Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast

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Episode 71: Do you procrastinate? Get back to me on that one… Mar 23, 2021

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In this week’s episode When can cleaning the dishes suddenly become really appealing? Or when does Facebook become welcome, rather than be an annoying distraction? That’s easy – it’s when you’re procrastinating! This week Paul looks into why we let ourselves get distracted and what we can do to stay focused Also on the show this week, Paul’s special guest talks about something that Steve Jobs used to transform Apple – the humble whiteboard – and how it could do the same for your MSP Plus Paul explains why your MSP could grow faster if you personally work less. And there’s a listener book recommendation all about brilliant positioning Show notes Out every Tuesday on your favourite podcast platform Presented by Paul Green, an MSP marketing expert Read more about the Zeigarnik effect and how it can help beat procrastination Find out the subject and book your free place on Paul’s next Live MSP Monthly Profit Booster webinar Paul’s special guest was Mark Edwards from Whiteboard Strategies talking about how grab attention and sell more on video meetings Many thanks to Brenna Loury from Todoist for recommending the book Obviously Awesome by April Dunford Please recommend a book you think will inspire other MSPs here paulgreensmspmarketing.com/podcastbooks On March 30th Paul will be joined by Jason Kemsley from Uptime Solutions talking about what the future could hold for your helpdesk solution 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 episode 71. Here’s what we got coming up for you this week. Mark Edwards:Done in the right way by the right person, the combination of the visual element and the verbal is very, very powerful. Paul Green:We’ve also got a great book suggestion from a productivity expert, and we’re going to explore how you can avoid procrastination. Voiceover:Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast. Paul Green:Have you ever asked why you find it so hard to stop doing so much yourself or why you find it so hard to outsource things to people outside the business or delegate to within your team? Well, it’s probably because you’re an intolerable control freak. And don’t worry, I’m an intolerable control freak, and let’s be honest, so are most other business owners. Why do we start the business in the first place? Well, partly it’s because we want to make a little bit more money, partly it’s because we want more flexibility in the work that we do, but really mostly, if you examine the deep psychological reasons that business owners are so driven, it’s about control. We want control over what we do. We want control over how we do it, and we want control over when and where that we do it. Paul Green:And what makes the control freakery even worse is when we discover in the early days that no one else can do stuff in the business as well as we can. This is the curse, isn’t it? It’s the curse of being the competent business owner. So you end up using your business owning superpowers to hang on to as many little jobs as you can. And even if you didn’t realise that you’re doing this, oh, trust me, you are doing this. Paul Green:Now, the ability to exert this level of control is actually what stops far too many MSP owners from becoming proper business owners. And they spend their entire careers as owner operators. So, where you’re actually doing the work in the business. Now there’s nothing wrong with that, but after 10 to 15 years of that, you really need to grow both personally and grow the business. You need to let go and transition from being the owner operator to being just the owner, where the business is being run for you by people who actually working together can do a better job than you would do on your own. Paul Green:And yes, this hurts. It really hurts. It can actually lead to an identity crisis, but the reward for this is that you get paid very well to go and do lots of other things that you really like doing like golf, holidays, travel, owning other businesses, investing, whatever it is, but you also retain full ownership of your MSP. And to get anywhere near this goal, there comes a point where you have to truly start to let go and you have to accept that once you start involving and trusting other people, sometimes they will only ever do something 80% as well as you personally could do it, but that’s okay. In fact, it’s more than okay as it means that in the short term, you can focus your valuable time and energy on things that make a bigger impact on you, on your family and on your clients. Paul Green:And in the long-term, you can create a business that thrives without you needing to be there. So, imagine if you had this phone call tomorrow morning and it was like, “Hey. Hi, it’s your biggest client here. I am so annoyed that you can’t restore that file that I lost because our backup fell over eight days ago and you didn’t fix it.” And you have to say, “Yeah, I’m really sorry about that. I was so busy answering the phone and changing people’s passwords and scheduling social media and logging tickets and editing our printed newsletter and cleaning the kitchen and checking the invoices and fixing the automation link and tweaking the PSA and setting up new users. Ah, I just didn’t get around to checking your backups.” Paul Green:Now, here’s the thing. All business owners go through this and letting go of stuff, it’s a rite of passage because you do it slowly. You don’t do it just like that and walk away. You do it slowly. You delegate more to your team slowly. You bring in outsourced help slowly. And over a number of years, you just give more and more and more things away. Things that you, personally, don’t need to do so that you’re focusing on the things that only you can do. Paul Green:And then one day, you don’t turn up for a few weeks to the business and the business does better without you. This happened to me in my last business. The business that I sold five years ago and it hurts. I came back from a very long cruise and the business was ticking along just fine. In fact, it wasn’t just ticking along, it was thriving without me. They had won new clients. They had kept the existing clients happy. Everything was great. And it really does hurt for a short while until you realise that you’ve created something just wonderful. Voiceover:Here’s this week’s clever idea. Paul Green:Question for you. Do you procrastinate? Perhaps you can get back to me on that one. Yeah. That’s a kind of a dad joke that one, isn’t it? But we all procrastinate all of us and yet procrastination, it’s the killer of productivity and we have so many readily available distractions for us right now. And it’s really easy to give into those. It’s really easy to go in and just check your email or just have a quick look at Facebook or maybe for you it’s, “I’ll just have a quick look at the tickets,” or, “I’ll just see what my team are working on right now.” Paul Green:When we try to do something important and something that will actually build the business, working on the business, that’s when we’re most at risk of procrastination because it’s when we’re doing jobs that push us out of our comfort zone, where we’re doing something that we’re not necessarily good at, which you could argue the vast majority of business growth activities you’re not good at because you don’t do them regularly enough. And, certainly, I find myself when I’m doing brand new things that grow my business that I’ve not done before, I’m either really excited and super engaged with it or I find myself procrastinating and just checking my email and just finding other little things that I can do. Paul Green:In fact, with my daughter in homeschooling, as she was a few weeks ago, it was very easy to just nip upstairs and see how she was getting on with her maths, rather than actually doing the thing I needed to do. But procrastination is actually quite easy to beat. The secret to avoiding procrastination is so simple, you will not believe it. All you need to do is get started on a task. You see, once you’ve started a task, you are dramatically more likely to complete it because it’s going to be front of mind. It will nag at you and your brain loves completed tasks. It loves completed tasks and it hates uncompleted tasks. Paul Green:So, by getting started on a task, what we’re doing is leveraging something known as the Zeigarnik effect, which is named after a Soviet psychologist called Bluma Zeigarnik. She noticed that waiters who had taken orders, but not yet fulfilled the orders, were more likely to remember what the orders were. And then the second that they’d actually completed the order, they were more likely to forget it. Paul Green:Essentially, you can put it like this. You’re twice as likely to remember a task that’s been started and interrupted than one that you have completed. So it’s like our brain is carrying this constant tally of things that we have started, but haven’t yet finished. Do you know what I mean by that tally? It’s the unfinished tasks. They really do hang over us. So this is how you avoid procrastination. You get started. In fact, if you can find the time of day where you’re most likely to get started on something, for me, it’s early in the morning. I find it really easy to start new projects early on when I’m fresh and I’m raring to go, whereas afternoons and evenings, there’s no point in me trying to start something new there. Paul Green:So, when’s the time for you? Maybe you’re more like that in the afternoons or the evenings. Maybe you’re a night owl and you find it easier to start new projects at night. Whatever it is that you’ve got to do, that big thing that’s going to make a real difference to your business when you get started on it and when you get it completed, all you’ve got to do is get started. The Zeigarnik effect will help your brain to nag you enough that once you’ve started it, you will want to see it through to completion. Voiceover:Paul’s blatant plug. Paul Green:If you love this podcast and you want a deep dive into some of the subjects that we talk about here, then I put on a brand new live webinar every single month. It’s called the Live MSP Monthly Profit Booster. And you’re invited to come and join me on that webinar. Now, we’ve done about six or seven of them already, and we’ve covered off some amazing subjects. For example, we started by looking at how to create an MSP that’s there for you rather than the other way around. We looked at why your website doesn’t generate enough leads and how to fix it. Paul Green:Another one we looked at was why LinkedIn is so good for MSP leads gen, why your data capture on your website doesn’t work, and of course how to fix it and how to find, train and maximise a telephone person. So, every month it’s a brand new subject. I present it live and I guarantee it’s not content you’ve ever seen me do before. It’s a deep dive into the most important marketing subjects for MSPs around the world. So you can see what the next webinar is going to be, when it’s going to be, and register for free at paulgreensmspmarketing.com/webinar. Voiceover:The big interview. Mark Edwards:Hi, I’m Mark Edwards from Whiteboard Strategies and I help organisations deliver their value proposition using a Whiteboard. Paul Green:And it’s such a great sales tool, isn’t it? A whiteboard. You and I were just talking about before we started this recording about famous people in history who loved their whiteboards and love using it as a communication tool. And you’ve actually made a career out of helping people to sell using a whiteboard, haven’t you? Just tell us briefly about that. Mark Edwards:SO starting in 2009, as I said, prior to that, I’d done about 15 years of traditional consultative sales training for a lot of tech and teleco organisations. And then in 2009, kind of transitioned across into delivery purely on whiteboard training. So developing stories and story boards and illustrations that organisations can use and present standing at a whiteboard to their customer. And that’s all I’ve done for the last 10 or 11 years. Right now, it’s slightly difficult in lockdown times because whiteboards are also one of the tools that are typically locked away at this moment. Paul Green:Yes, they are. And we’ll come back to that in a couple of moments, but we were talking about Steve Jobs of Apple and how famously he used a whiteboard to set out the entire turnaround strategy for Apple when he took over. Was it the late ’90s? Mark Edwards:On his return, there’s photographs of him, but there’s also perhaps the best one. There is a kind of cartoon illustration of him, but supposedly what he did was he came in, realised… Well, he knew anyway that the product portfolio had grown out of all kind of shape and form, and was very confusing and complex and difficult for them to actually manage and present to a customer. So, he did a typical four box diagram. I mean, if you think about the standard four box, similar to a kind of Gartner’s Magic Quadrant, similar to… I don’t know if you’ve ever read Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits. I’m assuming you probably have at some point. But you’ll remember the urgent important matrix. So a four box matrix. Mark Edwards:Jobs on that occasion basically did a four box matrix. And I think, off the top of my head, on the axes. One was basically desktop, and the other one was kind of laptop, and one was consumer, and one was for professional. And that was the remaking of the portfolio of products that brought them back right from the edge to where are they now? One of the world’s leading companies. So, that was the very start of it. And he delivered that message consistently through the business for a number of years. So, it’s very powerful. Great tool and Jobs clearly saw that. Paul Green:And we’ve all used whiteboards in our business. I mean, I have a flip chart, which obviously is the paper equivalent of a whiteboard, but in various offices throughout the years, I’ve had massive whiteboards and they are such powerful communication tools. I can see why you would recommend that MSPs use them as a sales tool. So, what is it about a whiteboard that makes it so powerful? Mark Edwards:There’s a number of elements to it. I mean, the reality is, from the customer’s perspective. So if you’ve got somebody on their feet presenting at a whiteboard, first of all, just notice that they’ve taken a stand in front of the whiteboard and that alone captures attention. All of the focus now is on that individual and it’s up to that individual to now shape their message in terms of the narrative that they deliver, but also the whiteboard provides them with an opportunity to put a diagram to it. Whether they are mapping out a process, outlining some kind of a diagram in terms of technical infrastructure, the combination, the visual element, and the verbal is very, very powerful. Done in the right way by the right person. Paul Green:So this has worked very well for you for years, as you said, and then suddenly along came COVID-19 and the ability to go out and physically see people and use something as powerful as whiteboard has completely been shattered. So, Mark, what have you suggested to the MSPs that you’re working with in terms of transitioning from doing face-to-face sales to virtual? How has that changed and what’s working right now? Mark Edwards:The difference between virtual selling and face-to-face is really quite significant. And I think most organisations, although they were using Teams or Zoom or one of the other platforms, they hadn’t necessarily planned for the transition. And it was being used probably as a second strand means of engagement with customers. For those organisations out there and MSPs that have territory based sales, people that were used to actually going in and…

