Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast

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Episode 51: Stop dealing with clients: Work/life balance for MSPs Nov 03, 2020

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In this week’s episode Not all time is equal, especially the time you spend with clients. Yes they’re the life-blood of your business, but you really need to spend less time dealing with them on a day-to-day basis. So you can focus more of your attention on growing your business. This week Paul explains how exactly you can do this and why it will improve your work/life balance Also on this week’s show, excellent practical advice on how to maximise the current trend in cybersecurity, direct from an expert in the field The show is full of inspiration this week; Paul’s joined by another guest with a great book recommendation. And he’ll be telling you about a website for entrepreneurs you might get addicted to! Show notes Out every Tuesday on your favourite podcast platform Presented by Paul Green, an MSP marketing expert Paul mentioned Appsumo where you could find heavily discounted software, courses and ebooks Register for a free copy of Paul’s book Paul’s special guest was cyber security sales expert Jennifer Bleam from MSP Sales Revolution talking about current trends in cybersecurity and how you can leverage these to sell more to your clients Many thanks to Steve Taylor from RocketMSP for recommending the book Simple Numbers, Straight Talk, Big Profits! by Greg Crabtree Please recommend a book you think will inspire other MSPs here paulgreensmspmarketing.com/podcastbooks Paul’s special guest on November 10th will be speaker, coach and author Andy Edwards. Find out about his new book “Leadersh*t” here 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:Welcome to a freshly baked podcast. Here’s what’s coming out of the oven for you, this week. Jennifer Bleam:Every sale is based on emotion. And if you don’t engage the emotions, there will not be a buying decision. Paul Green:We’ve also got a great book suggestion for you from Steve Taylor of RocketMSP, that’s coming up towards the end of the show. If you haven’t got a free copy of my book yet, I’ll tell you how you can get a copy. Plus, we’ll be talking about something called AppSumo. If you’ve never heard of AppSumo, lock your wallet away because you’re about to spend a whole lot of money on apps that you didn’t know you really needed. Voiceover:Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast. Paul Green:Now, if you’re the owner of your own MSP, you’ve probably got several jobs within the business. So, it’s likely that you take an overview of all of the finances, of course, you’re responsible for the sales and the marketing as well, if you’ve got an office then, obviously, you’re responsible for keeping that up to date, staff development, recruitment, it just goes on and on and on. Oh, as well as keeping clients happy as well. And the day-to-day reality of that kind of workload for any normal human being is that you kind of struggle to spend quality time on any one activity. Such as, for example, if you wanted to spend a huge amount of time on sales and marketing, which is the single most important activity if you want to grow your business, you’ll probably struggle to do that. It might be something that you can spend some time on every day, but perhaps not your primary activity on a daily basis. Paul Green:But here’s a scary thought, you will always, always struggle to create a business that gives you the lifestyle and the income that you want whilst your main activity each day is doing anything other than focusing on sales and marketing, and I include client retention in sales and marketing. And client retention is not doing stuff for clients, it’s doing activities which keep clients. So if your main activity every day is dealing with clients, is dealing with tech problems, doing tickets, sorting things out, then you’re going to struggle to achieve the business you want within the timescale that you want it. So if you’re serious about growing your business in the years to come, and we’re not just talking about 2021, we’re talking in the next two to three years, the trick is to find some of your time to work on the business rather than working in it. Paul Green:So working on the business is doing things which get you more new clients, that get your existing clients to buy more from you and they get your existing clients to choose to stay for longer. So all of these are things which grow the business. Working in the business is where you’re busy caught up doing the day-to-day stuff, the stuff that needs to happen, dealing with invoices, dealing with tickets, dealing with admin, hassle, staff questions, all of that kind of stuff is working in the business. Paul Green:Now, I get it, you’re probably the best technician that the business has got, and the clients probably love you. In fact, many of them have maybe dealt with you for a number of years, so of course they want to keep talking to you. But the rate of progress of your business will always be restricted by the amount of time and energy that you are personally able to put in. If you spend more time on business development, your business will develop faster. It really is that simple, there is that direct link on it. Spend two to three hours every day on business development, on growing the business, on the marketing and the sales and of course your business will get there faster, there is that direct correlation. Paul Green:Of course, I do realise that walking away from doing so much support work, I know that’s not such a simple thing to do and it often does take several months to ease a business owner such as you out without having a negative impact on the business. But, I promise you, it will make a significant difference. Not only will the business perform better, but you will enjoy it more as well. You won’t be so grumpy in the evenings because you’ve got to spend your evenings dealing with finances, with marketing, with your staff problems. This is a wonderful sector. And even with all the problems that we’re all having right now, it generates new, highly trained and qualified staff every single year, so make use of that. Hire people, there is some great people on the market right now because they’ve been let go. Hire people, and if they’re not right, fire people until you get to the right kind of people for your business. The right kind of people that can fulfil the amount of support work that you need them to complete so that you can focus your time on more important things. Paul Green:Don’t get me wrong, it is vital that you stay in touch with your clients, but you’ve got to make sure that you get the balance right as well. Because working on business development strategies, well, that’s an incredibly powerful use of your time. No one else is ever going to do that as well as you can do it. And as the boss of the business, the driver of the business, this is the most valuable contribution you can make to the future prosperity of your business. You should only do what only you can do. Voiceover:Here’s this week’s clever idea. Paul Green:I mentioned this as a side note in the podcast around about six weeks ago. And since then, it’s been hanging as a task at the back of my brain that I really must tell you fully about it. What is it? It’s something called AppSumo. And if you’ve never come across AppSumo before, then I’m afraid I’m about to ruin your evening because AppSumo is both awesome and terrible in the same package. So let me first of all explain what it is. Do you remember Groupon? I don’t know if Groupon… Is Groupon still going? Sadly here in the UK, Groupon is not a big deal anymore. In fact, I can’t remember the last time anyone said to me that they were doing a Groupon deal or going to eat out on a Groupon or going for a spa treat on a Groupon. It might still be going, I guess it’s still going in the States. Paul Green:Well think of AppSumo as Groupon for entrepreneurs. So they have deals on software. And it’s the kind of software that when you look at it, you think, “Oh, this is really interesting. I think I could use this, I could really use something like this.” If I was to look at some of the deals that are available right now, so just as at time of recording they’ve got a unified platform for invoicing and accounting called Deskera, well, that’s not really of interest to us because we can fix that with your PSA and an integration to Xero or QuickBooks or something. Paul Green:They’ve got a whole load of offers on… There’s a CloudSocial which is a social media platform that would post, analyse and manage your social content, there’s a WordPress portal deal, there’s something called Volley which is fast track design review, okay, that’s not relevant to us. Zook is a communications app, Client Joy to manage your leads, proposals and all that kind of stuff in one place. Oh, this is a good one, StickerMule Die Cut Stickers, get vibrant custom die cut stickers that show off your brand without breaking the bank, I’m going to have a click through to that one. There’s something called Live app where you can broadcast live, SmartTask which is a project management thing, there’s idea after idea after idea. And what makes each of these unique is you get a deal. Paul Green:So if we take that SmartTask that I was just looking at, let me click through to have a look at that. So it’s got the price $360 crossed out and it’s got a buy now price starting at $49. And these are genuine prices by the way, and I know this because I buy a lot of stuff from AppSumo. So you will typically get a year or a couple of years or even better a lifetime deal at a certain level on this software for the lower price. And AppSumo is pretty good at filming videos to show you what the software does, it breaks it down into what it’s good at and what it’s not good at, there are some usage cases in there, they give you a hell of a lot of information to show you why you should invest in this app. And when you look at something like this and you think, “Do you know what? It’s $49 for a lifetime deal on this, I’m going to give it a go.” And if you don’t like it, it doesn’t really matter. Paul Green:Now, you can actually ask for a refund, the vast majority of things that you buy from AppSumo, you can get a refund on it if it turns out not to be quite what you’d hoped it would be. And again, that’s just their way of de-risking it for you, they’re trying to encourage you to buy more apps. Let me reveal how AppSumo is able to do this. Now a couple of years ago, it was a little bit different, I imagine they were the ones that were going out trying to get the deals. These days, lots of early stages apps come to AppSumo and they’re actually using it as a kind of funding platform. Paul Green:So they will build a proof of concept, a just slightly better than beta version of their app, then they’ll go to AppSumo, they’ll sell 10,000 memberships at $49 a time, I would imagine AppSumo takes a fairly hefty percentage of that, but suddenly this new startup company with its new beta app, well, they’ve got a whole load of essentially beta testers who’ve paid to be involved and a whole load of cash in the bank so they can fix everything that’s wrong and they can actually start to turn it into a decent product. Paul Green:So some of these deals that are on AppSumo, they do come with a bit of a buyer beware because you are essentially buying into early stage apps, but there are lots of mature products on there as well. Depositphotos comes up once a year with a really good deal where you can buy a whole load of stock images, dirt cheap, which is always, always oversubscribed. And it is worth just having a look through and seeing what they’ve got every day. They do add new stuff all the time, and make sure you join their email list, they email out their best offers. Paul Green:But as I say, this does come with a warning, I must add up how much I’ve spent with AppSumo but it’s getting on for thousands, thousands of dollars. And I found some amazing stuff in there, in fact, there’s three or four apps that I’m still using day-to-day in the business right now. But there’s probably more apps, well, some in there that I’ve never used, which is a little embarrassing to admit, but something there that I tried, it wasn’t quite right for me, I’ve never really asked for a refund, I’m not really that kind of guy to do that. I think if you get an app and you try it and it’s just not quite for you, I don’t believe the app should be punished for that. So I don’t personally ask for refunds, I know lots of people that do, that’s fine, you do whatever is the right thing for you to do. But go and have a look at AppSumo, it’s appsumo.com, we’ll put a link to it in the show notes. At the very least, it gives you ideas of things that sometimes you didn’t even know you could do. Voiceover:Paul’s blatant plug. Paul Green:Right. Come on, if you haven’t got a free copy of my book yet, what have you been doing? It’s a book called Updating Service Doesn’t Grow Your Business, and it’s the quick guide to getting started on MSP marketing. The thing is, if you’re in the UK or the US we will ship you a physical paperback copy at no cost to you whatsoever. There’s no catch, you don’t have to put your credit card in, there’s none of this “pay a dollar for postage” and then we’re trying to upsell you, there’s none of that. What I’m actually trying to do is start a working relationship with you. And the fastest way for me to do that is to physically get my book into your hands. I want to invade your toilet time. If I can get half an hour of your time on the… Yeah, I know that’s weird. Half an hour of your time on the toilet, it means that you can see what I’ve got to say and the chances of us doing some business down the line, well, you never know. But there is no obligation to buy anything ever. Paul Green:So just get a free copy of my book. As I say, in the UK and the US we ship you a free copy and everywhere else in the world we’ll send you a free PDF copy. All you got to do is go to my website, it’s paulgreensmspmarketing.com/book. That’s paulgreensmspmarketing.com/book Voiceover:The big interview. Jennifer Bleam:Hello, my name is Jennifer Bleam. I’m the Cybersecurity Sherpa and I help IT companies, MSPs and technology service providers figure out their cybersecurity packaging, pricing, sales and marketing strategy. Paul Green:So you must be one of the most in demand people on the planet right now. Jennifer Bleam:It is quite busy, that is true. Paul Green:Because cyber security is obviously the hot thing to sell. The end user and the end decision makers might not know that they need it as much as they do, but obviously MSPs know that cybersecurity is a massive thing. How long have you been doing this, Jennifer, and what kind of change in the trends have you noticed over the last couple of years? Jennifer Bleam:Yeah. So I have been doing this on my own for about a year and then prior to that I was part of a cybersecurity company that sold into The Channel and we realised that part of our challenge was helping IT companies sell our solutions. So all told, on the cyber side about three plus years, in the IT side, man, I’d have to say 20 years which dates me significantly. I was two when I started, we’ll just say that. And changes in the trends, obviously of late, the biggest thing is the work from home trend, that’s a bit of a challenge. The happier trend is that these small business owners are finally having some level of awareness on the fact that cybersecurity maybe is not just this fly by night thing that the technology salesperson is trying to sell them. And so there’s at least a bit of awareness that it’s maybe needed and maybe not necessarily just this fluffy thing that’s going to pad the pockets of the sales person. So, that’s a great change. Paul Green:So for an MSP that wants to sell…

