Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast

*/ ?>

Latest Episodes:

Episode 31: SPECIAL: Get new clients deep dive Jun 16, 2020

Show notes

In this week’s special episode Unless you’ve reached capacity, I bet you’d love more new clients. If this is something you struggle with (most MSPs do), then this special episode of the podcast is just for you. Listen to a real marketing deep dive between MSP owner Jim Smith and Paul Green. Jim, from Philadelphia-based Proper Sky, has been doing pretty much everything he can to attract more clients, but reached out to Paul to see if he was missing anything. As expected, Jim was already doing some great marketing. However now with Paul’s advice, is poised to make it work even harder and is preparing to invite more new clients into his business. The special extended episode this week has one sole focus – the full deep-dive conversation in it’s entirety. Listen as Jim discusses his MSP’s background, what marketing he’s tried so far and his honest feelings on running a growing MSP – it’s powerful stuff. There are definitely a couple of ‘light-bulb’ moments for Jim during this conversation and hopefully this special episode will help you too. Show notes Out every Tuesday on your favourite podcast platform Presented by Paul Green, an MSP marketing expert A huge thank you to Jim Smith from Proper Sky for allowing this conversation to feature in the podcast Many sites and tools were mentioned during the conversation and all are details here… Email marketing & CRM tools Zoho CRM, Mailchimp, MailerLite, ActiveCampaign and InfusionSoft LinkedIn tools Dux-Soup, Linked Helper and Alfred Direct Mail tool Stannp Outsourcing services including fiverr.com, peopleperhour.com and upwork.com You can join Paul in the MSP Marketing group on Facebook Register for a free copy of Paul’s book Paul mentioned the service MSP Videos (also Darren Wingham from MSP Videos will be Paul’s guest next week, talking about the power of video for your MSP) 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 a special extended episode of the MSP marketing podcast. Now, one of the most common questions that I’m asked by MSPs is how do I get new clients? I think it’s the number one marketing question. Because MSPs are great at retaining clients and upselling them, the challenge is always in bringing new people on board. Recently I had an opportunity to do a marketing consultation for an MSP owner. He’s not someone who’s a client. We were just chatting on LinkedIn. And I realised there was an opportunity here to do a really in-depth, if you like, a deep dive consultation for him on how to get brand new clients in a way that actually benefits you as well. And he very graciously allowed me to record the whole thing. And that’s what today’s episode is. This is about three times, four times, longer than a normal episode, but I think as you listen in, you’ll realise this has an immense power in helping you to get more new clients for your MSP. Voiceover:Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast. Jim Smith:My name is Jim Smith and I’m the owner of Proper Sky. We are a managed service provider located outside of Philadelphia. Paul Green:Jim, you and I caught up on LinkedIn and we started chatting on LinkedIn about your business and about how difficult it can be sometimes to get more new clients and increase your monthly recurring revenue and net profit, and all the things that most MSPs want to increase. I thought it’d be quite handy for us to have a chat and essentially for me to give you a consult, and of course this could form part of the podcast. Let’s start by just getting very brief history of your business. Tell us how you got started, how long you’ve been running, how many techs you’ve got and what kind of clients you’re working with right now. Jim Smith:I started in 2006. I was actually in the United States Peace Corps. We helped a lot of nonprofits and small businesses. I was stationed in a little island in the South Pacific called Tonga. It’s a small country, about 100,000 people. And one of the things that was consistently clear to me is that there were a lot of people doing IT that didn’t do it very well. And when I got back to the States I decided that instead of getting a job, I’d start my own business, helping nonprofits and small businesses with the right team. In 2006, I wrote a little script, believe it or not, that would read Craigslist. And if anybody mentioned the word server, or Windows, or Linux, or something along those lines, it would actually text me a message. 2006, it was pretty high tech and the first five people I called, four of them are still customers to this day, I believe. Paul Green:That’s amazing. That’s great. Jim Smith:That was how it started. And ironically, the first customer that I landed, I was helping them with an Ubuntu server, an Ubuntu mail server for a Nigerian arts collective. And this guy ended up partnering up with another guy in Atlanta that was purchasing dermatology practices. They purchased their first practice in Philadelphia. I helped build their data center. We helped… at the time it was a 2003 cluster server back-end. That practice grew from four providers in four offices to, I think it was almost 70 providers in 60 offices across seven states by the time we were done. And I just grew up on the back of those guys between 2006 and 2013. At one time we were… I think 12 was my staffing level at that point, then that company crashed spectacularly, and went out of business. In 2013 they were 90% of my monthly recurring revenue. Paul Green:Well, you did quite well to survive, because to lose 90% of your monthly recurring revenue and still be here seven years later… Jim Smith:I’ll tell you. We purchased LabTech. They had given me a free pass, I think, to the IT Nation Conference, which I had never been to. I went to that conference. I was sitting at the bar feeling sorry for myself and I bumped into this guy who was another MSP from Seattle. He was like, “Listen, there’s a guy that knows a lot about this, but you need to look at your business as a way for you to sustain a lifestyle and not being a technician.” And he’s like, “Take a look at the way that managed services are run and the model of it. And I think you’ll find that you’ll have some pretty good success.” Jim Smith:I came back from that conference renewed and I basically had a whole bunch of break-fix customers that I had picked up over the years, just small doctors’ offices and just random people that I bumped into and helped. And I basically said, “Hey, listen, we’re only selling managed services contracts. We’re not doing hourly work any longer. And if you want us to be able to help you, here’s what it’s going to look like.” And that was 2013. Now we’re back up to… we were at nine and we were hiring a new dispatcher and salesperson. Paul Green:So you’re up to nine staff again. Now then let’s talk about what kind of clients you’d like for the business. Is it general clients that you have just in the Philly area? Jim Smith:Correct. We target, right now, specifically the five counties in and around Philadelphia. Paul Green:Paint me a picture of what the perfect client looks like. Let’s say the phone rang today and you picked up the phone and it was someone who said, “Oh, I’ve been referred to you,” or, “I’ve been on your website,” and you say, “Well, tell me a little bit about your business.” And imagine everything they say, every single word they say, has you salivating, because you just want this person as a client and you want their business. What does that business look? Jim Smith:The business has significant investment in technology and that’s either in the way of cloud or they understand the value of providing accessible toolkits and just tools to their staff. That’s one of the things that we always look for is somebody that really tries to invest highly in technology. The other thing is we also look for organisations that are regulated. We have a lot of solid experience in the HIPAA and medical space. Doctors and physician groups are always pretty good fits for us. Jim Smith:Generally speaking, we look for people that are looking to partner with an IT company, and just outsource the headache. We want to basically serve as the virtual CIO, if you will. We don’t want them to have to worry about the day to day technology. They understand that it’s important for the organisation. They get it’s important, but they really want to be able to speak to a business owner about what their needs are and not necessarily as in a technical capacity. That’s good. And a big old budget. Paul Green:Yes. Absolutely. And I must, at this point, point out for most of my UK listeners will know this, but most of my US listeners won’t, which is that in the US you guys get away with charging what seems like 10 times more than MSPs can get away with charging in the UK. And we have no idea why there’s this disparity, but sometimes I see things in forums, places like the TechTribe which I’m a member of, or my own MSP Marketing Facebook group, and US people will talk about charging several hundred dollars or a couple of hundred dollars per user and here in the UK we’re charging the equivalent of $50 per user. It’s absolutely insane. But there we go. That’s just the way of the world. Paul Green:I’m going to come back to regulated industries later, because that’s gives me a germ of a marketing idea, which I want to come back to in a bit, but what are you doing marketing-wise right now? Let’s forget your existing clients for now and how you’re upselling them and servicing them. It’s just part of them. Let’s talk about new clients. Specifically, what are you doing right now to get new clients into the business? Jim Smith:A lot of what’s on your podcast resonates with me. Most buyers nowadays are a bit more sophisticated. There’s so much more information and it’s so much easier to vet the quality of a managed services provider online without ever picking up the phone. And not only that, but a customer is so far down into the buying cycle once they’re searching for managed services that they’re pretty much ready to commit, or they know exactly what they’re looking for and the sort of relationship they’re looking to establish. With all that being said, I’ve been focusing on very specific what I considered down level keywords in Google ad words. In my marketplace, it’s very expensive. It could be anywhere from $35 to $45 per click for the search term managed services. Jim Smith:We have some traction there. I had an organisation that I had hired. I had outsourced my marketing originally to an organisation well known in the MSP space. And they had recommended doing long tail geographical landing pages. And we tried that for about a year, we didn’t get much traction. I hired on an agency… For us, it was a pretty high spent. We did a lot of content marketing. We were using outsourced content marketing, and we were doing email blasts, we were doing some social media stuff. And we also just recently turned to buying inbound links through different services. It’s kind of a hodgepodge. I’ve been focusing less on sales and I guess more on marketing. But I haven’t really found a silver bullet. I don’t really know where I need to be spending my time and energy. And that’s, I think part of the challenge. Paul Green:Yeah. And obviously that’s led to this conversation. Do you have… you mentioned you’re doing email blasts, is that to a database of your own prospects that you’ve put together? Jim Smith:Yes and no. We have not done a very good job at collecting potential leads’ email addresses. We have some capture forms on our website, the contact form. One of the projects I’ve actually been working on is we’re a ConnectWise shop, not to speak ill of ConnectWise. They’ve been a fantastic partner and I love it. But their email newsletter tool leaves a little bit to be desired. What we’ve been trying to do is integrate our ConnectWise tool with our CRM tool. In this case, we’re using Zoho. And we’re trying to set up a two way sync between the creation of accounts and prospects inside of ConnectWise that sync into Zoho, and then putting the leads into Zoho and then choosing which ones to sync back into ConnectWise, and then using Zoho as the marketing tool because there’s so much more integration and visibility into who’s looking at what on your website based on the content that you’re sending out. Paul Green:Yeah. That makes perfect sense. Okay. There is so much we can talk about off the back of this. I must just mention in terms of ConnectWise not being a great CRM, I don’t think ConnectWise is a great marketing tool. I’m sure I have no direct experience of it, but I’m sure auto task is the same because that’s not what they’re designed for, of course, whereas you look at something like Zoho CRM, or Mailchimp, or MailerLite, or ActiveCampaign, or Infusionsoft, which are all designed from the ground up to be marketing tools. And I think that kind of integration between the two is a good idea, although… and maybe we’ll come back to this down the line, ConnectWise really shouldn’t be used for any marketing at all. I would focus ConnectWise on delivering to your existing clients and focus Zoho or whichever CRM you’re using to focus on prospecting. Paul Green:And it’s only when someone becomes a client that you shift them off, off to Zoho and into ConnectWise. I realise two different systems jars with people because we all want nice elegant things that talk to each other, but actually marketing to prospects and delivering to clients are two completely different jobs with different communication levels. But we’ll come onto that if we can. First of all, you’re in a really, really good position, Jim. And apart from the fact that you’ve nearly lost the business seven years ago and you recovered, and we could have that conversation with 100 people in the same boat and 95 of them will have gone under and gone and got a job. And I don’t know about you, but that’s my idea of hell is ever having to work for someone else ever again. So genuinely, a massive round of applause to you for pulling round a business turnaround like that. Paul Green:Because you’ve been through that, I think it’s probably made you more resilient than a hell of a lot more people. I think many of us have been through good times and bad times and been through recessions, but to be in a position where you’ve essentially got to start again from scratch seven, eight years after years of hard work down the plug hole is a massive thing. You’ve got this mental resilience, which is awesome. I think the other thing you’ve got going in your favour is you’re doing stuff. You’re investing into SEO, SEO being search engine optimisation, you’re spending on Google ads even though it’s costing you $30, $40 a click, you’re hiring marketing agencies, you’re doing content marketing. This is awesome. Because… I don’t know if you’ve found this in your marketplace, but in most marketplaces I look at, there are very few MSPs that are actually doing any marketing at all. You take… how many MSPs would there be in your marketplace in Philadelphia? Hundreds? Jim Smith:Hundreds, yeah. Paul Green:Hundreds. Yeah. And if we were to do a Google search and look to see how many are actively on Google or how many are doing something or they’re actually putting stuff on their blog or acting on social media, it will be a reasonably small percentage of those. It’s not going to be a massive number of them. And that’s quite exciting because what that does is that it creates opportunity for a small number of players in each marketplace. And we would see this, not just in Philadelphia, not just in the States, we would see this absolutely worldwide. The fact that you understand that you need to market and you need to do stuff gives you a massive, massive psychol…

