the best kind of new leads you can get. It’s just not something you can drive particularly aggressively. Whereas if someone has just clicked on an advert literally 13 seconds ago and then they’ve picked up the phone and called you, you could argue that that’s a less warm prospect. If someone’s looked at your website or if they’ve been in your email list or they’ve read your book, or they’ve seen you on a webinar, or they’ve heard you on a podcast or something like that, all of these things, warm people up that make them better prospects. Paul Green:I think the next question you should follow up with is, “Are you the decision maker?” Or maybe a more subtle way to put it is, “Who else needs to be involved in making a decision about which IT support c…

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