Full show notes at the publisher

Episode 50: How can your MSP compete against the big boys? Oct 27, 2020

Show notes

In this week’s episode It’s time to be more like David and stop worrying about Goliath. If there’s a massive dominant MSP operating in your marketplace, Paul has some invaluable advice this week on how you can dodge, duck and weave your larger competitor… and actually become a better and stronger MSP along the way Also in this week’s show, if you’ve ever sat down and thought to yourself “if only we had a really simple marketing plan” – you’ve come to the right podcast! Paul welcomes a special guest who has the ultimate guide on how to systemise a brilliant marketing plan Paul also looks at the beauty and power of a multi touchpoint marketing campaign. Plus how you can free yourself from the day-to-day clutter in your life, work less and take more holidays Show notes Out every Tuesday on your favourite podcast platform Presented by Paul Green, an MSP marketing expert Paul mentioned the brilliant book – They Ask, You Answer by Marcus Sheridan Find out more about Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Edge (in which there is a multi touchpoint ‘campaign in a box’ about ransomware) For more details about the competition to celebrate the first birthday of this podcast, just visit paulgreensmspmarketing.com/win Paul’s special guest was author and marketing coach Cody Butler, talking about how exactly to make a great marketing plan. Check out his book The 90 Day Marketing Plan on Amazon or get a digital copy at the90daymarketingplan.biz Many thanks to James Newell from Clear Sales Message for recommending the book The 4-Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss Please recommend a book you think will inspire other MSPs here paulgreensmspmarketing.com/podcastbooks Paul’s special guest on November 3rd will be cyber security sales expert Jennifer Bleam from the MSP Sales Revolution talking about current trends in cybersecurity and how you can leverage these to sell more 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:Oh my goodness. I can’t believe I’ve recorded 50 of these podcasts. Welcome to episode 50 of the MSP Marketing Podcast. Here’s what we got coming up in today’s show. Cody Butler:There’s no shortage of businesses out there that want these type of services. They just don’t know you are there and what you can do for them exactly. Paul Green:We’re going to be talking about the beauty and power of multi touchpoint marketing campaigns. I’ll explain those later on in the show. Got a great book suggestion for you. It’s one of my favourite books, even though it’s a little bit crazy in parts. And it’s the final week of our competition. I’ve got some amazing prizes for you to win as a thank you for listening to this podcast. Voiceover:Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast. Paul Green:In many marketplaces you’ll have lots and lots of smaller MSPs, and often you’ll have one or two really big MSPs, depending on the size of the market of course. Typically you see these bigger MSPs based around larger cities or larger towns. Now, I don’t believe that you, assuming you run one of those smaller MSPs, have anything to fear from big MSPs at all. In fact, the only thing you have to fear from the big MSPs is that they’re better resourced than you. They simply have more cash and they can use that cash to buy more time, and just make more impact, make more noise in a marketplace. But that doesn’t mean you should be scared of them. In fact, if I was to put my money on any MSP really winning within a marketplace, it would actually be a bunch of smaller MSPs beating the bigger MSP. Because often you’ll find that those big MSPs, they get so big that they start to become a little bit inefficient with their money. Paul Green:So rather than getting really good at marketing, they’ll just throw money at salespeople. Or they’ll throw money at partner channel and marketing initiatives, because that seems like the right thing to do. And they kind of lose touch with the kind of marketing that really makes a difference to talk to the kind of decision makers that you really want to talk to, those business owners and managers. As a smaller MSP, the biggest advantage that you have against a bigger competitor is speed and flexibility. 20 years ago, big business beats small business, because we didn’t have a particularly equal playing field. You think 20 years ago, you couldn’t reach a marketplace very easily without having cash. You had to go and buy lots of adverts in newspapers, magazines, radio, TV, even direct mail was a hell of a lot more expensive than it is today. Same with phoning people up. Paul Green:Whereas fast forward to 2020, and actually it is a very level playing field now. The internet has made it easy for anybody to reach absolutely anybody with their marketing message. And that’s why it’s no longer about big beating small these days. It’s about fast beating slow. So you think how much business has sped up over the last 10, 15 years or so. It’s getting faster and faster and faster every year. Just the other day I was relistening to They Ask, You Answer by Marcus Sheridan, possibly one of the best books I’ve ever read and listened to about content marketing. And he was talking about conversational marketing. Conversational marketing is where someone will come onto your website and they’ll want to have a live chat with you because they’ve got a question immediately, and they want that answer immediately. They didn’t want to have to wait for that. And they’ll either do that over social media, or they’ll do it over live chat, or a number of different ways of talking to someone instantly. Paul Green:Marcus makes a very good point in that book. He says, “When was the last time you emailed your friends to set up a social occasion?” Well, due to lockdown, you probably can’t, but you get the idea. Well, I haven’t emailed my friends for a very long time, but we chat on Messenger and WhatsApp and text and all of that kind of stuff. And this is the example of conversational marketing in play. People want instant gratification. They want instant answers these days. And this is a trend that’s only going to continue going forward. Fast beating slow. How can your smaller MSP be faster and more flexible than those big MSPs that you’re up against? Maybe you can make faster decisions. Maybe you can come up with offers and deals and be more flexible with the kinds of packages that you want to sell. Maybe, because you’re not mired down by levels of management and bureaucracy and paperwork and control and all of that kind of stuff that comes with bigger businesses, maybe you can just simply move faster. Paul Green:So if someone’s on the phone today you can be talking to them right now. You can have a meeting with them, “Hey, what about this afternoon? What about first thing tomorrow morning?” You can get a proposal into them the same day. You can dedicate all of your resources to doing this because you want that client. You’re not just a salesperson who would like another client because it means a bit more bonus. You’re the business owner, it’s your MSP, and you can move faster and be more flexible than any of your competitors because you know that this one extra client is going to make such a difference to your monthly recurring revenue. Big MSPs, by their very nature, have to systemise the marketing and have to systemise the sales. And I know that I’ve been banging on in the last 50 weeks on this podcast about systemising your marketing and your sales, but there’s still an element of being able to break out of it and speed things up and be super fast when it is appropriate. Paul Green:When a really nice prospect comes along and you want to jump on it and just make sure that you absolutely maximise your response to something that’s something only a small MSP can do, not something that a big MSP can do. I think the other area where smaller MSPs can really win is actually service delivery. So there might be more resources at a bigger MSP, but that also means more structure, more going through the motions of talking to the different people before tickets get escalated, and things move from one team to another team. Which yes, that’s a more robust way of doing service delivery, but for the end user, for that client at the end of the phone who just wants it to work, sometimes just having a chat to someone on the phone who can say, “Yep, hang on. Give me 20 minutes. I’ll call you back. We’ll get that fixed.” Sometimes that’s just what people want. Paul Green:And depending on the kind of clients, the kind of prospects that you’re talking to, that can be a massive advantage for them. That’s exactly the kind of thing that they want to see more of. They want that speedier, more flexible, smaller approach. I guess what I’m trying to say from this is, just because you’re up against a mega MSP in your area, doesn’t mean that you’re at a disadvantage at all. You are at some disadvantage because they have massive economies of scale and huge resources compared to you, but also they’re at a disadvantage to you because they can no longer move at speed. They can no longer be as flexible as they used to be. And really they can no longer offer that bespoke feeling, customer support and service delivery. In fact, I think if you find yourself up against a whale of an MSP, you should almost celebrate because it gives you something to talk to your prospect about. Paul Green:You can help them with that comparison. “Here’s a bigger company that we’re up against. They are bigger than us, yeah, sure. They’ll have a lot more resource than we will, and ultimately will have a lot more structure as well. But all the downsides of that are our upsides. They can’t move at the speed that we can. They can’t be as flexible as we can. And they can’t innovate and look after you in the way that we can.” Now, you never bad mouth your competitors directly, but it’s certainly fair to make a comparison between a big company and a small company. And even the big prospects, they will sometimes go with a smaller company because they know they will get higher levels of service. They know that if it comes to it, they can get the owner of the business on the phone. Now and I don’t want that, but you get the idea. They perceive that they can get the owner of the business on the phone if there’s a real problem. And they’re much more likely to be able to do that with a smaller company than they can with a bigger company. Paul Green:If you’re up against a bigger MSP, celebrate. It’s something you can compare yourself against in the marketplace, and it can actually be a big advantage for displaying your superpowers. Voiceover:Here’s this week’s clever idea. Paul Green:Now, call me a saddo if you want to. Computer voice:Saddo. Paul Green:Thank you. But I love multi touchpoint marketing campaigns. Nothing is more exciting for me than seeing a clever campaign that someone’s put together where you’re sending the same message repeatedly to the same prospect, but you’re using different channels. And the beauty of multi touchpoint campaigns is they are very, very effective, because all the different elements really start to work together to get inside someone’s heart, to make sure that your message is appearing inside their brain. There was something that I learned when I used to work in radio about 1000 years ago, or that’s how it feels now, which is you can go on the radio as the radio presenter, and you can talk about something important to the station. It could be a competition, it could be a promotion, it could be pushing a specific advertiser. And you can talk about it today, and you can talk about it tomorrow and the day after that, and the day after that. And you’ve mentioned it four, five, six, seven times. And you, at that point as the radio presenter, are getting really sick of it. Paul Green:But here’s the thing. The listener has only heard it once, maybe even twice. Their ears may have heard it a number of times, but their brain hasn’t taken it in yet. Because we hear things all the time, and we see things all the time that we don’t perceive because we have a part of our brain called the reticular activating system, which acts as a sensory filter for all the information coming in. So we were always told in radio, as radio presenters, at the point at which you are sick to death of talking about something, the listeners are only just starting to comprehend it. They’re only just starting to perceive it. So carry on talking about it. And it’s exactly the same with multi touchpoint campaigns. You might be running a specific campaign. Let’s say ransomware. Let’s say you’re trying to educate your prospects about ransomware, and you’re trying to get that message out to them. And at the point of which you feel like you’ve said it 1000 times to 10,000 different people, actually it’s only just starting to go in. Paul Green:And this is what makes multi touchpoint campaigns so powerful. For example, let’s take that ransomware example. And actually, that’s a real campaign right now that, in my MSP Marketing Edge service, a lot of my clients are rolling out, because we provide them with a multi touchpoint campaign every single month. So that one is a very simple multi-touch point campaign. It starts with a postcard which talks about ransomware and how hackers can sit in a system for up to 60 to 100 days before they launched their ransomware attack. And then it has an email which is sent out, which arrives the same day that the postcard arrives. And the purpose of the email is to say, “Hey, did you get my postcard? This is the link to click.” Because of course on the postcard you have a call to action. You have a website address you want them to visit to do whatever it is you want them to do. In this specific campaign we want them to book a 15 minute, no obligation meeting like a Zoom meeting with the owner of the MSP. Paul Green:So the problem with putting that on a direct mail is someone’s got to go to their computer and press buttons. And that actually reduces the response. So when you send an email which arrives on the same day, and you can say, “Hey, did you get my postcard? This is link I was talking about,” it’s very easy for them to just use their finger and just tap on that link. So that actually increases the response rate. So they get a postcard and an email on the first day. And then later down the line they’ll get some follow-up phone calls. They get some more emails. There’s actually a second piece of direct mail that can go out with a free guide to teach them all about ransomware if you wanted to send that out. There’s even a mention of ransomware in our printed newsletter which comes out every month. And you can see there there’s lots and lots of different touch points. And that’s not a particularly ambitious campaign. There are no Facebook adverts in there. There’s no LinkedIn messaging in there. There’s a whole bunch of other stuff that you could do. Paul Green:But the secret behind all of these things is that it’s exactly the same message, just delivered via different methods. When I say it’s the same message we’re not using exactly the same words. Of course we change the words on each message, but it’s the same message overall. We’re talking about ransomware and how deadly it can be, and how hackers can sit in a system long before an attack is ever launched. And by the way, these are the symptoms to look out for. And we’re talking about that in the postcard, in the newsletter, in the educational guide, in the emails. And it’s even in the script for the person following them up by phone as well. Always the same message delivered to them three or four different ways. Paul Green:Now the vast, vast majority of people who are targeted with a campaign like this do not read everything. They don’t take in…