Full show notes at the publisher

Episode 30: What your MSP can learn from Iron Man Jun 09, 2020

Show notes

In this week’s episode Did you know there’s a link between Iron Man and your MSP? Paul explains why embracing the ‘Iron Man protocol’ could really make your MSP stand out in the crowd and boost your business These days when it comes to marketing your MSP, two things have changed everything. Special guest Heather Harlos from Bitdefender joins Paul to discuss how the shift to digital marketing has combined with the global pandemic to create new opportunities for MSPs Also this week, a listener to the show may not have a problem with recruiting 1st line technicians, but asks Paul for some advice on attracting those with greater experience Show notes Out every Tuesday on your favourite podcast platform Presented by Paul Green, an MSP marketing expert Listen back to Episode 5 in which Paul discussed the legendary book Influence by Dr Robert Cialdini Register for a free copy of Paul’s book Paul’s special guests was Heather Harlos from Bitdefender talking about how marketing has changed in the digital age, in which the customer relationship tool HubSpot was mentioned Many thanks to Justin Chapman from Press Start Ltd for the question about recruiting 2nd and 3rd line techs (listen back to some great ideas for recruitment adverts in Episode 23 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, here’s what’s coming up in this week’s show. Heather Harlos:It’s not always the right time to ask somebody to buy something, I think that’s something that salespeople miss. You probably shouldn’t ask them to buy something yet. Paul Green:We’re also going to be talking about email subject lines that get opens, because email marketing is still a powerful thing to do. And, how to recruit second and third line techs. Voiceover:Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast. Paul Green:So our family, along with around about 50 million other families around the world, have now got Disney Plus. I have to say, it’s a pretty good package, isn’t it? You’ve got your Star Wars in there, you’ve got all your classic Disney stuff, you’ve got The Simpsons. And, you’ve got Marvel, and I absolutely adore Marvel. Find me a 45 year old man, with the beating heart of a 14 year old boy inside him who doesn’t love Marvel. I think what Marvel have done over the last 10, 11 years, building up that cinematic universe, is just amazing. Paul Green:Of course, one of my favourite characters is Iron Man, played by Robert Downey Jr., Tony Stark. I was chatting to my nine year old daughter about Robert Downey Jr., she’s really, surprisingly, into the Marvel movies, which is great, sitting watching them together. We were talking about Robert Downey Jr., and I was telling her he’d had some troubles in his life, and now he’s one of the highest paid actors in the world. In fact, for End Game alone, he made $20 million as a base salary, that was just to do the acting. And then, because he has a bit of backend, he takes a percentage of the backend profits. He’s made, so far, an additional $55 million, because of course, End Game getting on for $3 billion worldwide, or something like that. It’s an immense amount of cash. Paul Green:I think Robert Downey Jr., I don’t know, can anyone justify owning $75 million for one piece of work? Maybe. But, I think he’s worth every penny. From everything that I’ve read, all the directors think he’s worth every penny, as well. One of the reasons for that is when you hire Robert Downey Jr., you don’t just hire him and his star power, his ability to attract people into theatres, you also get a pretty unique process from him, which leads to more interesting scripting for your film. Paul Green:What he does is, when you hire Robert Downey Jr., he will get the script, and obviously he’ll turn up on set, and he’ll deliver the script as it’s been written. But what he also does is he has his own script writer, and his own script writer rewrites his dialogue, three or four times. So they look at what it is he’s supposed to be saying in a scene, or his character’s supposed to be saying in a scene, and they’ll do three or four different versions of it. He, when he’s on set, constantly wears an earpiece. Paul Green:So they’ll do the first take, and that will be the scripted version. And then, in between the takes, in between take one and take two, an assistant will read him his lines for the second take. So he’s not doing the original lines that were written by the movie script writer, he’s now doing his own script writer’s lines. And then, he’ll do the same thing for the third, and the fourth, and the fifth. So essentially, you’re getting him acting, and playing it out, and his character doing lots and lots of different lines, every single time you do a script. Paul Green:Apparently, directors find this incredibly useful because he’s not being disrupted offset, he’s got an earpiece in his ear, he’s got an assistant feeding these lines to him, and he’s paying for all of this. I mean, $75 million for a film, I’m sure he can afford an assistant, and a script writer, and a wireless earpiece. But, he’s doing all of this off his own back, so that his character can come up with more interesting things. A lot of the iconic lines, the things that we know from Marvel, such as, “I am Iron Man.” You remember, it was the big reveal at the end of the very first Iron Man film, the one that really kicked it all off. That was, essentially, an ad-libbed line. This is what makes Robert Downey Jr. so, so powerful to movie directors. Paul Green:Now, what could Iron Man possibly have to teach at MSP? Very simply, Robert Downey Jr. goes the extra mile. And he doesn’t just go the extra mile a little bit, he studied, in some detail, what would make me more valuable to these people. “They’re paying me a lot of money for these films, I want to be a very, very wealthy mega-star. I also want to have the best lines in the film.” Paul Green:Because you know, Iron Man was never guaranteed to be the big star of Marvel, he’s worked hard, over 10 years, to make Iron Man incredibly successful, to the extent that, no spoilers, but when things happen in End Game … and, come on, it’s been out a year now, we’ve all seen it, surely. But, when things happen in End Game, it has the most incredible emotional impact because we’ve invested 10 years into a character that we absolutely adore. He’s done that off his own back, he’s hired his own script writer, he’s written his own process, it’s an incredible thing to do. Paul Green:Let’s flip that back to your MSP. What could you do, off your own back, that generates so much more value for your clients? I guess what we’re looking for here is what could you do for your client that, routinely and systematically, over services them? We’ve all heard the phrase before, that you should under promise and over deliver, but actually, this is a real thing. When you start working with a brand new client, and they’re expecting something from you, how amazing if, from day one, you’re constantly over delivering. Of course, yeah they’re going to get used to that, eventually, that stops being very special to them after a couple years, when you’re over delivering, over delivering, that becomes the new normal. But, what a great way to get a new client started. Paul Green:When the lockdown started, I spoke to many of the MSPs that I work with, clients, not clients, people that I just know, and the ones that seemed to do the best with their clients, and that certainly had fewer retention problems than others were the ones who constantly over service their clients. So they were ringing them up, they were saying, “What frustrations have you got? What can we do to make your life easier? How is that annoying you, what the best thing for us to do here?” And they were constantly over servicing them. They were finding out what their expectations where, and they were going the whole extra hog. Essentially, they were taking the Iron Man approach to it. Paul Green:So here’s a challenge for you, maybe this is something you and your team can jump on a Teams call, you can talk about later on this week. What can you do to over service your clients? When we say what can you do, we mean the easy things. We’re not talking, here, about massively upping your extra level of service, but something simple. For example, could you start doing training videos for them, tech tips just for your clients? Could you start doing a drop in, maybe it’s a Teams call once a week, and any of your users could just drop in? They haven’t got to log a support ticket, but if they’ve got a small, minor thing, an irritant, a thing they’d love to have fixed but they’ve never gotten around to raising a support ticket, could they just drop in, and it’s almost like a clinic? Paul Green:What if you could go through a process of ringing all of your clients once a month, say? So, someone in the office is responsible for ringing, yes the decision makers, but also the influencers as well, and maybe other key users in the business. People who are putting in lots of tickets, or people who seem to be influencing other people with their tech support. Yes, there’s a burden there, of calling people, but what great service! In fact, what kind of problems are you going to unearth, before they actually become a problem? Wouldn’t it be better to tackle stuff proactively, both from their point of view, but also to stop things getting worse, and to stop frustrations increasing? Let’s call this the Iron Man protocol. How can you put it in place in your business today? Voiceover:Here’s this week’s clever idea. Paul Green:As much as email marketing is getting harder and harder, it’s getting harder to get people’s email address, to actually get your emails delivered to them, let alone getting them to open it. Email marketing is so important, it should still be at the cornerstone of your direct response marketing. Paul Green:You’ll have heard me say before on the podcast how important it is to build audiences of people, build a relationship with them, and then obviously be there at the point they’re ready to switch from their incumbent MSP. Well, the number one audience that you should be building is your email list because it’s the only one that you completely control. No one can ever take your opt-in email list away from you. LinkedIn can snatch your audience away from you, if Microsoft falls out with you for whatever reason. And Mark Zuckerberg can definitely take your Facebook, or your Instagram, or your Messenger lists away from you, if Facebook changes its mind about how it’s algorithms should work, again. But, no one can ever remove your email list, it’s your data. Paul Green:So you should be focusing on building your email list using ethical bribes, which is something that you give to someone in return for their contact details, to build up your opt-in email lists. For an MSP, even just 500 prospects in an email list is enough. I mean, 1000, 2000 would be better, but 500 prospects is enough because it’s not like you need 50 new clients every single week. You need one new client a month, or every now and again, or whatever will fill the capacity that your MSP has got. Paul Green:So when it comes to email marketing, as I said, the challenge is getting it delivered to them. The challenge is, then, to get them to open it. And, what dictates whether or not someone opens an email versus deleting it, or just hitting the spam button, are two things. The first is the person or the company that sent it to them, and the second is the subject line. Paul Green:Now, I prefer to send emails that come from me, so if you’re on my email list, and if you’re not you can go and join up at paulgreensmspmarketing.com, and you’ll see that when I send out promotional emails, they just have my name, Paul Green, in the subject line. So what I’m looking to do is to build a relationship with my audience, and it’s based around my name. Company name is irrelevant to me, and you could do exactly the same with your MSP. You could base the name around you, so your MSP might be called XYZ IT, and your name might be Dave Smith but it’s much better to send it as Dave Smith. People who receive emails from other people are more likely to open them, more likely to build a bond. And ultimately, people buy from people anyway. People don’t buy from companies, they just buy from other people. Paul Green:I would send your promotional emails with a name, just make sure it’s a name of someone who isn’t going to leave. As the owner of the business, you’re the last person to leave. In fact, when you do leave, you care less about what happens to the business. You can always broker a deal to license your name for a year, for the new owners when they’re doing email marketing, if that’s important to them. So the sender name is easy, the hard thing is getting the email subject lines right. Paul Green:So I’ve got here three or four areas of subject lines, which I’ve always found work very, very well. And from what I’ve read in the newsletters that I’m subscribed to, because I’m subscribed to it feels like hundreds of different email marketing lists, these are the ones that tend to perform better. Paul Green:So in no particular order, we’ll start with social proof. Now, social proof is where most people prefer to do what most other people are doing. Social proof directly hooks into us as cave-dwelling animals, who are somewhere in the middle of the food chain, something’s going to eat us, so therefore, basically, if we stick together, there’s safety in numbers. We prefer to do what most other people are doing. A social proof email subject line is a very smart thing to do, something that, perhaps, highlights how other people are using your service. Paul Green:So you could say something like, “We’re humbled at this feedback from our client,” that would be a great piece of social proof. Or, if there is actually a short snippet of something they’ve actually written in a review, or a testimonial, you’d actually put that short line in the subject line, perhaps in inverted commas. Now, the concept of social proof was first coined by Dr. Robert Cialdini, in his 1980s, 1990s book Influence, and he calls it a weapon of influence. Paul Green:In fact, another one of his weapons of influence is scarcity, because when there’s only a short supply of something, we have to make a decision in our brains. Do we want this, or don’t we want it? So scarcity, or urgency, can be a great email subject line as well. In fact, I would say this is one of the most powerful types of subject line you have to use. The only issue you’ve got with scarcity for an MSP is, what’s your real scarcity? Because software licenses never run out, hardware, I know we’ve had supply issues, but hardware doesn’t really run out in normal times. The only thing you’ve got that really runs out is appointments, or slots, or project time, or something like that. So a great scarcity email subject line would be something like, “There are only three of these available.” Or, much better, maybe, is a deadline. “This ends on Sunday at six PM,” something like that. Paul Green:Another subject line that’s easy, and gets good open rates as well, is actually just relaying news. So you can take something that’s happening in our world, and let’s be honest, there’s plenty of places to go within the channel to do this, and then you can just rewrite it, and pop it in your email newsletter, and the subject line can be about something new. People do love reading about new devices, they do love reading about new services, so long as they’re relevant to them. The big challenge for you in doing this is not to be too techy. If you’re too techy, and you start using technical terms, you’re going to abs…