Full show notes at the publisher

Episode 70: Stop using the words “users” and “tickets” Mar 16, 2021

Show notes

In this week’s episode Words have power – be careful which ones you use! This week Paul unpicks the terrible words used by many MSPs, that can be a real turn off for your clients and prospects Also in this week’s show, an MSP customer satisfaction expert details how best to survey clients and what to do with the results Plus Paul talks about the kind of meetings that will help your MSP to grow (and which could have the opposite affect). And there’s a listener book recommendation all about brilliant branding Show notes Out every Tuesday on your favourite podcast platform Presented by Paul Green, an MSP marketing expert In talking about planning better meetings, Paul recommended the book Traction: Get A Grip On Your Business by Gino Wickman Find out more about Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Edge content service Paul’s special guest was Andrew Wallace from SmileBack talking about how to keep your clients for longer by collecting feedback Many thanks to Steve Pailing from Plexa for recommending the book Building Strong Brands by David Aaker Please recommend a book you think will inspire other MSPs here paulgreensmspmarketing.com/podcastbooks On March 23rd Paul will be joined by Mark Edwards from Whiteboard Strategies talking about how grab attention and sell more on video meetings 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:Somehow we’re already 10 weeks into 2021. Seriously, how did that happen? Here’s what we’ve got coming up for you on today’s show. Andrew Wallace:Businesses tend to focus more on growth than we do on retaining our existing customer base. Paul Green:I’ve got a great book suggestion for you later on about how to build a great brand for your MSP. Plus, we’re going to be talking about meeting rhythms, how often you should meet and who you should meet with on your team in order to grow your business. Voiceover:Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast. Paul Green:There’s a word that far too many MSPs use in their marketing. And I hate it, hate it, hate it. That word is user or users, because to us, you and I, we know what users are, they’re end users. They’re people that are actually using the computers, but to the decision-makers that you want to influence, the word users might mean something else. To some people, it might mean a drug user. To other people, it might mean that a user is someone who manipulates other people. Users is just not a good word. I mean, how would you feel if your techs were on the phone to someone and they said to the boss, “Hey yeah, could you get a few of your users to give me a call, please?” They wouldn’t do that, would they? The techs just wouldn’t speak like that. We don’t use the word users when we’re talking about people, we use the word people. Paul Green:So in your marketing, use the word people, use the word person. Those are the words that you should be focusing on. In fact, there’s another word as well: tickets. I hate the word tickets used in marketing because it’s an internal word. You and I know again, exactly what ticket means. It’s support tickets. It’s jobs that have been queued up to be done. And we want to clear the ticket, but to someone who’s stuck, to someone who has got a problem and they can’t continue, they can’t do their work because something’s broken, they don’t want to think of themselves as a ticket. They didn’t want to think of themselves as being in a queue of work that needs to be done. They want your immediate attention now. They just want it fixed. They want it to be over so they can get on with all the things that they need to get on with. Paul Green:We should never use the word users or tickets in our marketing because they are internal words, and internal words are the wrong words to use to try and influence external people. Ordinary decision-makers, business owners and managers that you want to reach do not use these words on a regular basis. So you must not use them. It’s internal jargon, and internal jargon actually creates a barrier between you and your clients. Avoid the internal jargon and it makes your communication with people so much easier. And as we’ve talked about so many times on this podcast, people don’t buy from you with their brains. They’re not making logical decisions about which MSP to buy from. They are making emotional decisions based on how they feel about you. Remove the internal jargon, the words they don’t understand, and they’re going to feel a lot more warmer towards you than they will towards the MSPs that you’re up against. Voiceover:Here’s this week’s clever idea. Paul Green:About a month ago on the podcast, I was talking about the need for your MSP to have rhythmic marketing and how critical it was to get into that rhythm of doing stuff daily, weekly, monthly, rather than letting your marketing be a sort of haphazard, boom and bust style affair. Well, it’s exactly the same with meetings. You need to get into a good meeting rhythm if you want to grow your business. So a meeting rhythm kind of takes away some of the haphazard nature of growing the business. Now, if you have a management team that you work with, you kind of need to figure out how often you should meet with those people and why. I believe with this, that less is definitely more. The more meetings you have, the more the meeting seem to take over your life and seems to dominate everyone. Paul Green:So you don’t want to have too many meetings, but I think there is a risk that you can also have too few meetings, and we need to make sure that you get into a rhythm of the right kind of meetings at the right times to sit and talk with your people about how the business growth is going. Now, even if you don’t have a management team, this is a good rhythm to get into, and I’ve got a suggested rhythm for you here. This isn’t going to be the perfect rhythm for your business, but it might be something that you can use for inspiration. So for example, I believe that every MSP, whether you’ve got a management team or whether it’s just you and two techs, you should all just go away at least once a year and have a couple of days off-site. And that’s primarily for bonding, but it’s also for thinking big. Paul Green:So you want to spend some time together, lockdown permitting of course, spend some time together, bonding, socialising, enjoying a few beers together, really getting to know each other, but also challenging each other to think big. Where do we want to be in a year’s time? What about three years time? What about five years? Where could we take this? What are we in this for? What are the big picture things here? What are the things that we’ve got to consider? What’s our vision? Where do we want to go? What are the problems that are likely to crop up along the way? What can we do now to stop those problems from holding us back when we actually get there? Even if it’s just you on your own, even if you’re a one man band, you should do an off-siter once a year, kind of a bit weird to do an off-siter on your own. I suppose, just going to the cinema during the day, isn’t it? Paul Green:But you could take your life partner if you don’t have a business partner, and the two of you could … Actually, you could turn it into a weekend away in a hotel. That sounds very nice as long as you know that we’re not just there for fun, we are there to talk about the business, we’re there to think big and decide where we want to go. So you should do a once a year off-siter. The next meeting that I recommend you get in a rhythm of is a once a month meeting and this would be a formal management meeting. Ideally, you would physically up for this. And again, it’s not ideal at the moment doing Zoom meetings is it? Even if that’s the only kind of meeting we can do. But if you could physically meet up for a couple of hours every month, that would be an amazing focus meeting, and you should set an agenda for it as well. And that’s agenda should be 100% subjects that grow the business. Paul Green:This is not an operational meeting. This is not about staff. This is not about problems. This is about growing the business. It’s, if you like, a check-in. If you’ve done that once a year off-siter, it’s a check-in of how are we doing, implementing our vision? How are we doing changing things to get towards our goal? What’s our progress? Let’s check where we are. Let’s see if we’re going as fast as we need to be going. And if not, why not? Why aren’t we making that progress? What can we do to speed things up? Paul Green:Now, then on top of the monthly formal meeting, I think you and your management team should then have a once a week meeting. Now, this one can be a video call. In fact, it’s probably preferable to be a video call, and it’s literally a short progress update on the actions from the management meetings. Because if you just do a management meeting once a month, and there’s nothing in between those meetings, guess what? There’ll be a splurge of action just after the monthly meeting, there’ll be another splurge of action just before it, but there’ll be nothing in the middle. We call this the donut effect. It’s the management meeting donut, where you have things that happen on one side and things that happen on the other side, but there’s a hole in the middle. It’s an action hole. Paul Green:So if you have a short video call every week, what that does is it prioritises for you and your management team that this stuff is important. And you’ve got to allocate some time every single week to making progress on it. Because we all know that working on the business is more important than working in the business, but sometimes we have to schedule time to do that. I would recommend that this weekly video call is the same day each week, in fact, Mondays are pretty good. Perhaps Monday afternoons when you’ve cleared all the tickets and problems from the weekend. What makes Mondays’ good is you can set up the whole week. Paul Green:If you start having these meetings on a Wednesday or a Thursday, the week’s kind of over in a way, because the weekend really does act as a massive reset button. So I would do these perhaps on Monday afternoons and I would make them must attend events. You and your management team must be there unless they’re off on holiday, on vacation, or they’re really quite desperately ill. Paul Green:And then finally, we’ve got operations meetings. Now, I believe you should call these only as needed, to discuss technical issues and client issues. If you do do them once a week, then you just need to make sure that they’re on different days to the growth calls. Otherwise the risk is if, for example, you had a growth meeting followed by an operations meeting, yeah, they’re going to merge into just one meeting and the whole point of a growth meeting that’s separate is you’re only talking about growth issues, not the current client crisis. If you have an operations meeting that’s separate, that’s where we talk about those kinds of things. So I would, for example, keep your growth meetings on a Monday afternoon and your client meetings on a Wednesday afternoon. You might find that you actually need to have daily operations meetings. Again, though remember the risk is if you have too many meetings, it can become utter overkill. Paul Green:Now there is a great book that you can read about this sort of thing. It’s called Traction: Get A Grip On Your Business by Gino Wickman. We’ll put a link to it in the show notes on my website, go and have a look at that book because it talks about how you can get into a meeting rhythm, and in fact, organise the way that you run your business and that you talk about growing your business so it’s done in a much more structured way. It’s a really, really good read and I do highly recommend it. Voiceover:Paul’s blatant plug. Paul Green:More than 400 MSPs are now a part of this, they trust it and they love it every day. It’s called the MSP Marketing Edge. It’s my content service. So we give you all the content you could possibly need to attract new leads, to turn those leads into prospects and to turn those prospects into clients. And it’s such a low investment for your business. It’s £99 a month if you’re in the UK or $129 a month if you’re in the US or anywhere else in the world. And when you go onto the website and you see exactly what you get for all of that, you will be utterly shocked, especially when you see that we only supply it to one MSP per area. You’re not competing with other MSPs using this stuff. You can use it in your area and no one else can. Paul Green:So actually the first step is to see if someone’s already beaten you to your area. If you go on to mspmarketingedge.com, that’s mspmarketingedge.com, have a look to see if another MSP has already locked your area, or whether it’s available for you to start your first month’s trial at a very low cost and see how many marketing problems this would solve for you. Voiceover:The big interview. Andrew Wallace:So I’m Andrew Wallace of SmileBack, which is a customer satisfaction platform or system for MSPs. Paul Green:Now, we all know that MSPs benefit from huge, huge retention. Most MSPs have still got their first or second client from back in the day, even if that’s 10, 15 years or more. And yet it’s impossible for any business, with anything more than sort of three or four clients to have all of the clients being a hundred percent satisfied all the time. Personally, I believe that MSPs benefit a lot from something called inertia loyalty, where it feels more difficult to move to someone new than it is to stay with your existing supplier. Paul Green:So Andrew, your whole system is about showing MSPs and your other customers exactly how happy or unhappy someone is. What are some of the small warning signs that your clients are starting to become a little bit dissatisfied? Andrew Wallace:Yeah, so I think that’s a really important question and probably the key piece of the platform, because the flip side of what you said is that we also as businesses tend to focus more on growth than we do on retaining our existing customer base. And it’s a much more efficient spend of dollars and time to retain your customer base. So putting focus on it is important. And so what SmileBack allows you to do primarily through our CSAT, which is our customer satisfaction and NPS, which is net promoter score surveys and the reporting and automation functions that result from that, we get good leading and often definitive indicators of a customer who isn’t happy. Andrew Wallace:So I would say that the first and the simplest is a negative response to a CSAT survey. So this would be when a service agent, a tech, whatever you want to call it, has completed a ticket. And the customer satisfaction survey is given to the client and they lodge a negative. There’s positive, neutral, and negative scores. So negative is really obvious. They’re putting their hand up and saying, I was not happy with this transaction, but that’s usually not necessarily a indication, a direct indication of a potential risk. It’s usually when there are multiple instances of a negative score, especially in a confined space of time that that customer may be unhappy. And why it’s important to have both the CSAT and The net promoter score surveys is that when they’re used together, you can get quite a holistic picture. Andrew Wallace:So net promoter score measure is a measure of brand loyalty or customer loyalty. And so customers will often also give a negative score, which is called a passive or a detractor score in an NPS survey, which is a zero to 10 scale. And then in the comments, the net promoter score looks more at the overall relationship. So you’re more likely there to see someone directly say, we are not happy with this, about the business…