Full show notes at the publisher

Episode 49: Why MSPs should never offer discounts Oct 20, 2020

Show notes

In this week’s episode How would you want a client to describe your business in just 3 words? Hopefully ‘cheap’ wouldn’t be one of those words! This week on the show Paul explains how discounting your services can affect your business in good, but (mostly) bad ways Plus, what’s on your wall? MSP legend and author Karl Palachuk joins Paul to list some of the unbreakable rules he used to put up around the office, designed to focus him and his staff on growth Also how to win some incredible prizes to celebrate the podcast’s first birthday. And some great tips on how to change your daily habits to make you more productive Show notes Out every Tuesday on your favourite podcast platform Presented by Paul Green, an MSP marketing expert In talking about the compound effect of creating better daily habits, Paul mentioned the brilliant book Atomic Habits by James Clear For more details about the competition to celebrate the first birthday of this podcast, just visit paulgreensmspmarketing.com/win Paul’s special guest was the legendary author and managed services expert Karl Palachuk, talking about his ultimate guide for starting and running an MSP. Check out his book The Absolutely Unbreakable Rules of Service Delivery and the Small Biz Thoughts community Many thanks to Sam James from Fresh IT for recommending the book The Pumpkin Plan by Mike Michalowicz Please recommend a book you think will inspire other MSPs here paulgreensmspmarketing.com/podcastbooks Paul’s special guest on October 27th will be author and marketing coach Cody Butler, talking about how exactly to make a great marketing plan. Check out his book The 90 Day Marketing Plan 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 episode 49 of the show. Here’s what we’ve got coming up for you this week. Karl Palachuk:A lot of people at the beginning of the recession started saying, “Well, times are hard and Karl doesn’t understand, and you can’t get prepaid for everything.” Paul Green:We’ve also got plenty of book suggestions for you this week. A great suggestion from an MSP, that’s coming up towards the end of the show. And I’ve got a book suggestion for you in about five minutes time that could literally change your life by changing the way that you act every single day. I’m also going to be reminding you about our fantastic competition that we’re running throughout October with a chance for you to win a one-to-one marketing consult with me, plus loads of other valuable prizes. Voiceover:Paul Green’s MSP marketing podcast. Paul Green:Should you offer discounts to clients? My gut reaction on this one is no. And I think the majority of the time, you shouldn’t be doing that for a number of reasons I’ll tell you about in a second, but there are moments where actually offering a financial incentive, such as a discount can be a very valuable thing to do either to retain a client that’s currently having some issues or just to get a new client on board, but it does come with some dangers. Let’s go through all of these things. On the whole, when an MSP that I’m working with says, “Should we offer a discount?” My reaction is no. No, I don’t believe you should. For a number of different reasons. Firstly, I think it can completely change the relationship that you have with your client. Depending when you offer the discount, it can do some fairly substantial damage to the way that they think about you. Paul Green:For example, if you say to a client, “Hey, look to work with us. It’s a thousand pounds a month, but I’ll give you a discount for life down to 800 pounds a month.” Now that can be a very damaging thing to do at the start of the relationship you have with the client. It’s a wholly different thing to offer a discount to someone before they’ve ever become a client to you compared to offering a discount to an ongoing client. Someone you’ve already got a relationship with in return for them taking on an extra service. When someone’s thinking of using you for the first time, if one of their primary motivations for choosing you is because you’ve got that financial deal, that discount they’re almost picking you for the wrong reasons. We’ve said before on this podcast, the very best clients use price as one of the deciding factors, but not the deciding factor. Paul Green:If price is the deciding factor, they’re picking you for the wrong reasons and the chances are they won’t be a great client going forward. People that you take on board, whether they’re a good fit or not, but you need the cashflow it rarely works at well in the long-term. It just becomes a burden that you wish you’d never taken on when the relationship starts to fail. Now, I think when you first start working with the clients, you shouldn’t discount cash. You should absolutely stick to your guns. This is how much we cost. This is why it costs that much. If you want to do business with us, if you want to partner with us, Mr. or Mrs. Client, then this is the price that you should pay. Paul Green:I think there are only really a couple of times where you would offer a discount. So one of them is if your client is struggling. Now we saw this a lot during March, April and May, where people were really impacted by the lockdown. And I think we’re going to see it again, as we go from this point forward where your clients start to struggle, perhaps because their business has been reduced or because they’ve lost a whole number of their staff, not through really any choice of theirs, other than the need to reduce the numbers. That’s where you absolutely would step in and you would help them and you would potentially offer them a discount. And what you’re playing here is almost a bit of a game. You’re playing a game of giving them a discount now or making it financially easier for them now. And essentially you taking the financial impact of that in the hope that if your client survives and gets through this, you’re going to double down their retention because they will remember who looked after them when times were tough. Paul Green:So that’s a reason you do that. I think you can also offer a discount for a client when they buy extra stuff from you. An existing client where you’ve got an existing value relationship, they value you, they see you as a partner and you are offering them extra services. That’s the point at which you would absolutely say to them, “Look, we retail this out to everyone else for 200. We’ll give it to you for 175 as a thank you for our existing relationship. And as a thank you to you for being a client.” Or, you might say to them, “Look, we’ve got service one, service two, service three. These are the prices. If you were to take all three of these in a bundle, then obviously we can offer a discount because we get some economies of scale with that.” I think if you’re going to offer a discount to them, a financial discount, you’ve always got to give them a reason why. Why are you able to offer them this financial incentive? Paul Green:Another reason that you might offer a discount is just to get the business in. As I said, just a few minutes ago, we’ve all done it, where we’ve taken on a client purely for cashflow reasons. And even though we all regret it, do you know what? Every single one of us would do it again and again, and again, if it means that the business survives. And actually if you’re in a place right now where cash is tight and you really could just do with some extra pounds or dollars or whatever your currency is coming through your bank account, then using a discount just to get those clients on board is the right thing to do. You just need to remember with that, the right mindset for those kinds of clients. You’ve got to remember that they’re not going to be long-term ongoing clients. In fact, if anything, they’re going to be pain clients, they’re going to be the kind of clients that really do make you and your staff miserable down the line. Paul Green:They’re the bottom 20% clients possibly even the bottom 20% of the bottom 20% clients. So long as you remember that, and you know that they’re the first ones who have to go when times get better and you no longer need their hassle that goes with their cash then I think that’s okay. Because we’re all going to do that really to keep our businesses going and make sure the cash comes in. So as long as we do that knowingly and very aware of what we’re doing and why we’re doing it, that’s not such a bad thing. Yet, still, as I said, right at the beginning of this piece, I still don’t think you should offer discounts routinely. And certainly not to new clients, it has a major impact on relationship has a major impact on the way that they think about your business and just using a discount to when a client is not necessarily the right thing to do. Paul Green:So, what would you do? Because people do respond to offers. Everyone loves a deal and an offer and feeling like they’re getting something extra. I think the answer here is to offer value add rather than a discount. So instead of giving someone a cash discount, you would give them extra value. This happened to me the last time I bought my car, I didn’t get a cash discount from the salesman, even though we were playing that game of come on, I’ll ask for a discount and you decline it. But what he did give me was extra stuff. I got the protection on the seats that stops the liquid soaking in and I got floor mats. And I can’t remember what else I got, but I got some value add stuff. The cash impact to him was probably minimal, but the perceived value to me was a lot higher certainly than the cash outlay that the car dealership had to lay out. Paul Green:And I think that’s the answer. You’ve got to look at this and say, “What extra could I give to my clients? Be they new clients or existing clients. So they see that we’re adding value, that there’s extra stuff for them, but the actual cash cost to us is minimal.” And we’re certainly not risking skewed client expectations. We’re not risking damaging the relationship or them thinking that they can always get a deal. That’s the other downside of giving deals to people. They will always hold out for a deal and actually we don’t want them to do that. We want them to see that the price is the price is the price. So to summarise then I think you need to keep the possibility of cash discounting in your back pocket as a tool either when you’re desperate for the money or when you’re very keen to get this particular client to buy extra stuff from you but it’s something they should only be used sparingly. It’s not something that your salespeople should routinely be able to use, value add is a much better way to gain new clients than discounting will ever be. Voiceover:Here’s this week’s clever idea. Paul Green:I’m trying out new business and marketing books all the time. I do love finding a new book. Earlier on this year, I think it was around about February, March when the lockdown first happened. I got hold of a book called Atomic Habits. Paul Green:One of my clients recommended to me and I got hold of the paperback and I loved it. It’s written by an author called James Clear, and actually I’ve joined his email list as well. He sends out a once a week email with loads of productivity ideas. And the core idea behind Atomic Habits is that if you want to achieve your goals, the big things that really inspire you in life, that you’re really working towards. It’s a lot more about what you do day to day than it is about writing that goal down and being clear what it is that you want to achieve. An Atomic Habit is a daily habit, a regular practice or routine that’s small, that’s easy to do, but it is also the source of incredible power because you benefit from something called the compound effect. Paul Green:Now we all know about the compound effect because when we save money, for example, you put a pound or a dollar away every single month. And after let’s say 36 months, you haven’t just got $36. You’ve got maybe 37, $38. Well, if you can find a bank that will give you interest anyway, it’s a bit hard these days, but you get the idea, you get a little bit of interest and then you earn interest on the interest and interest on that interest and so on and so on. And that’s called compound growth. And it’s exactly the same with your habits as well. Based off the back of that, when I do my daily weightlifting, just something just to keep my arms toned, nothing too serious, you understand? I used to do 80 repetitions a day, and now I do a hundred repetitions a day simply because the compound effects says those extra 20 repetitions every day, times five days, that’s another hundred repetitions a week. It’s the same reason why I stopped running three or four miles a day and started running five miles a day. Paul Green:That one extra mile has very little impact on me because I’m already out sweaty, dirty, wet if it’s raining. But that one extra mile makes quite a difference to my fitness over a period of time. That’s another 70 or 80 calories that I’m burning off every single day, that all adds up. And it’s no surprise to me that my weight loss has gone hand in hand with that kind of way of thinking. This is what Atomic Habits are. They’re tiny little changes that you can make to your routine that make a big difference when they add up over time. Now the book also addresses not just good habits, but bad habits as well and how bad habits repeat themselves again, and again and again, not because we don’t want to change, but because we’ve got the wrong system for change. Change comes from good habits over a period of time, doing something once doesn’t seem to make a big difference, but when you repeat it five or seven times a week and you repeat it 20 or 30 weeks of the year, that’s where you get the big change. Paul Green:And it’s exactly the same with the bad habits that when you’re doing those bad habits repeatedly, be that biting your nails, having a glass of wine at the end of the day or not exercising or whatever it is, those bad habits become part of your system. And in order to eliminate them from your system, you’ve got to eliminate the bad habits. As James Clear says in his book, “Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement.” So if you want better results, forget about setting goals and focus on your system instead. Focus on changing your habits, the tiny little things that you do day in, day out to make it easier for you to change your life in the longer term. What else I like about the book is how he has a simple set of rules that you can use to build better habits. And these rules really feed into the way that we actually work rather than the way that we think we should be working, because let’s be honest, we’ve all listened to these kind of productivity things or read productivity books and thought, “Yes, I must change the way I work.” Paul Green:And that lasts for like three days. And then after three days, you fall back into the old habits. So James Clear, the author of this book says, “Do you know what? If you make your habits obvious, if you make them attractive, if you make them easy and you make them satisfying your much more likely to actually stick to those habits. And conversely with bad habits, if you make them not obvious, make them unattractive, make them uneasy and not satisfying, then you’re less likely to carry on with those bad habits and you can replace them with good habits.” So whether you get these on Audible or you go and get the good old fashioned killer tree paper copy, and let’s be honest, we all take in more from books. When we’re reading physical print books, go and get this Atomic Habits by James Clear, read it, action it. It’s a beautiful book and it genuinely could make a major impa…

Full show notes at the publisher

Episode 48: Why MSPs shouldn’t listen to critics Oct 13, 2020

Show notes

In this week’s episode Everyone’s a critic… but only some of them are worth listening to. Boosting your marketing efforts to grow your MSP can increase the chances of someone criticising you. This week on the show Paul explains who you should listen to and who you can happily ignore Speaking of criticism, this week Paul’s joined by Lindsay Willott, the founder of Customer Thermometer, the brilliant one click satisfaction app. They discuss how you can improve your retention rate by embracing the small things that often go wrong within your MSP Plus on the show this week, 3 recommended marketing blogs to inspire some fresh ideas. And 2 recommended books from the Nigel Moore, the leader of the Tech Tribe Show notes Out every Tuesday on your favourite podcast platform Presented by Paul Green, an MSP marketing expert In talking about some great marketing blogs to check out, Paul mentioned the HubSpot blog, Neil Patel’s blog and marketingexamples.com For more details about the competition to celebrate the first birthday of this podcast, just visit paulgreensmspmarketing.com/win Paul’s special guest was Lindsay Willott from Customer Thermometer talking about how and why to track dissatisfaction Many thanks to Nigel Moore from The Tech Tribe for recommending the books Get A Grip and Traction by Gino Wickman Please recommend a book you think will inspire other MSPs here paulgreensmspmarketing.com/podcastbooks Paul’s special guest on October 20th will be the legendary author and managed services expert Karl Palachuk, talking about his unbreakable rules for growing and running an 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:I’m delighted to have you back for another podcast. Here’s what coming up in today’s show. Lindsay Willott:Actually, I don’t want to start recommending you to people, or are you going to call me and ask me for a bunch of my contacts? Paul Green:We’ve also got a great book suggestion from the legend, that is Nigel Moore, of the Tech Tribe. That’s coming up towards the end of the show. I’m going to tell you how you can win some pretty cool prizes, as we celebrate our first anniversary. And, I’ve got three great marketing blogs, that you really should follow. Voiceover:Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast. Paul Green:I do a lot of proactive marketing, and I mean a serious amount. There’s me spending about 50 percent of my time on proactive marketing. I have a full-time marketing manager, a guy called James, who is amazing. And between us, we share a network of virtual assistants, freelancers, people who do specific jobs for us. So as a business, we are as geared up for marketing our business, as much as we are geared up for delivering, what it is, that we actually sell. And this, by the way, is the secret to running a great business. You shouldn’t just be an MSP; you should be the marketer of an MSP as well. And, you almost need to dedicate, I guess, really up to 50 percent of your time, to doing that. Anyway, what I want to talk about today is criticism. Because, I’m out there so much pretty, proactive on LinkedIn, perhaps not as proactive as I should be; but we’re doing loads and loads of stuff on email. Paul Green:We have all sorts of segments, with different campaigns running; some of them broadcasts, some of them automated schedules. We do loads of stuff on our Facebook group, which has just passed more than a thousand MSPs. We’ve got this podcast of course. We do bits and bobs on YouTube. And inevitably, at some point you get criticised. In fact, this happened to me on LinkedIn, a few weeks ago. It was when we were doing the podcast about good, better, best. You remember the one, about three-tier selling. I think this was back in episode 44. And, I put it on LinkedIn as I normally do; and, someone I forget who, criticised it saying, “Oh, that’s very old hat, it’s not how it’s done these days.” “That’s what all the big vendors used to do back in the day.” Do you know what? I don’t care, in the nicest possible way. Paul Green:That’s why the person’s name, hasn’t stuck in my head. In the nicest possible way, I don’t care about critics, I really don’t. And, in fact, as you do more and more marketing, you have to toughen up to the critics. Some of the things that have been said directly to me over the years, have been just ridiculous, they really have. Paul Green:I sent out a piece of direct mail once, and someone sent it back to me, without a stamp on the envelope. So, I had to pay, to go and get it from the post office. And, they’d scribbled all over it; and written, recycle your own rubbish. It’s like, why would you do that? Why would you waste your life energy, taking someone’s direct mail, which whether you liked it or not is irrelevant, but writing on it, getting an envelope, writing the address and posting it. Why would you do that? What kind of small minded nature, would make you want to do something like that? It’s like the people who hit reply to your emails, and just give you a bit of grief or say, “How did you get my details? I do love it when that happens, because I can show someone the page they opted in, and tell them the exact date and time that they opted in, and sometimes their IP address as well; and that’s a fun one, that is. Paul Green:But, you have to ignore the critics. Because here’s the thing that happens, as you do more and more marketing, more and more people criticise you. It is that classic thing, if you put your head above the parapet and people take pot shots at you. But this is the nature of the world, small minded people cannot help, but attacking what they fear, or attacking what they have an opinion of. Paul Green:It’s the main reason I stay clear of Reddit, to be honest. Have you been on Reddit? It’s like the Wild West of the internet. Anything that you put on there, someone will come in, will attack it, will criticise it, and typically they’ll do it anonymously as well. And, I just don’t have time for that kind of stuff. What I see though, with some of the MSPs that I work with, is that, as they do more and more marketing, they start to attract more criticism as well. And, it really affects them. One person, one stranger emailing back, and saying that they’re not happy with something, or they didn’t like this email, or they disagree with them, or something like that. And some of my clients, they really can’t cope with that. And, I understand that, I understand the psychology of that; because I used to be like that as well. Paul Green:When I started my first business back in 2005, if I had any criticism at all, from clients, from my team, or even from just strangers, responding to marketing, I took it very, very personally; and I would obsess over it. I would go to sleep thinking about it at night. It’ll be the first thought in my mind the next morning, and that’s quite disruptive to a normal life. And, over the years, I just kind of hardened up a bit. And, I realised that actually, if the clients criticise you, then that’s something that you should listen to. Because 99 times out of a 100, your clients want you to succeed. They want you to be great, they want you to do a good job. And, I’ve never been scared of client feedback, because client feedback back is your clients telling you, how they think you can improve, what you do. Paul Green:They’re not always right, of course, but they are right, a majority of the time. And, I listened very, very carefully to what my clients say. And, if we can go and act on something like that, then we will go and act on it. But, I’ll tell you who I don’t listen to, strangers. People who just respond to marketing, that I’ve sent out. People I don’t know. And, I think you should have exactly the same attitude. Sure, if they come back with a little bit of criticism, and it’s a valid point, that’s one thing. But it’s the nasty trolls, the critics, the angry anonymous people on the internet; you shouldn’t listen to those people. Because they’re just not valid, their opinion is not valid. You’re trying to do something amazing with your business. Paul Green:You’re trying to grow your business, get more new clients, make more profits, so you can pay your staff more, so you can invest in better tools, and do an even better job for your clients. That’s why you’re marketing yourself. That’s why putting yourself out there and being proactive, it’s a really important part of growing your business. If you don’t do that, you can’t grow the business. Being good at what you do, isn’t enough. You’ve got to be great at marketing, what you do as well. And, that’s why I think you’ve got to ignore those critics, focus on what your clients say, focus on what people are doing with their wallets, more than what they’re doing with their angry, anonymous comments. Voiceover:Here’s this week’s clever idea. Paul Green:Let’s be honest, with the internet, it’s so easy to find the answer to almost any question that you have. The problem is knowing, which answer. We’ve all done this when we’ve Googled a problem, and there’s been about 640,000 potential answers to that problem. This is why your business still exists, and my business still exists, because even though the answers are out there, you need someone with experience to pick the correct answer, for the specific set of circumstances. Paul Green:Now, let’s take marketing advice for example, there’s tons of marketing advice out there, but it is not an equal playing field, because there’s a ton of absolute rubbish. And then, there’s a small number of marketing blogs, that are actually worth you reading. And, I’m going to give you three of them now. So, these are three marketing blogs, that marketing people like to read, but they’re not techie, marketing techie blogs, getting all technical with your marketing. Well, actually one of them is a little bit techie, but it’s still a very interesting read. Let me tell you what they are. The first blogs that I read and that I recommend, is the HubSpot Blog. Now, HubSpot is just amazing, at its own content marketing. HubSpot is a CRM, it’s an integrated suite of tools that you can use on your website to track prospects, and just see what’s happening across all sorts of things, across your business. Paul Green:It’s a very powerful tool set. I know a number of people that are using it now. It’s very expensive, it’s not cheap at all. And, you’ll find that your bill goes up, and up, and up. But my goodness, these guys know how to do marketing. They presumably use their own tools to do marketing; and they are really, really good at marketing. And, their blog is one of the best marketing blogs out there. So, if you just Google HubSpot Blog, you will be in fine company, there is plenty of really good advice there. What they’re particularly good at is, long form content, where they do very, very in-depth articles about specific subjects. And, it’s no surprise really, that they’re in a partnership with Marcus Sheridan, who wrote the book, They Ask You Answer. Because, he uses HubSpot to power his businesses. And, he recommends long form content, and HubSpot is full of long form content. Paul Green:So, I wouldn’t be surprised if they are very, very close, and feeding each other. That’s not a bad thing. In fact, that’s a very fruitful partnership. The other blog that I read on a regular basis, is written by Neil Patel. Now this is quite a search engine optimisation focused blog, but Neil Patel is just a genius. He’s a genius, again, for writing very long form content, very in-depth articles about very specific things to do with search engines, and coming up more on the website, and increasing your conversions. But the way he writes them, they’re so open. I’m not a search engine expert, by any measure, I’m not even really a tactical expert, I’m a good strategy guy. And, I have to work very hard to do the tactical stuff, that’s why I employ other people to do it for me. But I understand, pretty much everything I read on Neil Patel’s blog. It’s just wonderful, and he has a writing style, which makes it really easy for anyone; people like you and me, to understand exactly what it is, he’s writing about. Paul Green:The third book that I recommend you read, is a little bit different, but it’s one of those that could give you some amazing ideas, and it’s marketingexamples.com . So here, the author of this blog, I forget his name, but he trawls around the internet looking for examples of great marketing. And he will then, go into an analysis of why these are great marketing. And so often, if we’re looking for inspiration for something to do, or a new experiment to try; or just generally, just ideas, because a lot of great marketing comes out of taking two or three ideas, and putting them together, and creating a brand new idea. Paul Green:Well often, we’ll go onto marketingexamples.com , and we’ll find some great ideas, and it will trigger off ideas, something new, we would simply never have thought of. I mean, these are just three of the great blogs that I read. There are a number more, that I could talk about, and maybe I’ll feature them in a future podcast. But, if you were to read only these three blogs for your marketing education; Oh my goodness, you’re going to get such great ideas out of them. Voiceover:Paul’s blatant plug. Paul Green:You might’ve heard me launched this competition in last week’s podcast. We’re celebrating nearly a year of the podcast, with a giveaway throughout the whole of October. I’ve got three cool prizes for you to win. First prize is, a one-to-one marketing consult with me. We will jump on a Zoom call, we’ll go through all of your marketing. And, I will advise you on a load of things that you can do; both strategic and tactical stuff, to get more new leads, turn those leads into prospects, and ultimately those prospects into clients. Paul Green:Now, if you give your permission, we’ll record that and turn it into a future podcast special. If you really rather not do that, that’s fine with me. We’ll just do it as a one-to-one consult. That’s a conversation we can have, if you win the first prize. And, the second prize is a copy of my best selling video training course. It’s called the MSP Net Profit Masterclass. It sells on my websites for around 799 pounds, plus VAT, if you’re in the UK. Or $999, if you’re in the U.S., or anywhere else around the world. Paul Green:And, it’s a 21 week video course, very, very powerful; completely focused on improving the net profitability of your MSP. So, that’s the second prize. The third prize is a hundred pounds to spend on Amazon, or whatever is the equivalent in your local currency, and my recommended book list. So, you can go and buy some business and marketing books that I recommend, or you could just spend it on yourself, really doesn’t matter. Now to enter is very simple, you just have to go onto my website, paulgreensmspmarketing.com/win. And, what that will do is, that will redirect you to a post on LinkedIn; and, on that post, it tells you exactly how you have to win. It’s very, very simple. I’ve made it easy to do. And, all the terms and conditions, and all that kind of legal stuff, that’s on there as well. paulgreensmspmarketing.com/win. Voiceover:The big interview. Lindsay Willott:Hi, I’m Lindsay Willott. I’m the founder of Customer Thermometer. We provide one click feedback satisfaction and software, for a whole range of markets all over the world. But we specialise in service, help desk ticketing systems and also MSPs. Paul Green:So, loads of MSPs use Customer Thermometer. And, I’ve had lots of discussions with people about it, and how simple it is. And, I love those the little ticks, which one are you going to press at the end of a ticket, to give instant feedback? It’s one of those things, t…