Full show notes at the publisher

Episode 29: Should your MSP have its own podcast? Jun 02, 2020

Show notes

In this week’s episode Google are not really in the search business, they’re in the experience business. Paul’s joined by an SEO expert (who also happens to be the VP of marketing at SolarWinds) to explain this and how you can appear higher in searches Did you know there’s a way to grow your business by 33% this year WITHOUT having to increase your activities by 33%? Paul explains the 3 simple steps that can help you achieve this Also this week, having your own podcast can seem appealing, but a question from a listener prompts Paul to go behind the scenes of his own show and explain the good, bad and ugly side of creating a weekly podcast Show notes Out every Tuesday on your favourite podcast platform Presented by Paul Green, an MSP marketing expert Find out more about marketing legend Jay Abraham and his books Paul’s special guests was Kyle Sutton from SolarWinds talking about how to improve your search engine optimisation (his email is Kyle.Sutton@Solarwinds.com) Kyle mentioned the fooling tools, Google Search Console, SEMrush and Google Business Many thanks to Wayne Stanley from Iron Dome for the question about starting your own podcast Paul currently uses a Samson Studio USB microphone and his producer James Lett uses a combination of Audacity, Adobe Audition and hosts the podcast on the Castos platform The guest on June 9th will be Heather Harlos from Bitdefender talking about how marketing has changed in the digital age 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 :It’s an absolute pleasure to be back on your device for another podcast this week. And here is what I’ve got lined up for you. Kyle Sutton:How does Google make money? They’re not really in the search business, they’re in the experience business. Paul Green :We’re also going to be looking at how to grow your business by 33% over the next year, and it’s a lot easier than you’d think it would be, with three specific things to focus on. And I’m going to answer a question from an MSP of whether or not you should do a podcast to promote your business. Voiceover:Paul Green’s MSP Marketing podcast. Paul Green :I try to support local businesses whenever I can, independent businesses. And there’s a little coffee shop that was near my house for a couple of years. It was called the Coffee Bean, and it was an absolutely wonderful place to go. It was run by a family. The dad was in the kitchen, the mum was out front, the adult children were the waiters and the waitresses. And they ran that business for about, must be about two and a half, three years. And it reached a point of perfection because it was quite a big unit that they were in. And when they first opened, you know what people are like with new businesses. They flock to have a look and they’re a bit suspicious, but there’s something about this that they just got right on day one. The coffee was delicious. The cakes were delicious. The food was just amazing. And it was one of those places you suddenly found yourself going two or three days a week. And the weekend, if my family were like, “Should we just nip out for lunch?” I’d be like, “Coffee Bean.” Paul Green :I mean, there was a Costa Coffee and a Starbucks choice as well, but I would always be like, “Coffee Bean. Let’s go to the Coffee Bean.” Everything about it was perfect. It was the atmosphere, it was the staff. The customers seemed to enjoy it. It was beautiful. And then around about a year ago, they sold the business. And frankly, I’m not surprised because they looked exhausted. They must have been making some pretty good money out of it, but they all of them looked just generally a bit exhausted all of the time. And I think working six days a week, 51 weeks a year, who’d want to do that in a cafe? That can’t be much fun and you can’t be making that much money out of it. Paul Green :Anyway, they sold the business quite easily and I’m not surprised. It was a very well run business. It was clearly churning out net profits and they sold it fairly easily. And then the new owner came in, and I’m looking at acquiring a business this year. And if I buy something that works very well, I’m not going to fiddle with that. I’m going to fiddle with the things that aren’t working very well. And I’m assuming I’m going to buy some kind of business that operationally does well, but from a marketing point of view could be improved. And this guy that bought the Coffee Bean, he’s a nice enough guy, but he’s kind of changed it. I mean, it started with little things. They put up televisions. So the Coffee Bean has never had big televisions up. And suddenly I went in about a week after they bought it and there were big televisions up, and they were playing music videos. And you think, “Okay.” But it changes the atmosphere of it. Paul Green :And then the coffee changed and then the menu changed. And it wasn’t just the actual food that changed. The look of the menu changed. It went from being a nice paper based menu to being that horrible wiped down plastic, if you know what I mean, that’s kind of the greasy spoon type menus. And then the menu changed again and they stopped doing half the dishes that they used to, and it all became a bit chip heavy. And then the nice cakes kind of vanished and they became Costco cakes. Paul Green :There’s nothing wrong with all of these. These are all choices. And prices went down as well. That was it. Everything got a little bit cheaper. But essentially they bought something that worked very well, that churned out net profit, that was a very efficient business. And for a cafe to achieve that in a couple of years is quite impressive. And then they broke it. If you go in there these days, and I’m guessing because I’ve stopped going, but if you go in there these days, certainly outside of normal lockdown and quarantine, it’s half empty. You just don’t see the regulars that used to go in there anymore because it’s just not nice. It was not cheap before. You were certainly paying a good price for what you were getting. Whereas now it’s interesting, isn’t it? It’s cheap, it’s lower quality and it’s attracted a different kind of person. Paul Green :I guess what I’m trying to say with this is when something works, don’t break it. It’s very tempting for us to be constantly reinventing the business all the time. And so often I’m talking to some of my MSP clients and we’ll be talking about PSAs, and there’ll be with auto task or there’ll be with this, or they’ll be with that. And they just want to shift. They want to switch over almost for the sake of trying to find something else. The grass is always greener in the other PSA. And actually sometimes it’s a case of look, you’ve got auto task or you’ve got ConnectWise manager, whatever you’ve got. Do you like it? It’s okay. Does it do the job? Yeah, it’s okay. Then why don’t you just stick with that for a year or for two years? Because you can be constantly switching around, but maybe, just maybe you’re breaking something. Maybe you’re investing the business into a 10 to 20 hour project and there’s no real outcome from it. There’s no real bonus or benefit from switching to a different PSA. Paul Green :Look at your business right now. In fact, you can rank your business in all different areas on a scale of one to 10, where one is just awful and 10 is literally couldn’t be any better. And if you were to look at your sales and marketing, at your operations, at your service desk, at your ability to generate net profit, at your management, at your leadership, at your staff, at all of these different things, how would you rank them? If you’re really good at delivering a great service for clients, don’t change it. Don’t break it. Focus on the areas that are not good. Every single business has areas that are good and not good. And of course, as you go off and fix one area, sometimes another area breaks while your attention is diverted elsewhere. So there are always things that can be fixed in a business, but you’ve got to focus on those things and don’t destroy the things that work just because you want to meddle with them. Voiceover:Here’s this week’s clever idea. Paul Green :Many MSPs think that the route to growing the business is all about getting new clients. And certainly you need to be onboarding new clients on a regular basis. It’s a good systematic habit to be getting into because you do lose clients eventually, so you need to make sure that you’re onboarding new ones. But in my mind, there are actually three jobs that you need to be focused on at the same time. You need to get more new clients, you need to get those new clients to buy from you more often, and you need to get your clients to spend more every single time they buy. And these three ways to grow your business were first put together by a marketing legend called Jay Abraham. Do go and Google him and look him up. I’ve bought, it must be 10,000, maybe 20,000 pounds worth of Jay Abraham stuff over the years, and much of today’s modern marketing can really be traced back to Jay’s career. He’s put out some amazing stuff over the years. Paul Green :In fact, my favourite thing I bought of his was I bought about four or five years ago, I bought a hard disc and it was called A Dump of Jay Abraham’s computer. And it was all of his old programs, all of his old audio. I mean, there was literally 20 years worth of stuff in there. I did find a document with Tony Robbins’ mobile phone number in as well. I mean, there were thousands of documents on this thing and I didn’t think I was supposed to have that document. And no, I haven’t phoned it yet. Maybe one day when I’ve had a few wines and I’m feeling a bit brave and it’s 10:00 AM California time. Maybe I’ll just try it then and see if that’s still a valid number. I suspect it’s not. Paul Green :Anyway, Jay Abraham was talking about doing these three things simultaneously, and this is something I’ve adapted into my teachings and I’ve been talking about this for years. You can’t just go and get more new clients. You’ve also at exactly the same time, got to increase the number of times they buy, and increase how much they spend every single time they buy, because these three things then work together to leverage up your turnover. Let me give you an example of this. I’m going to simplify it somewhat, away from actual real life business, but just to make my point. So let’s say you had 100 clients and they’re all on a monthly contract with you. So essentially they’re buying from you 12 times a year because they’re paying something monthly. Paul Green :It’s a good way to think about your monthly recurring revenue clients. They’re actually making 12 purchases a year from you. Isn’t that great when you think about it? So you’ve got 100 clients buying from you 12 times a year. And let’s say just for figures sake, they’re spending a hundred pounds a month or $100 a month. 100 clients multiplied by 12 multiplied by a hundred pounds or $100 gives you a turnover of 120,000. Now what if we can increase all of those three areas by just 10%? so we get 10% more new clients. That means 110 clients. What if we could get them to buy a 13th time in the year? So we find something else during the year that they can buy. Let’s call it a mini project. Because 12 times a year increased by 10% is they’re buying 13.2 times a year. Don’t worry too much about the 0.2. It means some people are buying 13. Some people are buying 12. Paul Green :They were spending on average a hundred pounds a month. If we increase that by 10% to 110 pounds a month, well, let’s multiply those figures. 110 clients multiplied by 13.2, which is the number of times they buy in a year, multiplied by the average monthly spend of 110. Now, previously we had a turnover of 120,000. Just increasing those three areas by 10% increases our turnover to 159,720 pounds or dollars. That’s actually a 33% increase in turnover. And yet we didn’t have to increase the number of clients by 33%. We didn’t have to sell them more by 33%. This is so exciting. And it’s when you focus on these three things at exactly the same time, that’s when you really start to see the power of growing the business strategically. Paul Green :So what does this mean in real life? Well, obviously you should be looking for new clients all the time. As often as you can onboard new clients, onboard new clients, because they do stay with you a long time. It then means getting them all onto monthly recurring revenue. I’m sure you do that anyway. No more ad hoc clients, no more break/fix clients. If you want to shift to the MSP model and you’re not already there, shift to the MSP model. Just stop taking on new ad hoc or new break/fix clients. And the real win for you then is to focus on increasing average monthly spend. If you can increase the amount of money that each of your client spends with you each month, that will be such a powerful thing. And in fact, that’s where the extra net profits lie. Paul Green :What we’re really talking about here is great account management. It’s about doing strategic reviews with your clients on a regular basis and finding out what they need, what they want and what they’re scared of. Because if you can fulfil a need or you can fulfil a perceived want, or you can take that fear away from them and you will have services and products and things that you can do to achieve all of these, then that’s going to be a way for you to grow your monthly recurring revenue and increase your monthly spend or their monthly spend with you the easy way. And the reason to do that with strategic reviews is simply because it’s the cleverest and smartest way to do it. You don’t want to be the MSP that’s constantly ringing them up, asking them to buy more, but you meet with them, either every six months or 12 months to review where their business is going over the next couple of years. The sales opportunities will just present themselves. Voiceover:Paul’s blatant plug. Paul Green :Did you know, we have a free community where we discuss things like this? In fact, all the things that we talk about on the podcast tend to be reflected in the Facebook group as well. It’s called the MSP Marketing Facebook group. It’s free to join, but only if you actually run or own an MSP. Unfortunately, and I’m sorry vendors, it’s just a vendor free zone. So when you apply to join, we do ask you to post your website, just so me and my team can double check that you are indeed a proper MSP and not a vendor trying to sneak in. So grab your Facebook on your phone, go to the search bar at the top, type in MSP Marketing. And then if you go to groups and I should be the top result. You’ll see a little picture of my face. And it’s called the MSP Marketing Facebook group. Apply to join it. Paul Green :We normally let you in within 24 hours. And you’re going to join a community of more than 800 MSPs from all around the world, talking about all the things that market and grow your business. Would love to see you in there. Voiceover:The big interview. Kyle Sutton:Hi, my name is Kyle Sutton. I’m the senior director of marketing with SolarWinds MSP. Pretty extensive background in search. So I spent about 11 years on the agency side, running digital media campaign from everything from mom and pop brick and mortars to the Fortune 100. Started in search on the paid side, moved into organic and ran teams there for many years. Paul Green :Now we all know that appearing high up in search results is absolutely critical. And for most MSPs, myself included, I’ll be honest, we see SEO or search engine optimisation as a bit of a dark art. You’re never quite aware of what people are doing and what you should be doing and what you shouldn’t be doing, because it all see…