Full show notes at the publisher

Episode 69: This should be your MSP’s marketing funnel Mar 09, 2021

Show notes

In this week’s episode Embrace the ‘science’ and say goodbye to your marketing appearing to be frustratingly random. This week it’s all about Paul’s formula for a great marketing ‘funnel’. You can make it much easier to attract new leads and turn them into clients with this detailed 10 step marketing machine Also on this week’s show, how to increase the fun at work and improve productivity at the same time – it really is a win-win Plus details of six new monthly recurring revenue streams and a brilliant book recommendation from a productivity expert 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 In talking about multi touch point campaigns, Paul referenced the content back in Episode 50 Paul’s special guest was Paul Charnock from Plexa talking about how to sell white-label marketing services to your clients Many thanks to Barnaby Lashbrooke from Time Etc for recommending the book Alchemy by Rory Sutherland Please recommend a book you think will inspire other MSPs here paulgreensmspmarketing.com/podcastbooks On March 16th Paul will be joined by Andrew Wallace from SmileBack talking about how to keep your clients for longer by collecting feedback 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 another podcast. Here’s what we’ve got coming up for you this week. Paul Charnock:You’ve now got six monthly revenue streams that MSPs can sell. Paul Green:We’re also going to be talking about marketing funnels. In fact, I’m going to explain what a marketing funnel is and tell you what your MSPs marketing funnel really should look like. Paul Green:Plus I’ll be offering you a free book, a chance for you to get a copy of my book on MSP Marketing. And we’ve got a book suggestion from a productivity expert who’s helping thousands of business owners around the world to get more done. Voiceover:Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast. Paul Green:Over the last year or so I’ve got into a really good habit with this podcasts, whereby I record it around about a month before it goes out. So as I’m speaking to you now, it’s currently 11:44 AM on Friday, the 12th of February. And I know that you’re all listening to this on the 9th of March. Paul Green:The reason I mentioned that is right now I am trapped in the hell of homeschooling, as hundreds of thousands of other parents are, and maybe you are in your area as well. The schools here in the UK have been shut, they didn’t open again after Christmas. And actually, interestingly, what made me think about this is this episode is due to go out the day after the schools might open. There’s all these talk about March the eighth. Did the schools open yesterday? Who knows? I’ll have to wait a month to find out. Paul Green:Anyway, so I’m trapped in this hell of homeschooling. I’m a sole parent, there’s just me in the house and my lovely ten-year-old old daughter, Tilda. And when we did lockdown last year, the first lockdown, and we ended up doing, what was it, about four or five months of homeschooling. That was different to how it is now, because it was a new experience for both of us. So I was probably a better parent, paid more attention, did a bit more work. And she was certainly had a better attitude towards it. Paul Green:But this time it’s been a little bit different. Her attitude has been a bit crappy, if I’m honest. And I can say this knowing that she can’t hear me right now. The Zoom calls are killing her, and let’s be honest, they kill us all. But this lockdown has not been an easy one for her, and she’s just not been motivated to do her schoolwork. Which is really unusual for her, she’s actually a great student. She does really well at school. She loves school. She’s always gets really glowing reports from her teachers. Paul Green:So I’ve been struggling over the last few weeks to make it interesting for her, to make it relevant. The actual schoolwork itself is good, it’s just, she’s just not that motivated. And then a couple of weeks ago, I realised what was missing. When someone’s got a job to do that they really don’t want to do and their motivation to do it isn’t very high, let’s make it a game. Let’s game-ify it. In fact, this process is called gamification. It’s also known as gamification, don’t know why but that’s what some people call it. You take something that you don’t want to do and you turn it into a game. Paul Green:Now you can do this for you, you can do it for your staff, you can do it for your family as well. And we’ve turned work into a game of points. So each day she can give herself a point score for the four subjects that she has to do. Just doing what the teacher asked you to do, that gets you a one. Pushing yourself a bit harder, that gets you two points. And if she really excels at something, like when something really grabs her attention and she’ll go on and do a PowerPoint or do something else or film a video or something about it, then she gets three points. Paul Green:And if she can hit a certain point score by the end of the week, then we go out on a Friday afternoon. In fact, it’s what I’ll be doing after this recording. And we go out and we have a takeout coffee and a cake, and that’s a real treat for her. And in fact, if she hits it … We added another level as well. If she hits a higher score, then I’ll buy her something of her wishlist of things. Paul Green:So we turned the whole thing into a game and, okay, it’s a complicated game, but it’s given her focus. It’s given her the ability to say, “Right. I don’t like geography. I’m not going to push myself on that because what’s the point, but I love English and I love writing stories and I love doing this.” And she’s spending … I mean, a couple of days ago, she spent nearly two hours writing up a story and putting in illustrations and doing all sorts of stuff. Brilliant. Engagement, that’s what we want. Paul Green:So you could do exactly the same thing for you and your staff. What’s something that your techs don’t like to do? Perhaps it’s documentation. I was talking to some of my clients this week about this very thing, getting techs to document properly is a major, major thing. And in fact, one of my MSPs that I worked with, they had a major outage at one of their clients. And it was because when they did some work, I think it was around six years ago, they didn’t document it properly. So they couldn’t trace and track down the faults as efficiently and swiftly as they might have done otherwise, and that’s brought the issue to a front. Paul Green:And it strikes me that making it a game is the big thing. If techs don’t like documenting, how can we make it a game? Because we can either use the carrot or the stick, can’t we? And I always find that the carrot works so much better than the stick. Sticks have their moment, we all need to stick now and again, but carrots are the better long-term solution. How can we make it a game? How can we make it fun? What about for you? If you’ve got a job that just needs to be done that you don’t like doing, what’s that job? How can you turn it into a game? The more gamey we can make something, the better. Paul Green:A lot of the vendors are getting really good at this. And software as a service, when you sign up for new software and there’s an onboarding process, often they’re really, really good at getting you to try things. I mean, even something like a progress bar. If you can see a progress bar and you know that you’re at 65% and you’ve only got a couple more steps to do, it makes it a game. The brain likes jobs to be completed and it becomes a game, let’s complete the game. Paul Green:I once bought something called ClickFunnels, which is some software you can buy. And their onboarding, which you had to watch a number of videos and set up your account in a certain way. I got a T-shirt. They actually posted me a T-shirt from the States to the UK. That was the reward, that was the game that we were playing. And there were some fun things along the way. Paul Green:So make a list of all jobs that you and your staff hate doing and then consider for each of them, how can we turn these into a game? What’s a fun way of doing it, what’s a great reward that could come at the end of it? You don’t always have to give people money as a reward, something as simple as, “Hey, I’m going to get you all a coffee,” or, “Get a pizza in or something like that when we’ve done this.” That can be a great way of gameifying something and making sure that it actually happens. Voiceover:Here’s this week’s clever idea. Paul Green:Now you’ve probably heard talking in the past about marketing funnels, saying that you need a marketing funnel. What is a marketing funnel? Let me explain it to you at its simplest. A marketing funnel is simply the journey from someone being a suspect to being a client. So there’s a number of stages that they go through. A suspect is someone who’s never heard of you. In fact, if you imagine someone right now looking at you with their arms folded in cynical suspicion, they’re suspicious of you, “Who are you? I know nothing about you, therefore you’re a potential threat.” And that’s what a suspect is. Paul Green:Now we then want to take that suspect through the funnel to turn them into being a client. And the next stage of the funnel is turning them into a lead. So a lead is someone who’s joined one of your audiences. So they might’ve joined your email list, as in, you can send emails to them. Or they might’ve connected to you on LinkedIn, or maybe be following you on YouTube or listening to your podcast or whatever. So a lead is someone who’s in one of your audiences. Paul Green:Now the next step is when they become a prospect. Now a prospect is where you’re starting to have a one-to-one conversation with them. So if you’re talking to someone and doing quotes or proposals and it’s a one-on-one conversation, that’s a prospect. You can have hundreds and maybe even thousands of leads. In fact, you probably should have hundreds, if not thousands of leads, because that’s a one-to-many conversation. You put out a piece of content or you post on LinkedIn or you send out an email, and that’s quite an efficient way of communicating with hundreds or thousands of people. And that’s what you do with your leads. But they become a prospect when you start having that one-on-one conversation with them. Paul Green:Now from a prospect, to the next stage they move on to is becoming an opportunity. So an opportunity is where they have either a want or a need, and they’re ready to take action on it. So not all prospects turn into opportunities. Sometimes we have a conversation with someone and they’re not the right fit, or we’re not the right fit, or the timing’s just not right or whatever. And they go back into the lead pool. But most of the prospects you speak to do become opportunities because they’ve got a want or a need. And critically, and this is the most critical thing, they are ready to take action. And of course we all know what happens after an opportunity. They become a client and they are buying you a Porsche, thank you very much. Paul Green:So that’s a sample marketing funnel. I can actually give you a 10 step MSP marketing funnel. Now just because there are 10 steps, it doesn’t mean that it’s complicated. This is actually a very, very easy thing. And remember, if you want to see this written down, for every single podcast we do, we have a transcript. And if you go onto paulgreensmspmarketing.com/podcast, which may be where you’re listening to this right now, but you can go into any episode page and there’s a transcript down there with show notes so you could go and see this written down. Paul Green:So this is the 10 step marketing funnel that most MSPs would have. Step one is getting their attention. And that’s simply about … It’s about driving traffic really, it’s about putting yourself in front of your potential future clients. Step two is audience. Like I said, it’s about getting them to connect to you on LinkedIn or get them to join your email list, or join one of the other audiences that you might be running. And an audience is where people are listening to you. Paul Green:Now, the third step in your MSPs marketing funnel is building a relationship. And this is the one that can actually take years and years sometimes. This is where you’re educating people and entertaining them at the same time, edutainment we like to call this. And you can turn this into a series of daily, weekly, and monthly tasks. So daily you can post on social media. Weekly you can send out your emails, your edutainment emails, and monthly, you post them a printed newsletter. And all of these things, they build the relationship. Paul Green:Some people don’t need a great deal of relationship building. They’ve got a need or a want. They’re ready to take action, they just want to know who you are, but there are other people who it’s just not the right time now or in 2022 or in 2023, but in 2024, they are willing and ready to buy. And by that point, they’ll have built a great relationship with you. It’s not actually physically with you, but emotionally they feel as though they know you and that makes you the safer choice. That’s the point of this. Paul Green:Now step four is to target people. And for this, you would run a multi-step marketing campaign. If you want to hear more about this, go back a few weeks to the specials that I was running. I did some special podcast episodes at the beginning of January, I think it was, and we talked about multi-step marketing campaigns in those. Paul Green:Step number five in your funnel is to have a telephone person. So your telephone person sits very nicely with your multi-step marketing campaign. Because you sent someone something in the post and you’ve sent them some emails, and you’ve perhaps even targeted them on social media. And it’s been the same message that you’ve been hitting them with, just delivered via different platforms. Paul Green:And then your telephone person comes along and they pick up the phone and they proactively call this lead. And their goal is to move the relationship forward, keep building that relationship. Qualify them, so check that they would be a good fit for you in terms of the number of users and all of that kind of stuff. And then find out when they’re likely to be ready to switch from their incumbent over to you. Because you have to remember, people only buy when they’re ready to buy. A telephone person is such a critical weapon. In fact, you must have a telephone person. Every MSP must have a telephone person to just warm up the database and just warm people up and move things on. Paul Green:Step number six is the outcome for the telephone person, it’s the thing that you most want them to do. And that’s to book a 15 minute Zoom call with you. So whenever your telephone person calls up, this is why they don’t need to know anything about tech or really that much about your business. Their entire goal is to just book 15 minute appointments with you. And it’s on that 15 minute appointment that you make the magic happen. In fact, what you’re looking to do is to move people on to step seven, which is a proper sales meeting. So this is the desired thing for those MPS, “Get me in a room with people who’ve got a want or a need.” And nine times out of 10, you get the business, don’t you? Well, this is a process that’s just gets you more of those meetings. So step seven is the proper sales meeting, step eight is the proposal. Paul Green:Step nine is a scheduled followup. I’m a big fan of you setting a time to actually talk to someone, rather than you being the person that’s chasing them. You put it in th…

Full show notes at the publisher

Episode 68: Double your MSP’s sales with this one tactic Mar 02, 2021

Show notes

In this week’s episode There’s nothing more frustrating than getting all the way to a sales meeting… building a good relationship with your prospect… putting in your proposal… answering their questions… and then losing the sale, right at the last minute 😔 Paul and many of his MSP clients have doubled their sales conversion rate by implementing one tactic before the meeting – find out what it is in today’s episode Also on the show this week, SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) no longer has to be a mysterious ‘dark art’. Want to improve your search position? An expert joins Paul to tell you exactly what Google wants you to do better Plus there’s the chance to dramatically improve how organised you are AND do it for free. Paul’s giving away premium subscriptions to Todoist Show notes Out every Tuesday on your favourite podcast platform Presented by Paul Green, an MSP marketing expert Here’s just a selection of the ‘video greeting cards’ on Amazon that you could send before prospect meetings Paul mentioned the brilliant book all about inbound content marketing They Ask, You Answer by Marcus Sheridan For a chance to win one of three 6 months premium Todoist memberships thanks to Brenna Loury, just comment on Paul’s LinkedIn post (closes 5pm GMT 16th March 2021) Sign up for Paul’s entry-level Marketing Accelerator training Paul’s special guest was John Vuong from Local SEO Search, talking about how to rank better in search results Many thanks to Manuel Bruschi from Timeular for recommending the books Atomic Habits by James Clear and A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking Please recommend a book you think will inspire other MSPs here paulgreensmspmarketing.com/podcastbooks On March 9th Paul will be joined by Paul Charnock from Plexa talking about how to sell white-label marketing services to your clients 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, hello, and welcome to the show. Here’s what we got coming up for you this week. John Vuong:And what you want to do is be served up high on the first page on the ranking so that you get more traction, more clicks. Paul Green:We’re also giving some stuff away this week. I’ve got three premium subscriptions to the productivity app, Todoist. I’ll tell you later on in the show how you can win one of those. Plus, I’ve got two book suggestions for you from a productivity expert. Voiceover:Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast. Paul Green:I can’t quite believe that it’s gone this quickly, but on the 24th of March, it’s five years since I sold my first business. 2016 was when I sold that. It was a specialist marketing agency for three verticals, veterinarians, vets, dentists, and opticians. And it was a great business, really good business, fully systemised. I had 15 great staff. What’s quite cool is a lot of those staff, or certainly the best ones, are working with me again now in this business. Paul Green:And I was chatting to one of them the other day, and we were chatting about sales meetings. So he was my sales guy, my field sales guy back in the last business. And we were talking about something that we did which doubled our conversion rate. So we used to get a one in three sales result. So for every three appointments we’d go to, on average, we would sell one new client and we did one thing which doubled our sales. We moved from a one in three to a two in three conversion. Paul Green:Let me tell you what that thing is, because it’s so simple, but my goodness it’s effective. We sent them social proof before the appointment and we sent it to them in a way that was easy for them to consume and we forced them to consume the social proof if they wanted to meet with us. Let me go back a few steps and explain exactly what we did. So I sat down with some of my clients and actually filmed a video, and it was only about seven minutes long, but it was my clients talking about the successes that they’d had working with my marketing agency. Paul Green:We then turned that into a DVD, bearing in mind, we’re talking about seven, eight years ago now. So we could have sent it as a YouTube, but we turned it into a DVD because we thought it would be easier to get it on their television than it would be to get it on their computer. So we turned it into a DVD, we had that transcribed, and the transcription was turned into a book. And we actually produced good, high-quality, well we had them professionally made, high-quality DVDs and the book was professionally printed. And we would post these out to people along with written confirmation of the dates that our sales guy was going out to see them. Paul Green:And the letter, which was from me, said, “Please, can you watch this DVD? It’s just seven minutes long and read the book before the sales meeting.” And then we used to ring them up 24 hours before and say, “Hey, have you seen the DVD yet? Have you watched it?” And if they hadn’t, we asked them for a commitment. We asked them to commit to watching the DVD before we had the sales meeting. And if they were a bit, “Nah, I haven’t got time. Blah blah blah,” we actually canceled the meeting. Now, we only did that a couple of times, but it was a pretty good thing to do because it said something about the potential attitude of the client. Paul Green:So why did this double our conversion rate? Very simply, because social proof makes things safer for people. We’re driven at a very deep psychological level to do what other people are doing. There’s safety in numbers, because remember, the programming that we’ve got in our brains right now is the same programming we had when we were not at the top of the food chain. So if everyone else is running, you just run. If everyone else looks happy and safe and they’re content, then you’re probably going to be happy and safe and content with them. We are herd animals and we really, really are affected by what other people do and say. Paul Green:So when you can put some social proof in the form of a case study or a testimonial or some reviews, when you can put that in front of a prospect, before you talk to them about them switching from their incumbent MSP over to you, that’s very, very powerful. It de-risks the potential purchase for your future client. And I would expect to see a similar explosion in conversion rate if you were to put this into place. Paul Green:So how would you do this? Well, the very first thing you would do is you would put together something printed with social proof in it. So if you’ve got a case study, brilliant, use that. If you haven’t got a case study, hire a writer, get one written. It’s as simple as that. Case studies are incredibly powerful because they are testimonials, social proof wrapped up in a compelling story. That’s what you’re looking for. Paul Green:It doesn’t even have to be a dramatic story, it could just be a story of perhaps a client that’s just done well, maybe they’ve grown their business considerably over the last few years and they’ve been working with you in that time. So you can almost take on some of the thanks for that. You could talk about how you’ve transformed their technology. Don’t get caught up on the actual technology. Paul Green:Say you moved them from an on-prem to cloud, eh, that’s boring. No one cares about that kind of stuff. Don’t focus on the technology, focus on the story, focus on how you’ve made their lives easier, focus on how you’ve made them more productive, focus on how you’ve helped them bring on board, more staff or open new offices or things are just easy. Remember, people buy outcomes, they don’t buy technology. If you use the word server in your case study, I want you to punch yourself in the face, not actually do that, but you’ve completely got it wrong if you’re talking about solutions and technology stacks and all of that kind of stuff. Focus on the story. Paul Green:So, that’s very much the first thing I would do. And I would get that professionally designed, get it properly, professionally printed. This is not something that comes off your laser printer. This is something that a proper printer does for you and it is high quality. Because remember, this document is going to double your sales, literally double your sales. Whatever your conversion rate is now, it can double it. And yes, okay, if you’ve got more than 50% conversion rate already, I’m not going to suggest that this will sell every single person, but you get the idea. You know what I’m talking about here. Paul Green:Now, if you wanted to take this to another level, get a video put together. These days, you wouldn’t send out a DVD. That would be a bit crazy, but you could send them a link to a short YouTube video. That would be acceptable. What would be even better perhaps is to put together one of those video greetings cards that I was talking about in the podcast a few weeks ago. You can get them on Amazon. They’re not that expensive, 20, 30 pounds or dollars, and you just load an MP4 onto them. And because you’re going to actually see them at a sales meeting, you could even take it back and reuse it for someone else. Don’t try and do all of this digitally though. Remember, the whole point of this is to get stuff into their hands, physical stuff has 10 times the impact that digital stuff has because it’s real, it’s tangible, and you’re going to see them. So let’s make it real. Paul Green:Now, that’s what you can do before the meeting, Oh, I should address, would you actually cancel the meeting if they hadn’t consumed it? Well, if I was running a sales team again, I would do exactly the same thing. I would decline for us to go and see people who weren’t willing to consume the social proof. And actually, I remember reading about this last year in They Ask, You Answer by Marcus Sheridan, which is a great book and I keep recommending it and get that book. Paul Green:And actually he says in his swimming pool company, if the salespeople ring up the prospects and they haven’t watched the videos or whatever social proof he sent out to them, then they don’t go to the appointment either. And I realise this goes against everything, every single natural instinct in your body to cancel a prospect and not go to the sales meeting, but wouldn’t it be better to only go and see the most qualified prospects? And that’s the majority, the 95% that happily consume your social proof for you. Paul Green:Now, in terms of what you do after the meeting, there’s a couple of things you can do there as well. First of all, I wouldn’t leave the follow up as a sort of, “Shall I ring you next week?” That’s too vague for me. And you don’t want to be that person who’s constantly phoning the prospect because you haven’t heard from them, because that gets tiring. That’s an awful way to start a relationship with someone. I, instead, would agree with them a day and a time of when you’re going to call them. Paul Green:So you’d say something like, “Hey, when do you guys think you’re going to have a decision on this?” And they say, “Well, I don’t know. By the middle of next week, I guess.” And you say, “Great. Let me give you a call on Thursday. What’s best for you, morning or afternoon?” And your future client says, “Afternoon.” You say, “Okay, grab your diary right now. Does 3:00 PM work?” And you get them to put it in their calendar there and then. So they are scheduling when you are going to call to answer the final questions and then to, of course, collect the sale. Paul Green:And you would then send them an email to confirm that, you would send them a calendar invite, and you would write a letter to them. And the letter would confirm that you were calling them. Why do you do all of these things? Because print, of course, is better than digital. And this, again, keeps it real, makes it tangible and keeps it real. If they cannot make that decision by then, or for whatever reason they’re not available, they will phone you or email you to reschedule. There is virtually no risk of you becoming that person, that sales person who’s chasing them up. This is a beautiful, beautiful way for you to schedule when the start of your partnership is actually going to happen. It is gorgeous. Paul Green:Oh, and of course, when you send that letter, you also sent a printed copy of your proposal. So you send the proposal as a PDF or whatever you do right now. You send that instantly. You meet with them at 5:00 PM on Wednesday. They have that by 8:00 PM on Wednesday. That’s really important, but you also send them a printed copy and that goes with the letter that you send them to confirm when you’re calling up to get their decision. Paul Green:There’s one final thing that you can do, and this is a really smart thing. You assume that they have spoken to five other MSPs. So you assume that there has been a whole load of people sitting in their boardroom talking technology to them. And here’s the thing, they won’t remember which of those people are from which business, because all IT companies have very similar sounding names and if they’ve met a lot of people, there’ll be struggling to remember which person represented which company. So we are going to make it easy for them to remember that they need to buy from you. Paul Green:With anything that you send to them before or after the sales meeting, you make sure there’s a photo of your face on there. And it needs to be a recent photo as well. So there’s no point using the photo from 10 years ago when you were a lot thinner and less gray. It’s got to be an up-to-date thing, because what you want is that they pick up that letter, they pick up the letter or anything that you’ve sent them and they look at it and they go, “Oh yeah, yeah. That was the guy. That guy.” Paul Green:And you want them to look at it and have a warm, emotional reaction when they look at your face, because this is the way they’re going to feel when they are clients. If they have a warm, emotional reaction to you now inside at an emotional level, they will perceive that you are safer, they will perceive that you are better at what you do, and that you are the right choice. Because remember, no one ever buys from a company, people buy from people. Certainly in this space, they’re buying you and your team. So remind them who you are, make sure there’s a photo of you on everything that you send to them before and after every sales meeting. Voiceover:Here’s this week’s clever idea. Paul Green:I tell you what’s clever, being more productive. And one of the ways to be more productive is to use productivity software. A couple of weeks ago, I had on Brenna Loury from Todoist and Todoist is the productivity software that I use, you can see it at todoist.com. I love it, probably because I’m comfortable with it and I’ve used it for a number of years now, but I find it incredibly good for just getting stuff out of your head, organising projects, organising tasks. You can do collaborative stuff with it, I choose not to do that, but my entire life is in Todoist. It’s one of the apps, in fact it’s pretty much the only app I look at seven days a week. Paul Green:Yep. I even arrange my weekends with Todoist, of course I do, there are things that I want to get done. I’ve never forgotten a birthday, that’s important anyway. I’ve never forgotten anything because it’s all there in Todoist. And maybe you’d like to have a go with it as well. There is a free version that you can try at the website, but Brenna very kindly gave me some codes, three sets of codes, each of which will give you six months of Todoist Premium. And I think Todoist Premium, the benefit is it just syncs up across all of your devices, which really is what you want. You want exactly the same features on your computer as you do on your phone. I’m actually just bringing it up on the website here. Here we…