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Episode 47: 2 cyber security books every MSP should read Oct 06, 2020

Show notes

In this week’s episode To sell more security services to your clients, you need to think like a hacker. The MSPs that get inside a hacker’s mind, can better educate their prospects and clients. They’re better protected; you sell more; everyone wins. This week Paul has some book recommendations to help you do this. Also on this week’s show, Paul welcomes a special guest with some great suggestions on how to sell even more products to your current clients Plus, are you feeling lucky? Well, are you? The answer hopefully is… no! Paul explains that to take advantage of growth opportunities, it’s better to believe in something better than luck Show notes Out every Tuesday on your favourite podcast platform Presented by Paul Green, an MSP marketing expert In talking about some brilliant books to recommend, Paul mentioned Ghost in the Wires by Kevin Mitnick and Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin’s Most Dangerous Hackers by Andy Greenberg For more details about the competition to celebrate the first birthday of this podcast, just visit paulgreensmspmarketing.com/win Paul’s special guest was JB Fowler from Domotz talking about other ways to sell more to existing clients Many thanks to MSP author, producer and entrepreneur Mark Copeman for recommending the book Key Person of Influence by Daniel Priestley Please recommend a book you think will inspire other MSPs here paulgreensmspmarketing.com/podcastbooks Paul’s special guest on October 13th will be Lindsay Willott from Customer Thermometer talking about how and why to track dissatisfaction 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:Here we go then for episode 47 of the podcast. Here’s what’s coming up on this week’s show. JB Fowler:Managed service providers can start to look at, are these other systems that are now connected to the network? They can monetise that. Paul Green:We’ve got a great book suggestion from Mark Copeman of Helpdesk Habits. That’s coming up at the end of the show. I’m going to tell you about a couple of books about hacking that I’ve read and loved, and you’re going to love them as well. And also on today’s show we’re launching a brand new competition for the whole of October. It’s a chance for you to win one of three top prizes, including a free marketing consult with me. Voiceover:Paul Green’s MSP marketing podcast. Paul Green:As lockdown’s eased a little bit here in the UK, it’s been lovely actually just chatting to other people again, and particularly when my daughter started school a few weeks ago, round about the middle of September, because I got to catch up, at an appropriate social distance, I’ve got to catch up with some of my business-owning mum and dad friends that I meet at the school. So my daughter is in the last year. She’s in year six of her primary school, and I’ve got to know a whole bunch of people there. So it’s lovely just standing in the playground and having a little chat two meters apart. Paul Green:And one of the parents I was talking to just the other day was actually talking about how their business has been affected during lockdown. They’ve really suffered a little bit. Can’t remember what business they’re in, it’s something dull and services-based, but they struggled. Really, really struggled. What it sounds like is actually they’ve really struggled to pivot, and I know it’s a cliche, but we all understand what I mean by that. They’ve struggled to adapt to the circumstances and they’re still doing the things that probably worked for them for the last 20 years, which just aren’t working for them any more. It’s a real… I don’t know. It makes you feel awkward when you’re having that conversation with a business owner, because we all know how that business is going to perform in the next 12 months, and the chances of their business being here in 12-24 months time is… I don’t know, it doesn’t seem very likely. Anyway, I’m going to have a chat with that person and see if I can help them in some way. Paul Green:But the point I was going to make was, they said to me, as you do when you’re trading business stories, “How’s your business been during the lockdown?” And I said, “Well, actually, we’ve had a pretty good lockdown.” So we took a bit of a revenue hit at the beginning because a certain percentage of our revenue was based on events, which we suddenly couldn’t do. But we’ve pivoted, we’ve adapted, we’ve launched some online training. We’ve doing Zoom, MSP Masterminds now. And in fact, our service, the MSP Marketing Edge, has more clients than it’s ever had before. Paul Green:And this business-owner friend of mine, he said, “God, you’re lucky, aren’t you?” And that made my blood boil. That really made my blood boil, because I don’t really believe in luck at all. I believe that we make our own luck and I had to calm myself and retort to him and say, “Luck has nothing to do with it. You make your own luck. In fact, luck is when preparation meets opportunity.” Paul Green:And really that’s all that happened to my business. We had a little bit of bad luck, as we all did when COVID first came in and lockdown first came in, but we were prepared. We were ready with a whole series of things that we could do that we were planning to do anyway. And all that lockdown did was created massive opportunity, a shift in the market, and an opportunity for us to go ahead and roll those things out and change what we were doing. And it’s worked very well, because we’ve worked very hard at making sure that it works very, very well. And I hope that your business has equally pivoted and changed and has adapted to the new market circumstances that we are surrounded by. Paul Green:So let me repeat that phrase again. I do not believe in luck. I believe that luck is where preparation meets opportunity. We create our own luck. And if you look at the businesses that aren’t doing well right now, regardless of what’s happened to them with all of this lockdown stuff and COVID and all of that, those that are doing well are well-prepared. They implement fast. They get things done fast. They change. They pivot. They do different things fast. Paul Green:I think business in 2020 is not about big beating small any more, because if you look back at business in the seventies, eighties, nineties, that’s what it was all about. It was about big businesses beating small businesses. In 2020, and going forward from this point, it’s about fast businesses beating small businesses. If you can be faster than your competitors in the way that you change, in the way that you implement, in the way that you market, in the way that you just run the business. If your whole attitude is one of speed and getting on with it and getting things done, and rahhh, then you have a much greater chance of winning, because you can change quicker than they can. Paul Green:Business doesn’t operate at the speed that it did all those decades before. Blimey, I would say that business doesn’t operate at the speed today that it was operating at this time last year. Things seem to be moving faster and faster and faster. And that’s not always a pleasant thing. The always-on culture that we all fall prey to is not great for our work-life balance. It’s not great for getting away and enjoying our lives and making sure that we actually live some life in the work-life balance. But it does create an opportunity for us, for me, for you and for everyone who runs their own business, and that is to be faster than your competitors. Paul Green:And what you need to do is set your business up so that you are prepared for change, because you can guarantee there will be more change. We’ve got probably the greatest world recession we’ve ever known, in our living memory anyway. That’s on the way. That’s going to come at some point. It’s not going to be devastating. We’re not going to be wandering around the streets with wheelbarrows of cash just to buy a loaf of bread. Well, we hope we’re not. But it is going to have an effect. Paul Green:You’re going to lose clients. I’m going to lose clients. Everyone’s going to lose clients. There’s going to be a lot of unemployment. There’s going to be a lot of difficult times for lots of people. And I feel very sorry for those people. But there’s also going to be a huge number of winners, and I want you to be one of those winners. I want your business to be fast enough, to be prepared enough, so that when opportunity comes knocking, you’re ready to jump on it and go for it. And that’s why I’m so excited that you’re listening to a podcast like this, because this is exactly the stuff that we focus on is how do you win? How do you beat your competitors? How do you take advantage of all the good things and the bad things that are happening out there? In every bad situation, there is opportunity. Paul Green:And maybe a lot of that is about mindset. As I’m saying this, I’m thinking no more. Maybe this is my attitude more than it is about anything else. So what do you do if you don’t have that attitude right now? Well, attitude is a choice. That’s what I believe. I believe we can’t choose what happens to us, but we can absolutely choose how we react to it. This is something I’m telling my ten-year-old all the time when she’s inevitably let down by the day’s disappointments. You can’t control what happens to you, but you can control how you react to it. Paul Green:And maybe that should become a mantra for your business over the next couple of years. We’re going to roll with the punches. We’re going to take the bad things when they come, but do you know what? We’re going to hit back faster. We’re going to hit back harder. We’re going to make something of this, and this business is going to be exciting and bigger and more aggressive when we come out of whatever it is that we’re going into, because we’re going to move faster and implement more than anyone else. It’s an exciting journey, and I am genuinely delighted that I, through this podcast, and maybe even if we’re doing some work together, can be a part of your journey. Voiceover:Here’s this week’s clever idea. Paul Green:I’ve got a couple of book suggestions for you this week. And before I tell you what they are, it’s really important you remember that I am not a tech. I am only slightly above the technological ability of your average client. I love technology. I love gadgets and just how the internet has completely changed the way that we do business forever. But ultimately I’m not a technology person. I’m not the kind of person that looks at setting up a new Windows 10 machine, and I’m not rubbing my thighs with pleasure when I’ve got that kind of task to do. That’s actually a drag for me. It’s a bit of a pain. And yet the books I’m about to recommend to you are techie books. They’ve have been recommended to me by a couple of clients, one of them a certified ethical hacker, and they are brilliant books. Now you may have read or listened to them already, but the first of them is called Ghost in the Wires by Kevin Mitnick. Paul Green:Go back to the late 1990s, and Kevin Mitnick was the FBI’s most wanted hacker, and this is his story. It’s essentially his autobiography. And it is a fascinating story. So yeah, sure, it’s about hacking a bit. It’s actually more about social engineering than it is about hardcore hacking, but Kevin Mitnick was a great hacker as well. And in fact, if you’ve seen any of his videos on YouTube, he was, or maybe still is, the face of KnowBe4 the cybersecurity training company. You’ll know that he really knows his stuff. And this is a fascinating insight into what actually like to be a hacker, or maybe what it was like to be a hacker. I imagine these days, hackers are mostly organised gangs working for criminal enterprises. But back in the day, it was just Kevin. He had a bit of a job. He was moving around, trying to stay one step ahead of the FBI. And it is a brilliant book. I actually listened to that book on Audible and I found it an incredibly enjoyable way to pass long journeys. Paul Green:Now, the other book I’ve got to recommend for you, I’ve only just started. Again, I’ve done this on Audible, but it’s called Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin’s Most Dangerous Hackers. And this is like a true-life thriller. It’s the kind of book that you start to read and you think, “Wow, this will make a great novel,” but it’s not a novel. It’s about real life. Now, from what I’ve read of the reviews, it’s quite a biased book. It’s quite an anti-Russia book. But it does give you quite an insight into cyber crime and just how much stuff is happening out there. So people like you should absolutely be reading books like these, because that all goes into your mind and it allows you to help educate clients and end users just how important cyber-security really is. So I’m listening to that one on Audible while I’m out running. Again, I’m enjoying it so far, and it’s a highly-recommended read from me. Voiceover:Paul’s blatant plug. Paul Green:Not so much of a blatant plug this week as it is a chance for you to win some very cool stuff. You see, we are coming up to the one-year anniversary of this podcast. We launched on the 5th of November last year, 2019. No idea that it was going to be such a crazy year this year. And so to celebrate throughout the whole of October, we are running a competition with three cool prizes. The third prize is we’ll give you a hundred pounds, or the equivalent in your local currency, to spend on Amazon. And I’ll give you my book list as well, so some recommended business and marketing books that you could buy, or you could just go off and buy stuff for your family. It doesn’t really matter what you do with that. But a hundred pounds to spend on Amazon is the third prize. Paul Green:The second prize is I’m going to give you a copy of my best-selling video training course. It’s called the MSP Net Profit Masterclass. Now you can see details of this on my website. If you go to paulgreensmspmarketing.com/masterclass, you’ll see it’s a whole series of videos sent to you across 21 weeks. And over that time, we look at every single element of your business that you need to improve, frankly, to get more. To get more new clients, to sell more to those clients, to maximize your marketing and to really, really push your sales. Now, this is the best-selling video course that I’ve ever done. And we sell this on the website for £799, which is about a thousand dollars. The second prize for this competition is that video series. We’ll add you in to that, and you’ll get all of those videos and all the support that goes with it from me. Paul Green:Now, the first prize is priceless, because it’s a marketing consultation with me. You and I will jump on a Zoom and we will have a one-on-one marketing consultation based on your business, and I will give you a bespoke marketing strategy to help you grow your MSP. Paul Green:So we’ve got three really awesome prizes there, and to enter it’s very, very simple. All you have to do is tag yourself on a specific post on my LinkedIn. I’ll be honest with you, from a marketing point of view, I’m trying to kill two birds with one stone here. I’m trying to promote the podcast, and also if I can get a couple of hundred people tagging themselves on a specific post on LinkedIn, that’s going to get my LinkedIn content in front of more people. I do love a double win on marketing, don’t you? Paul Green:So if you want to find that LinkedIn post we’ve set up an easy redirect to it. All you got to do to enter the contest is go to paulgreensmspmarketing.com/win. Paulgreensmspmarketing.com/win. That’ll take you to LinkedIn. There’ll be that specific LinkedIn post telling you that you’ve just got a comment on the post and you’re in tha…