Full show notes at the publisher

Episode 28: The huge profit impact of price increases May 26, 2020

Show notes

In this week’s episode Some of the best IT innovations are born from the simplest of ideas, just like the incredible physical Helpdesk Buttons that allow your users to summon support. Paul’s joined by Alex Permenter and his colleague Elizabeth Copeland to discuss how they developed this very clever concept and how you can use it to market your MSP Also in this week’s show, Paul talks about the immense impact of price increases and why you should be constantly nudging your prices up Plus Paul discusses the ‘wheel of life’. Business is so important and so consuming, but you have to remember all the other things that you need to have for a healthy balance Show notes Out every Tuesday on your favourite podcast platform Presented by Paul Green, an MSP marketing expert Listen back to the episode discussing how best to price adhoc work here Find out more about Paul’s monthly marketing service at MSPmarketingedge.com Paul’s special guests were Alex Permenter and Elizabeth Copeland developers of the incredible Helpdesk Buttons Many thanks to Ashley Kennedy from Pure IT for the question on how to test social media effectiveness The guest on June 2nd will be Kyle Sutton from SolarWinds talking about how to improve your search engine optimisation 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 another packed show. Here’s what we’ve got coming up for you this week. Alex Permenter:We’re trying to figure out a way to make it very easy for end users to put in tickets. Somebody came up with the idea of physically hitting a button and we sort of laughed. Paul Green:We are also going to be looking at the immense impact of putting up your prices and answering a question for an MSP about how you know when your social media is working. Voiceover:Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast. Paul Green:I record this podcast quite a few weeks ahead and as of date of recording, we’re still in lockdown or quarantine here in the UK and we’re not supposed to leave our homes unless we’re going out either to go shopping for food or go for exercise or if our work can’t be done from home. Of course work like this can be done from home, can’t it? I have to say what’s been wonderful apart from the fact that weather’s been so nice, is just spending loads of time with my nine year old daughter. Paul Green:I have a good work life balance in normal times, but just lately it’s been absolutely cracking because of course we’ve literally physically been together, trapped in the same house. I dare use the word trapped, but stuck in the same house literally 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And thank goodness what has been already a good relationship between the two of us has just got better and better and we’ve done loads of stuff together. Paul Green:Weekends have been great but weekdays as well have have been good fun and yet I’m also getting good work done. And I was chatting this over with some of my MSP masterminders just a few weeks ago when we were doing a Zoom call and we were talking about the wheel of life. It’s about remembering that there’s more to life than just work and it’s very easy for us, especially at times of crisis where we have to work a little bit harder, and I know that most MSPs have just done some sterling work over the last couple of months in terms of supporting people, getting them through this, getting them set up for remote working, removing their frustrations, and then going out and marketing and finding new clients because of course this is a great time to steal people from their incumbent MSP when they’re unhappy, when they haven’t been looked after properly because not everyone has been doing such a good job as you’ve been doing. Paul Green:The wheel of life is all about balance and if you found that tomorrow that you only had, let’s say five years left. For some reason your doctor rings you tomorrow and says, “Yeah, hi. Do you remember those tests you had last year? Well, I just remembered I found your test results on my desk. I’ve been meaning to call you for a few months. Unfortunately you’ve got a really rare and bizarre condition, which means you will just drop dead five years tomorrow. So, sorry about that. I have a good life. Bye.” Paul Green:And I’ve picked five years by the way because that’s not a short enough time for you to immediately knee jerk and make some massive changes to your life, but it’s also not 10, 15, 20 years. What’s most likely off the back of a fairly unlikely scenario like that is that you would go and put more balance into your life if you don’t already have that. Paul Green:There are a number of things that we have to balance. We have to balance our health, we have to balance our family, we have to balance our wealth, and if we get these things out of balance, that’s when we feel wrong in some way. If you ever find yourself getting to a Friday evening and all you can do on a Friday evening is pull yourself onto the sofa and get a glass of wine or a beer and start binging Netflix because you’re exhausted, then that’s a red flag if you like. The balance is out of whack for you. Paul Green:There are many other flags. Your family saying that they don’t spend enough time with you or you get into holiday times and it being a massive, massive stress. Getting yourself prepared for the holiday. The family might prepare themselves, but you yourself are quite stressed out because it’s an enormous amount of work for you to get the business and yourself ready. These are all flags that your wheel of life, your balance is out of whack. Paul Green:Now there are five elements of the wheel of life, which you need to make sure that you’ve got in the correct balance. And the first two are the two resources that we need the most and the two reasons really why we have our own business and that’s cash and time. So most of us, we started our own business because we wanted control. We wanted to be our own person. We wanted some times maybe to stick it to the man, but we start the business for all these different reasons and then over a longer period of time we keep going with it because we enjoy the cash that it generates and also because we enjoy having control of our own time and cash and time are our two most basic resources and if you don’t have enough of either of those, that’s when it feels painful. Paul Green:If you’re throwing all of your time into the business and it’s not chucking out enough cash for you, that’s painful. It’s actually equally painful if you’re throwing all your time into the business and he’s chucking out loads of cash, but there’s no time left. You’ve got to have the right balance of cash and time. And a very smart friend of mine was saying to me just a few weeks ago how they’re going to rebalance their life because they’re making a ton of cash out of their different business ventures, but they felt that the time was just wrong, that they weren’t doing all the things that they wanted to do. In fact, as part of lockdown, they’ve been going for very long walks every day in some beautiful sunshine and just really enjoying life. That whole thing of stopping to smell the roses. Paul Green:So you need a balance of cash, you need a balance of time. You also need a balance of family. Family are the most important people in our lives if you think about it. I was about to say you only have one family and of course that’s not true is it? Many people go on to have two or sometimes even three families, but we’ve got to look after the family that we’ve got. Your other half, your children, maybe even your extended family, your parents if they’re still here, we do truly only have one family. And as much as sometimes we all want to kill them, slowly or quickly, family are the most important people we’ve got. Paul Green:There’s also having fun. What’s your idea of fun? Is it golf? Is it hang gliding? Is it going out into the woods and building dens or sleeping overnight in the middle of a field or riding cows or whatever you’re into? Whatever your fun is, you’ve got to do more of that fun. Paul Green:Unfortunately a lot of my fun I’ve not been able to do during lockdown because my fun involves wandering around London with a camera, it involves going to the cinema, but I’ve been able to really get into running, I mean like seriously get into running. Some days I’ve be running 10 miles, which if you’d said to me just 12 months ago, “Hey, you’re going to be going out for 10 mile run some days.” I’d literally be laughing at you. But I’ve discovered that running is fun. And of course it’s having very positive effects on my weight and on my mental wellbeing as well. Paul Green:So, I’ve discovered some new fun from that, which is great. And I’ve prioritised, in fact, it’s really interesting, I found a way to prioritise almost every single day of the week going out for a long run. And before lockdown I wouldn’t have done that. I’d have been too busy doing something else. So, I’ve been quite grateful to lockdown for being able to address that balance and put some fun back into that. Paul Green:So, we’ve got cash, we’ve got time, we’ve got family, we’ve got fun. There’s one more thing that has to go in and that is meaningful work because people like you and me, we have to work. We have to find things that we can do to challenge our brain, to entertain us almost through our work and when I sold my first business back in 2016 I took more or less six months off. I had bits and bobs of work, but none of it was particularly meaningful and mentally I was so bored. I was doing almost any activity just to give myself something to do. I will never put myself in that situation ever again. Paul Green:If I sell another business, I will absolutely put in place projects, in fact, I’m already lining up things that I can do in my fifties and sixties. I want to start a charity. I want to be a magistrate. I want to be a fiction writer. All of these are things that I can challenge my brain with. So, right up to the moment where I cannot work because my body or my mind will not allow me to anymore, I’m going to throw myself into meaningful work. Paul Green:And do you know what? I bet you I last longer because I’m keeping my brain going and I’ve got meaningful work, things to do. So all of those things need to be in balance. Cash, time, family, fun, and meaningful work. And if you feel that your wheel of life balance isn’t quite right at the moment, please do take some time, perhaps some time at the weekend, to reflect on what’s out of balance and please do take urgent action on it because this stuff is so important. Voiceover:Here’s this week’s clever idea. Paul Green:Now this one’s a biggie because I want to talk about putting your prices up and the immense impact on your bottom line of doing that. Now, as I said earlier on, I have recorded this quite a few weeks ahead, so I’m not quite sure if you’re still in quarantine now or lockdown, but certainly the world is in a very different place and what I’m about to talk about might not be for now, but it might be something to do down the line. Paul Green:Saying that, there might be some prices that you can increase now and some prices which you can’t. And we’ll come to that towards the end of this segment. But in general, putting up your prices is something that you have to do on a regular basis, at least annual. I would almost recommend that you review your prices twice a year because the impact of putting up your price, even just a few percent, is absolutely massive when you’re focused on the bottom line. Paul Green:And remember the purpose of the business is not to provide IT support to your clients and to provide employment to your staff, the purpose of the business is to give you a great life and to churn out loads of net profit every single year in order to give you that great life. In fact, your clients will end up with a better service longterm and your staff will end up with more pleasurable, better paid jobs long term, if your business is highly profitable. No one, trust me, no one wants to work for a business that struggles for years and years and years and ultimately it’s not much fun being a client of that business either. So, you really owe it to your family, you owe it to your staff and bizarrely, you owe it to your clients to put your prices up enough to make enough net profit that the business is fun to run. Paul Green:It’s rewarding enough to run, and you can provide a really high level of service. Now, let me give you an example of how much putting up your prices can make such a big difference. Let’s say you made a 30% gross margin, just simplify everything that you sell. Everything you sell you make a 30% gross margin and let’s say that you put up your prices by just 5%. Now, putting up the prices across the board by just 5%, which I know you wouldn’t do but just go with this for an example, you could actually afford to lose 14% of your revenue and you would still make the same amount of gross profit. Paul Green:Now let’s assume you were able to put your prices up by 20%. You could actually lose 40% of your revenue and still make the same amount of gross margin. That’s the beautiful impact, and that’s just putting up your prices 20%. That’s the beautiful impact of increasing prices. It has a dramatic effect on the bottom line. Paul Green:Now even if you are scared of putting up the front end prices, there’s always something that you can do in the backend. What’s the difference between front end and backend? Well, front end are the prices that your clients see, that prospects see, so your per user charge or your per device charge. Maybe even what you’re charging for Office 365 or some of your other basic subscriptions, the things that they can go and compare to other MSPs. But then you have a series of backend prices as well. And do you remember just two weeks ago, in episode 25, we were talking about how much do you charge for ad hoc clients and how you probably weren’t charging enough. That’s a perfect example of a backend price. Paul Green:Very, very few of your clients, when they start working with you, will ask you how much you’re going to charge them per hour for ad hoc pricing. It’s the same with projects now. They may care about the project cost when they first come on board with and there’s a certain onboarding costs, but long term they’re just not going to ask a question like that because it just doesn’t occur to them to say, “Hey, you know in about four years time when you’re going to get rid of our server and move us to the cloud, how much is that going to cost us?” Paul Green:Because apart from the fact that you can’t price it, it just doesn’t occur to them to look at something like that. So, if you can’t put up your front end prices now because of the current situation, perfectly understandable. You’ve got to remain competitive, you’ve got to remain good value for money to your clients. But there are always backend prices that you can just nudge up and nudge up and nudge up. And remember that figure a 5% increase in prices. If nothing else changes, you could lose 14% of your work and still make the same amount of gross margin. Paul Green:Now what we’re really looking to do is to keep all of that work, put the price up, and actually keep all of the gross margin and add more gross margin. That would be the ultimate goal. Stick something in your diary every six months just to have a look at your prices, review them, have a look at how vendor prices have gone up and you don’t just want to adjust for inflation as it were or for their price increases, you want to make sure that you’re also adjusting so your own net profits are going up every six or 12 months. Voiceover:Paul’s blatant p…