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Episode 67: How to get more referrals for your MSP Feb 23, 2021

Show notes

In this week’s episode Sure, you may get SOME referrals from happy clients – but why don’t they all send potential new clients to you? This week Paul explains why there are many potential referrals you’re not aware of and what you can do to make them appear Also on this week’s show – there are some big opportunities that can put you in the best position for growth this year. And Paul’s joined by an expert technology analyst to discuss them Plus, how do you motivate a sales person (it’s easier than you might think). And there are more details on Paul’s free marketing webinar Show notes Out every Tuesday on your favourite podcast platform Presented by Paul Green, an MSP marketing expert Paul mentioned MSP sales experts Fiona Challis from The Next Gen Sales Acceleration Academy and Paul Lloyd from Sellerly (he was a guest in Episode 57) Paul discussed the power of Social Proof as detailed in the brilliant book Unstoppable Referrals by Steve Gordon Find out more about the book that you can call your own from Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Edge service Sign up for Paul’s free webinar the Live MSP Monthly Profit Booster Paul’s special guest was Jay McBain from Forrester Research, talking about what 2021 could have in store for your MSP Many thanks to Mark Edwards from Whiteboard Strategies for recommending the book Skin in the Game by Nassim Nicholas Taleb Please recommend a book you think will inspire other MSPs here paulgreensmspmarketing.com/podcastbooks On March 2nd Paul will be joined by John Vuong from Local SEO Search, talking about how to rank better in search results Also on next week’s show there’s the chance to win 6 months premium from Todoist thanks to Brenna Loury 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 episode 67 of the podcast. Here’s what we’ve got coming up for you this week Jay McBain:More than 23% of customers threw up their hands and said, “I can’t manage it, from a security perspective, a basic infrastructure perspective.” Paul Green:I’ve also got details of a free monthly live MSP marketing webinar, which is going to give you a real insight into the kind of marketing that you should be doing. Plus, we’ll talk about how you can get loads more referrals from your existing clients. Voiceover:Paul Green’s MSP marketing podcast. Paul Green:Now, if you’ve got a salesperson who works with you within the business, you’ll know it’s actually sometimes very hard to keep them motivated. It’s a difficult job selling MSP services. It’s all right for you when you do it because it’s just one of the 782 things that you do on a daily basis. But for someone who’s dedicated job is actually chasing these deals down, closing these deals, bringing on board, new clients, it can be a very, very tough gig. It’s a long sales cycle. There’s a lot of very complex stuff involved. And yet there are many, many people who do sales for MSPs and do it incredibly well. And I think the thing to focus on is three key ways that you can motivate any salesperson. Now you could actually apply these to yourself, but I do really intend for them to be used with your staff, with people that you’re working with. Paul Green:And again, and I’m actually primarily looking at these for motivating someone whose job it is to bring in new business or brand new clients, but you could also use these with your account managers. Because you’ll know there are two types of salespeople, you’ve got the person who brings in the brand new clients, and then you’ve got the person who looks after the existing clients and upsells them stuff. They’re two completely different sales roles, account management and new business. And they require different skill sets. I don’t think one person should be doing both of those roles because it’s far too easy for them to hide behind account management, which let’s be honest, is a much more pleasant way of selling. Isn’t it? It’s going out to see people you like and collecting orders sometimes, or just telling them about ways you can make their life easier. Paul Green:That’s not a difficult sell in any way, whereas bringing on new clients is. So my experience is you give one person, both those roles, they’re going to spend 95% of their time account managing and only 5% looking for new clients. Anyway, I digress. How do you motivate a salesperson within your business? There are three things you need to do. And the first thing is you need to get the commission level right. Now, commission, oh my goodness. We could have an entire podcast series just dedicated to commission. And I don’t consider myself a big expert in this area at all. There are some fantastic salespeople out there. People like Fiona Challis from the Next-Gen Sales Academy. She was a guest on the show last year. And I must get Fiona back on again, because this is one of her areas of expertise. There’s a guy called Paul Lloyd at sellerly.co.uk. Paul Green:You can find his website address in the show notes. In fact, he was my interview, my guest, right back in the middle of December last year in episode, I think it was episode 57. So there were loads of very, very specific sales experts in our world out there. But you can look at commission for your salesperson and you can say, “What’s going to motivate them to sell the right thing.” And I guess that starts with you asking yourself, “What do I want?” You probably want more monthly recurring revenue, because that’s what most MSP owners and managers want. More of that lovely cash that just turns up every single month. So maybe you’d put your commission structure together so then it rewards your salespeople for bringing in monthly recurring revenue. Sure, they get a bit of a reward when they sell a project because we need to do this project sometimes, but they get the greater reward for selling monthly recurring revenue. Paul Green:And I prefer commission schemes that aren’t capped, no ceiling on a commission scheme because that motivates someone to pick up the phone, that extra time. It motivates them to go that little bit further. We want to motivate them to do the things that matter. So for example, you might say that they get, just as an example, 5% or 10% of any monthly recurring revenue for the first year. So if they sell, let’s say $1000 or 1000 pounds worth of monthly recurring revenue, they’re going to get a hundred every month for the first year. Now, you know you’re going to keep that monthly recurring revenue for three, four, five years, so that’s why you don’t have to pay commission forever. However, they get the beauty of a little bit of extra money coming in every single month. It’s actually protects you that way, because if the monthly recurring revenue falls over, you stop paying commission on it. Paul Green:Oh, and you should also have something built into your contracts, that if they leave for whatever reason, you fire them or they decide to go, the commission ends and you don’t have to pay out any more commission. Because trust me, I’ve been there where I’ve had to pay out commission to people that I’d fired because it was, I’d got the contracts wrong and that hurts. Paying commission to someone you don’t even want working for you anymore, that’s a way to make you feel sick every month. So make sure that the commission ends, the commission trail as we call it, it ends when someone leaves your employ. So you’ve got to get the right kind of commission. You’ve got to make it easy for them to earn that bonus, easy and rewarding. And as I say, you want to reward them selling the right kind of thing. Paul Green:The second thing that I think you need to keep your salesperson happy is public results. When I was around about 18, I got my first job in a newspaper. Now I went on to be a newspaper reporter and then worked in radio. But my first ever job in newspapers was actually selling advertising. I was really bad at it. And in fact, I quit about a week before they were going to fire me, which is pretty cool, good timing. And one of the things that worked really well in that sales department, obviously it wasn’t their recruitment strategy because they were hiring people like me, but one thing that worked very well is we had a flip chart. And every day the sales manager would do a great big thing at the start of the day. She talked to us about what we were expecting to bring in. Paul Green:And I was just on the phone sort of just selling, I think it was jobs I was selling, our job advertising and this was a very long time ago, this was the 1890s. And I was selling… Was it property as well? I can’t remember. Anyway, I was selling a couple of different things, but she’d start the day saying, “What do you think you’re going to bring in today?” And then she’d set a target. And let’s say our target for the day was 2000 pounds and she’d write up 2000 on the flip chart. And then what we had to do every time we brought in a sale, was we had to go through this process where we sort of put the phone down, we filled in the order form, and then we had to walk our order form to the front of the room, to the sales manager’s desk, put it in her tray, everyone will be applauding. Paul Green:And then walk up to the flip chart, cross out the figure and write in the new figure. So for example, if I’d sold a 500 pound advert and it says 2000 pounds on the flip chart, I walk to the front, I cross out 2000 and I write in 1500, because that’s what we’ve got to achieve. And there was always a reward, of course, for hitting that target, it might have been something simple. I seem to remember, we consumed a lot of chips and chocolate just for hitting our daily targets, but it was really motivating. It motivated you to do anything you could do, to get today’s target down. And we were working as a team so we were egging each other on. Right down to, if I didn’t pick up the phone for 10 minutes, my colleague would lean over and say, “Oye. Greenie, pick up the phone. You’re not going to sell adverts if you’re just talking.” Paul Green:And that wasn’t my boss, that was my colleague. So, that very public result was a good thing. Now, we did make a big elaborate thing of it. We made it funny, we made it a joke, but ultimately it was the team celebrating success. In your MSP, you could do a version of that. So, the days of ringing a bell or having a flip chart might be a little bit past you, but why not? Why not have that target up on a whiteboard or if you must be technical about it, okay, get a great big wide screen telly and do a software solution, but nothing really beats having a whiteboard or a flip chart and the ability for someone to actually go up and cross it off and just put, “Look, this is what we’ve achieved.” Paul Green:And I do think countdowns work better than count ups. If you set someone a target of generating 1000 pounds worth of extra monthly recurring revenue in a month, and they get to five days before the end of the month and they only need another 150 pounds of monthly recurring revenue, that can be very motivating for them to try their hardest, to get to that target. And you don’t need to reward them for hitting that target, it’s just a guide. Our brains are hardwired to achieve things when we see a target, and particularly when we’re close to that target and we know we can do it. That’s a very motivating thing. In fact, this will work well with your account managers as well. In fact, you could argue it could work even better with account managers, because all they’ve got to do is look after the clients really well and communicate with them well enough and ultimately they will bring in that monthly recurring revenue. Paul Green:So the first thing we talked about was getting the commission right. The second thing was having, if you like public results. The third thing is for them to have a sense of belonging of community. Now, the chances are, unless you’re an enormous MSP, the chances are that if you do have a salesperson, they’ll be the only salesperson in the business and they will feel lonely. They will feel separate, as friendly as they can be with the techs. And obviously, we’re talking about when everyone’s back in the office again, but it is a lonely job. In fact, sales is one of the loneliest jobs you can possibly have. So what can you do to help them be part of something? Can you involve them in the daily huddle? Now I know that’s a technical thing, the daily huddle, when you talk to all of your engineers, but if you involved your salesperson, actually you could huddle with them as well. Paul Green:You can say, “Who are you seeing today? What are you expecting to have today?” And so the engineers get to learn what the salesperson’s doing and vice versa. And that’s great, because not only do the, through the power of osmosis, learn more about the actual real day-to-day technical challenges that your clients face, but they will respect each other’s jobs. The engineers and your salesperson will come to respect what each other does. And they’ll realise as well that they’re symbiotic, they need each other. If they sell something, there’s no one to deliver it, it falls over and if someone’s not out there bringing new clients in, then that’s no good for the engineers. So I think putting them together in a huddle every day and just generally getting your salesperson involved with the business is an absolutely critical thing to do. The more that they feel they’ll belong, the better they’ll perform because everyone wants to be part of something. We all want to be part of a winning team. Voiceover:Here’s this week’s clever idea. Paul Green:If you’ve ever found yourself wondering about this today, I have the answer for you. So you’ve got loads of clients and the vast majority of them, they’re happy. They love what you do. They love your team. They love you. They’re satisfied clients. And yet they never seem to refer other people to you. Why is that? Have you ever wondered that? Have you ever wondered of why you can have such happy clients and yet they don’t refer other people on the whole? Well, you’re not alone. It’s not just you. In fact, it’s not just the world of technology. This is a problem that all business owners have. You can have happy, delighted clients and the vast majority, most of the time simply will not refer someone else to you. Paul Green:And there’s actually a very good book that explains why this happens and what the answer is. The book is called Unstoppable Referrals by Steve Gordon. And inside, he talks about why we don’t do this, why we don’t refer people. It’s all down to the perception of social risk. So let’s say I refer you to my friends. Let’s say my friend, James. And I say, “Hey, James. You’re looking for IT support. Well, I use this great company. They’re called… Insert your name here. And I love them. They’re just brilliant. Give them a call. There’s nothing they can’t do to help you. They’re brilliant people.” And then James phones up your business and it just catches the wrong tech, answering the wrong phone at the wrong time. Paul Green:Hello? Oh, yeah. Hi. I was given your name and number by a friend. Right. Yeah. And so we’re looking for the IT support company. Well, you need to talk to Dave. He’s not in right now. Oh, right. Okay. Shall I just call him… Shall I just… Yes. Okay. Thanks. Bye. Paul Green:Oh, by the way, I’m sure that, that would never happen, never happen in your business. You’d never have a conversation like that. Side note, I once said that to a bunch of clients. I was in a room with and I said… We were talking about those kinds of bad conversations. And one of my clients said, “Ring my place right now and I bet you, they will be perfect.” And we did, we did ring this place and I pretended to be a prospect. And it wasn’t quite tha…