Full show notes at the publisher

Episode 46: So which is the best PSA? Sep 29, 2020

Show notes

In this week’s episode It’s the One Trillion Dollar question… which is the best PSA? The right PSA, set-up in the right way, can make you more efficient and increase your profits… but how do you choose a PSA in the first place? On this week’s show Paul is joined by a PSA expert to help guide you Paul’s also going to be looking at the two most important elements of your website; traffic and conversion. You can’t rely on just one or the other. You need both. So Paul details how you can make them work hand in hand. Plus in this week’s show there’s a brilliant book suggestion about improving sales techniques. And Paul has got some great suggestions for dealing with sales objections Show notes Out every Tuesday on your favourite podcast platform Presented by Paul Green, an MSP marketing expert In talking about ways to increase website conversions, Paul mentioned the services calendly.com hotjar.com Google Optimize Check out the free marketing resources at paulgreensmspmarketing.com/resources Paul’s special guest was Chris Timm ‘the PSA guy’ from Sondela Consulting and author of PSA Profitability. Whilst talking about available PSAs, he listed ConnectWise, Autotask, Tigerpaw, Syncro, Atera, Bluetrait & Halopsa Many thanks to Jennifer Bleam from MSP Sales Revolution for recommending the book Gap Selling by Keenan Please recommend a book you think will inspire other MSPs here paulgreensmspmarketing.com/podcastbooks Paul’s special guest on October 6th will be JB Fowler from Domotz talking about how to sell even more to your current 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:Do you know what, this year is going so fast. How is it already the end of September? Here’s what we’ve got coming up in today’s show. Chris Timm:One of the things I find about our industry is we’re very much of a me too industry. We always want to use what everybody else uses. What it is that you want a PSA tool to do, and why you want to use that PSA tool. Paul Green:We’re also going to be talking about how you can overcome sales objections, and sticking with the same theme, the wonderful Jennifer Bleam has got a great book suggestion for you that’s going to help you close more sales and win more business. Voiceover:Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast. Paul Green:If there’s one thing an MSP can say to me that really makes my heart sing and makes me think, “Oh really? Have we got to have this conversation again,” is when someone says, “I just don’t get any leads off my website.” And I know it’s a major issue for most MSPs. It’s also a conversation that I seem to have two or three times a day. Now, normally the main reason for the fact that you’re not getting any leads off your website is because you’re just simply not driving enough traffic. 20 years ago, websites were sufficiently… Not quite rare, but sufficiently unique enough that having a new website and just having a website got you traffic. But that was 20 years ago. It’s now 2020, and I don’t know how many new websites are published every day, but it wouldn’t surprise me if up to a million new websites turned up or a million website refreshes were done every single day. Paul Green:Having a website doesn’t mean anything anymore. Just having it online means nothing. You’ve got to drive traffic to it. And that means either spending money or investing time. You’ve either got to spend money and buy some traffic, or you’ve got to spend some time and go out and build lots of different traffic streams. It’s not easy. It’s not cheap. It’s not something that you can just do in your spare time. In fact, I think the MSPs that do get more leads out of their websites are the ones that are investing that time and energy and money and effort into driving traffic streams. My website gets a fair amount of traffic. I couldn’t tell you off the top of my head. I suppose I could look in analytics and tell you, but we are constantly driving traffic. We’re doing paid stuff and we’re doing organic stuff. So the paid stuff includes SEO. We had an SEO company for a while. I haven’t got one at the moment, but we’re close to hiring another SEO company. SEO of course, being search engine optimization, making sure that you appear high in relevant Google results. Paul Green:We do Facebook ads quite a lot at the time. We do some targeted Google ads. Now and again we try LinkedIn ads on LinkedIn. A little bit hit and miss, but we spend several hundred, if not a thousand pounds a week on driving traffic to the various websites. And we do that because I want to make sure I’ve got high levels of traffic. I also include there some remarketing. Remarketing is where you’re putting adverts in front of people who’ve already visited your website. It’s that phenomenon that you’ve probably seen where you visit something, you look at something online, and then the adverts for that thing seem to follow you around the web. That’s remarketing, also known as retargeting. And a proportion of our advertising budget, of our traffic budget goes onto remarketing because it’s so much more profitable to pay to get someone back onto your website, someone who already knows about you at some level, than it is to drive cold traffic to your website. Paul Green:So we do paid stuff like that, and we do a load of organic stuff as well. We get a lot of traffic to our website from our own email list. When we send out an email, there’s always a link to click through to the website. That’s probably our highest proportion of traffic. Get a lot of traffic from our own Facebook group, because we’ve got around about a thousand noncompeting MSPs in that right now. LinkedIn, I’ve got about 4,400 connections, something like that, so that generates a fair amount of traffic. And then I’ll go and sit in forums. So places like the TechTribe with permission, and other forums where I can add value to conversations about MSP marketing that people are having. And by default that drives some traffic back to my website. Paul Green:So you can see, I probably personally invest, it’s probably around about three to five hours a week in driving traffic. As a business, we spend around about a thousand pounds a week and I have a full-time marketing guy called James and his job is… Well, one of his jobs is to drive traffic, so he’s probably spending 10 hours a week on traffic. So we take traffic very, very seriously, and so should you, because you only need one or two new clients a month, and if you could add one or two new clients a month systematically, wouldn’t that just change everything within your business? Well, partly that starts with getting more traffic to your website. And seeing as your website is the single most important digital marketing asset that you have, spending time and energy and effort and money to get more traffic to that site is a very smart thing to do. Paul Green:However, there is a second part of this, and the second part is improving conversion. Because if you’re getting lots of traffic and you’re still not getting people booking 10, 15 minute meetings with you, then you’ve not got the right conversion. Now it’s a lot harder for an MSP to get conversions right than it is someone selling, let’s say, e-commerce products. Someone like Amazon, for example, they can be very, very focused on looking at their pages and saying, “How do we convert more? For every hundred or thousand or a hundred thousand people who visit this page, how do we increase the percentage of those people who actually buy this product?” In fact, one of the reasons that the Amazon pages look so ugly is because they’ve done a series of split tests over the years to determine what creates a better conversion, what creates better sales. Paul Green:Companies like Amazon, very successful online companies, are focused on traffic and conversion. And actually you should be doing exactly the same thing. So it is easier for e-commerce because they know when they get an instant conversion. But actually you know when you get a win as well. One the best practice calls to action right now on any B2B website, and especially yours, is for someone to book a 15 minute no obligation video call with you, and to use a live calendar, something like Calendly or Microsoft Bookings, put that into your website. It’s literally there on the page and they can go and book themselves a 10, 15 minute call with you there and then. And the reason that that’s best practice right now is because that’s the most convenient thing for them. If they’re on your website at 2:00 AM, then they can book an appointment with you. They can’t book an appointment for 2:00 AM, but at 2:00 AM, they can book an appointment that’s convenient for both you and for them. Paul Green:Incidentally, we’re getting six to eight appointments a week being booked online using exactly the same system. We use Calendly, and in a normal week… Well, if we don’t get six appointments, then something somewhere has changed. And remember, we’re driving lots of traffic and we’re spending money and effort and time driving that traffic, but we’re also getting the conversions. People are signing up for our services, such as the MSP Marketing Edge, but they’re also booking appointments with my business partner Ben. And Ben and they have a chat and sometimes they go into buy and sometimes they don’t. But the point is, we’re engaging with them, we’re interacting with them. It’s exactly the same system I would use if I was running an MSP. Paul Green:In fact, if I was running an MSP, I would take almost exactly the same website I’ve got now, I would obviously change the content because the actual services are being sold differently and being sold to different people. But I would use exactly the same system, and I would put the same amount of effort into driving traffic to that website. I’d still have someone, if the cashflow allowed it, spending up to 10 hours a week driving traffic themselves. I’d get someone who was an expert going on to forums and things and adding value, not just selling. You can’t just sell in those areas. You’ve got to add value, and people will just automatically end up looking at your website. And I would definitely spend that money on paid advertising. I would do that, especially if I had an MSP, because the long-term payback is huge. I mean, you think your average new client, you get someone today, they’re spending 500, 1000 a month on you and they will stay for 5 to 10 years. So the overall average lifetime value of a customer for you is huge. Paul Green:Could you afford to spend two, three, 4,000 pounds or dollars to acquire a new client? Yes, you can. The cash may take a little bit of time to be replaced, but you can keep doing that. In fact, the best marketing is systematic and it happens consistently. And if, for example, you know that by spending, let’s say, a thousand a week on buying traffic, that that gets you one or two appointments a week booked through your Calendly, and those one or two appointments, even if your conversion rate was down to one in three or one in four, you know that two appointments a week, which works out at, let’s say, eight appointments across the month, that will give you one or two new clients a month. And that’s exactly what we mean by consistent and organised systematic marketing. Paul Green:So you’ve got to look not just at your traffic, but you’ve got to look at your conversions as well. And there are a couple of tools that you can use for this. Some of these I’ve mentioned before in the podcast, hotjar.com is an amazing tool that will heat map, it’ll show you exactly where people are looking and clicking on your webpage, and it’ll also video users as well. You can’t actually see the person, but you can see exactly what they were doing on your website. Hotjar is free up to a certain level. Another one I would recommend is Google Optimize. Google Optimize is free. It creates copies of your pages so you can do split tests, marketing tests on what happens if you change different elements in the page. That’s exactly what Amazon and all the other big boys do. In fact, they do something called multivariate testing, where they’re testing lots of different elements at once. You can just stick with a simple split test, because of course you won’t have huge amounts of traffic going through your website. Certainly not compared to the likes of Amazon. Paul Green:But if you agree with me that your website is your most important and always will be your most important digital marketing asset, then don’t you owe it to your staff, your family, your bank manager, your clients, even, and certainly future potential clients who haven’t yet discovered you, don’t you owe it to them to take your website more seriously, and to make sure that you’re not only driving a lots of traffic to that website, but also that you’ve optimised that website so that it converts as well as it possibly can? Voiceover:Here’s this week’s clever idea. Paul Green:Most of the MSPs that I meet are not traditionally sales people. They’re typically technicians. Maybe you’re exactly the same, but technicians who by the very nature of needing clients and work and money have had to learn how to do sales. In fact, I can talk to an MSP owner of 20 years experience who’s been out there selling for 20 years and may have put together a fairly impressive business with a good number of staff and a high level of turnover, and even then they would say, “Well I’m okay at sales, but I don’t enjoy it and I’m not very good at it.” Which is insane because often they’ll have a 50% or 75% close rate, or often even better than that. As the business owner, we tend to be better salespeople because we’ve got a passion. We absolutely love what it is that we do, we know that we can help the prospects, and we’re not coming at it from a sake of “got to get the sale to get the commission.” That’s not how business owners work, is it? Paul Green:We work very much in a way of, “I can help this person. And you know what, we’re good at what we do. They deserve to be with us, because if they’re not with us, they’re going to go with some other MSP and the solution just won’t be as good as our solution.” Now, the reason that I mention this is if you’re not a confident salesperson, despite the fact that you’re actually an epic salesperson and may have been an epic salesperson for some time, then you may struggle with some parts of the sales process, such as for example, overcoming objections. And if you look at some of the objections that are thrown out, there’s loads and loads of free advice online of how to overcome objections, but I think you’ve got to put together the thing that sits right within you. It’s got to feel emotionally right for you to have the right answer, to not try to sound too slick, but to know that when someone objects to something, that actually you’ve got a good answer. Paul Green:And the first thing I’d say about this is that objections are not really objections. They are sales questions that haven’t yet been answered. So when someone says to you, for example, “Hey look, this looks great, but it’s just too expensive.” That’s actually better than them just saying no. Because when they’re just saying no, they’re not giving you anything to work with. They’re not feeding back. I don’t even believe a no means no, but that’s for another day. But when someone says, “Hey, this is too expensive,” what they’re saying is, “We really want this, but we just haven’t got the resources to pay for it at that level.” And of course the way to overcome this objection is to show them either the return on investment of whatever it is that you’ve proposed to them, or of course to look at taking parts of the solution out. Paul Green:Now, many MSPs will only sell a mini…

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Episode 45: The big client switch is happening NOW Sep 22, 2020