Full show notes at the publisher

Episode 27: A good time to buy a competitor? May 19, 2020

Show notes

In this week’s episode What will be the new normal for MSPs when the pandemic is over? Paul’s joined by special guests Heather and Brian Johnson from Gozynta to talk about what we’re going to be facing and how you can spot some huge opportunities amongst the chaos We’re also going to be discussing growing through acquisition and whether or not you’ll be able to pick up some of your competitors because of everything that’s happening right now Also this week Paul has a ton of advice about the one thing that most likely to keep you awake in bed at 4am – cashflow management Show notes Out every Tuesday on your favourite podcast platform Presented by Paul Green, an MSP marketing expert While talking about growing by acquisition, Paul mentioned the past conversations with growth expert Jonathan Jay from The Dealmaker’s Academy in Episode 10, plus how MSPs are typically valued with The IT Business Growth Expert Richard Tubb in Episode 21 Order your free copy of Paul’s book Updating Servers Doesn’t Grow Your Business Paul’s special guests were Brian and Heather Johnson from Gozynta talking about finding new opportunities during financially uncertain times. Within this they mentioned one of their products Mobius Connect and Tixt Many thanks to Jason Watts from Neveco for the question about making tech cool The guest on May 26th will be Alex Permenter and Elizabeth Copeland developers of the incredible Helpdesk Buttons 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:Well I can’t quite believe it. We’ve been doing this podcast for half a year now. It feels both longer and shorter in so many different ways. Here’s what we’ve got coming up on today’s show. Heather Johnson:And then everything’s different. You’re in a new reality and it is scary. It is very easy to get in the mindset of I’m just kind of going down with the ship, but you don’t need to do that. Paul Green:We’re also going to be talking about something which on the surface doesn’t seem cool, but as business owners, we all know how important it is and why we’ve got to keep a grip on this because it keeps us up at night. It’s cash flow management. And I’m going to be answering a question from a listener about is there any way that we can make tech cool for the prospects that we want to engage with on social media. Voiceover:Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast. Paul Green:One of the fastest ways to grow your business is actually not to try and do it organically by adding new clients, but instead to go out and acquire a competitor and I’m a big fan of acquisitions. One of my best friends is Jonathan Jay, who if you few listened to episode 10 of the podcast, he was on then talking about acquiring businesses. It’s what he teaches people to do, to buy and sell businesses. And I myself are looking at acquiring some businesses this year in my town where I live of Milton Keynes. I’m not interested in MSPs, but I tell you what is interesting. Right now with the way that things are right now, I think this is potentially some opportunities coming up for you to acquire something and I know there’s going to be opportunities for me to acquire something in the next six months ahead. Paul Green:Now going to start right from the start by saying with everything that’s happening right now and the impact it’s had on businesses, is unfortunate that some businesses are just simply not going to do well out of this. They’re going to really struggle. They’re going to struggle to get back on their feet. And I realise I risk criticism of people saying you’re profiteering on this Paul, you’re cashing in on other people’s misery. You’ve got to understand that a business which gets into trouble really quickly off the back of what we’re talking about here of the current situation, they were already struggling before we went into the current situation. All this has done is this has accelerated, I mean at some scale, but it has accelerated the business problems of those businesses that were going to fall over. They were always going to fall over anyway. Paul Green:And I think you actually owe it to the staff and the clients of these businesses that were going to fall over to pick up those businesses and to fix them and to integrate them with your existing operations so that the staff continue to have a job and the clients continue to have IT support. And that’s certainly the way that I’m viewing it. Whatever it is that I go and buy this year and I’m looking to buy one or two businesses, see if I can even put them together in some way, I will be aware that a business owner somewhere has suffered in some way. Or has put their business up for sale and perhaps they’re not able to sell it for as much as they had hoped for when they thought they would sell their business. Paul Green:And I will handle this in the most sensitive way that I can and I will try to make sure that that person gets a great deal, but also that I get a great deal because I’ve got the hard work of turning that business around and fixing that business and of course the cash impact as well. I’m going to be taking on the risk of looking after that business. Paul Green:So maybe that’s the opportunity for you over the next 6 to 12 months is to say, right, some of my competitors are struggling, they’re going to struggle more. They’ve got a client base, they’re probably not servicing that client base as well as I can service them. How can I acquire that business? And I think the very first step for you is to actually contact all of your competitors. Literally just write them a letter. Hi, this is me. I’m based just down the road from you. I just wanted to say, if ever you’re thinking of selling your business, I’d love to have a chat with you. The first step would be a confidential coffee or beer. Let’s just go and have a chat. See if we think we can work together and we can always take things from there. And what you’re looking for is you might send that to 50 competitors in your town, in neighbouring towns and you might get one or two people responding off the back of that. Paul Green:And what we’re looking for is those people who are at that point in their mind where actually yes, they’re ready to have a conversation. They’re starting to think, oh my goodness, business has been impacted so badly by what’s been happening over the last few weeks and months. Or they’ve just had enough. Essentially what you’re kind of looking for, you’re either looking for distressed businesses or better still, you’re looking for good businesses with distressed owners. And these are people who for whatever reason, maybe it’s illness, maybe it’s just tiredness, maybe is the impact of what’s been happening and they just haven’t got the energy to build it all up again. And believe me, we all feel like that sometimes, but these people feel like that over a longer period of time. You’re looking for those people and if you can find those people and if they are at that point where they just can’t and don’t want to do it anymore, you actually potentially are a knight in white armour swooping in to go and help those people. Paul Green:A few weeks ago, back in episode 21, we know that the average MSP is valued at one times recurring revenue or annual recurring revenue. To add up all the recurring revenue, the monthly recurring revenue and the annual recurring revenue and whatever that comes to, that’s what the business is typically worth. That seems to be becoming the standard valuation for an MSP. So you can say this to your competitor and you can say, look, this is what your business is worth. This is what I’ll be willing to pay for it. And actually you’re a hell of a lot closer to a deal if you’ve got a valuation that you can both agree on. Now you don’t need to pay cash up front because no one pays cash up front for a business. You can agree a deferred deal where you’re paying for the business over one, two or three years. Paul Green:So essentially you’re paying for the business out of cashflow and there’s massive, massive advantages for you of doing this because you’re integrating it into your existing operations. You can take their best techs and integrate them into your operations. You can take their clients and integrate them into your existing account management. You can take their technology stack and know that over two to three years, you can transition their clients from their technology stack into your technology stack. But this is the advantage that you would have over say someone like me, whatever kind of B2B business I’m going to acquire, I’ve got to start from scratch. I’ve got to learn that business. I’ve got to learn how it operates and I’ve got to work with the resources that I’ve bought. You’ve got a massive advantage in that you’re just buying clients and you can service them with your existing operations. And so long as you can do a better job of that than the business that you’ve bought, the chances of you keeping most of those clients are very high. Paul Green:Now, acquisition is not for everyone. It’s a time consuming thing to do. It’s incredibly energy consuming and it’s very, very difficult work in the first couple of years, but for some people listening to this, acquisition is absolutely a very smart route forward and you can grow your business dramatically, hundreds of percents worth of growth every year instead of 10 or 20% worth of growth because it is a hell of a lot faster than growing organically. Voiceover:Here’s this week’s clever idea. Paul Green:I really do try my hardest only to talk about interesting subjects on this podcast and the next one is potentially a slightly dull subject, but my goodness, it’s important and the subject is cashflow. Now we all know as business owners that cashflow is the thing that’s most likely to have us awake at four in the morning. You know how it works. You get up, you go to the bathroom and you go back to bed and you can’t sleep because things are whirring through your head and cashflow is such a destructive, worrying thing if the cashflow is negative. Because businesses don’t go under because they’re not profitable, they go under because they don’t have great cashflow. And just talking there as we were about acquisition, one of the reasons that a competitor might be up for sale or you might be able to acquire them is because their cashflow is in trouble. Paul Green:They could be unprofitable for years and that’s not really a massive issue. I mean it’s an issue for the owner in terms of personal income, but when the cashflow is wrong, that’s when things go badly very, very quickly and it’s why businesses get into trouble and it’s why businesses go under. Paul Green:Now I’ve got a number of things that I recommend that you do to monitor your own cash flow just to keep on track of it. The first of those is to make sure you know your figures. So you need to know what’s the cash that’s in the bank. If you take credit card payments and the card companies holding onto a chunk of that in case of chargebacks, what are they holding onto? You should be doing some regular cashflow reports. I mean weekly, I would say as a minimum and cashflow reports and forecasting literally what’s coming in and what’s coming out. In the next week is more money coming in than is going out? Paul Green:Because if it’s not, then you need to be aware that there needs to be some funds in the bank account to absorb that. You should perhaps ask your bookkeeper or your accountant for management reports so you can see what’s happening with the P&L on a monthly basis. It amazes me how many MSPs try and run their business without management reports. You’ve got to know what’s happening not just 12 months ago from your actual P&L, profit and loss, but you need to know what’s happened within the last month. Paul Green:Second thing I suggest that you do is you regularly review your overheads. So your utilities, your rent, your phones, your insurance, anything that’s a fixed cost and that’s a fairly commoditised one way you can switch to another supplier and it’s more or less exactly the same. In fact, anything like utilities or insurance, as long as you’re comparing, like for like if you can get better terms elsewhere, then do go and do that. And talking in better terms. You should also be talking to your suppliers. Now, some of the big vendors, they’re not going to be interested in talking to you about this but some of your smaller suppliers will, you might be able to ask for better terms. For example, if they normally offer you 30 days, why not just ask for 60 days? You never know. Paul Green:They might come back and say, well look, we can’t do 60 but maybe we’ll do 45 days and we can do that for the next year. Often, particularly if you have someone who’s account managing you, there will be an accounts department somewhere that rubber stamps their decisions, their job, they’re bonused on keeping you as a client. So you come back and you say, look, we’re willing to pay. We’re okay with cashflow. We’re just trying to improve our credit terms right now. Can we have 60 days please? And they’re not going to judge you on this. They’re not going to think that your business is failing. They’ll just trot off to accounts, ask accounts to see if that’s okay. And suddenly you’ve got yourself 60 days to pay. Now what that does is that just gives you another 30 days or another 15 days or whatever it is that your cash is sat in your bank account instead of their bank account. And good cashflow says that it’s always better that your cash is sat in your bank account rather than someone else’s bank account. Paul Green:Something else that you should be focusing on is making sure you’re getting cash upfront so your clients should be paying upfront for everything. And I hope that you’ve either got them on direct debit if you’re in the UK or authorised to take colour payments from the few in other parts of the world. And when clients order something, well you should be taking money from them upfront regardless. So their monthly recurring payment, that should come out early on in the month and that should be automatic. And then when they order something new like a new piece of hardware, you should be taking the cash for that up front. That’s really important because if you spend say £500 on a new laptop for someone and you have to pay for that fairly quickly, but your client isn’t paying for 30 days, you know there’s a gap, isn’t there? There’s a gap between the point at which the money has left your bank account and the money from your client has turned up to replace that money in your bank account. Paul Green:And if there’s a gap there of 10 days, that’s 10 where you have subsidised your client’s purchase from a cash point of view. Well you’re not a bank, you’re not a credit card company. They should be paying upfront for this technology because if they walked into any other store, they’d have to pay for that upfront before they got it. Paul Green:Now these are some very, very simple things, but when you put them into place and you systemise them within the business, they can have a fairly dramatic effect over the long term and I don’t believe that any business owners should ever have to worry about cashflow because bad cashflow often, not always, but often it comes because of a lack of design because there’s a lack of systems, a lack of thinking through how do we get that cash in quicker than it’s going out? How do we keep more of that cash in our bank account for longer? When you approach this from a systematic point of view and it’s done by design, it makes the cashflow so much less stressful. Voiceover:Paul’s blatant plug. Paul Green:Tell me you’ve got a copy of my book. I mean a p…

Full show notes at the publisher

Episode 26: How to get your technicians to upsell May 12, 2020

Show notes

In this week’s episode We look at why most technicians are so bad at upselling, and how to motivate them to tell you when your clients really should be buying extra services from you We also look at how much you charge contract clients per hour for ad hoc work – it’s probably not enough, so get ready to put your prices up! Plus this week Paul talks to the people behind a brilliant cybersecurity plug-in for ConnectWise Automate. And answers a question from an MSP on how you can differentiate yourself from all the other MSPs out there Show notes Out every Tuesday on your favourite podcast platform Presented by Paul Green, an MSP marketing expert Paul’s special guest was Scott Springer from Third-Wall talking about a new cybersecurity plug-in for ConnectWise Automate Many thanks to Martin Limburn from Limbtec for the question about differentiation While talking about how to stand out against other MSPs, Paul mentioned the video service MSPvideos.co.uk The guest on May 19th will be Brian and Heather Johnson from Gozynta talking about finding new opportunities during financially uncertain times 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 a fresh new episode of the show straight out of the oven. Here’s what I’ve got coming up for you today. Scott Springer:Bad guys always find a way in and we identified the primary ways that that happens and we built a plugin that makes taking care of those vulnerability really easy to do. Paul Green:We’re also going to look at how much you charged contract clients for ad hoc work, and it’s probably not enough, which is good news for your profit margins. And we’re going to answer a question from an MSP about how to differentiate yourself from all of your competitors. Voiceover:Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast. Paul Green:So we do record this podcast quite a few weeks in advance, and as I’m recording this one, we’re still in lockdown in the UK and my nine year old daughter and I, obviously we’re in the house, we’ve been in the house, more or less just the two of us, every single day. You get the drill. I’m sure it’s the same with you and your family. So what we’ve done of course is we’ve fallen into new patterns, brand new ways of working. She’s doing her schoolwork in the morning. I’m being interrupted by her while I’m doing my work in the morning. And then the afternoons she does her own thing and I carry on working. But one of the things that we have enjoyed is every Friday we are ordering in lunch from a local deli. Paul Green:Now where we live on the outskirts of Milton Keynes, there are no shops in our village, but the next village, which is literally just half a mile away has a bustling high street full of shops and there’s a deli there, which almost immediately, once locked down started, they announced that they were going to flip from being a deli to doing a sandwich delivery service. And I do believe that you should support your local independent businesses. So every single Friday we’ve been ordering a sandwich from them. It’s nothing that’s special, to be honest. It’s just sandwiches. Fairly overpriced if you ask me. But we’re supporting local businesses, which is the right thing to do. So we’ve been doing this for a number of weeks now, and it amuses me how little upselling this shop is doing on the phones. You have to phone your sandwich order through, which in itself is not great. Really they should be having online ordering, but there we go. Paul Green:So you phone through and you place your order and they’re clearly in a rush and they’re trying to get all the orders done in time. There’s a deadline that you have to phone it through by. But they never ever try and up sell anything. Now I know, I’ve been in this deli, and I know that on top of sandwiches they’ve obviously got crisps, they’ve got cakes, they’ve got all sorts of other stuff. I’ve just been waiting for them to say, “Oh, do you want us to pop a packet of crisps in there for you?” Or “Which of our cakes do you fancy today?” Or something like that. They never do this. In fact, last week, when I phoned my order through, the woman who was on the other end of the phone actually said, and these were her exact words, “You don’t want any crisps or anything with those, do you?” Listen to that there. “You don’t want any crisps or anything with those, do you?” Paul Green:Now bearing in mind, I’m primarily ordering from this shop to help this shop. If she said to me, “Shall I pop a packet of crisps in for each of you there?” I’d probably just say, “Yeah, go on then, what’s the worst that can happen?” But no, she actually said, “You don’t want any crisps or anything.” And it made me think about technicians and a lot of the MSPs that I’ve worked with, they have probably a very similar problem to you, which is that the technicians simply will not upsell, even when there’s a really easy upsell opportunity in front of them. So they might be on the phone to a client. It’s the decision maker, that client. That client has got a very specific problem and they know that you sell a specific service or an upgrade or a higher level of service that would solve that problem, but they don’t upsell. They don’t go for it. Paul Green:Why? What is it that stops them doing that? Well in my experience, the thing that stops most people from selling is fear. It’s fear of someone saying no or it’s fear of having to ask in the first place or it’s just in general fear that, “Oh no, I’m a technician. I don’t want to be seen as selling. I didn’t get into tech to sell. I got into tech to fix problems with people, to help people, to do all those kinds of things. Selling is not for me. That’s not something that I do.” And even when they can see that it would make their lives better, they don’t make that suggestion. Now, most technicians are this way. Not all of them, but most are. And what you’ll typically find in MSP is it’ll only take two or three technicians to be this way and all of the rest of the technicians will operate this way. It almost becomes a cultural thing. Paul Green:In fact, sometimes it’s terrifying how much culture in our business is set by two or three people who are doing something in a specific way or rather not doing something in a specific way. So I think the trick for trying to get technicians to upsell, first of all, is not to try and get technicians to upsell. It’s a battle that you could be having for weeks, months, and years, and I don’t think it’s a battle that you could ever win. So instead of asking them to actually do the selling, what we should be asking them to do instead is to ask them to spot the potential upsell opportunities. Well actually, let’s not even use the word upsell. Let’s use the words client delight opportunities. Because remember, most technicians want to do a great job for the clients and want to help the clients. Paul Green:So let’s train them to spot when the clients really should be buying a different service or a better service or something that helps them, and let’s focus on getting the technicians to tell someone about it. Now, maybe it should be you, maybe it should be the account managers, whoever it is, that will depend on the system within your business, but let’s focus their attention on that. Spot an opportunity, tell someone about that opportunity. Let’s have a system in place. You could even put in place some kind of reward mechanism. I mean, personally I don’t think you need a reward mechanism. The reward for the technician, for most of them, will be the feeling of doing a good job. But you could say, for example, you get 10% or 5% of any monthly recurring revenue for the first year. So if they go on to buy this monthly recurring revenue service and they stick with it for the next three years, you get 5% of that new monthly recurring revenue for the next 12 months. Paul Green:Now that’s an optional thing to bring in, but that will certainly make some of the technicians very focused on finding things that they think the clients should be buying, particularly when they haven’t actually got to do the close themselves, when someone else will do that. So I would make this a training issue. The very first thing is putting in place that system, here’s how you report this, here’s who you report it to, here’s how we track it, and here’s the reward if in fact we do sell something to a client. And then the second thing you need to do is product focus. And in fact, what you could do perhaps is a Friday lunch and learn. Every Friday, get some pizzas in, we divert the calls over to Continuum or whatever call answering service that we’re using at the moment and all of the technicians just have 30 minutes with a pizza and we do a bit of a lunch and learn. This is this service that we’re selling right now. This is the enhanced level of this service. This is the benefit of a client taking this service. Paul Green:And if you were to do that every single week of the year, just think 50 weeks where your lunch and learning them about a very specific service and teaching them about all these different enhanced levels of service. For some of them that’s going to go in and if you remind them every single week, 50 weeks, of the system for reporting clients who really should be taking a service like this, you can see that for many of your technicians, most of the time it’s going to become systematic for them to spot these opportunities and tell you about it. And of course the massive bonus for you off this is that you get to sell more services and we all know that selling more to existing clients is the route to dramatically higher net profits. Voiceover:Here’s this week’s clever idea. Paul Green:Now in the spirit of increasing your net profit, let’s talk about how much you’re charging your contract clients for ad hoc work. And this is a debate that I have with my MSP masterminders fairly regularly here in the UK because I believe that when you’re doing ad hoc work for clients who are under contract, you should be charging as much as you can get away with. And by get away, I don’t mean profiteering, I mean accepting what the actual cost to you is of delivering ad hoc work. So let’s put this in perspective. These are existing clients, they’re under contract, they’re paying you a fee every single month, it’s a recurring revenue, for their support contract. They’re buying other things from you, and then every now and again, some ad hoc work comes up. Now I’m going to be talking about this in pounds Sterling, but you can easily convert this over to dollars or your own local currency. Paul Green:If you’re charging them 50 pounds an hour for ad hoc work, you’re probably not making a profit on that 50 pounds. Because it probably costs you a lot more than 50 pounds an hour to deliver an hour’s worth of value. If you think how much it actually costs you to open the doors every day. What’s the cost of the office, the rent, the rates or any local taxes you have to pay, your staff, the utilities and the insurances, the debt costs, the equipment costs, all of that. In fact, it’s a good exercise to have is to figure out how much it actually cost you just to open your doors every day. It’s probably a lot more than you think. That means you’ve got to cover those costs every single day before you’ve actually made some money. So you’ve got all of that to take into account. Paul Green:Then you’ve got the opportunity cost and the cost of sale of an employee or a number of employees doing an hour’s worth of ad hoc work for clients and because they’re contract clients, you will tend to over-service them in some way. You will tend to do a very, very good job. So what’s the real cost of delivering an hour’s worth of ad hoc work to your existing clients? It is a lot more than you are currently charging right now. I mean if you wanted to be scientific about it, then maybe yes, you should actually work that out. Work out the cost of opening the doors every day. Work out the employee costs, which isn’t just what you’re paying them, it is of course also the cost of what they can’t be doing, the proactive work that they can be doing while they’re doing ad hoc work. And this is what you should be charging probably, if not double, and certainly a lot more than you’re charging right now. Paul Green:And my MSP mastermind, the clients, we’re pushing now 100 pounds, 110, some of them charging well over 150 pounds per hour of ad hoc work. Now that might seem a lot to you, but there’s a couple of factors at play here. Not only is there making sure that you’re actually making profit from it, there’s also looking at it from the client’s point of view, that they don’t know how much ad hoc work costs, and to be honest, they don’t really notice if it really is just the odd bit of ad hoc work. So when someone signs up for contract with you, that’s what they’re focused on. They’re focused on the monthly costs. How much is this going to cost me every month? And most B2B decisions are made with the cashflow in mind, remember. We don’t look at the overall cost of something. We look at what’s the impact going to be on our cashflow on a monthly basis. Paul Green:So they’ll be looking at that and when a piece of ad hoc work comes up, yeah, it stings a little bit, that 100, 150 pounds an hour. But do you know what? It’s just a cost of getting this job done. It’s only a couple of hours. It’s a few hundred pounds. Fine, fine, yeah, we’ll do that. No problem. And that’s very much the mindset of the typical client. And this is why if you’re charging them 50 pounds an hour, it’s going to cost them 100 pounds. You’ll charge them 150 pounds. It’s going to cost them 300 pounds. Sure, that’s a big difference between 100 and 300 pounds, but it’s a one off cost. Their mind is not looking at this as the recurring cost of this on a monthly basis. Paul Green:Their mind is looking at this saying, “Yep, we can afford 300 pounds. We need to get this work done. Absolutely. Go ahead with that.” So they don’t see the cost of ad hoc work in the same way that you do. You have to remember here that your business is not a charity. Your business does not exist in order just to do work for clients. The primary goal of the business is to make net profit for you. The primary goal of the business is to give you the cash you need to achieve the life vision that you’ve got laid out for you. The primary purpose of the business is to pay your mortgage, to put your kids through private school, if that’s appropriate, to give you and your family the resources you need to live the lifestyle that you want. To pay your staff. This is the primary goal of the business. Paul Green:And the way that we do that is we delight the clients and we make a great profit along the way. The profit is the side effect of running a great business that’s there to support you, but the profits side-effect needs to be there, otherwise it’s just not a fun business to run. And we’ve all run unprofitable businesses and it’s not fun at all, which is why we’ve got to make sure we’re making good money. So you should be examining every single stage of the process. How much net profit are we making off this, and if it’s not enough, we’ve just got to increase the prices. Being expensive is nothing to be scared of. In fact, you should aim to be the most expensive MSP in your area, and I don’t just mean just by ratcheting all the prices up. Paul Green:You’ve got to be aware of the front end, back end. The front end is the pricing they see when they sign up. That’s your per user or per device support costs, but the backend, you should absolutely look to be as expensive as you can be, because no one’s looking at the ad hoc price of having some work…

