Show notes
In this week’s episode Although MSPs have had the opportunity during the Covid pandemic to service more clients needing homeworking solutions, the issue of client retention has never been so pressing. In this week’s show Paul’s joined by an expert in generating profitable growth to discuss the steps you can take to keep your clients Paul’s also going to be talking about a slightly delicate subject – the matter of your life expectancy and how your MSP is linked to it Along with a great question from a listener on marketing to prospects, Paul recommends an incredible book on negotiating that could save you money. Paul literally used it to save thousands and thousands of pounds Show notes Out every Tuesday on your favourite podcast platform Presented by Paul Green, an MSP marketing expert As mentioned, listen back to Episode 28 for the discussion surrounding the ‘wheel of life’, plus the conversation with Andy Edwards in Episode 2 about the best work / life balance Check out the books Paul mentioned called “The Top Five Regrets of the Dying” by Bronnie Ware and “Never Split the Difference” by Chris Voss and Tahl Raz Paul’s special guest was Ben Niernberg from MNJ Technologies and Ignyte talking about how to manage client retention in these unusual times Many thanks to Jacques from Ingenio Technologies for the question about how to look at MSP marketing from a prospect and not a tech The tools Paul mentioned to help with testing your website from a user’s point of view were User Brain, User Bob and User Insights Paul’s guest on July 7th will be MSP author, producer and entrepreneur Mark Copeman talking about the 84 nuggets of advice every MSP should use Please send any questions, ideally in audio-form (or any other feedback) to hello@paulgreensmspmarketing.com You can join Paul in the MSP Marketing group on Facebook 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 back to the show. Here’s what we’ve got coming up for you today. Benjamin Niernberg:You have to be the champion for how you go about questioning those customers. Otherwise you’ll slowly start to see that business trickle away to those that are. Paul Green:I’m also going to tell you about the best book on negotiating that I ever read. In fact, last year it helped me to save 7,246 pounds. We’re also going to look at how you can examine your marketing as a prospect does and not look at it like a tech. Voiceover:Paul Green’s MSP marketing podcast. Paul Green:Back in episode 28 we were talking about the wheel of life and how important it is to get a balance between your work, your family, having fun, all of the things in your life. And we become a bit dull when we’re obsessed with work. And we also become a bit dull when we don’t have meaningful work. It’s very much about a balance. And I’ve been meaning for some time to talk to you about the figure 953. And this is a figure which was given to me by my friend, Andy Edwards. If you go right back to episode one of this podcast, Andy was my very, very first guest, he’s a very good friend of mine, and he’s one of these people who teaches other people how to have a better life and how to get that kind of balance back into their life. Paul Green:And he gave me this figure years ago, 953. I can’t remember exactly where he got it from, but it was some research somewhere which showed that on average in the US, in the UK, in most Western economies, that’s the average life expectancy in months of the average person. 953 months, which in human years works out to be around about 79 years. Now, what that means is, if currently you are 30 years old, you’ve only got 593 months left to live. That’s a scary figure, isn’t it? If you’re 40, you only have 473 months left to live. If you’re 50, you only have 353 months left to live. If you’re 60, you’ve only got 233 months left to live. And I’m not going any further than that, because that’s already a scary enough figure. But it’s part of the human condition that we always look ahead and think that we have so much more time left. Paul Green:Oh, and this of course is best case scenario. This is absolutely best case scenario, 79. It’s not about living as long as you can. It’s about having the best quality of life for as long as you can. And we’ve all met very elderly people in their 80s or 90s who really don’t enjoy being alive any more. So I think it’s important that we do think about that wheel of life and getting that balance right and enjoying our family and enjoying our work and making sure we live a great life. Now, there’s a book that I recommend that you get. And when I tell you what the title is, you’ll think, “Oh, come on, Paul. We listen to this podcast to be motivated.” Well, I think this is quite a motivating book because it’s called The Top Five Regrets of the Dying. And it’s written by a lady called Bronnie Ware. We’ll put a link to it in the show notes. Paul Green:Now, she was an Australian palliative care nurse and spent her career looking after mostly elderly people at the ends of their lives. And she did this for about, I think it was about 15 years, something like that. And she noticed that their regrets were all very, very similar. They could all be grouped together in the same kind of way. You don’t really need to read the book, because the summary I’m about to give you