Show notes

In this week’s episode Not many MSPs fully realise the scale of the opportunity for gaining new clients right now, but you will after listening to this podcast! Paul explains why, even though Covid has been impacting us for 6 months, NOW is the time to steal clients from your competitors Also on this week’s show: What kind of marketing is working for other MSPs? Paul’s joined by a special guest from one of the biggest MSP marketing agencies in the United States, for a fascinating discussion about which tactics are working the best right now Plus find out how to increase and improve your own personal content marketing. And there’s a brilliant book recommendation all about building the right kind of team to work with Show notes Out every Tuesday on your favourite podcast platform Presented by Paul Green, an MSP marketing expert In talking about content marketing and scheduling social media content, Paul mentioned Hootsuite, Buffer and AppSumo Find out more about Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Edge Paul’s special guest was Andra Hedden from Marketopia talking about what kind of marketing is working right now for MSPs Many thanks to Matt Solomon from ID Agent for recommending the book The Success Cadence by David Mattson Please recommend a book you think will inspire other MSPs here paulgreensmspmarketing.com/podcastbooks Paul’s special guest on September 29th will be Chris Timm ‘the PSA guy’ from Sondela Consulting, talking about the best PSAs available 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 another fresh episode of the show. Here’s what we’ve got coming up for you today. Andra Hedden:And that is what’s really helping MSPs stay present in the market, even though we’re living in more of a virtual world right now. Paul Green:We’re still going to be talking about three ways that your MSP can really improve it’s content marketing. And we’ve got a great book suggestion from Matt Solomon of ID Agent. Voiceover:Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast. Paul Green:For months and months and months, I’ve been saying that this is coming, and I believe we’re finally at the point where it’s starting to arrive. What is it? It’s the great big client grab. It’s the point at which a whole bunch of very unhappy clients, currently served by your competitors, are soon to start hunting for a brand new MSP. And you have the opportunity to put your business in their way to try and pick up those clients. Now, all of this relates back to what happened in March and in April this year, and the lockdown, which pretty much took us all by surprise, where suddenly we had to work from home with virtually no notice. It created a lot of stress. It created a lot of havoc and pain for the ordinary business owners and managers that you look after. Paul Green:Now, here’s the thing. Your MSP probably did a great job. I know you probably work some insane hours, you and your team, and you made sure that everyone had exactly what they needed, that your users and their bosses and the whole infrastructure was set up correctly, that they could work from home and be safe and keep their data safe and be productive, and you literally pushed yourselves to the very limits to make sure that they could keep doing their jobs. Now, many MSPs did this, and, of course, the longterm benefit from this is you get to keep those clients even longer. Your relationships strengthened with those people, and they absolutely adore you even more because of it. Paul Green:But here’s the thing, not all MSPs acted this way. Some MSPs got it wrong back in March and back in April, they didn’t look after their clients well. They didn’t service them correctly, let alone over-servicing them. They left them with gaps in their workflow. They left them with data security problems. They let them having to use work around. They didn’t return their calls. They didn’t get tickets closed quickly. And a level of dissatisfaction just turned up in the emotional feelings of those clients. In fact, over a period of a number of weeks as they were going through the distress of suddenly having to run their entire businesses from home, they started to develop this feeling that the IT support company that they had was just not right for them. And a whole load of those business owners and managers back then, they made a decision. The decision was, “It’s time to switch. It’s time for us to a brand new IT support company.” Now here’s the thing, they may have made that decision back in March or in April, or maybe even in May, but the majority of them haven’t taken action on it yet. Paul Green:And I made prediction back then. In fact, I based an entire marketing program around it, which we had more than 45 MSPs go through. My prediction was that it would be in the autumn, around about now, when people started to take action on that unhappiness. Why wait so long? Well, there are a number of different reasons. First of all, there was the fact that people were at home. They weren’t in the office. So it kind of felt wrong for them to make a big IT decision. And then, of course, we had the summer holidays and the easing of lockdowns and a whole series of other things. Paul Green:But now here we are in September, and people are starting to take action on that unhappiness, starting to take action on that decision that they made a few months ago. And they’re only starting to take action now. I believe now, October, November, December, January, February, maybe even into the middle of next year, lots and lots of clients are going to take action on the decision that they’ve already made to switch to a different MSP. Paul Green:And this is amazing for you. This is a huge opportunity for you, because it’s a chance for you to go and steal unhappy clients from other MSPs. Now, I don’t believe this is a bad thing in any way. And what I mean by a bad thing is I don’t believe you’re acting in any way nefariously or unscrupulously to go and take these clients. These people are going to leave their incumbent. It is only a matter of time until they do. The damage has been done, and that damage cannot be undone. And there’ll be a whole bunch of MSPs. So we’re going to have a real shock in the next three to six months, as a number of their clients leave them, because of something that happened six months ago. Is that unfair? Maybe? Is it just life and business? Yes, maybe it is. It’s always the small things that make people leave an MSP and move over to a different one. And March and April and May were full of lots and lots of small things that really frustrated a lot of people. Paul Green:So what do you do to pick up these people? Well, simply you start marketing. In fact, you keep doing the long-term marketing that works well, and maybe even you look at some short term marketing. So the long-term marketing that works well is a three step process. It’s about building multiple audiences, such as your LinkedIn connections, your email lists, maybe even using platforms like Instagram and Facebook, depending on the audiences you want to speak to. Step two is then building a relationship with those audiences, which is all done through content marketing. And step three then is commercialising those audiences. And the best and most robust way to commercialise those audiences is to run multi-touchpoint marketing campaigns. And this is what I recommend that you roll out now. Paul Green:I’ve actually put together a campaign for the members of my MSP marketing edge service, so they can go into their content dashboard today and download a 30-day corona virus campaign in a box. And I’ll tell you what’s in it, because it’s something that you could swipe the idea and adapt to use in your area. You can’t use my materials, but you can certainly use these ideas. So this blends together a whole series of different interactions with people, where we’re sending exactly the same message, but we’re sending it using lots of different distribution methods, and we’re sending it repeatedly over a 30-day period. This is really about making sure that your message does get through to the prospects that you want to speak to. Paul Green:So this particular campaign starts with a piece of direct mail, because nothing beats physically posting something and sending it to them. And then, it’s followed up with an email. And it’s followed up with a Facebook advert that’s targeted at those people. And that’s followed up with a message via LinkedIn and also some posts that go onto LinkedIn. And then, comes the thing that really gets the results and that’s someone picking up the phone. And they’re picking up the phone to talk to these prospects about the message that they’ve been sending through. And the message across all of these platforms has been, “If you’re not happy with your IT support company, because of the way you were treated during lockdown, it’s time to switch,” which is a great message to send out, because people who are already thinking that are dramatically more likely to take action on it. It’s almost as if your marketing has appeared at exactly the right time, at that moment at which you’ve managed to hook a message directly into their heart and their emotions and their desires, and they instantly feel like, “Yeah, do you know what? We need to take action on this?” Paul Green:So listen, if you’re ready to take on some new clients, and there are very few MSPs I meet, who are ready to take on new clients, the simplest source of new clients in the next three to six to nine months is going to be those unhappy clients currently served by your competitors. All you got to do is start marketing to get those people. Multiple touchpoint campaigns, those are the things that will attract those people. And if you haven’t got enough people to go and speak to with your existing audiences, if your LinkedIn is a bit apathetic, if your email list is kind of nonexistent, then the best workaround for that is to actually go and buy yourself some cold data. Go to a data broker in your area and buy data of businesses in your area. Paul Green:You can overthink data buying, by the way, and put in place all sorts of conditions and terms and turnover limits, and must have this contact and all of that kind of stuff, or you could just buy several thousand records, 2, 3, 4,000 records of businesses around you, get yourself a 12 month multi-touch license, so you can pretty much do any kind of marketing that you want to those people over the next 12 months, and just start hitting them with a multi-touchpoint campaign. Paul Green:This is the thing that makes the difference when you’re hitting them with the same message repeatedly across different platforms. Sure, you’re going to annoy a tiny percentage of those people, because those are the people who actually consume all of the marketing messages that are being sent to them, but the vast majority of people, they simply don’t do that. They do not consume those messages. And so by hitting them with multiple methods across all of these different platforms, you stand a much higher chance of your message actually going in and then taking action on it. Paul Green:And all you need is two or three prospects a month in the months ahead to just, at the very least book, a 15-minute Zoom call with you and have a chat with you. You and I both know if you can get them on a Zoom or on a phone call for 15 minutes, you can get a meeting with them. If you can get a meeting with them, you are very likely to pick them up as a client. One new client a month or two new clients a month for the next three, six, nine months… Wouldn’t that just change everything for your MSP forever? Voiceover:Here’s this week’s clever idea. Paul Green:As part of that three step strategy I was just talking about, that one of building audiences, build a relationship with them and then commercialise them using marketing campaigns. That one in the middle, which is about building a relationship with them, is done through content marketing. So if you’ve got someone’s email address as part of your email list, you send out a weekly email. If you’ve got someone connected to you on social media, whichever platform that is, you put content on social media on a daily basis. Paul Green:And I’ve got here for you three suggestions to make your content marketing so much easier, because most MSPs don’t enjoy marketing, and they certainly don’t enjoy creating content. It’s seen almost as somewhat of a dark art, that it’s a difficult thing to do, but it really, really isn’t. So my first suggestion to you is that you make it easy by keeping a list of ideas as they happen. This is something that should go into your phone, just keep a list in the notepad, in your phone of ideas, as they occur to you. And once you get into the habit of realising, “Do you know I’ve got to churn out a certain amount of content every week or every month,” then it’s surprising how often you notice that there are great content ideas all around you everywhere. Paul Green:I mean, if you take something as simple as looking at tickets, look at the tickets that come in on a typical day. Does that create content ideas for you? Because it should do. Because the kind of problems that ordinary users are coming up against on a daily or a weekly basis are exactly the kind of content that you should be creating. Content marketing is about creating content that your audiences find fascinating. And the kind of things that they find fascinating and not the kind of things that you find fascinating. The second you find yourself using words like “cyber security” or “encryption,” you’ve lost them. You’ve completely lost them. They’re not interested in that. But they’re interested in the small things. Paul Green:So for example, if you see that you have a lot of tickets coming in around the subject of, “My computer is slow,” could you create a piece of content off the back of that? Of course, you could. Now you don’t want to be talking about specific operating systems and specific faults and clearing out registries and things like that. Is that even a thing anymore? I don’t know. But what you could do is just do a general piece of content about why computers are slow, perhaps even the top ten reasons why your computer is slow and how you can fix nine of them. I mean, that would be a great headline for a piece of content. Paul Green:Looking through tickets makes it really, really easy for you to do that. And then, just having conversations with people makes it easy as well. What are the things that people are talking about? What are they worried about? What keeps them up at night? What’s scares these people? What are they most concerned about? These are the things that make the biggest pieces of content marketing. And they’re the things that people are going to be really interested in reading about. So that’s my first idea for you, is to keep a list and to get into the habit of writing stuff down on that list as it happens. So when you actually come to create some content, you never have to worry about what it is that you’re going to create. Paul Green:Now, the second idea you’re going to love, because it actually cuts you out the loop of having to create your own content marketing. You get someone else to do it for you. You’ll have heard me say on this podcast many times before my favourite acronym: DOA, which doesn’t stand for “dead on arrival,” or rather, it will if you try and do everything yourself. Better that it stands for “delegate, outsource, automate.” And content marketing is one of those things that if you really don’t enjoy it, just get someone else to do it on your behalf. Delegate it to a member of your team or, better still, just outsource it, because there are writers sat on fiverr.com and upwork.…