Full show notes at the publisher

Episode 25: Looking after your staff now and in the future May 05, 2020

Show notes

In this week’s episode The world is gripped by a pandemic and offices everywhere are deserted. It may sound like the premise for a movie, but of course it’s sadly real. This week’s one-off special episode looks at how best to manage the fragmented workforce of an MSP during the Coronavirus lockdown. Paul’s joined by HR specialist Emma Wynne to discuss the affect that homeworking, financial uncertainty and strained communication can have on your team. Show notes Out every Tuesday on your favourite podcast platform Presented by Paul Green, an MSP marketing expert Many thanks to Emma Wynne from Gateway HR for being Paul’s special guest The guest on May 12th will be Scott Springer from Third-Wall talking a new cybersecurity plug-in for ConnectWise Automate 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 Episode 25. And in a change to the advertised program, we’re going to scrap the usual format this week for an MSP marketing podcast special. You see with everything that’s happening around the world right now and the impact on our businesses, it’s easy to look at how we can protect our clients. It’s easy to look at how we can do more marketing and get more new business in. And there is plenty of new business to be won right now. But there’s one other aspect that’s absolutely critical that certainly in this forum we haven’t talked about yet, and that’s looking after your team, your people, your staff. And that’s what I’ve invited this very special guest to join me today to talk about how you can protect your team right now and over the next few months. Emma Wynne:Hi, I’m Emma Wynne I own Gateway HR. Set up at 12 1/2 years ago now, mainly working with micro and small businesses to help them manage and develop their people better. Paul Green:So thank you for joining me at such short notice Emma. We did only concoct this one a few days ago, just before the transmission date. And I was talking to some of my MSP clients over the last couple of weeks really and we realised that the subject of looking after your own staff, so the MSPs looking after their teams, was something we hadn’t really addressed and hadn’t seen addressed in many different places. Paul Green:So obviously you and I have known each other for a very long time. I think it must be getting up to eight, nine years or so now. You did the HR for my last business and thank you very much for looking after those people and helping me get rid of the ones I didn’t want, in the most legal and incorrect way of course. Paul Green:Today I want to talk about the more, if you like, the more fluffy side of people. So I don’t want to talk about HR, I don’t want to talk about laws because obviously our audience on this podcast is MSPs all around the world. But I do want to talk about three specific issues. Paul Green:The first of them is managing our teams remotely in the long term. So we’re now what, I think it’s six, seven weeks into this in the UK. Some of the countries are a little bit less or a little bit longer. And we are now entering a long term remote management so I want to look at that. I want to look at caring for staff long term as well, when they’re remote and when we can’t see them and hear them as well as we can normally when they’re in the office. And then the final subject that I want to talk about is actually what happens when things start to return back to normal. We all know they’re not going to just snap back to how they used to be. So as things start to return back how should we look out for our staff, their welfare, their mental well being? And also what happens if we have to lay some staff off, so if we have to let some people go? Whether that is a genuine business necessity or whether it’s being used as an exercise in clearing out deadwood? Paul Green:So we’ll come on all of those things, but let’s start with just almost a little bit more credibility building for you. Because you’re not just an HR person are you? You’ve actually had quite an incredible career looking after people and making sure that the businesses look after their people well? Emma Wynne:Yeah, I mean it’s always been a big part of what we do. I genuinely believe if you treat people properly, and that obviously applies outside of work as well, you get the best from them and therefore the best for the business. So we spend a lot of time with our clients looking at how to look after their employees, how to motivate and inspire them to want to do a good job. Emma Wynne:And also recently, just before the lockdown happened, we were starting to run mental health training in organisations as well. So the organisations that we’ve done that for already, hopefully will be able to be putting some of that into practice. And I’m quite confident that once this is over, whenever that might be, I think there’s going to be a huge demand afterwards as well. Paul Green:So what kind of an impact do you think this unexpected and sudden lockdown had on staff in those first few weeks? And what kind of impact is it going to have as it kind of keeps going on and keeps dragging on? Emma Wynne:I think in the first few weeks it was almost shock, I think it was. Even though we saw it happening in other countries, there’s always that feeling that somehow it’s not going to have the same impact on us. A lot of obviously uncertainty. So anybody with parents in their workforce, parents not knowing if school’s going to shut. Are they not? If they do, how am I going to manage that? And equally, people who were caring for others as well. Lots of uncertainty I would say were the main emotions. Emma Wynne:And then the first few weeks before, certainly in the UK, the government stepped in, a lot of worry about is my job safe? What happens if I lose my job? And the financial impact of, obviously they’re still there, but in the moment in the UK with furloughing but only probational timescale. So I think everybody’s still got that worry at the back of their mind. Paul Green:I agree. And I think as we go into, where are we? I think this is week seven in the UK. Obviously this is clearly going to be a much longer thing than we thought. Even when the lockdown does end, we can see that there will be a phased end to it. It’s not going to be just straight back to normal. So as owners of businesses and you know most of the MSPs that I talk to and work with care very much for their staff and it’s a wonderful sector to work in Emma, what’s the best things that we can do to look after our team as they stay remote longer term? Emma Wynne:The most important thing is, as far as you’re able to, to be consistently honest with your team that you’re doing everything you can to protect the business, protect jobs. And also involve them in that. I mean there’ll be limits as to what you want to share financially, but probably your people in the team are the ones who will come up with some of the best ideas. Emma Wynne:We’ve seen lots of great examples, not just with our clients, but we’ve probably all seen them on the news, of businesses that have started to do something completely different. And have changed or pivoted, which seems to be the new favourite word, so much quicker than anybody ever has done before. So it’s keeping those lines of communication open, particularly if the vast majority of people you’re not physically seeing each other every day. So making sure that you’re keeping in contact, keeping people up to date, but also making sure that everybody’s okay. Paul Green:Most MSPs obviously are completely happy with video calls. They were set up for work from home years before everyone else was set up, which is quite right. It’s not just about physically keeping in touch with people, is it? What’s good remote management really about? Emma Wynne:Yeah. A lot of it is around trust, for clients that previously, until they’ve had to do this, did not like the idea of remote working. Some would be honest and say it was to do with trust. Some would say it was something else. But we were always pretty sure it was to do with trust. Now people have no choice. Managers have really starting to see, in most cases, who they can trust to continue to do a good job and who perhaps needs a little bit closer management. But it’s building that trust and managing, what we would normally call managing by outcomes rather than by time. Emma Wynne:So if people are juggling homeschooling, shopping for relatives, but it’s managers realising well what is a good level of performance? What are the outcomes I need from each team member? And as long as I know that they are happening, what time of day they happen doesn’t really matter. Paul Green:But how do you actually demonstrate that in a practical way? Because obviously certainly for MSPs where they’re trying to provide a level of service within a certain number of hours, where jobs just need to get done. You can have that desire to let your staff be flexible in your mind, but in practical terms it can annoy business owners and the managers really quickly, can’t it? Emma Wynne:Yeah, I think it’s, it always has to come back to what’s needed for the customer. So I’d imagine a lot of them have a service level agreements, amount of time it would take to respond to a call, how long it would take to make the changes or the repairs or whatever. So again, it’s sharing with the team. Emma Wynne:If there are definite work hours, if you have, maybe a help line that’s say between eight and six, those are the core hours. But then, where possible, maybe within the team, to divide up those core hours. So maybe each person has four hours where they have to be completely available. So they have to manage what else is going on within their household. But then maybe they have another four hours where the second person on call. Paul Green:Because I imagine it would be quite stressful for a member of your team, if you were trying to get them to work six to eight hours a day, and as you were saying, they’ve actually got homeschooling to do and they’ve got relatives to look after and they’ve got other things. And they’re utterly caught between needing to work and needing to do the things that that keeps you the owner happy, but also needing to look after their family. Emma Wynne:We always like to say that you should know your team really well anyway, but this might be a chance where actually you need to get to know them better. So what other demands do they have on their time? But equally as importantly, making sure that it’s fair within the team. Sometimes you see issues where perhaps the person who hasn’t got young children at home or all those other commitments ends up doing perhaps all the hours. And what you don’t want to do is cause a rift within the team. Paul Green:This is almost like how it used to be in the olden days when everyone smoked, wasn’t it? Where all the smokers got to go out and have regular breaks and the nonsmokers had to do all the work when everyone else was having a smoke. Emma Wynne:Yeah. Paul Green:So you and I have always been big fans of doing one to ones, and sitting down and having structured but informal conversations with staff. Not appraisals, just literally from, almost from their point of view, that you’re chewing the fat. But from your of view, you’re looking at what’s gone well and what hasn’t gone so well and what they can do differently. Would you recommend still trying to do this over Zoom or, or the teams or the video platform of your choice? Emma Wynne:Yeah, absolutely. We’re certainly saying to all our clients to carry on with all of those things, albeit in a different structure, probably via Zoom or over the phone. But all of that needs to carry on as normal. And perhaps now it’s even more important than it would be normally. Because there might be things that person will share in that dedicated time that perhaps they wouldn’t in a team Zoom call or whatever that might be. Emma Wynne:So again, you can check in with the individual, both in terms of work and anything that they’re struggling with or ideas that they’ve had, and also, again, that work/life balance. And the same goes for any new starters. We certainly, in our team, had two new starters the week before this happened. So they started work and then got sent home. So we’ve had to adapt all our induction process and our training to make sure that they’re still able to do their role. So it’s not been as easy, if that’s the right word, as doing it in the office, but both of them are now pretty much up to speed. Paul Green:So if you don’t already do regular one to ones with your team, but you can see the power of just having a 10, 15 minute video call one-to-one with them? Because you are missing out on that, that just having a look at them in the office and seeing what emotional state they’re in in the office. Emma, what do you think the most authentic way would be to to start that process right now? Emma Wynne:It would be as simple as to start it, so to announce it to the whole team. So however you do that, if you’re having maybe team Zoom calls, to let everybody know. Perhaps say that as a manager you’ve been looking at different ways to stay in touch and catch up with everybody. But also to say that actually having perhaps read around the subject, it’s something that you’d like to continue even once this period of time is over. There’s so much research out there to the benefits of regular one to ones, it would be very easy for managers to say that they’ve spent some of this time looking at that their management style, what they could do differently. And this is something that they would like do going forward. Paul Green:Now looking at the long term care, what other kinds of things should we as owners and managers be doing? For example, with some of my clients I’ve, we recommended in the early days that they send small gifts to their team just to say thank you very much for all your hard work over the last couple of weeks. Here’s 10 bars of your favourite chocolate bar to enjoy while you’re at home. Perhaps not best for their physical health, but certainly very good for their emotional health. I mean little things like that, little gestures, can they really, do they really make such a big difference to staff? Emma Wynne:Yes. I think they make a huge difference. I mean, motivation, engagement, as you know Paul, is one of my favourite topics. And what I really love showing the business owners is that it doesn’t have to cost you a lot of money. Again, it comes back down to knowing your team. So for example, at Easter normally I would leave an Easter egg on everybody’s desk, but of course it might still be there in August. So I sent everybody some mini eggs and chocolate rabbits and an Easter card. And I got really lovely thank yous from everybody saying, oh that was so, it really brightened my day. We’ve seen examples of clients sending vouchers for things like just eat. I’m sure there’s others available, but that that kind of thing. Paul Green:Okay. Let’s look at when things start to go back to normal. And we’re not going to speculate on how that may or may not happen because it’s going to happen in different ways in different countries. Now again, for MSPs, it’s not really about the technology, I want to focus more about the people and managing the people. So what advice are you giving to the people that you’re working with about how to bring people back into the workplace when they might be a little scared of going back into an office? Because a lot of people now are starting to say, you know that they’re liking the work from home, but you might prefer to work them in the office. What kind of advice are you giving at the moment? Emma Wynne:Different typ…