Full show notes at the publisher

Episode 66: Why your MSP should pay YOU before anyone else Feb 16, 2021

Show notes

In this week’s episode It’s not being selfish – it’s being smart. This week Paul talks about the importance of making sure your business pays you, the owner, first. And how hiding away money could actually help you spend more in the right areas, such as on your marketing Also on this week’s show, does your MSP do sporadic maketing, or does it have a marketing machine? If so, like all good machines, it should operate with a rhythm. Paul explains how to get your marketing machine oiled up and working like clockwork Plus, another expert from the world of productivity – check out how to get more done thanks to our expert from Todoist Show notes Out every Tuesday on your favourite podcast platform Presented by Paul Green, an MSP marketing expert Paul mentioned the books Atomic Habits by James Clear and Profit First by Mike Michalowicz Find out more about Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Edge Paul’s special guest was Brenna Loury from Todoist, talking about how to improve time management and productivity Many thanks to Martin Baulig from Cloud Console for recommending the book Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time by Jeff Sutherland Please recommend a book you think will inspire other MSPs here paulgreensmspmarketing.com/podcastbooks On February 23rd Paul will be joined by Jay McBain from Forrester Research, talking about what 2021 could have in store for your MSP 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 Order 66. Here’s what’s coming up in this week’s show. Brenna Loury:By the end of the day, you’re like, “Oh, I didn’t work on this huge task that I’m supposed to work on because I was focusing on all of these other small things that are competing for my attention.” Paul Green:We’re going to be talking about a service that makes your marketing really easy by giving you everything you need for daily, weekly, and monthly marketing. Plus, we’ll be looking at a book, you’re going to love this book because it recommends that you as the business owner get paid first. Voiceover:Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast. Paul Green:Back in October on this podcast, I recommended a book to you called Atomic Habits by James Clear. And if you haven’t yet read that book, please do get it. It’s available on Audible and it’s available in paper and Kindle and all of that kind of stuff. And it’s about how you can achieve the things that you want to achieve with your life by turning them into habits. Paul Green:So the author makes a very good point that just having a goal in itself, isn’t enough. You’ve actually got to take the actions that get you to that goal. And because our brains sometimes seem to work against us in many different ways, it’s so much easier to develop good habits. One of the examples he gives is habit stacking. So for example, you have a habit at the moment of at the end of a meal, you always put your things in the dishwasher, your plates in the dishwasher. You might stack a habit onto that. Let’s say you wanted to finish your meal and then jump on your exercise bike for five miles. You would just stack that up. So you’ve already got a habit of putting the dishes in the dishwasher. You then just create a new habit that every time I’ve put something in the dishwasher, I jump on the exercise bike for five miles. And that’s exactly what we mean by habit stacking. Paul Green:Now, I think habit stacking and just getting into a general rhythm of doing things and having habits to do things is not only great for us in our lives, for the goals that we want to achieve, like fitness and eating well and all of that kind of stuff, but it can also work very well for our marketing and for growing our business. You see, most MSPs that I speak to don’t do any kind of rhythmic marketing. And I define rhythmic marketing is where you’re doing something on a daily or a weekly or a monthly basis. And you keep doing it every single day, every single week, every single month. And what happens is the results of those little actions that you keep taking start to add up over time. Paul Green:Most MSPs do, what’s called boom and bust marketing, where there is no real concerted marketing effort because they’re busy, they’re servicing their clients, they’re doing projects, whatever it is they need to do. And then they realise that things are going to be a little bit tight ahead, that there’s not quite enough work coming in. So they go and do some marketing and that marketing of course generates some clients. And then they get so busy servicing those new clients that they don’t do any marketing. So the marketing is start, stop, start, stop, start, stop. Paul Green:And the problem with start-stop marketing is it gives start-stop results. And in actual fact, for most MSPs, it’s quite an inefficient way to market because your sales cycle is so slow and people are so slow to make decisions. And it can take them months, if not years, to decide to switch from their incumbent MSP over to you. That stop-start marketing doesn’t ever build up any kind of momentum. Paul Green:No, rhythmic marketing is what you want to get into the habit of. You want to take all the little cogs of the marketing machine that you want to build, and you want to put those cogs in place in your business. So if, for example, you are following my longterm three-step marketing strategy that I recommend for the vast majority of MSPs, and that’s to build multiple audiences, build a relationship with those audiences and then commercialise that relationship. Now let’s say that was the strategy you were going to follow, you could put in place hundreds of tiny little cogs that help you to implement that strategy. Paul Green:So for example, if we look at the middle one, which is about building relationships with your audiences, that’s done through educational content. And that’s typically done through social media, it’s done by sending emails out, and it’s done by sending print stuff to people. So you need to have set up some cogs in your business that every day, posts some social media content. Every week, it sends out an educational email. Every month it sends out a printed newsletter. This is what I mean by rhythmic marketing. Every day we publish some social media content. Every week we send out an educational email and every month we send out a printed newsletter. Paul Green:Now you might not physically do these tasks on a daily, weekly, monthly basis. You might have a marketing day once a month, where you do all of these tasks in one go because you can use scheduling tools and you can work in advance for example. But even that is an example of rhythmic marketing, where for example, the first Monday of every month is Marketing Monday and on Marketing Monday, you do the whole months’ marketing. The Monthly Marketing Monday, I just thought that’s quite a good idea, actually, that one is. But you get the idea, even that is a rhythm. Paul Green:As humans, we love rhythms. We’re much better when things happen regularly. In fact, the stuff happening daily is much more likely to become a longterm permanent habit. I have weekly habits and daily habits, and sure the daily habits are easier for me to stick to. For example, I have a weekly habit of recording this podcast. I have a weekly habit of writing some content for my website, and I sometimes have to remind myself to do those habits. Whereas my daily habit, where I write new pieces of content for my clients in our service called the War Room, which you can see on my website, paulgreensmspmarketing.com, but I’m in the habit of writing new content for them every single day. Paul Green:And because that’s been a daily habit of mine for some time now, it’s not a habit that I forget. In fact, it’s top of mind, every day when I wake up, there’s some content ideas in my head for me to write about today because my brain overnight has been working on that problem of what the hell are we going to write about tomorrow? Thank you very much, brain. This is a great example of rhythmic marketing. It’s become a rhythm. It’s something literally I do day in, day out. And for that reason, it makes it actually very simple. Paul Green:So there’s the challenge to you. Break down all of the marketing that you want to do, all the longterm marketing, break it down into a series of little cogs. And then slowly over a period of time, you start to put those cogs in place and make them repeatable tasks. This is the route to putting in place consistent systematic marketing, which will deliver you great results in the longterm so long as you put enough of those cogs together, and you keep turning the handle that turns all the cogs round and ultimately attracts leads, turns those leads into prospects and turn some of those prospects into lovely clients. Voiceover:Here’s this week’s clever idea. Paul Green:Over the years, I’ve read so many business and marketing books. Loads of them have been okay. They’ve had a couple of good ideas. You always get something out of a book, don’t you? At least just one idea. But now, and again, I come across books that just blow me away and they’ve got so many new ideas in or such novel thinking that I elevate them to my special bookshelf. I just had some bedroom furniture built in my bedroom, in the house that we moved into last year. And I had a big bookcase built in my bedroom and I’ve moved all of my favourite books, my top tier books into my bedroom now, so I can sit at night gazing at them and wondering when I should read them again. Paul Green:One of them which caught my eye just yesterday, actually was Profit First by Mike Michalowicz. I hope I’ve pronounced that right, Mike. If I have got that wrong, due drop me an email and let me know. It’s an amazing book because it talks about why we as business owners never seem to have enough money in the bank. So Mike, I’m not going to try and pronounce his surname again, Mike, the author, he built up and sold two multimillion dollar companies. And then he became an angel investor. And by his own admission in the book, got a bit cocky with his investing. I remember reading this in the book, at one point, he says to his wife, “You needn’t worry about anything. We’ve got more money than God.” And I think anytime anyone says that, I mean, you could see it in a movie, couldn’t you? And it’s exactly the same in the book. Some short time later, they actually run out of cash because they’re spending their capital that they’ve got from selling those businesses and he doesn’t have any income coming in. Paul Green:So the book is kind of about the lessons that he learned, having a lot of money and then losing a lot of money and running businesses along the way. And if I was to summarise this book up in kind of three parts, the three parts to it are this: The first of them, which is indicated by the title is before you pay your bills, before you pay your staff, you take your own personal income out of the business first, because quite often as business owners, we take whatever is left. Don’t we? So we get money in, we pay the bills. If there’s money left, then we take money out. I’ve been there in business ventures. You’ve been there in business ventures. You may even be there right now. Paul Green:And it’s not a great place to be because we are the owner. The whole point of the business is to feed our lifestyle. I know we don’t just do it for money, but when we’re doing it and there isn’t enough money, that sucks. That’s awful. So that’s his first kind of big idea is that you take your profit first and actually you arrange your accounts and you arrange your bank accounts and have lots of different bank accounts so that as money comes in, money is siphoned out of your operating account, and it goes into your profit account or your earnings account. Paul Green:So right from the start, in fact, you could start doing this tomorrow. I’d read the book first, but you could start doing this tomorrow. You have a separate bank account in your company’s name, and let’s say you have $1,000 coming into the bank, a proportion of that goes over into your earnings account or your profit first account. And actually in the book, he gives you a formula to try and work out what percentage of that should be going over. But this is such a novel idea, isn’t it? It means every single time money comes in, a little proportion of it is put aside for you. So essentially you’re protecting your own earnings. Paul Green:And if you have staff and the vast majority of people do, then you can do exactly the same thing with your staff. You have a bank account from which your staff get paid as well. So you’d have a staff bank account and a bank account for you. And these are all in your company name, but it’s a case of almost cutting up the pie when it comes in. The $1,000 comes in, $200 goes into your earning account, $300 goes into your staff’s wages account. That leaves you $500 to pay the bills and do whatsoever else with. So that’s kind of the first big idea. Paul Green:The second big idea in the book is that you run your business based on what you can afford to do today, not what you hope to be able to afford someday. So he talks about putting off capital purchases, for example, and just waiting another day and wait another week and wait a bit longer and wait a bit longer. And not buying anything on credit, but waiting until you’ve actually got the cash in the bank, bearing in mind, you’ve already paid yourself, remember. So you see that $500 or £500 in the bank, that’s money to spend, so long as you’ve paid the bills, of course. And that’s a completely different way of thinking. Paul Green:He quite rightly states that most business owners, we run the business based off of what money we see in the bank account, rather than actually looking at the P&L or the management accounts that our bookkeeper or our accountant has provided for us. We see a thousand bucks in the bank and we go and spend it. And we forget that there’s a bill coming in, that we’ve got to pay. I’ve done this, you’ve done this, we’ve all done it. And that’s why you need to read this book so you don’t do it. Paul Green:The third kind of big idea in the book is that when profit comes first, it becomes the focus of the business and it’s never forgotten. Now, this is not about making the business profit obsessed, because I don’t think any business should be profit obsessed. In fact, one of the things that bothers me about big public companies is how they make very, very short-term decisions to maximise profit for the shareholders, which I know is their legal duty to do so. But I think often they do this at the expense of the bigger picture, at the expense of the longterm picture. And you look at companies like Disney, for example, which is currently not making a great deal of money, and that’s not so much to do with COVID so much as it is they’ve gone in on Disney+ in a massive, massive way. And if you don’t have Disney+, it is a fantastic service if only for The Mandalorian alone. Oh, and the Marvel TV shows as well. Paul Green:Anyway, they have completely gone in and said to their shareholders, “Hey, not going to be a lot of dividends for a couple of years, but we get to dominate entertainment on TV for the next 10, 20 years and properly take on Netflix or whatsoever.” There are very few big public companies that do that. They’re far too focused on the short-term, hitting their targets and the CEO getting their great big million pound or million dollar bonus. Whereas here in small business world, we can act a little bit differently. In fact, should act a little bit differently. We should be focusing on marketing the business, growing the business, keeping our customers delighted, keeping our staff delighted and general…