Full show notes at the publisher

Episode 44: 3 tier selling helps MSPs sell more Sep 15, 2020

Show notes

In this week’s episode Of course you’ll agree, the best kind of selling… is when you don’t have to sell at all! This week on the show Paul dives deep into the 3-tier principle of selling. And how you can easily grow your MSP by actually letting your clients choose between good, better and best options Plus a marketing expert joins Paul to explain what a brand really is, how you can make one for your MSP, and the huge benefits that await Also listen this week to find out why you should change your MSP to thrive whether you’re actually there or not. And there’s a brilliant book recommendation that could help you see business in a completely new way Show notes Out every Tuesday on your favourite podcast platform Presented by Paul Green, an MSP marketing expert You can join Paul in the MSP Marketing group on Facebook Paul’s special guest was Heather Harlos from Bitdefender talking about the increased importance of ‘branding’ Many thanks to Heather Johnson from Gozynta (creators of Mobius Connect and Tixt) for recommending the book ‘The E-Myth Revisited‘ by Michael Gerber Please recommend a book you think will inspire other MSPs here paulgreensmspmarketing.com/podcastbooks Paul’s special guest on September 22nd will be Andra Hedden from Marketopia talking about what kind of marketing is working right now for MSPs 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 44. Here’s what we’ve got coming up in today’s show. Heather Harlos:If you do this, customers are going to be your biggest advertisers without you having to pay a penny for it. Paul Green:We’re also going to be looking at how you can sell more, both to your existing clients and to new prospects, by giving them the perception of choice. And we’ve got another book suggestion this week. It’s a classic book, and it’s the one which explains why you get so frustrated with your staff and with the way your business is running. Voiceover:Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast. Paul Green:What I want to talk about now is inspired by the book suggestion that’s coming up towards the end of the podcast. And, well, I believe that the most important business activity of your MSP should be sales and marketing, because you’ve got to be constantly adding new clients and growing the business. It is of course also vital to ensure that the service meets and preferably exceeds your clients’ expectations, because a bad service means really chronic retention. And we just don’t see this, do we, in the MSP world? We see the vast majority of MSPs have great retention and that’s actually because they’re really good at servicing the clients. The challenge, I think, is continuing to do that as the business gets bigger and bigger. Paul Green:And certainly anyone who started off as a one-man band and help and has then moved forward into being a proper business where things happen in the business regardless of the owner directing them, moving forward from there, what you tend to find is that you move a little bit further away from the clients every time you add someone else into the mix. It’s an unfortunate thing of scaling a business is that you cannot continue to personally look after all the clients and ensure that they’re happy in the same way when you’ve got 10 or 15 staff compared to when you’ve got, say, two or three staff. Paul Green:So if you’ve got chronic retention or if your retention starts to be an issue as they grow the business, of course you’re going to struggle to get traction in the business. In fact, I’ve seen this happen. It’s where people add staff and add resources that the customer service goes down and the customers become unhappy. And you’re actually caught in a perfect storm, because you’ve added all of this overhead in the hope of being able to grow the business and take on more new clients. And yet at the same time, your existing clients are unhappy. They require more service. And ultimately the chances of them staying with you for another five years has just gone down a little bit. You can’t get traction in the business if you’re adding new clients just to replace those clients that you’ve lost. Paul Green:Now, the problem here is really mainly one of perception, not reality. So if your clients perceive that your business doesn’t know what it’s doing or that “things have changed”, and I’ve put that sentence in inverted commas, right down to something as simple as the way that you guys answer the phone has changed, it seems to take longer to get things done. “I don’t like Dave. I used to prefer it when Phil was answering the phone.” All of those things have an affect on the clients and what they think about your business. Paul Green:Now we know that most MSPs do offer a great service and will continue to offer that great service. But where many MSPs fall down is in the two, three or four weeks a year when the owner is away from that business. And when I’m analysing businesses, and sometimes when I get really deeply involved with an MSP, I do often see that the staff do act differently when the boss isn’t there. Now, I don’t mean extreme changes of behaviour. I just mean that attention to detail going out of the window. And yet, as we’ve just said, it’s that attention to detail that makes the real difference. It’s the little things that the clients spot, and it’s the little things that go awry when you’re on holiday. Paul Green:But you need holidays. In fact, you should be taking more holidays, because the more holidays you take… And a holiday these days, certainly in 2020, doesn’t have to mean physically going away, because that’s hard, but it certainly means having a break, not doing work stuff so that you can be away from the business. So how do you do this? How do you keep that level of attention to detail? Paul Green:Well, a lot of it comes down to your staff. You need the best possible staff that you can get. They need the ability to use their initiative. They need to be trained well and they need to be coached well. And that comes with a price. It’s a price of using up some of your time. But the pay-off from that is you can go on holiday and they will manage that for you without any major dramas. Paul Green:The other thing that you need is a Standard Operating Procedures Manual. This is simply your way of laying out how you want your business to run and why you want it to be run that way. Now I truly believe that an operations manual doesn’t hold your business back in any way whatsoever. In fact, on the contrary, I believe that it frees your business from its over-reliance on you and your decision-making abilities. Paul Green:A simple and clearly written operations manual acts like a rule book. So it lets your staff understand what’s expected of them and the business. And they’ll fill in the blanks, and often surprising you along the way by solving problems before you even knew that you had them. Doesn’t that sound like an exciting business? Doesn’t that sound like the kind of business that’ll let you go off on holiday? So where do you get started? Well, very simply you get started by writing one standard operating procedure. Paul Green:You do this already with your clients when you’re using IT Glue or stuff like that, but you should be doing it with your business as well. And if you sit down saying, “Right, I’ve got to write 30 standard operating procedures,” it’s just not going to happen. That’s too much work, too much hassle, and it just feels like this massive job hanging over you. Whereas if you write one, that’s easy. Then write another one. And then another one after that. And suddenly, before you know it you’ve written 10, 20, 30 standard operating procedures. Put them into OneNote or into your PSA or wherever is appropriate where all the right people can access them. Paul Green:But it’s not just about writing those standard operating procedures and creating your operations manual. It’s also about making sure your staff are engaged with them. Every time they ask you a question, “How should I do this?” “This has happened. What should I do?” Instead of giving them the answer, you direct them back to the standard operating procedure, and you say, “Hey, look, here it is in black and white. These are the instructions. Go and use that to guide you, please. And if you have any questions that haven’t been answered by it, come back and ask me and we’ll adjust the standard operating procedure.” Paul Green:What we’ve found while going through this process in standardising our business and pulling together our manual is that the best standard operating procedures consist of a list of written instructions, but also a video: a video of you doing the thing that you’re telling them how to do. And yes, that means you’re essentially documenting it twice. But some people, they like the plain simple instructions there on the screen. Some people like to just watch a video and see exactly how you did it. And often there are little nuances and things that you miss in the written instructions which can be there in the video. This is the route to taking more holidays, confident in the knowledge that your clients will still receive the great service and the business will still have the great attention to detail as if you were there. Voiceover:Here’s this week’s clever idea. Paul Green:You’ll have heard me say before on the podcast that no one likes being sold to, but everyone loves to buy. Especially when you’re spending business money. Even as business owners, we can spend our business’ money knowing that it has little or no cash impact on our own personal ability to spend. And that’s quite exciting. So what we’ve got to do is we’ve got to reward these business owners and managers that we want to reach. Reward them for spending money with you and for signing up to your services. One of the best ways to do this, in a way which also makes them feel as though they can choose to buy more stuff from you, is to offer them three tiers of something. Paul Green:Now the three tiers are known as good, better and best. So you have a good choice, a better choice and a best choice. You might see these in practice as bronze, silver, gold, or silver, gold, platinum, or something like that. But let’s refer to them here as good, better, best. Now the beauty of good, better, best is you can take a package and you can put together your standard offering: the thing that you would most like people to buy. And that becomes your better offering your middle offering. What you can then do is take some stuff out of that. That becomes your good offering. And then you can go back to that middle offering and you can add some stuff in, and that becomes your best offering. Paul Green:So when someone looks at these offerings, they can see that the good offering is okay. It’s perhaps a basic offering at a basic price. The better offering has more stuff and obviously has a higher price level. And the best option has even more stuff in it but obviously has the highest price. And you can do this with security offerings. You can do it with support options. You can do it with hardware. You can do it with practically anything. In fact, you’ll see this all over the world whenever you look for it, right down to airlines. Paul Green:Not that there’s a lot of airline action happening right now, but you want to fly from the UK to the US, there’s a good option, a better option and a best option. The good option is sitting in I guess what we call economy, the better option is sitting in first class. And the best option is upper first class, if that’s available. But you get the idea, you see this everywhere, three-tier selling. Paul Green:Now, the reason this works so well is because people can compare the tiers. So they can look at the good one and say, “There doesn’t seem to be a great deal of stuff in there.” They can look at the better one and say, “Okay, there’s more stuff in here. This seems more like us.” And they can look at the best one and say, “Whoa, there’s loads in here, but it’s not really for us. I think we’re just going to go with the middle option.” Paul Green:In fact, here’s the secret of three-tier selling. When you get it absolutely right, you get a majority, let’s say 70, 80% of your sales, in the middle tier. And the main reason you get them in the middle tier is because there’s something worse that they can compare it against and something better they can compare it against. So the middle tier feels like the safe option. Paul Green:In fact, that’s the secret psychology behind three-tier selling. You’re not really trying to sell three tiers at all. You’re trying to make people choose the middle tier because it appears to be the best value because there’s something worse and something better to compare it against. We’re giving people the perception of choice, and they can genuinely choose any option, but we’re giving them the perception of choice and actually psychologically driving them to pick the middle option. Paul Green:So here’s how you start to put this together. You start with your standard offering. What’s the thing you most want to sell to your prospects? What’s the package that you most want them to buy? What’s the minimum standard? That becomes your middle package. Then you take some stuff away to create the lower package and add some stuff on to be the higher package. And that really is the way to do it. Paul Green:And there’s a whole series of different factors that will affect how many people buy that middle package, right down to price, packaging, positioning and the way that you promote it. These are some of the Ps that affect that. But if, when you’re putting that package on sale, you find that at least three quarters of people who buy go for that middle package, then you know that you’ve got it right. If you find that the vast majority of people are actually buying the lower package, they’re telling you one of those Ps isn’t right. Maybe the price isn’t right, or the package isn’t right, and maybe that lower package should become your middle package. And if you find that the majority of your sales are the higher package, hallelujah, this is happy times, because the clients are telling you that they would buy even more. So you move that top package into the middle package and you create a brand new top package. Paul Green:That’s what’s wonderful about three-tier selling. You get instant feedback from the clients on what they would want to buy and what they would be happy to spend while they’re doing it. Now, if you’re not doing this either with your existing clients or with new prospects, just pick one item. Give it a go. I tell you what, security bundles are great to give this a go with, because you can take stuff like encryption, you can take stuff like cyber security, awareness training, or dark web monitoring, and you can add in these different things. Put the bundle that you would most want to sell, what’s the stuff you’d want every client to buy, pop that into the middle tier and then create the other two tiers to create that illusion of choice. And I bet you £5, or $5, that more people go on to buy the package overall, just because you’re offering them the choice. Voiceover:Paul’s blatant plug. Paul Green:Things like three-tier selling are the things that we talk about in the MSP Marketing Facebook group. Now this is a completely free group and we are just under a thousand members. No vendors, no time-wasters, that’s a thousand MSPs from around the world who are members of that group, which is why we have such vibrant conversations every day. We’re constantly talking about marketing new products that you can sell and ways to improve your net profit margins. Paul Green:So if you own or manage an MSP, you are welcome in that group. You just…

Full show notes at the publisher

Episode 43: What to do when prospects don’t reply to your emails Sep 08, 2020

Show notes

In this week’s episode It’s an all-too-familiar tale. You’ve had an awesome meeting with a prospect, but when you go to follow them up… they ignore you! Or that’s the way it seems. Whatever the reason they’re not getting back to you, this week Paul offers a brilliant technique to get a response Also in this week’s show, did you know that your marketing targets different areas of your prospect’s brains? Understanding which part is the most important will help to increase the effectiveness of your message If you’ve ever wondered whether outsourcing would be right for your MSP, James Vickery from Benchmark 365 joins Paul to explains what’s changed in the world of outsourcing over the last 30 years. Plus, prepare to be inspired by a brand new feature on the show – MSPs and experts in and around tech join Paul to recommend inspirational books that have had a huge impact on them Show notes Out every Tuesday on your favourite podcast platform Presented by Paul Green, an MSP marketing expert Check out the book Paul mentioned called “Never Split the Difference” by Chris Voss and Tahl Raz Find out more about Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Edge Paul’s special guest was James Vickery from Benchmark 365 talking about how best to outsource your workload Many thanks to the IT Business Growth Expert Richard Tubb (find out more here) for recommending the book The Go-Giver by Bob Burg & John David Mann Please recommend a book you think will inspire other MSPs here paulgreensmspmarketing.com/podcastbooks Paul’s special guest on September 15th will be Heather Harlos from Bitdefender talking about the increased importance of ‘branding’ You can join Paul in the MSP Marketing group on Facebook 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 another fresh podcast. Here’s what we’ve got coming up for you this week. James Vickery:We really want to grow our business and we really want to add more people but we either cannot find the people that we need or we find them and then they’re quickly sucked up by larger organisations. Paul Green:We’re also going to be looking at what you can do when prospects simply don’t answer your follow-up emails. It’s really frustrating and I’ve got some practical things today that you can try. And we’re starting a brand new section of the show. I’ve asked a whole load of special guests both from within our world and outside if they can recommend their favourite marketing or business book to you. Voiceover:Paul Green’s MSP Marketing podcast. Paul Green:I came across something the other day which really resonated with me. It’s one of those things that you know sometimes you read something and a couple of days later it’s still at the back of your mind. Well this was a quote from an American civil rights activist called Maya Angelou and she said, “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” The reason that resonated with me is that completely matches up to the kind of marketing that I recommend to MSPs all over the world. Because the kind of marketing that works best is emotional marketing. It talks to people’s emotions and makes them feel something. This is what makes marketing so hard for MSPs because of course typically an MSP manager or owner is a technical person who’s used to dealing with technical matters which is a very cognitive thing and they’re not used to dealing with emotions and feelings, and yet when it comes to marketing, we’ve got to focus on feelings and emotions because these are the things that influence people. Paul Green:I’ve said before on this podcast, your average business owner or manager simply cannot at a cognitive level decide whether or not your MSP is a good one or not. They don’t have the information. They haven’t got the context. They haven’t got the references and the experience to compare it against. So they’re picking your MSP or not based on their emotions, based on whether or not they like you or whether or not they don’t like you. This is a massive opportunity for your marketing because to go back to that quote, they’ll forget what you said, they’ll forget what you did but they’ll never forget how you made them feel, and you’ve got to make them feel something, anything about your business. Paul Green:This starts with your website. This stretches across all of your social media. This goes into all of your printed literature. It’s the way you pick up the phone, it’s what your technicians say, and the warmth in their voice or the lack of warmth in their voice. All of these things affect how people feel about your business. If you look at some of the most successful brands in the world, brands like Apple, Nike, Microsoft even, people feel things when they think about those brands and I’m laughing because as an Apple fanboy, I think about Apple and I think, “expensive but great,” and I think about Microsoft and I think, “Difficult. Disruptive.” That’s the emotions I have, you probably have a completely different emotional feeling when you think about Microsoft. You probably think profit margins and money and opportunities to sell things. It’s funny, isn’t it, how we all have different feelings and different reactions to things. Paul Green:There are two parts of our brain that come into play when we’re trying to market to people and I’m going to get a bit technical with this one but we’ve got the neocortex and you’ve got the limbic brain. The neocortex is the thinking brain, so it’s responsible for things like learning, language, the kind of social interactions that we do and all of the complex information is handled by the neocortex. Now most people’s sales and marketing messages are directed towards the neocortex and you look at most marketing, but B2B marketing certainly, and it seems to be very cold almost, very precise. It seems to be very fact-driven. You look at all the vendor marketing and the channel and it’s very, very facts driven. Not all of it but much of it and it’s all driven towards trying to influence people’s brains and essentially trying to influence their neocortex. Trying to get someone to understand your unique selling proposition and the small things that make you different to all the other MSPs that do exactly the same thing as you, most people try and influence the neocortex with this but the neocortex isn’t really interested. The neocortex is almost an on or off type of function. It’s either good or it’s bad and there’s not really a great deal of vagueness, of grayness in between. Paul Green:So in our marketing, we don’t want to market to the neocortex. We want to market to the limbic brain. Now the limbic brain is where your experiences live. It’s where the emotions live. This is where all the fun happens. It’s also where the bad things happen as well because our memories and the way we feel about things all sit within there. When we’re sad, it’s the limbic brain. When we’re happy, it’s the limbic brain and it’s where decisions are made as well. The very best buying decisions if not all of the buying decisions are made by the limbic brain. If you like someone or you dislike them or you think they’re an idiot, those decisions are being made within the limbic brain. Now what’s interesting is if you read up on it, the limbic brain has no capacity for language. All of the language is handled by the neocortex which remember is the thinking part of the brain. The limbic brain very much deals just in feelings and emotions. Paul Green:This is why you can sit in a sales meeting with someone and talk and talk and talk at them and they simply don’t hear you because all they’re hearing … Well they’re not hearing anything, they’re feeling the emotions of being bored or being frustrated or being happy or whatever it is that they’re feeling at that moment, and actually the part of their brain which is making the sales decision, should we do this or not, is not the part that actually understands language. Paul Green:Let me put this another way. You cannot talk someone into buying from you. All you can do is influence the way that they feel, and influencing the way that people feel is so easy, it’s so much easier than talking at them. It’s all down to showing them things that move them in one way or another, like case studies, videos, testimonials, reviews, all of these kind of things. Yes they have written words in their language, but they convey emotion. If someone else just like them trusts you, that goes a very long way indeed, which is why social proof is so important and so influential. Videos, I mentioned just then, videos are great for reaching the limbic brain because videos come away from just being about language and they become about emotions. If you’ve got a really well-edited video with a very clear message and it emotionally affects them in some way, of course that’s going to have an influence. It’s going to make a big difference to the decision that they’re making. Paul Green:So here’s what I’d like you to do. I want you to go back through all of your marketing. Go and have a look at your website, what’s on your LinkedIn, what are you putting out on social media, your printed materials, what do they look like, and I want you to ask yourself, perhaps even assess for each piece of that marketing, is this trying to talk to the thinking brain, the neocortex, or is this trying to talk to the feeling brain, the limbic brain? You want to make sure that 80% of your sales and marketing stuff talks to the limbic brain, because it’s the limbic brain that’s making the decisions. 80% of your stuff should be about emotions and feelings and all that kind of stuff, and the 20% that’s left should be enough brain fodder that the thinking brain, the neocortex, can rubber stamp the buying decision that the limbic brain is making. Paul Green:Now don’t be put off by the fact that the vast majority of MSPs’ websites and marketing materials are the other way round, that actually it’s 80% of it talking to the thinking brain. They’ve got it wrong. This is one of those instances where you can look at what the vast majority of people are doing and do something different and most of the MSPs that I work with, I have to say exactly that. Ignore what your competitors are doing, ignore the coldness of their marketing and how logical it is and how fact-based it is. You’ve got to focus on the emotions because it’s only when you get the emotions right and you talk to people’s emotional brains that you really start to ramp up the engagement of your prospects and ultimately you get more sales. Voiceover:Here’s this week’s clever idea. Paul Green:Is there anything more frustrating than when you have a successful sales meeting with a prospect, everything seems to have gone in your favour, they seem engaged, the price seems to be right, the package seems to be right, and you say to them, “Right, great. I’ll get back in touch with you next week and we can see how we can move this forward.” Then next week you call them, nothing. Can’t get hold of them on the phone. Leave a voicemail, perhaps you call again. I don’t want to call a third time because I don’t want to seem too keen, so you drop them an email. Nothing. They don’t answer your email. Perhaps if you’re tracking whether or not they’ve opened it, they open it but they don’t answer it. That in itself is deeply frustrating, but it’s just frustrating in general when people don’t get back to you. Paul Green:Now there’s two parts to this. The first part is I’m going to give you a little trick to get people to answer your emails and it’s actually out of a book which I recommended … Must have been about 10 weeks or so ago, but the book I recommended was called Never Split The Difference by Chris Voss who is a former FBI chief negotiator and he put everything that he found out and discovered about negotiation and influencing people. He put that into a book, it’s a brilliant book. Go and get it on Audible or get the paperback copy and read it and scribble notes in it. One of the tricks that he suggests in there is a way to get people to answer your emails and it’s very simply done by sending them an email and the email says in the subject line, “Have you given up on this project?” So you’ve had this meeting with someone, they’ve ignored your voicemails, they’ve ignored your emails, and then you send them this email that says in the subject line, “Have you given up on this project?” Inside in the email, it’s a very short email saying something like, “Hi Dave, just wanted to connect with you and see if this is something you still want to do or whether or not you’ve given up on this project. Thanks, Paul.” Paul Green:What this does is this talks to people at a very deep psychological level and it makes them want to answer you. Because if they have given up on it, you’ve made it very easy for them to say, “Actually, we changed our mind or we decided to go with someone else,” or something like that. If they haven’t given up on it because let’s be honest, that’s the case nine times out of ten, isn’t it? That they haven’t given up but there’s a delay. They got busy or someone on the board hasn’t looked at it yet or whatever the delay is. It’s again an opportunity, an easy opportunity for them to just hit reply and say, “Yes, I’m so sorry, I’ve been meaning to get back to you, I’ll do that in the next couple of days,” or whatever the reply is. Paul Green:So that’s an easy way to get people to answer your emails when you feel like they have given up. The second part of this though is I’ve got a better suggestion for you. Rather than waiting for your prospects to get back to you, I believe when you’ve actually seen someone at a sales meeting that you should proactively there and then book a follow-up appointment. So when you’re in the meeting with someone whether that be face to face or over a video call and you finish the meeting, you actually say to them, “Okay, when’s the best time for me to call you, next week or whatever, to follow this meeting up, to get your final questions and discuss the finer details and get you started?” They might say, “Well, you know, Thursday afternoon would be quite good.” Instead of just saying, “Great, I’ll give you a call on Thursday afternoon,” you actually book in there and then. Perhaps you’d say to them, “Okay, 3:00 p.m., how does that work for you?” They’d go, “Look in their calendar. 3:00 p.m.? Yeah, actually that works,” and you say to them, “Great. Can you pop that in your calendar now? I will send you an invitation as well and I will call you at 3:00 p.m. on Thursday afternoon.” Then you send the invitation to them. Paul Green:You could even take that a step further and physically post a letter to them confirming that you’re going to call at 3:00 p.m. on Thursday, and that might seem like overkill, but actually what we’re doing here is we’re setting a deadline. Because nothing’s worse than having a successful sales meeting and then you’re just constantly following people up and waiting for their decision. That’s awful, so force the decision from them. Get that decision by setting a deadline and setting a point in the diary when you are going to call them. Paul Green:Nine times out of ten, if they can’t make that meeting anymore, they will actually move that meeting. They will proactively contact you to move that meeting because they cannot make it and that is a very beautiful thing. If you have this problem with your sales I promise you try this. The next time you go out to see a prospect, it could completely change the way that you do your follow-up forever. Voiceover:Paul’s blatant plug. Paul Green:More than 280 MSPs around the world now trust the MSP Marketing Edge. Very simply we…