Full show notes at the publisher

Episode 24: MSPs that niche their marketing, sell more Apr 28, 2020

Show notes

In this week’s episode It’s natural to baulk at the idea of turning away perfectly good clients, but specialising in a market niche doesn’t mean you need limit your options. Join Paul as he explains how you can still maintain a broad range of clients whilst boosting your business by marketing within a specific niche Not only will we be looking at the traffic that you drive to your website and how to improve your conversion rate, but Paul also answers a brilliant question from a listener about the best kind of ‘call to action’ to put on your MSP website Plus a special guest joining Paul to to explain how you could boost your monthly recurring revenue by selling a whitelist antivirus solution, rather than a traditional blacklisting one. It’s called PC Matic and we find out how their whitelisting process means it’s all ready to re-sell Show notes Out every Tuesday on your favourite podcast platform Presented by Paul Green, an MSP marketing expert During the discussion about improving conversions, Paul mentioned the AIDA marketing formula and services from Hotjar.com, Google Optimize & Optimizely Find out more about Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Edge The guest was Corey Munson from PC Matic talking about how to resell their whitelist antivirus solution During the MSP question about the best call to action on a website, Paul mentioned the plugin from calendly.com The guest on May 5th will be Emma Wynne from Gateway HR with an extended discussion about how to look after staff during the Coronavirus lockdown 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, here’s what’s coming up in today’s show. Corey Munson:Even for the least tech savvy out there, I think it’s easy to consume and appreciate the benefit. Paul Green:We’re also going to be looking at the marketing super power of niching, particularly when you do it in a single vertical; and I’m answering a question for an MSP about the best call to action to put on your website . Voiceover:Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast. Paul Green:Sometimes as business owners, we think the answer is just to send more traffic to our website. “Let’s get lots more traffic. Let’s drive some Google ads. Let’s do some Facebook. Let’s do some more LinkedIn. Let’s get traffic, traffic, traffic, traffic, traffic going to the website.” And sure, getting more of the right qualified traffic can help and qualified traffic is the right kind of traffic. It’s people who could go on to buy from you at some point. Paul Green:Not all traffic is equal, but the way I see is that traffic alone is pointless. Traffic without conversion is just a waste of your time and money because traffic costs these days. The days of free traffic are long gone these days. You’ve got to pay for it in some way. You’ve got to pay for it either in cash or in sweat. Go back five, 10 years ago, and you could get loads of traffic from Google organically for virtually no cost, perhaps a little bit of investment in SEO. These days you’ve got to spend that money on either on the Google ads or spend the money on SEO on someone optimising the campaign for you. The traffic is more expensive and we actually need to make sure that that traffic is turning into something. Paul Green:Let’s talk about conversion. For most MSPs that I speak to, if you can get someone on the phone just for 15, 20 minutes, you can have a quality initial conversation. Which if it’s appropriate for you and for your new lead, your new prospects that can lead to an offsite meeting when that can happen. And obviously, once you’re in front of people at that point it can lead to an offline meeting when that can happen. And once that happens, then you know they’re in your sales process from there. Paul Green:Most MSPs, even if they don’t enjoy selling, they don’t have a problem with selling at all. The issue is just simply getting enough people to talk to. And that’s why I believe that traffic without conversion is completely pointless. Because if you have a website which simply doesn’t convert, tripling the number of people who come to that website is still not going to convert. Just because you’re chucking more people at it doesn’t mean it’s going to perform any better. Paul Green:I think those are the two areas that go absolutely hand in hand. You have to make sure that you’re driving quality traffic and that’s about having a plan, and you’ve got to know where are we going to get our traffic sources, how are we driving traffic? How much are we willing to invest in that traffic? That’s the first thing. Paul Green:But then secondly, you need to look at the conversion, and that’s about looking at your website and saying, when someone comes onto this website, what does it tell them that makes us different from all the other MSPs that they could go and speak about? Does our website, at the same time, talk to them in their language and engage with them at an emotional level? And also is it very, very clear what it is that they have to do next? Paul Green:Now there’s an old marketing formula called AIDA, A-I-D-A, and it stands for attention, interest, desire, and action. This was created, I think it was more than a hundred years ago, and this was a formula for you to create marketing collateral with. You had to make sure that each piece of marketing that you did grabbed their attention, and we do that with a headline. You had to make sure that each piece of marketing collateral built up their interest and their desire to have whatever it is you’re selling or to do whatever it is you want them to do. Paul Green:And then the final one, A, action is the call to action. It’s the thing that you most want them to do. In fact, we’re going to be talking about that later on in the podcast, what’s the best call to action on your website. But you need to make sure that it’s easy for people to get in touch with you. Whether that’s booking an appointment directly filling in a form, doing a live chat. There are lots of different things that you can do, and some work better than others for MSPs right now. Paul Green:There are a couple of tools that are worth embedding into your websites. I’ve mentioned, I think, both of them are on the podcast before. One of them is something called hotjar.com, definitely mentioned that one before. It’s a great piece of technology. You embed it in your website and it takes videos of people using your website. Well, there are two aspects to is it. It will video user sessions, so you can’t see the person but you can see what action they’ve been taking within your website. Paul Green:The other thing that it does is it does something called heat mapping. Heat mapping shows you where people have been looking on your website and it’s kind of terrifying because it makes you realise how little content people actually look at. You put Hotjar into your websites and you realise that they don’t go down the page as far as you think they do. What that knowledge allows you to do is to reorganise your website so that the call to action is what they see. It’s why call to actions need to be typically higher up a page because they typically get more conversions up there. Hotjar.com is the first piece of software I suggest you use. Paul Green:The other thing you can use is something called Google Optimize. Now there’s a separate standalone piece of software called Optimizely, if you’d prefer not to use the Google version. But to be honest, the Google version is absolutely great and isn’t going to cost you anything. And what Google Optimize will allow you to do is to set up split tests on your website. Split tests sometimes called an AB split test is where you have two different versions of the same page. Paul Green:For example, if you had a page with a headline which said, “We are great at IT,” which is a terrible headline of course, and you decided to test that with a split test. You would create within Google Optimize a second version of that page. It would be absolutely identical to the first version apart from the headline. And then you’d change the headline to say, “You found the right people for your IT,” and then Google Optimize will split your traffic for you. It will split it. Paul Green:Let’s say you send 100 visitors to version A, 100 different visitors to version B; and version B has a slightly higher conversion rate, as in more people book an appointment with you online. We can tell now that that headline outperforms the original headline, and that’s the beauty of split testing. You can optimise and optimise and optimise your website just off the back of doing something like this. Paul Green:To sum up, most MSPs don’t spend nearly enough time on their websites and you can see that by the state of most MSPs’ websites. But if you want to be absolutely, genuinely serious about driving more traffic to your website and making sure that it actually turns into more prospect meetings then you’ve got to focus on the conversion as well. Voiceover:Here’s this week’s clever idea. Paul Green:I discovered the super power of niching in a single vertical around about a decade ago. Back then I was running my very first business, which at the time was a general PR and marketing business, and we would take any client on, anyone that did anything. And as long as they had around about a thousand pounds a month, then we’d quite happily service them and do some of their marketing and do some of their public relations for them. Paul Green:The problem with that was we never really got to know our clients particularly well because we had such a diverse range of clients. We did have some IT companies. In fact, that was the first introduction I had to IT support and MSPs and how wonderful your world is. But we also had some random clients, like a guy that printed charity greeting cards. We had a training school, we had an engineering company. kind of you name it, we had an accountant, we had a lawyer. It was your classic marketing agency with lots and lots of different clients doing lots of different things. Paul Green:And the two main problems with that were inefficiency and lack of perceived expertise. So I had a team of I think three or four people at the time and they were constantly, all of us were running around creating marketing materials for our clients. And yeah, okay, that was our job. That was what we were supposed to do. But it was exhausting because you’d be writing something for the lawyer, and then you’d flip and you write something for the engineering company, and then you’d flip and you’d be trying to sort something out for the charity greetings card company. And it was a constant slog and your mind was constantly flitting from, “Right, what do our lawyers prospects want? What do people who buy from an engineering company, what do they want?” You’re constantly flitting. It’s exhausting. You never build any traction with it. You never get any momentum going. Paul Green:And I had an epiphany, which was actually down to an optician that I was working with at the time. He was an optician who was doing very well for himself. In fact, he turned up at one of our meetings in an Aston Martin. Side note, never turn up for a meeting in an Aston Martin because your rates up. Anyway, we sat chatting and then we went out and had lunch. And he said to me, “You guys are really good at what you do. The problem is your flitting around all these different subjects. You should niche. You should just do this for one sector. And you know what, opticians would be a great sector.” Paul Green:And off the back of that, we formed a little bit of a partnership and we went off and we started doing marketing just for opticians. And within a year, we’d fired all of our general clients because suddenly those general clients were a real pain in the backside. Whereas with the opticians, we could do a piece of work once and then we could sell it multiple times. And in fact, we replaced the net profit that we’d been making from those general clients within a year just focusing on opticians because it was so efficient. There was a very, very clear route to market because they all read the same magazines and blogs and went to the same trade shows. It was very easy for us to gain momentum and traction and expertise in the marketplace. We just kept going and kept going, and learning more and more and more about opticians, and learning more and more and more about the marketing that works and what their clients responded to. Paul Green:And the only reason that we went off and then worked in a couple of other niches, which turned out to be veterinary and then dentistry was because at that point, 10 years ago, the market for independent opticians in the UK just wasn’t that big. It had been decimated by a company called spec savers, which then went on to do the same in Australia. And for my US listeners, it’s the equivalent of LensCrafters. It’s the big national chain. So we sidestepped into veterinary and dentistry, which are kind of similar sectors to optics, and that was it. Those were our three sectors. Paul Green:We dipped our toe into some other sectors along the way. I lost a lot of money trying to do it for restaurants. Restaurant owners don’t respond and act the same way as professionals do, professionals like vets and dentists. But we essentially, we stuck to those core three verticals. And again, the same thing happened. We could do a piece of work once. We could sell it multiple times to lots of different people. The routes to market were clear. It was beautiful. And it was one of the reasons why I was able to grow the business and we were doing a random at a million a year off the staff that we had. It was 15 staff. It was a systemised delivery and sales and marketing because we understood our audience. We were deep diving into our audience and the people that we needed to speak to, and that’s why I recommend that you do exactly the same thing. Paul Green:Now I’ve recommended this to virtually every MSP that I’ve ever spoken to, which is if you’ve got one, go find your niche, go find your vertical, and as much as you can marry that market because it’s so powerful. And most MSPs will obviously still take on anyone that comes along, and quite right too, and you keep your general clients. You don’t have to fire off your general clients. Because actually for you, the work that you do is 80% similar for every single client, but it’s from a marketing point of view that the niching, the verticalisation becomes so powerful. Paul Green:I have clients who specialise in lawyers. I have clients who specialise in accountants, recruitment, call centres, manufacturing, engineering. I’ve got a client who’s doing very well in veterinary, another one who’s doing very well in dentistry. They all have general clients on the side, and in fact most of them they’ve got more general clients than they’ve got niche clients. But from a marketing point of view, they can go and reach those people in a really, really clever way. It’s so much cheaper to reach people when they perceive that you are the expert at what it is that you do for them. And this was the thing I found when I started working with the opticians. Paul Green:Whereas the charity greetings card guy would say to me, “What do you know about marketing charity greeting cards?” Which actually the truth is very little. When the opticians just didn’t say that. They never asked the question of, what do you know about optical marketing? Because we had a website that was just about optical marketing. We had staff that knew all about optical marketing. We had examples that we could show them. We got case studies, we got testimonials. It’s very, very, very powerful. Paul Green:The thing to do is to look…