Full show notes at the publisher

Episode 65: Why your MSP should phone every old prospect Feb 09, 2021

Show notes

In this week’s episode It’s the MSP equivalent of putting your hand down the back of the couch, to see what you might find! On this week’s show Paul explains how old forgotten data could uncover some brand new surprise revenue for your MSP Also – starting to use the services of a part-time virtual assistant could be even easier than you think. Listen as Paul’s joined by an expert in the field to explain how you make it cheaper and hassle-free to get help Plus on the show this week, why you need to create a financial forecast more than ever before. And a listener book recommendation that could even improve your business karma 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 mentioned the tool for tracking time Timeular Paul’s special guest was Barnaby Lashbrooke from Time Etc, talking about how best to use a virtual assistant Many thanks to John Vuong from Local SEO Search for recommending the book Give and Take by Adam Grant Please recommend a book you think will inspire other MSPs here paulgreensmspmarketing.com/podcastbooks On February 16th Paul will be joined by Brenna Loury from Todoist, talking about how to improve time management and productivity 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:You’re very welcome to episode 65 of the podcast. Here’s what we’ve got coming up for you this week. Barnaby Lashbrooke:Lots of people let the day run away from them because they’re pummelled with distractions that they haven’t planned for. Paul Green:We’re also going to be talking about why your MSP should phone every single old prospect, every single one, and why it’s a critical part of the numbers game. That’s so important in marketing. I’m also going to tell you later on how you can get a free copy of my book on MSP marketing, and we’ve got a great book suggestion from another marketing expert. Voiceover:Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast. Paul Green:I have a great accountant, his name is Rob Bowden, and he’s one of those accountants who is not just interested in the numbers, he’s interested in what’s caused the numbers. He has a real passion for business, and it’s wonderful sitting down with him talking about how figures to him they paint pictures, they give him clues, they lay out stories and tell him what’s happening within businesses. In fact, over the years as Rob has become not just my accountant but also a friend, we’ve started looking at doing some joint ventures together and even acquiring some businesses together this year. It’s fascinating to hear him talking about how you can see what’s going to happen in a business based on the historical figures and on forecasts for the future. Forecasts are what I want to talk about today because most MSPs, we very rarely talk about numbers with MSPs. Paul Green:Because assuming you’ve got managed services and assuming you’ve got lots of clients under contract with monthly recurring revenue, well, as long as you keep on top of your overheads and you bill for your projects correctly and you just keep an eye on what’s happening with the figures, then for most MSPs finance and cashflow is just not a big issue at all. But I’m aware that not everyone is in exactly this position. In fact, with the difficulties that we’ve seen last year and, of course, this year, it’s continuing this year, we’re at a point now where maybe, just maybe for your business, you should start thinking about doing a financial forecast. Paul Green:Now, what is a financial forecast? It’s a tool that you can use to maintain control of your business. So you may previously have produced financial forecasts perhaps if you were borrowing some money and your bank manager was fairly insistent about it. But I think it’s a good time now to look at producing a financial forecast just for your business. You may already have this, you may already have management accounts from your accountant or your bookkeeper on a regular basis, let’s say a weekly or a monthly basis. But a financial forecast is looking at where things are going over the next three, six, maybe even 12 months based on how things have been. So essentially if things continue the way that they have been, what is this going to mean? What are the implications of this? What are the net rebounds and the net effects on you as a business? Paul Green:Now I’m not an accountant, I’m not particularly friendly with numbers, I always struggle to look at balance sheets and P&L. I know how to read them and that, it’s just I have a, I don’t know, maybe I have a mild form of number dyslexia, and I rely on people like Rob to interpret figures for me and tell me what the figures actually mean in terms of the business performance. But there are certainly a very clear number of reasons why you would get a financial forecast for your MSP. The primary one is to reduce any levels of anxiety that you might feel. Now, we are in another uncertain year and in as much as we’re in a, we’re in a very good sector aren’t we? IT support is a great sector to be in. At the same time, there can be levels of anxiety, especially as some of your clients are starting to struggle. Paul Green:I’ve said in this podcast a number of times over the last few weeks that we’re all going to lose clients because of COVID because of the general impact on the economy and certain types of businesses. If you see a huge number of job losses from a big company because of COVID, that has a knock-on effect on lots of smaller companies. And as a lots of smaller companies lose their staff, that has a knock-on on the general effect and the general emotional wellbeing of people in a marketplace. So to reduce any level of anxiety that you feel about the future, do a financial forecast. In fact, once you’ve established a baseline for if things continue as they are, you can then do some what if scenario plannings, you can say, well, what if things get better? What if things get worse? What if we lose this whale of a client that represents 34% of our turnover? These what if scenarios can help you to feel better because they’re not going to take away the possibility of these things happening, but what they will do is allow you to plan. Paul Green:If you’ve got a whale of a client representing a third of your revenue and you lose that client because they go bust or something awful happens to them, then wouldn’t it be better to know in advance what your emergency action plan would be? Wouldn’t it be better to consider your staff and look at them and say, “Well, who am I going to have to let go? Who am I going to have to make redundant? What are the cutbacks that we’re going to have to make? Do we still need this big office or can we move somewhere else? When’s the break clause in this? Understanding what could happen to your business through a financial forecast allows you to do some planning. Paul Green:Once you’ve got that kind of planning, you can start to almost establish what level of financial support you might need to maintain the business. So if things go bad down the line, and if there are problems, what could you do to help? What are the things that you will need to do and the financial support that you’ll need to get down the line? Might you need to take on some debt? Might you need to do something to improve your cashflow? Might you personally need to put some money back into the business? The big picture with all of this is to remember what the purpose of your business is. And the only real purpose of your business is not to provide tech support, is not to employ great people, the real purpose of your business is to give you the lifestyle that you want to live. As the business owner, that’s the purpose of the business, it’s all about feeding you. Paul Green:Producing a net profit shouldn’t be the main goal of the business. To me, that’s a pleasant outcome of doing a great job for lots of good people, but it is ultimately the thing that you take home, that net profit is your personal income and it’s the thing that you take home. So I would do this financial forecast, I would do some what if scenario planning, I would have an action plan for all of the big, big, scary scenarios, and primarily I would look at what’s the impact or potential impact on your own personal family income. If you’re the main breadwinner and you take home 5,000, 10,000 pounds or dollars a month, and you need that because you’ve got high levels of personal debt or you’ve got big projects at home or something, you’ve got to consider the impacts, the possible impacts this year of any form of negative event and what that could do to your personal income. Paul Green:And I appreciate there may be a delay, a pause between a negative business effect happening and then the impact on your own personal income. But again, make that part of your action plan. What can you do to reduce costs at home? If you have got large debts that you’re paying down, what can you do to reduce the level of payments that you’re making in the short term? You may not have to do these things, I think for most MSPs, it’s actually going to be a very positive year. But wouldn’t it be better to do that exercise now? To have that in the back of your head, to have a sheet of paper somewhere or a document on your laptop with a plan for what exactly you’re going to do if any of these bad scenarios happen. Paul Green:The other way of looking at it is with your financial forecast, to look at what you’re going to do with the extra money if actually good things happen. If you win more new clients than you lose this year, if you add more users, if you sell more monthly recurring revenue services to your existing clients, what if you were to generate an extra 2,000 or 3,000 pounds or dollars of extra net profit every month, what would you do with that cash? Would you just leave it in the bank? Would you invest it somewhere? Would you move it to a second bank for safety? Would you withdraw it and turn it into your own personal income? Would you use that spare cash to go and invest in extra marketing or maybe even go and acquire a competitor? There’s lots of different things that you can do with extra cash. I think when you’re doing a financial forecast, you absolutely should start with, what are the worst things that could happen, but then go on to what are some of the good things that can happen. Paul Green:Now, this is something to do with your accountant, absolutely not something you should do on your own. A great thing to do with your accountant or your CPA is to do this financial forecast. And primarily don’t just look at it as a whole series of numbers, but what are the stories that the numbers tell us. Much better to know, six months before it happens, that there’s a major problem on the way than for it to sneak up and catch you unawares. Voiceover:Here’s this week’s clever idea. Paul Green:My clever idea doesn’t feel so clever today because it’s actually a very simple one. Pick up the phone, call every single old prospect you ever spoke to, every single one. As I said, that’s not particularly clever, is it? It’s literally just sitting and making a series of phone calls. But here’s the thing, marketing is not a mysterious art, it’s very much a science. In fact, I would say it’s 80% science and 20% luck. It’s scientific because you can do a whole series of things and measure the performance of those things, that’s what makes it scientific. The 20% luck, is because a lot of marketing is about timing. People only buy when they’re ready to buy, and you’ve got to get the right message in front of the right person at the right time. Paul Green:But here’s the thing, it’s also about the numbers game. Far too many MSPs that I speak to are talking to one, maybe two people a week, and then they’re wondering why they’re just not getting decent leads and decent prospects out of it, it’s because their numbers aren’t big enough. The more marketing you do and the more people that you do it to, the more results you get, the better results you get. It really is as simple as that. It takes the same amount of effort to send an email to 10 people through your CRM like MailChimp, takes the same amount of effort to send it to 10 people as it does to send it to 10,000 people. But you send an email to 10,000 people and you’ll get much better results. Of course, you will because the numbers game says there are more likely to be some people within that 10,000 that are ready to have a conversation with you right now, whereas the numbers game on just like 100 people is just too low. Paul Green:So that’s why I’m challenging you to call every old prospect. Go through your emails, go through every business card that you’ve ever had, look at every inquiry that’s ever been sent through a web form on your website, every single one, every single person you ever spoke to you know that guy that rang up about two new laptops four years ago, call him because four years ago it was just two laptops for the two members of staff he had. What if today he’s got 15 staff and he would be an ideal client for you? Call him, get back in touch with him. “Hey, I’m just calling to see how thing are going. How have you guys been doing over the last year with corona? What’s happening in your business?” Paul Green:Now, they’re not going to remember you, a lot of these old prospects, but it really is just worth a call. And you would absolutely go in with, “Hey, sorry I haven’t been in touch for a while. It’s been three, four years since we last spoke. We talked about a couple of laptops. I’m just wondering how’s business for you guys right now.” As I say, this is a numbers game. If you can find 200, 300, 400 old prospects to call, you’re not telling me that some of those people aren’t going to be ready to have a conversation with you. Sure, some of them will have gone out of business, some of them will be dead, some of them, most of them actually not really interested talking to you. But some of those people, oh my goodness, there’s some money and some clients and some business just waiting for you to turn up and take it from them. And that’s a very, very beautiful thing. Paul Green:So the first step for this is to find all the old prospects, pull together, all the old data, search your email, search every single Excel sheet, everything, anywhere you may have squirreled data. I’ve just cleared out an office that I’ve had for eight years and I’ve had it across a couple of different businesses. I don’t need it anymore because I work completely from home now. And it was only ever me in the office anyway, it wasn’t for my staff, it was a place to hide more than anything else. I have found eight years worth of stuff, business cards, boxes of things, flyers, brochures, all sorts of stuff that people have given me over the years. Now, a lot of that is irrelevant to me in this current business, but certainly if I still had my old business, the one I sold back in 2016, I’ve got a whole bunch of data in there of people that could be called, that maybe we haven’t even been speaking to over the last few years or so. Paul Green:So pull together all that data, that’s the first thing. And then the next thing is to try and get yourself into some kind of rhythmic calling. So rhythmic calling is where let’s say every day, you attempted to call 10 people. If you’ve got a couple of hundred prospects and you do 10 a day, or you attempt to call 10 a day, that’s brilliant because you’ll get through it in two to three weeks. Turning a job like this, which you could look at it as a pretty nasty job to do, having to pick up the phone and call people, call them up and see how they are. It’s much more likely that you’ll get that done i…

Full show notes at the publisher

Episode 64: Just ‘cos you’re busy, doesn’t mean your techs are Feb 02, 2021

Show notes

In this week’s episode Does this vicious circle sound familiar? To grow your MSP, you need to do more marketing… but you don’t have time to do marketing, so you can’t grow. If that’s you right now, check out Paul’s special month of episodes about productivity For the next 3 weeks Paul’s joined by an expert who can help you use time more efficiently – this week he’s joined by the creator of the incredible physical time tracking tool Timeular On the subject of productivity, Paul also talks about your pace of work vs your team’s pace of work (and how a greater understanding can also help communication with prospects and clients) Plus on the show this week, the format for an effective staff one-to-one and a great listener book suggestion to inspire better learning Show notes Out every Tuesday on your favourite podcast platform Presented by Paul Green, an MSP marketing expert Paul mentioned the tool for creating and tracking tasks Todoist You can join Paul in the MSP Marketing group on Facebook Paul’s special guest was founder and CEO Manuel Bruschi, talking about how his incredible Timeular tool was created Many thanks to Andrew Wallace from Smile Back for recommending the book The Art of Learning by Josh Waitzkin Please recommend a book you think will inspire other MSPs here paulgreensmspmarketing.com/podcastbooks On February 9th Paul will be joined by Barnaby Lashbrooke from Time Etc, talking about how best to use a virtual assistant 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 first podcast for February and back to our normal format. Here’s what’s coming up in this week show. Manuel Bruschi:This is how the idea was come up with, not just becoming aware of how you’re spending your time, but actually, how can I improve it? Paul Green:That’s Manuel Bruschi, the founder of Timeular.com. He’s the first of four productivity experts that I’m going to be interviewing throughout February. And you can hear his interview later on in the show. Paul Green:We’re also going to be talking today about a free marketing resource. It’s an amazing Facebook group with more than 1000 MSPs already inside. I’ll tell you how to join that group later on. Paul Green:We’re going to talk about why you should be doing one-to-ones with most of your staff, and I’ll give you a format for those one-to-ones to make it really productive for you. And we’re going to get a book recommendation from Andrew Wallace of Smileback. Voiceover:Paul Green’s MSP Marketing podcast. Paul Green:If you go back about seven years or so, and back then I had a different business. And around about seven years ago, I had about 15 staff as well, which was quite interesting. I didn’t go into the business very often. I used to go in just on Thursdays, but I was still running the business, so I was running it from a separate office, so I could hide away from my staff and get things done. But on Thursdays or Angry Thursdays as I came to know them, I’d go into the office where all the staff were. And I’d typically do one-to-ones and I talked to my team and just generally made sure that the ship was going in the right direction and look for ways to make the ship go faster. Paul Green:And I remember distinctly one particular Thursday, it was a roundabout four, maybe six months, before I decided to put the business up for sale. The business was doing very well. It was almost completely systemised at that point. So I wasn’t needed to be there. I was an addition I had the choice to, to go in there and keep things going, but there were no actual specific jobs that I had to do in order for the business to thrive on a daily basis. Paul Green:But that particular Thursday I went in. It sticks in my mind because I was just annoyed all day. I remember being annoyed on the drive in because it was about an hour from my home. I remember being annoyed when I got there. I was just generally annoyed all day. And the reason that I was annoyed was because I had a series of things that I had to do. Now you have to understand that I am an incredibly organised person. I use a piece of software called Todoist, which keeps me on track for all the things that I need to do every day. And that’s seven days a week, by the way. If I need to do a job in my house, it’s there in the Sunday folder. And it sat there in Todoist waiting for me to look at it. It’s literally the first piece of software that I look at every single day on my phone. Paul Green:I’ve been like that for years. And one of the downsides of being very highly organised and knowing exactly what needs to be done and when it needs to be done by is that know when you’re going to have some busy days. And this particular week, my week had been hijacked by a couple of other events. And I got to that Thursday and I knew I had essentially three days worth of work to do, but only one day to do it. Because the Thursday would be taken up talking to our team and doing the things that frankly make the difference in the business. But I knew I had these three days of work to do, and I think that’s why I was annoyed. Paul Green:So what I decided to do was in between my meetings with my staff, I’d sort of lock myself away in the office and I would try and get some of those things done so that it wouldn’t impact too much on my Friday. And the thing that sticks in my mind most about that very angry Thursday is just how much I got done. I mean, I was like a machine that day. I was just doing thing after thing, after thing. If I had a meeting and we did the meeting in 15 minutes and I had 15 minutes spare, I would get an hour’s worth of stuff done in that 15 minutes. In fact, as I’m talking about it, I’m thinking that maybe I had some kind of immovable deadline, maybe there was a holiday coming up on Saturday or something like that. There was something that was driving me. I mean really, really driving me that day. Paul Green:And you must’ve had days like this as well if you think back about your days at work. And in fact, when a holiday coming up that can be an incredibly, incredibly productive time to drive you forward. Paul Green:Anyway, I had that day, I was being very productive and I was busy, busy, busy, busy. And I remember coming out into the main office at lunchtime at a pace. I mean, I was literally physically walking fast. I was doing everything fast that day. And as I walked into the office, it was almost like I hit a brick wall because the attitude and atmosphere, the office, it was actually kind of normal, but it felt to me very, very slow. And it felt like everyone was slacking. And I kind of walked in and instantly got a bit annoyed and was like, “Wait, what’s everyone doing? What are you doing? What’s going on here? What’s happening with this project?” Basically, I was a complete idiot of a boss. I was the worst kind of boss, just for a minute or so, the worst kind of boss that you could have. I was that boss that comes in gets angry for no reason, barks out orders, issues instructions, interferes with what you’re doing. Oh, I look back now and I’m actually cringing. As much as I’m laughing. As I look back, I’m also cringing because that was just a terrible five minutes. Paul Green:The thing was, I was really busy and in my mind that meant that everyone was really busy. The reality is, they weren’t. They were just getting on with their work. And I had a pretty good team back then. Yeah, there was some that I’d never hire again, but I had a pretty good team and I’m working with some of them again now in this business. And I had perceived that when I was busy, they were busy too. Paul Green:This is what we do as business owners. We always perceive that whatever is happening to us is happening to other people as well. If you’re feeling a bit down right now, perhaps because the business isn’t doing so well, or you’re feeling elated because the business it’s doing well, or you’re frustrated or you’re angry or you’re ecstatic or whatever emotional state you’re in, it’s not fair, and it’s certainly not true, to assume that all of your staff are in the same emotional state. They don’t have the information that you have. They don’t have the same commitment to the business that you have. They are not you. Your staff are not celebrating and commiserating when you are. They don’t get the huge highs and lows that you do because it’s not their business. It’s just a job to them. Paul Green:Even to your closest, closest colleagues, the ones that you trust day in, day out, unless they have significant skin in the game, they are not as emotionally affected by what’s happening as you are. It’s one of the hardest things for us as business owners and managers to realise, that other people are feeling different things. In fact, it’s a key core skill: the ability to be empathetic to someone else, to what they’re thinking and what they’re feeling and realising that it’s completely different to us. Paul Green:We’re very focused, aren’t we? We know exactly what we want to do with the business. We know how we want to do it. We know when we want it to be done and we just want to get on with it. And that’s not them. They’re living completely different lives. They just want to get home at six o’clock tonight to go and kill lots of bad guys in Call of Duty or whatever the current big trendy video game is. Paul Green:It’s not just our staff that we need to empathise with. It’s the same with our leads and our prospects. Something you may have heard me say on this podcast before is that to influence what John Smith buys, you’ve got to look through John Smith’s eyes. And that counts for staff, it counts for clients and it counts for leads and prospects as well. If you want to influence them, you’ve got to look through their eyes, whatever emotional state you’re in right now, they are not in that emotional state. You’ve got to move yourself to the emotional state that they’re in. Paul Green:If someone’s looking at you and thinking of buying from your MSP, what are their emotions? What are they afraid of? What do they want? What do they need? What’s the worst thing that could happen to them? What’s the best thing that could happen to them? What would put them at ease? What would make them feel more comfortable? If you can answer all of these, and there’ll be slightly different for all prospects and leads. There are some similarities, but people do give away clues about how they’re thinking and feeling. If you can get yourself into that mindset with them, oh! What a difference you can make. What a tremendous difference you can make to your own marketing and the way that you just generally deal with people, be that partners, be that vendors, be that staff, be that anyone. The ability to empathise with where someone else is emotionally right now is an absolutely core skill for influencing them and ultimately getting you closer to your goals. Voiceover:Here’s this week’s clever idea. Paul Green:A couple of minutes ago, I mentioned doing one-to-one with my team. And these were typically 15 to 20 minute meetings that I would have with them right about once a month for some people, once a fortnight, depending on how much they needed them. And if you’re not doing one-to+ones with your team right now, oh! Much can I recommend one-to-ones? Paul Green:One-to-one can change everything, absolutely everything. I first started doing them more than 20 years ago when I was running a couple of radio stations and I found it a pretty essential way to keep in touch with my key people, the people that actually made the biggest difference to us hitting the goals that we needed to hit. Now one-to-one doesn’t have to be a formal thing. In fact, I think it’s better when it’s not formal. I’m not talking here about an appraisal where they do a bit of paperwork and you do a bit of paperwork or one of those 360 or 180 appraisals or whatever they call them, where you get your boss above you and someone below you. I’m sure all of those have value. I’m sure they do. But most of them, they feel like tools that big businesses use. In very, very big businesses, they use appraisals as kind of a control mechanism, as a way for the people at the top to know that the people at the bottom are doing what they’re supposed to be doing. Paul Green:I find that informal one-to-ones are a lot more useful. And let me tell you the format that I’ve been using for one-to-one for years and years and years now. It’s a very simple format. And actually, it’s a framework more than anything else. If you do this well, your people, the people that you do one-to-ones with, won’t even notice that there is a framework in place. They might feel that there’s some structure to the meeting, but they won’t necessarily look at it as a framework. Paul Green:So, first of all, we must talk about getting the environment right for a one-to-one. I really think that Zoom is the worst possible way to do a one-to-one. One-to-ones are so much better done face-to-face. Okay, you might need to socially distant these days and sit either ends of a room, but that is better than doing it over a video call. It really is. I’ve done only a few, only a handful of one-to-ones over Zoom and you kind of miss out on the little clues. This is the problem with Zoom overall, isn’t it? You miss out on those tiny little things that you pick up on when you’re sat face-to-face with someone. Paul Green:So one-to-ones over Zoom can be done, but I really don’t think you’re going to excel at them until you can do them face-to-face in some way. And when you do do them face-to-face, they need to be done somewhere where you can’t be interrupted. Maybe that would be your office right now. In normal times, I would suggest going out to a hotel or a coffee shop, or somewhere, hire a business room somewhere where you can’t be interrupted. And ideally where both you and the person that you’re doing a one-to-one with is away from their normal environment. If you normally sit in your office, that’s your normal environment. And in fact, coming into your office might be a slightly intimidating thing for the person that you’re doing a one-to-one with. So getting away from the normal environment when you can, is a very sensible thing to do. Paul Green:So the format for the one-to-one, the framework for your meeting, is very, very simple. It starts with a question: what’s gone well. Or if this is someone that you’ve previously met with, you might say, “Since we last met, what’s gone well?” Now, notice there. We’re not saying, “What have you done well?” Or anything like that? It’s a deliberately open question: what’s gone well? Paul Green:You see, you want that person to tell you what’s on their mind right now about what they’re enjoying, what’s going well within the business. Some of them will talk about their own performance. Some of them will talk about their colleagues’ performance, maybe even your performance, something to do with clients. It almost doesn’t matter what it is. They talk about. It’s a forum for them to sit down with mummy or daddy, that’s you, by the way. The boss is ways the parents, mummy, or daddy. It’s a chance for them to sit down with mummy or daddy and talk about something they are pleased with right now, what’s gone well. Paul Green:But here’s the thing. You need to have something as well, because this isn’t a one-way thing. A one-to-one is not a one-way conversation. It’s a two-way conversation. You need to give stuff back as well. So when they’ve told you something that they think is going well, then you tell them something that you think is going well. And in an ideal world, that would be something that relates to them, to their performance, to some improvement that they’ve made. A chance for a bit of mummy or daddy praise, becau…