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Episode 42: SPECIAL EPISODE: How this MSP built his business Sep 01, 2020

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In this week’s episode So, there’s easy growth and hard growth. Most MSPs go for the harder, less risky route of growing by obtaining their own clients over time. But occasionally we hear stories of MSPs who take the bold step of growing through acquisition. This special podcast episode is all about one such success story. This week Paul invites an MSP owner to share their inspiring story. Listen as David Darmstandler from Datapath explains how he built up his MSP over a number of years through a combination of focus, hard work and also acquisition. There’s some great advice in this show – especially if you’re also looking to acquire or even be acquired Also Paul’s special guest talks about how he has done something that most MSPs will need to do in the not-too-distant future; transition from being an MSP to a true MSSP (a managed security services provider) Show notes Out every Tuesday on your favourite podcast platform Presented by Paul Green, an MSP marketing expert Paul hosts a MSP Marketing Podcast Special, dedicated to the story of David Darmstandler from Data Path (you can email him here) On September 8th Paul’s guest will be James Vickery from Benchmark 365 talking about how best to outsource your workload You can join Paul in the MSP Marketing group on Facebook Please send any questions, ideally in audio-form (or any other feedback) to hello@paulgreensmspmarketing.com Episode transcription Voiceover:Made in the UK, for MSPs around the world. This is Paul Green’s MSP marketing podcast. Paul Green:Hello and welcome to an MSP marketing podcast special. It’s always good to hear other people’s stories and to hear how other people have made it, especially when they’re building up a business, that’s just like yours. And I’m joined today by a very special guest from the States to tell us how he built up his business. Voiceover:This is an MSP marketing podcast special. David Darmstandler:Hi, my name is David Darmstandler, I’m the CEO and co founder of an MSP and MSSP data path. Paul Green:And thank you very much for joining me for this special, David. So I want to explore today your story. I want to explore how you’ve built up the business, what the challenges have been on the way. And then in particular, there are two aspects that I want to examine because I think these are fascinating aspects that will affect a lot of MSPs. One of them is that transition from being an MSP, to being an MSSP, and we’ll come onto that later on. And also, I know you’ve acquired a couple of businesses on the way, and I think it would be useful to look at how you did that, what the pitfalls are and how you can position your MSP to be acquired by someone else, or go out and acquire an MSP yourself. Paul Green:So give us the overview of your business. Tell us when you started, what it was like in the first few years and sort of bring us up to date today in terms of where your offices are, how many staff you’ve got, that kind of thing. David Darmstandler:Data Path is, well, it’s 15 years old as of last month. We started June, 2005, not the best time to start just with the fact that we had a recession that kind of kicked off, at least in California here around that time. But we started off as really an hourly break fix IT solutions provider. So a good buddy of mine, James Bates, had already started as a sole proprietor doing a IT consulting. And him and I had been friends since the third grade and we’ve been talking about starting something together and we formed Data Path and the recession hit. David Darmstandler:And in a lot of ways it ended up kind of being a positive for us. People were laying off their IT departments, unfortunately, and we were able to come in and kind of just do hourly work. So we started off with a pretty low rate. And soon after we kind of developed what we didn’t know was managed services, but we created a couple of different plans. That was 15 years ago. So it was a lot of education to customers about what managed services was, why they needed it, completely different time in IT. Fast forward to today and it’s very rare that you have to educate customers on what managed services is, they understand. Pretty scrappy, actually, we’re in the middle of building our new headquarters now here in Modesto, California. David Darmstandler:And we were looking at old pictures of when we started and we had 100 square foot office and we had a little like dorm room fridge with servers stacked on it. And we’d grown to five people and you couldn’t even have all the people in the office, people were making phone calls from the hallway. And so it was just true kind of just gritty startup. David Darmstandler:And last few years, even though we’ve been around 15 years, we’ve done a couple of acquisitions in the last few years, been buying other MSPs up and down California. So we just finished another transaction in Southern California. So we now have offices, we have a headquarters in Modesto, California. We have another office in central California and Fresno. And we also have most recently an office in orange County in Irvine, California. Now the last four years or so, we also transitioned to being an MSSP. So we’d developed an actual security practice. And so we’ve been layering on those security services when we purchase these other firms throughout the state. Paul Green:What are the things that you think have made the biggest difference to you over the last 15 years? Because you’ve achieved quite a lot. I mean, how many employees do you have at the moment? David Darmstandler:So we’re a team of just above 60. Paul Green:Okay. So I mean, that’s a fair leap in 15 years. And what would you say has been the most important things to you over the years in terms of achieving that growth? David Darmstandler:Our mission here, and it took some time to really figure out what that was, even though we were doing it already was, we really want to see people come up. We really want to improve the communities that we live in. And when we say see people come up, my partner and both came from nothing, right? So I grew up as a poor kid, kind of government housing almost. And he grew up pretty poor himself. So we love to be able to help people that work hard, that are smart, that really want to make something of themselves. We want to be part of their success. And so realising that and building great company cultures and finding great people that we want to work alongside and with both on the client side and as a team, I think has really made the biggest difference. David Darmstandler:I know that sounds kind of cheesy, but really it was. Bad clients and bad team members can suck a lot of your time, right? So the ability to work with great people on both ends, whether it be a customer or whether it be a team member and it really… And even firing bad customers has really allowed us to speed up our growth and focus on where we’re going as an organisation. So that’s definitely one part of it. And then obviously there’s a lot of other things that have happened over the years, but just developing that team and really narrowing down what we do. So I think a lot of MSPs struggle, at least the guys I know with doing everything under the sun and it builds builds even confidence in your customers when you say, “Hey, we don’t do that. But we know some firms that do and we can recommend them,” or we just stray away from those things that we’re not experts in, has allowed us to really accelerate growth. Paul Green:To sustain 60 employees. And presumably the hundreds and hundreds of clients that you must have and thousands of end users, there must’ve been a point where you got really serious about sales and marketing. Can you sort of pinpoint when that happened? David Darmstandler:Yeah, absolutely. I mean, really, I would say the first three years or so Was primarily, in fact, totally word of mouth. I would see following that, we started to realise we needed to do a little bit of outbound. And so we obviously had a website, some other things we started to kind of creep into some social because social was pretty new then. I would say probably about year five or so. We got a little bit more serious and by about year seven, we had hired a marketing staff and it’s a big part of what we do now. So we’re big on particularly digital marketing, but also just ensuring that from kind of beginning to end, the customer has a good experience with your marketing and your branding. And there’s a lot of different ways that you can lose a customer in the process, right? David Darmstandler:Whether they are just visiting your site for the first time or whether it’s in the sales process where you’re too slow to get back to them or what you’re trying to sell them isn’t clear to them or your stuff looks horrible, that you’re presenting, right? So there’s a lot of things in that circle of the sales process from beginning to end, as far as when it comes to marketing that we really tried to, and we continue to tweak all the time. That’s a very big part of our business. I think it really has set us apart when you and I’ve heard you say this on your podcast, but when you go to the sites and literally, I think I’ve seen the same stock image used on every single IT website, MSP website, it’s this one with zeros and ones in the background and a girl on a computer. David Darmstandler:And it’s like, “If I see one more, I’m just going to like…” Really trying to, I think what we’ve done well is humanising our brand and showing faces because that’s who we are. And so that’s been a huge part of I think our success as an organisation is just helping people. It’s one thing when they’re talking with the tech, but when they can actually see that tech space, especially now with the environments we’re working in, right? With COVID and that person’s more than likely not going to come onsite for simple things, just due to risk. I think that’s been a big part of our success is continuing to remain human. And when I say human, I mean showcasing those team members that have been with us this whole time and have really come up in their careers too. What we’re doing in the communities that we live and work in. Paul Green:Now looking at the management of the business, I am going to make the assumption that you’re well-managed, that you’re well organised. And I made that assumption because in the conversations we’ve had before this podcast, and today you seem quite relaxed. You’re not as time pressured as some people would be. And I’m guessing that there’s a good management structure in place. I think a business with 60 employees would fall over very quickly if it didn’t have that good management structure in place. When was the point at which you realised you had to get serious about not just managing your staff, but actually leading your staff and setting up an infrastructure and making sure that every single person was being developed and had the opportunity to grow? David Darmstandler:I guess maybe from the beginning, my partner and I really always had that mindset, right? We’re reading a lot of books. We have mentors and about five years in, we hired a business coach. So someone that had done some pretty amazing things and really helped us to think through our structure and help us get through the day in and day out. I mean, he even went to the point where he made us log every 15 minutes of our day. So if I was using the restroom, and I probably put too much information there for him because he would send back, he would be laughing when he would respond. He’s like, “I really don’t need to know what you did with your spouse.” But no, I mean, I think overall that really even myself looking at my day and going, “Gosh, what am I doing?” David Darmstandler:Right? I’m not even focusing on the things I’m best at, I’m not focusing on the things that are most important. I’m really just reacting all the time. So there’s no strategic proactive work. And so about five years in, we started to kind of really identify areas organisationally that were struggling or needed more direction or regular supervision. Looking at today, we have a management structure. We have organisational units. We have regular check ins one-on-ones with every employee, career paths, all these things that are impossible to do if, as the owner of the MSP, you’re doing all of it, working with customers, managing finance to… I’ve seen some of these threads on your Facebook group. I mean, it’s a lot, right? I mean I saw one, I think yesterday they were saying, “Who’s ready to throw in the towel?” David Darmstandler:I remember those days, right? Because I was managing finance, I was managing customer relationships. I was the voice engineer. I was the guy dealing with a server outage. I think what we did well was we continued to not pay ourselves what we should have. And we would make big investments into those leaders that we needed, whether that was people that we raised up internally. But oftentimes those that as we got to a certain size, we had to bring in from the outside. David Darmstandler:I think that was really what’s helped us to get to that next stage. And there was always these pain points, right? So you would get to five employees and there was a big leap you had to make. There was 10 employees there’s a big leap, you get to 20 or 30 and you get stuck there for a little while just due to cashflow or its risk, right? Every one of these big decisions or these managers you bring on, it’s expensive, right? And sometimes they don’t work out, which is even worse. It was really just about making those leaps and doing it with faith that it was going to pay off. And that we’d kind of framed out what the problem was and what we expected as a return when we made those decisions. I think that that made a big difference in kind of continuing to propel our growth each year. Paul Green:So you mentioned a couple of times that it was about five years in. So I guess around about 2010, when you started getting serious about your sales and marketing, you started getting serious about your management. Was this a formal decision? Did you guys decide, right, we want to be big, we want to grow, we want to be well organised, we don’t want to be the guys doing everything forever. Or was it just something that you fell into, as you say, it was just a case of, well, we needed to do this, we needed to do that, and then suddenly we had 20 employees so we needed to do that. I guess I’m asking, was there a driving factor or is it just being an organic thing? David Darmstandler:No, there was definitely a driving factor. I mean, I distinctly remember kind of around that time that we took our team that we had at the time and that was engineers and all kinds of, we were pretty small, right? And we went and we rented this room in this pre, we let the person that was kind of overseeing some of the finances make the decision where we were doing the meeting, which was a bad decision because she picked the cheapest place in town, right? It was like the water pitchers you would not want to drink out of. But we got this little room in a, I wouldn’t even call it a hotel, but a motel or whatever. David Darmstandler:And we spent two days as a team going, “What’s wrong? Where do we want to be? Where do we want to go?” And really what we ended up doing first was really defining our values as an organisation. In that process we always we also defined some really just where do we see our company in five years? What do we all want out of this? Right? I mean, the fact that it was not just the two owners in the room doing all this, there’s definitely aspects of business that should just be the ownership defining. But the fact that it was the whole company that had ownership in what was decided and where we’re going and how we’re going to do it really brought about just a cohesiveness. We used some tools to kind of do that. You know, I think we used the Rockefeller habit…

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