essentially captures the book. It’s not the best written book I’ve ever read, but it’s one of those books that maybe you and your partner, and I mean your life partner, might want to read this book to trigger a conversation about, “What do we want to do with our lives? If we’ve only got 300 months left, what do we want to do with those 300 months?” Now, some of the regrets that Bronnie Ware talks about in the book include the fact that people wish they’d had the courage to live a life true to themselves, not the life that other people expected from them. Paul Green:And that’s about living your life your way and doing the things that you want to do. And I think as business owners, perhaps we don’t suffer too much from this because we’ve already gone down that route, haven’t we? We’ve already set up our own business or bought something and we’re doing things the way we want to do them. But I’ll tell you the one that resonated with me when I read this a few years ago, was, “I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.” Now, these days I have a pretty good work-life balance. I make sure I have plenty of time for my daughter, for family, for fun, for all of that kind of stuff. But if I look back to my 20s, when I was building my radio career and working in radio stations, and I did okay, it wasn’t spectacular, but I did okay. I worked very, very hard. I really threw myself into work. And I enjoyed it at the time, but I do look back and think, what if I’d looked after my body better then? What if I’d stayed fit? Because I had a fat few years. Paul Green:What if I’d spent more time on my relationships, what if I’d spent more time with my friends? It wasn’t all hard work. There was some fun in it, but I do regret a little bit looking back in my 20s and perhaps my early 30s just working too hard. Another one that Bronnie Ware wrote about was, “I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.” And again, maybe this is a generational thing. This was mostly elderly people, and she wrote the book about 10 years ago. So this is a completely different generation to us. We don’t have that problem expressing our feelings, do we? Well, we don’t want to get to the end and regret it, that’s for sure. Now, this is another one. “I wish I’d stayed in touch with my friends.” So much easier for us today with Facebook and electronic messaging. Paul Green:And yet still I’ve got hundreds of friends that I kind of know what’s going on in their life because of Facebook. But when was the last time I had an interaction with them? Wouldn’t this just be a great time to grab your phone, go onto WhatsApp, and just message three people? Who are the three people that jump into your right now that you haven’t spoken to for ages? You kind of know what’s going on with them because of Facebook, but you haven’t directly reached out to them. Go on, send them a WhatsApp or send them a Messenger message just to say, “Hi, how are you? I was thinking about you today. How’s it going?” You could make their day. Wouldn’t that be a great thing to do? Paul Green:And then another one that’s in Bronnie Ware’s book is, “I wish I’d let myself be happier.” And this, I think, is where we come back to that wheel of life, that balance. Because whatever it is that makes you happy, you really should do more of it. My work makes me happy. It’s very meaningful work for me, but it only makes me happy to a point. What also makes me happy is just pootling in my garden, going for walks, going for runs, spending time with my daughter, having fun, doing all the things that young parents do with their children. Don’t know how I can call myself young, I’m 45, but you get the idea. And you’ve got to remember with all of this, if we bring this back to your business, the purpose of your MSP is to be there for you and not the other way around. Paul Green:And if you heard me talk about that in episode 28, and I’m talking about it again now just a few weeks later, and it’s still resonating with you, that actually, yeah, the balance isn’t quite right. This is really the wake up call, this is really the time to do something about it. The purpose of the business is to be there for you and not the other way around. If you have to be there in order for the business to thrive, it’s not a business, it’s just a job. And a job that’s either well-paid or badly paid, but it’s still a job that you’re trapped within. Voiceover:Here’s this week’s clever idea. Paul Green:In the guest room of my house, that’s where we keep all of our books. We call it the library, it’s just the guest room really, but it’s quite an exciting room to go in. My daughter and I will go in and we’ll sit on the bed and we’ll just gaze at the bookshelves. Because we have bookshelves on both sides of the room. It’s really quite exciting. There’s nothing like sitting and looking at all the books that you’ve got and just letting your eyes just go over them. Paul Green:And you know that most of them you’re never going to read them again, but they’re there and you can look at them and you can be inspired by them. And it’s exciting. And I have one particular bookshelf, and that’s dedicated for the very best business and marketing books that I’ve ever read. And it’s a fairly limited number, because you’ve got to have an exceptionally good book to get