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Episode 63: SPECIAL: Maximise LinkedIn for your MSP Jan 26, 2021

Show notes

In this week’s special episode LinkedIn is a stunning tool for prospecting. And vastly under used by far too many MSPs On this week’s show Paul dives into why you should readdress your relationship with LinkedIn and how to maximise the platform to help find new clients Check out Paul’s simple but effective advice to make LinkedIn truly work for you. And more details about his ‘Three C’s’ – Connect, Content, Contact 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 for content to use on LinkedIn The Linkedin automation tool Paul mentioned was Dux-Soup Paul’s special guest on February 2nd will be Manuel Bruschi, founder of the incredible time tracking tool Timeular 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 an MSP Marketing Podcast Special. Paul Green:Our final January special this week. We’ve already looked at your website and we looked at your marketing priorities for 2021. This week, we’re going to be focused just on LinkedIn, why LinkedIn is so exciting and how you can make the most of it every single day. Voiceover:This is an MSP Marketing Podcast Special. Paul Green:I completely understand why many people are apathetic about LinkedIn. Sometimes when you go on there, it’s like being at the world’s worst networking meeting, where everyone is there to sell and no one’s there to buy, but a thing we always need to switch our mindset and look at the bigger picture with LinkedIn. Because if I said to you 20 years ago, “Hey, in early 2021, you’ll have access to a massive constantly up-to-date public database containing every single lead you could ever want to speak to, every potential contact, and every position of virtually every single business. Paul Green:Oh, and by the way, it’s free. Oh, and by the way, you can use clever computer bots that will exist in the future to automate the holiday work of using this database. Oh, and you can set yourself up as a thought leader, cliche alert, and you can stamp your expertise on this.” Now, 20 years ago, you’d have thought that was witchcraft, which is pretty amazing, and yet today we’ve got that. It’s LinkedIn. We’re all a bit sometimes a bit nah about it. And I get that, because sometimes I go into LinkedIn and I can’t be bothered. Paul Green:The messages from people I don’t want to hear from and the content. It’s almost like a business version of Facebook, isn’t it? Everyone’s doing so well on LinkedIn. Just like everyone’s doing so well on Facebook. Now, some of that content is not real. You know that person that you’re connected to on Facebook who has the amazing life? They don’t. They’re just posting the good stuff and not the bad stuff on Facebook. Anyway, I digress. You’ve got to look at the bigger picture with LinkedIn. It’s amazing. It’s a prospecting tool. Paul Green:Everyone you could ever possibly want to speak to is there, the vast majority of them are anyway. So for all MSPs, you should take LinkedIn as seriously as you possibly can. And there’s a number of things that you need to do to get the basics right, which we’re going to focus on now, and then we’ll talk about the daily actions to really sweat LinkedIn and really make it work for your business. So in terms of getting the basics right, that’s about getting your profile right, and your profile needs to be completely up to date. In fact, LinkedIn rewards you. Paul Green:I think it’s called all star status. It doesn’t really mean anything. I don’t know if you get a sticker or something. But all star status means that you’ve completed every single section of your profile. To be honest, it’s worth doing that anyway. Algorithmically, there’s bound to be a small advantage of doing that, but it’s also just good for people looking at your profile. So that starts with having a professional picture. Paul Green:And we mentioned last week when we were talking about websites about getting a wedding photographer or someone in to take professional photos of your staff. You as kind of the face of the business, you should have a professional photo done every year, so that the photo of you on LinkedIn actually looks like you in real life. Because we’ve all done it, haven’t we? Where we’ve looked at someone on LinkedIn and they look kind of young and healthy, and then we meet them in real life, a bit older and a little bit fatter. Paul Green:Actually that takes us out of our comfort zone because we realise that the public persona that we’ve been looking at isn’t the real person. It actually damages trust when that happens. I know it sounds like such a minor thing, but it really does damage trust. I would get your own personal photo redone every year. Do it in the summer when you’ve got a tan and you’re looking gorgeous and update your LinkedIn profile picture every year. Now, you also get like a cover thing as well, which is kind of like the background that goes behind you. Paul Green:Again, I would just get a designer to do that for you. It’s not a difficult thing to do or expensive. You can find tons of people on Fiverr.com that will do that for you, but don’t leave it as the default. Get something designed that’s got your business’ logo in there. Oh, and by the way, I always forget to mention this with LinkedIn because to me it’s such a basic thing, but actually it’s something that’s worth mentioning. When you’re building your LinkedIn, you’re doing it to a personal profile, not a company page. Paul Green:It’s really critical. So yes, you have a company page, but you kind of set that up once. Don’t have to worry about it from there. It’s the personal profile. That’s where all the action happens. Because if you look in the LinkedIn feed, you’ll see more updates from people than you will update some business. And one of the reasons for this is I believe that LinkedIn is Microsoft’s version of Facebook. I have no proof of this, but I believe that Microsoft, their modus operandi in all of their operations is to either buy or copy the market leader. Paul Green:Hence, Slack couldn’t buy Slack, even though Salesforce did in the last year, couldn’t buy Slack or didn’t want to buy Slack, so they built Teams. And Teams, of course, being their interpretation of that kind of collaboration and instant messaging. And Microsoft owns LinkedIn. I believe they’ve looked at the market leader, which is very much Facebook, and they have made their own versions of how they believe Facebook’s algorithms work. And that has prioritised content. It’s prioritised people above businesses. Paul Green:You absolutely want to focus on a personal profile. It should be your profile, assuming you’re the owner of the business. Never let your salespeople use their own LinkedIn, because that has a major disadvantage when they leave you and they go to the MSP across the road, which is all the hard work they’ve been doing on LinkedIn walks with them. If you must have salespeople with their own LinkedIn profiles, then set them up some separate profiles that belong to you and stay with you if ever they leave, but the most robust thing is just to focus all the effort into the owner’s LinkedIn. Paul Green:You personally don’t have to do any of the things that we’re talking about here. Someone can do it on your behalf on your LinkedIn. So you’ve got your professional profile picture. We’ve got the cover image behind. You should claim your personal URL. Just Google how to do that. And you should make sure that you’ve got all your basic contact info in there. Then you come to a bit where you have a headline and the headline should be full of impact. It should grab people’s attention. Paul Green:And essentially it should say what do you do, who do you do it for, and what are the benefits of this. Now, the number of characters you have in the headline it went up. It was last year or the year before, but it’s now 220 characters. So it means that saying something like IT support for town name businesses is a bit weak, to be honest, when instead you could put something like 1,082 town name people trust me and my team to keep their business IT running every day. And you’re welcome to go and pinch that one. Paul Green:I mean, that’s a great one to use, 1,082 town name people trust me and my team to keep their business IT running every day. That number, by the way, is the number of users that you actually support. So that headline is absolutely critical because it’s the first thing that people see when you make a connection request to them. They see your photo and they see that headline, and they will decide whether or not to join you based on that headline. You also then get to tell your story in the about section. That’s almost an extension of the headline. Paul Green:Remember we were talking last week on the podcast about how important stories are in your website. It’s no different in LinkedIn. The human brain responds better to stories. So tell a story. The trick is, and this is what really good writers can do, the trick is to tell your story in a way where it’s most relevant to the people you want to reach. You’ll have heard marketers say before that you should make your marketing about them, the prospects, and not about you. And that’s absolutely correct. Paul Green:But at the same time, you’ve got to tell stories and use your story to be about them. It’s a very difficult thing to pull off, but good writers can do it. Next up, give LinkedIn all of the information at once. You put some media into the featured box, media like videos, infographics, that kind of thing. List all the relevant jobs that you’ve had. Your paper round when you were 10 is not relevant. List your experience, your accomplishments, list your skills, and you could ask people for recommendations. Paul Green:And LinkedIn will help you get those recommendations because it wants everyone recommending each other all the time. The one final basic to get right is a clear call to action. What do you want people to do next? Now, I believe that your call to action on LinkedIn should be exactly the same as on your website, which last week we were saying is to get them to book a 15 minute video call with you. Paul Green:Now, you can’t embed your live calendar into LinkedIn, but you can absolutely have a link to your Calendly page or your Microsoft Bookings page, or even to a page on your website, which explains a little bit more about you, so put some context on I, and there is your live calendar. Now once you’ve got the basics right, which is pretty much a one-off job and then just checking it every, I don’t know, every few months or so, LinkedIn then becomes a daily activity. And I really do think it’s something you should do daily. Paul Green:In fact, there are three C’s that you should be working on every day, and they are connect, content, and contact. So connect is about growing your connections. It’s about growing your audience on LinkedIn. Now, we use the free version of LinkedIn and we’ve been able to grow… Well, last year we grew my LinkedIn connections from about 400 something to well over four and a half thousand. And you could do exactly the same thing if you wanted to do that. And I’ll tell you about the automated tool that we used in a second. Paul Green:Even on the free version, you can connect to I think it’s up to 20 people a day, or you can certainly put in up to 20 connection requests a day, but that’s been fine for us. And I’ve got to be honest, unless you’re on LinkedIn for multiple hours all day or you want to be constantly messaging people all the time, the free version is probably good enough for you. They have their sales navigator version, but it seems quite extreme, unless, as I say, you’re literally on LinkedIn all the time. You should try and connect to people every single day. Paul Green:I’ll tell you about the automated tool to do that in a second. The second C is content. That’s about drip feeding content, putting on stuff daily. And it should be daily. I know it feels like so many other people are putting so much content on. But remember, a lot of marketing is about being in the right place at the right time, because people only buy when they’re ready to buy and their brains are just not open to talking to you until it’s exactly that right moment. So drip feed content every day. Blatant plug alert. Paul Green:If you don’t have any content to drip onto social media every day, go onto mspmarketingedge.com. See if your area is still available. That’s my content marketing service and social media content is a big part of that. We give you content on a monthly basis, which you can schedule ahead, and then we give you fresh up-to-date content every week as well. But you can, of course, also generate your own content or indeed just get a writer off Fiverr to do it for you. You could do things like translate technology for them, because they don’t know about technology. Paul Green:In fact, they don’t know what they don’t know about technology, do they? You can come up with stuff that’s relatable to their lives. You can use humour. Just because it’s technology doesn’t mean it can’t be amusing. You can use client success stories. You can scare them. That’s the easiest thing to do. There’s so much cybersecurity stuff in our world that they just don’t hear. You can challenge conventional wisdom. So you can say that perhaps how people think it should be done isn’t the same. I mean, look at passwords, for example. Paul Green:You probably know that Microsoft has declared that it wants 2021 to be the year that the password dies. And that’s challenging conventional wisdom about how things are done. Maybe you’d want to jump behind that. Maybe you wouldn’t. It doesn’t really matter what your view is on that. You can turn it into content for LinkedIn. The other thing you can do is you can ask questions and you can definitely do how to’s. How to’s and asking questions are both great content suggestions for LinkedIn. So we’ve got connect, we’ve got content, and then the final C of LinkedIn is contact. Paul Green:And this is about messaging people. It’s about using the inbuilt messaging ability within LinkedIn to message people, message your contacts. And don’t be a spammer. Don’t just send them random messages. Add value to their lives. Offer them free stuff. Send them towards useful things. If they’re an accountant and you found a great tip that you’re working with other accountants, other CPAs that you’ve been dealing with, give them that tip. Drop them a message and say, “Hi, I didn’t want to post this publicly on LinkedIn, but I can see that you’re a CPA. Paul Green:I see you’re an accountant. One of my accountants I’m working with has recently discovered XYZ on Sage or whatever software they use and I thought you would find that useful as well. I did actually write it up on my website. Here’s a link to it.” That’s not spamming people. That’s adding value. And in fact, that’s adding value in a way that’s going to get that person onto your website. It’s a wonderful thing. The goal really with any contact that you have is to move the conversation offline. Paul Green:You want to move them to a point where you’re having a chat with them either across the phone or on a video call, or of course, when you can and it’s safe to do so to actually physically go and meet them, because nothing beats those in-person meetings. And that’s the power of LinkedIn. You see, it’s just a prospecting database. It’s there to provide you with the ability to go and talk to these people. That’s very exciting. It really, really is. The one final thing with LinkedIn is to apply the rule of DOA, which traditionally stands for dead on arrival. Paul Green:And that’s what you’ll be if you try and do everything yourself. So instead, delegate,…