your book onto that bookshelf. Now, one book which immediately earned its place on that bookshelf the second I read it was Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss. Now, Chris is a former FBI chief negotiator, and he tells some amazing stories in the book about how he developed brand new techniques during his career in the FBI to save people from criminals. Literally, he knew when things worked or didn’t work. Because if they worked the person got released, the hostage was released and they paid the money, and yes, they do pay money for that. If it didn’t work, people got killed. Paul Green:So it’s a fairly extreme, in the field way of testing out negotiation techniques. And he actually, over his time, he actually completely changed the way that the FBI negotiated with criminals who’d kidnapped people. And he’s taken the very best of what he learned and he’s put it all into a book. It’s on Amazon, it’s also on Audible, and it’s worth getting both copies. Because even though you think you might not do a great deal of negotiation, actually you’re negotiating all the time. You’re negotiating with staff, with clients, with your other half, with your business partner, with your children. Although I’ve found some of the more clever techniques don’t work, particularly with younger children. But there’s some very, very clever stuff in there. And I’m looking at my notes now, whenever I read one of my best books I keep notes, detailed notes of the things that I’ve learned from the book. And there’s things in there like labelling their pain. Paul Green:If you know during a negotiation that someone is likely to have a fear, something they’re scared that you’re trying to do, then instead of trying to avoid it and hide away from it, you bring it out and you label it as something that you are aware of and something that they’re scared of. To give an example from the book, when he was negotiating with a criminal he would actually say, “It sounds like you don’t want to go back to jail.” Because that was that person’s overriding fear, was, “I don’t want to go back to jail.” And the reality was, they were going back to jail because they’d kidnapped someone. But by negotiating with them saying, “It sounds like you don’t want to go back to jail,” he’s showing empathy. He’s showing that he understands what’s driving them and what’s motivating them. When we think someone understands us, we’re much more likely to do a deal with that person. Paul Green:He talks in the book about not trying to get people to say yes to things, but to get people to say no to things. Impossible for me to try and explain that fully to you now. You’ve really got to listen to or read the book to get it. In fact, what Chris Voss writes is that you don’t want to hear someone saying yes, you want to hear them saying the two words that change everything, “That’s right.” When they say, “That’s right,” it’s their way of acknowledging that you have reached an agreement on something. It’s almost impossible for me to summarise a book like this, but what I have done, because I kept those detailed notes, is I’ve been able to use that now and again when I’m doing negotiations with people. Paul Green:Around about 15, 16 months ago, I was buying a parcel of land. Now, I had a very short career as a property investor. I’ve got some buy-to-lets and that does just fine for me, but I thought I had this epiphany when I’d sold my business in 2016 that I should go and invest into properties. And I actually put myself through a training course in a mastermind group of something called build to rent, which is where you build houses and you refinance them at the end, and you keep those houses, and then you rent them out to people. So it’s like buy-to-let, except you’re essentially building your own houses. And the theory of that is sound, and there are lots of people who have done very well with it. I just didn’t particularly get on with it. The levels of risk were a little bit too high for me. And I did one land acquisition, which is going through, those houses are being built right now, but I won’t be keeping them at the end of it. I’ll be getting out of that. Paul Green:And it was quite a complicated deal. And we had to buy a couple of different parcels of land. We had to negotiate some rights. There were lots of parties involved, lots of egos, and it was all a bit of a nightmare, and lots of lawyers involved as well. And we all know how much fun it is when you’ve got lots of lawyers involved. Now, one of the sellers of land insisted on dealing over email, which was a real pain, because it’s very hard to negotiate with someone over email. It really is. Much easier to sit down with someone and have a chat with them or jump on a phone call, but this person, I don’t know why, insisted on negotiating over email. And I’ve actually got the email conversation here that we had back then. Paul Green:So we were trying to agree a price for their land, they were very ready to sell it. They knew what we were going to do with it. And we needed that piece of land to bolt it together to make the deal happen. The only thing that we needed to agree on was the price. And I got an email one morning saying, “We are willing to reduce the price by 5,000 pounds.…
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