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Episode 62: SPECIAL: How to fix your MSP’s website Jan 19, 2021

Show notes

In this week’s special episode Every MSP has one. And being honest, most of them are rubbish… we’re talking about websites in this week’s special episode Join Paul to discover what you can do to fix your most important marketing tool Paul takes you through the 10 fundamental things to improve on your website Show notes Out every Tuesday on your favourite podcast platform Presented by Paul Green, an MSP marketing expert In this special podcast Paul mentioned the book Influence by Dr Robert Cialdini Paul mentioned the outsourcing services fiverr.com, Upwork.com, PeoplePerHour.com & copify.com Find out more about Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Edge which includes a book you can claim as your own and give away to help with data capture Paul mentioned automated appointment booking services Calendly, Microsoft Bookings, AppointmentCore and ScheduleOnce 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 an MSP Marketing Podcast special. Paul Green:It’s the second of three marketing specials to get your MSP off to the best possible start for 2021. And this week, we’re going to be focusing on the single most important marketing asset that you have at your disposal, it’s your website. Today, we’re going to talk about how you can fix it. Voiceover:This is an MSP Marketing Podcast special. Paul Green:I know that you’re not happy with your website. I know that you’re genuinely frustrated with it, and you don’t understand why it doesn’t generate enough leads and what exactly to do to fix it. And the reason I know this is I have looked at hundreds and hundreds, if not getting on for 1,000 MSP websites. Anytime I start working with any MSP anywhere, I just have a quick look onto their sites. It gives me a very quick snapshot of where their marketing superpowers are. Paul Green:And obviously the vast majority of MSPs don’t have great marketing abilities, but it helps me understand what I’m working with. In fact, sometimes I come across a website that’s just beautiful. And it makes me realise, “Wow, this MSP has upped their game. Let me see if I can push them further, and further, and further, and further.” But the vast majority of websites just aren’t great. Paul Green:What we’re going to look at in this podcast special is how ordinary decision makers think and act. We’ll look at why your website leaves them cold, and why you owe it to your children, your bank manager, and actually your future retired self to make your website as good as you can possibly make it. And to help you do that, I’m going to give you the 10 most important website elements to focus on. Paul Green:Now, you think about the ordinary decision maker that you want to reach, the ordinary business owner or manager. How does that person think? What do they want from you? And how do they make buying decisions? Well, they think less than we think they do, because when they’re picking a new MSP, they’re not doing it with their brain, they’re doing it with their emotions. I think this is called your limbic system. It’s that gut feel. Paul Green:Because the average business owner or manager, the average decision maker doesn’t know what they don’t know about technology and IT, therefore it is virtually impossible for them to judge whether or not your business is any good compared to your competitors. When they can’t make that judgment, the decision just defaults down to that limbic system, to the emotions, to the gut feel. Their gut is picking a new MSP. Paul Green:Let me put this another way. They choose you if they like you. So yeah, they ask you all those questions, and they want to hear a little bit of technical stuff, and they certainly want to … More than anything, they want to feel confident, feel confident, that you will look after their business and their staff, that you won’t screw stuff up and that you’ve got their best interests at heart. And that’s the vast majority of buying decisions. Perhaps not at sort of C-level, corporate-level enterprise, buying decisions are made differently there. Typically, buying decisions are made there to protect people’s jobs. But the vast majority of decision makers that you may … And by protect people’s jobs, I mean them protecting their own jobs. The vast majority of decision makers that you speak to are making emotional decisions about whether or not they like you and they can trust you. Paul Green:I’ve said many times before that people do not buy technology, they buy outcomes. So why are we talking to them about technology? Why are we putting pictures of servers and network cables, and talking about cloud, and 3CX and other stuff like that on websites? That’s not what they buy. Sure that stuff’s got to be there somewhere, bang it on a service page. No-one’s ever going to see it anyway. But these people are not making buying decisions based on very techie things. They’re making buying decisions based on whether or not they like you, so let’s make them like you. Let’s help with that. Paul Green:And this is what makes your website your single most important marketing tool. It is the most critical one, because it’s the one thing you can guarantee everyone will look at. Absolutely everyone. Because if they’re thinking of buying from someone it’s what we all do, we check out their website first. It’s almost weird these days, if a business doesn’t have a website. Paul Green:In fact, when you start a new business, what’s the very first thing you do? You build a website. It’s the most basic thing that you do. They are going to look at your website. And the goal when they look at your website is emotional engagement. We want them to be moved emotionally. Paul Green:Now, I realise this is not what your website is probably doing right now. And I realise again, that many technical people, and this is not a criticism, it’s just an observation. Many technical people find it very difficult to be emotional on a website. And we’re not talking extreme emotions. We’re talking just about moving them, moving their emotions, not their brain. That’s what we want to be doing. Paul Green:Let me tell you how, and 10 different elements that you need to address on your website in order to achieve this. Element number one is humans. You’ve got to have more humans on your website. People buy from people, they don’t buy from companies. I’m excluding the big brands that spend millions every year on advertising, on brand advertising to move us emotionally. Yeah, in that instance, we buy a brand. You buy a can of Coke. You’re buying Coke. You don’t know who the people are at Coke. But that’s different. That’s a product, it’s a feeling. We are either a Coke drinker, or a Pepsi drinker. You’re either a Givenchy perfume person, or a … I don’t know any other perfume brands, but you get the idea. At the level that we sell, people buy from people. They are not buying from the company at all. Paul Green:So put humans all over the website. As many photos as you can, videos as you can. Tell stories. All of these kinds of things. The more humans on your websites, the better the chance of emotionally influencing people. Paul Green:And I know that many, many MSPs really don’t like the thought of being out there on your website. But unfortunately there’s no way around this, unless you hire a model to be you, to be your public image of you. And please don’t use a stock image. Don’t think I’m suggesting use a stock image to be you. That would be awful. But the best results come from being the face of the business. Even if you’re a one-man band, you can still be the face of the business. You don’t have to admit to being a one-man band. Even if you’ve got 40 staff, you could still be the face of the business because people buy from people remember. The more humans you can stuff into your website, the more emotional engagement you will get, and ultimately the more leads you’ll generate, the more prospects they’ll turn into, and the more clients you will get. Paul Green:Now, the second element, and I’ve touched on this already, is to put in more stories. People love stories. Now, I may be a bit wrong with my description of technology here. But as far as I understand it, there are two types of MRI machine, the magnetic-resonance imaging thing that looks inside your body. The first type is kind of an in-depth one that you just put people in and it builds up a scan of whatever’s being scanned. But the second one is something called a functioning MRI, which doesn’t have all the detail, but it shows what’s actually happening in real time in the body. Paul Green:If you put people’s heads in a functioning MRI machine, and you tell them some basic facts about something, one area of their brain lights up, from what I’ve read. But if you tell them those same facts wrapped up in stories, there are several parts of their brain that light up. And that’s good, because the more areas of the brain lights up, the more engaged someone is. In fact, it’s widely believed that a lot of our myths and legends were actually knowledge being passed on from generation to generation, in the form of stories, because we didn’t have written or permanent communication back then, so this was how one generation passed knowledge onto another generation, in the form of stories. We are literally hardwired to respond well to stories. Paul Green:Now, have a look on your website. What stories are you telling? And there are lots of different stories you can tell. You can tell your story. In fact, that should go on the about-us page. The two most trafficked pages of your website are the homepage and the about us page. They’re the two that should get 80% of your attention, because all the rest of the pages put together won’t have as much traffic as the homepage and the about us page, so you get those absolutely as good as you can possibly make them. Paul Green:You can tell your story on the about-us page. You can tell a client story in a case study. You can tell stories about your staff, just introducing people to your staff. What do they like doing outside of work? What’s their favourite bit of tech? What was their first computer? These are all stories. These are ways of bonding potential future clients to your staff. It’s beautiful. Stories, stories, stories, really, really work. Paul Green:And the third thing you need on your website is personality. Now, what I mean by personality is almost finding the voice. What’s the voice of your business? And by voice, I mean your unique voice. Are you talking on your website in a way which only your business could talk, or are you talking in a very generic way that actually could apply to any MSP? Paul Green:The vast majority of websites I see use very generic text like, “We’re striving to implement solutions and blah, blah, blah.” I mean solutions, and strategies, and striving, and systems, and all of those S-words are terrible words to use on websites anyway. But how are you talking in your voice? I’ll give you a clue how to do this. Paul Green:The way to have a voice on your website is for it to be your voice. You should write things that you love and that you’re happy with. If you’re happy with something, then it’s probably your voice coming across. Because that’s the thing, when prospects talk to you, assuming that you do the selling, they’re hearing your voice anyway. They’re hearing technology explained in the way that you explain it. And the wonderful thing is, no-one, but no one could ever be you. In fact, you are your USP, your unique selling proposition or unique selling point, which is critical that every business has in its marketing. Paul Green:Most MSPs just do the same thing as each other. You might have a different technology stack, and a different preferred tool, and a different PSA, and all of that kind of stuff. But none of that’s relevant to the end clients really. The thing that’s relevant to them is the way that you do things, your preferences, your ability to communicate in your specific way. That’s your voice. And your challenge is getting that on your website in a way which emotionally engages people. Paul Green:This is where a good copywriter comes in. If you can find someone who could interview you and take the essence of what it is that you’re saying, the essence of how you would explain things to a client, and then pass that on across the website, that’s a very, very beautiful thing to do. Paul Green:And it leads me on to numbers four and five, which is photos and videos, because the more of you that you can put in photo form on the website, beautiful. And certainly the more of you that you can put on the website in video form, even better. Videos are the best way to get across you and your voice. Paul Green:And I know the thoughts of being in a video on your website is literally probably your idea of hell. And you would rather lose a toe than being in front of a video camera. But I promise you, if you can get in front of that video camera and do a professional, well-made video, that would just be absolutely beautiful, because people can see you. And it only needs to be 60 seconds. And you know it would be better just kind of talking off the cuff than it would be scripted. Paul Green:Some people do very well with scripts. Some people do better talking off the cuff. I’m one of those people that, like when I’m doing this podcast, I know what I want to say. And I’ve got a series of notes laid out so I don’t go too far off piste. However, if you try and script me, I just don’t quite sound exactly the same as if I’m just talking, which is what I’m doing right now. Paul Green:You need lots more photos and lots more videos. Please spend the money on professional stuff. Cheap photos stand out for all the wrong reasons. Just because you’ve got the latest digital SLR, or the iPhone 12 Pro Max Badge, or whatever it is, it doesn’t make you a great photographer just because you’ve got a great camera. Have you heard the phrase, “All the gear, no idea.”? There’s more to a great photo than just getting someone to smile and having a great camera. It’s about adding depth. It’s about getting the lighting right. It’s about helping that person be natural. This is what professional photographers do. Paul Green:There are wedding photographers and wedding videographers in your area who had a crap year last year because the weddings weren’t happening. And I don’t know how things are at the moment in your area, but it’s likely that the weddings aren’t going ahead right now like they used to, so give them a call. Say, “Hey, do you want to come and take some photos of me and my team?” Or, “Do you want to come and do a video with us?” These people are really good at making people look great in uncomfortable situations, because that’s what a wedding is. It’s an uncomfortable situation where you’re having photos taken. You’ve got to look at for the next 20 years. Paul Green:And the same with the video really, because a good video will last you three to five years before you need to replace it. So let’s get some under-worked professionals, let’s get them in. Let’s pay them the money that they’re worth, and you will never ever regret having decent photos. Paul Green:As an aside, I have a professional photo updated every year. I normally have it done in the summer when I’ve got a bit of a tan, or if I’ve just lost a bit of weight, because that just makes you feel good to see yourself a little bit thinner in your photo. You need to make sure that your photo stays up to date. Paul Green:In next week’s podcast, we’re going to be talking about LinkedIn. And one of the most critical things on LinkedIn is to have an up-to-date photo. This photo that you’re having taken for the website, you can use that on your LinkedIn profile as well. In fact, it’s preferable that you do have the same photo so you have some consistency…

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