Full show notes at the publisher

Episode 23: Do you expect A Team performance from B Team players? Apr 21, 2020

Show notes

In this week’s episode You’re great at the technical side of your business and you have some pretty good marketing ideas too – but why do we find it so hard to execute both at the same time? Paul’s joined by a special guest who understands the challenge and can offer a solution This week, there’s a deep dive into the psychology of recruitment and why we plump for second best when we really need an A Team If you ARE looking for new staff, particularly if it’s second line or third line staff, Paul has a great recruitment advert concept for you to try. Plus he answers a question from an MSP about the best subject lines for emails Show notes Out every Tuesday on your favourite podcast platform Presented by Paul Green, an MSP marketing expert Paul mentioned the book How to Hire A-Players by Eric Herrenkohl You can order your free copy of the book Updating Servers Doesn’t Grow Your Business right here Paul’s guest was Kevin Clune from MSP Growth Hacks and author of The MSP Growth Funnel, talking about how to pick the right marketing strategy for your MSP Thank you to James Wakefield from Contedia for the question about email subject lines The guest on April 28th will be Corey Munson from PC Matic talking about how to resell their whitelist antivirus solution 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:Welcome back to another dive into marketing, growing and making the most of your MSP even in these difficult times. Here’s what’s coming up in this week’s show. Kevin Clune:It’s really difficult to focus on growth, when you have all these technical issues and the day to day heading over your head. Paul Green:Plus if you are looking for new staff, particularly if it’s second line or third line staff, I’ve got a great recruitment advert concept for you to try. And I’m going to be answering your question from an MSP about the best subject lines for emails. Voiceover:Paul Green’s MSP marketing podcast. Paul Green:I’ve got a friend I WhatsApp with quite a lot and he’s a very successful person. By successful, I mean he’s got a couple of businesses and he’s achieved most of the things that he wants to achieve in life. That’s my definition of success. The two businesses he’s got, they churn out plenty of profit. They help to feed the lifestyle he has and they’re good businesses, even in these uncertain times, his businesses are doing okay if not well. The biggest frustration in his life comes from the staff that he has and my friend’s biggest problem is that he is expecting A team performance from B team players. Now he hires lots of people for these businesses and he hires managers to run them for him and those managers, hire people to work for them obviously and my friend almost has a deep suspicion of staff. Paul Green:I think this is a deep rooted suspicion back to when he was running his very, very first business when he was ripped off by staff a little bit, which happens to all of us to a certain extent somewhere or another doesn’t it when we’re running a business, but this deep seated suspicion of staff has carried on to the extent that now he will hire people and almost expect them to do a bad job at some point. In fact, I think his default setting is that people will say one thing but the KPIs, the key performance indicators will say another thing, and this is quite an unusual situation because my friend is an A team player, he will operate at a high level of performance just like you do or just like I do. We operate at a high level of performance because that’s what the business owner does and normally, normally, A team players hire other A team players, but that seems to go wrong when it’s your own business. Paul Green:So often I’ll talk to one of my MSP clients and they’re having an issue with a member of staff and often that’s because they’ve hired a B team player just like my friend. Why do we do this? Because we all know what A team performance looks like. The issue for us is finding the right people to give that performance for us in the first place. Maybe part of the problem is that we’re not willing to pay the wages. We have lots of discussions in our MSP mastermind groups about the cost of decent second and third line technicians and I’m not sure what it is around the world, but certainly in the UK you have to pay a lot of money for these people. And certainly if you’re in, more popular parts of the UK like London and the Southeast, again that wages bill is going up and up and up and up. Paul Green:It’s almost unfair sometimes that we do hire these people who are okay at what they do and we expect absolutely the very, very best A team performance out of them. I think that’s a little unfair because not everyone can operate at the level at which we can operate. If they could, then they’d be running their own business as well. So I think if you want to genuinely hire A team players within your MSP it’s actually got to be a bit of a mindset shift, just like my friend, it’s not just a case of doing interviews a little bit differently. I think you’ve got to switch the way you recruit for the entire business. For example, you’ve got to say, look, “We’ve got a gap, we’ve got a vacancy, we’re busy. We need to fill this position.” That’s completely the wrong kind of mindset and we’ve all done that. I’ve done that, you’ve done that. And we all know we shouldn’t do it, but we still do it anyway. Paul Green:We’ve got to refuse to just try and fill positions instead of what we’ve got to do is we got to take our time and say, right, what’s the best kind of person to fill this position? What are the traits that they’ve got? How can this person be the person that excels in this job? That takes the job spec of what we want them to achieve and goes with it and adapts it and maximises it and really, really pushes it. I believe these people are farmed more than they are hunted and what I mean by that is hunting is going out and recruiting someone and stealing them from another MSP maybe, or they’re on the job market, but hunting is you go out, you find them, you hire them. That’s it. In out, quick kill. Paul Green:I think farming is a much more robust way of finding your A team players, particularly if your second and third line technicians, your more difficult hires. You need to be getting to know people almost months, maybe even years before you might possibly hire them. Imagine if you met on a regular basis, let’s say once a quarter or every six months, just met up for a coffee when you can with the A team players for your local competitors or people who are perhaps doing a similar job or something else where, who could one day come and work for you? Now they won’t all come and do that, but some of them might at some point and much better just like in marketing, I recommend exactly this approach in marketing, building relationships with people, long before they’re ready to buy from you. You can do exactly the same thing with your staff, building relationships with your potential staff a long time before they may come and work with you and that’s a great way to get to know people long before you’re ready to actually talk about hiring them or offering them a job. Paul Green:There’s lots of other things that you could and should be doing. For example, you should be enhancing your profile within your marketplace, but within the IT world of your local marketplace as an influencer because A team players want to go and work for A team players, so you need to position yourself as a top person. You can put together a referral program for your employees. Many of your team already know your next hire. The trick is getting the referral out of them at exactly the right moment, but also making sure you don’t create a little clique within your business of your employees who all know each other and then there is the opportunity to turn some of your B players into A players. And I’ve done a little bit of research on this. I haven’t read the whole book, but I bought it and I had a quick flip through for this podcast. Paul Green:It’s a book you can find on Amazon called How to Hire A-Players, Finding the Top People for Your Team, Even If You Don’t Have a Recruiting Department by Eric Herrenkohl. Go ahead and have a look at that book, as I say, I haven’t read the whole book, but the stuff I flicked through look pretty good to me and know that this is one of the most important things for you to do, if you’re going to grow the business and ultimately turn it into a lifestyle business where it pays you an exceedingly large amount of money to own the business, but not to have to run it. You’re going to have to hire a really great staff along the way. Voiceover:Here’s this week’s clever idea. Paul Green:So sticking with the same theme, how do you attract A players in your recruitment adverts? Now I believe that recruitment adverts are primarily a marketing problem rather than a people problem. In fact, I believe the whole of recruitment is a marketing problem because there are great people out there. It’s just how do you reach them? How do you get the right message in front of them at exactly the right time? That sounds like a marketing problem to me. The issue when it comes to recruitment adverts is that all adverts look the same. If you go onto indeed or monster or whatever is the predominant jobs website in your local area and you go and type in whatever you think a third line or a second line technician would type into, look for a job in your area and maybe you’ll see five 10, 20 jobs similar to the jobs that you’ve got that you’d like to fill. They all look the same. They’ve got very samey looking headlines that are very samey looking job roles. They all look the same. Paul Green:In marketing, we say that samey kills sales and actually in recruitment we can say a similar thing, samey kills response. It’s kind of simple when you look at it that way, because when you do exactly the same as everyone else in the marketplace, you don’t stand out. You have zero standout ability and that directly affects the response you get from your advert. Now, I wrote a job advert for one of my clients a couple of years ago. I’m going to read just a few lines from it. The headline is this, do not apply for this junior installation engineer’s job. It’s highly unlikely you’d enjoy it and the text reads this, you don’t want this job, trust us, you really don’t. Because even though you’d get full training to become a junior installation engineer, you’d also work very, very hard. Why? Because we’re business name, a busy growing network and AV installation business and we don’t have time for standing around drinking tea and scratching our arses. Paul Green:Yes, it actually put that in the advert and the advert goes on from there. It talks about the kind of work that they do, talks about where they work. It talks about the specifics of the job. It talks about ladders, drilling, fixing, lifting things because that’s what’s in that specific job and it talks about what kind of person they’re looking for. In fact, I’ll read it to you. Okay, we suppose there are some benefits. We assume you have no experience, which is okay. In the unlikely event you did want this job and actually got it. You’d work closely with the senior engineer so we could make sure you got excellent training and after an initial three month contract, there’s a strong chance you could be awarded a permanent position. Plus, we might buy you a Mars bar now and again, might. Now the personality of these adverts was matched absolutely directly to my client and they use the advert couple of years ago and they did get a pretty good response. Paul Green:They got their new junior installation engineer from it and that’s an advert they can roll out again and again and again. Now you wouldn’t use exactly that advert to hire second or third line techs for your business, but its got some real standout ability to it and that’s the point. You’ve got to stand out. You’ve got to do something completely different. Here’s a format that I think could work very well. Put an advert on your local jobs board and instead of just writing what everyone else writes, take a similar approach. You could say it’s unlikely this is the job for you and your techs could say, we’re looking for a second line, third line technician to work at company name, but this probably isn’t the job for you. Go and have a look at our video to find out why. And that’s it, that’s all that’s in the advert. Paul Green:And then the response URL takes them to a recruitment page on your website. And on that recruitment page there’s a video and the video is the actual advert itself. So the text that’s on the job board is just driving traffic. The video is the advert. And what do you put in the video? I would say something that matches your personality. So you might show them your existing office or you might get one of your existing engineers to talk about how much fun they have in the job. Or it might be you talking about how much work this person is going to have to do. Remember A team players are always looking for a challenge. They’re not looking to just sit on their backsides and do very little all day. They’re looking for that challenge. So maybe you talk about how much work there is to do and how many sites there are to look after and how many projects there are to manage and all of that kind of stuff. Paul Green:But a video advert gives you five minutes because five minutes is okay for a recruitment video, gives you five minutes to potentially talk to that person, those candidates, rather than the 30 seconds that you would perhaps have if they’re reading a text advert. And I would then make the call to action the way that they apply for the job, a little more difficult than usual. You could for example, put a quiz together. So right from the start they have to prove that they have level two or level three ability or at least Google ability. So you might ask them a series of technical questions that they have to answer and say to them, please send in your CV along with the answers to these questions and email them to, and then there’s a very specific email address and it might be something like 9 out of 10 people won’t get this job@yourbusiness.com, now you’ve got to match all of this to your personality. Paul Green:These are just my ideas, things that I would do and in fact I have done it when I was hiring staff in my previous business. Do the things that feel right to you and it will help the person that’s applying for your job get a measure of what kind of business they’re going to work for, but whether you do these video adverts or the kind of job adverts where you’re telling people not to apply, you’ve got to do something that appears to be so, so different from the way your competitors are recruiting. Voiceover:Paul’s blatant plug. Paul Green:Tell me you’ve got a copy of my free book. It’s called Updating Servers doesn’t Grow Your Business. I wrote it a couple of years ago and it contains within loads of information to get new clients for your MSP. Now you can have it as a PDF anywhere in the world and if you’re in the UK or the USA, we will post a physical paperback copy to you as well. Why do we do this? Because we all know if you’ve got a physical paperback copy in your hands, you’re much more likely to actually read the book, hooray. It’s not a long read, it’s only 44 pages. You could easily read it in the evening and there’s genuinely no downside to requesting a free copy. I send you a free copy, because I’m trying to set up some reciprocity, trying to set up a relationship between you and me and maybe just maybe we’ll go and do some work together down the line. You can get a fre…

Full show notes at the publisher

Episode 22: How to get loads more client referrals Apr 14, 2020

Show notes

In this week’s episode It can be harder than you think to get business from a quality referral. You may be doing a great job but Paul explains why some people will never be able to recommend you Now more than ever we need to be looking after ourselves, and this week Paul has some great tips to make sure you’re doing the right thing by your business, your family and yourself Also in this week’s episode a BBC producer explains how to increase the chances of getting coverage in the media. And find out what an authority website is (and why you should get one) Show notes Out every Tuesday on your favourite podcast platform Presented by Paul Green, an MSP marketing expert Find out more about Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs Read about Paul’s MSP Ultimate Net Profit Bootcamp Paul mentioned the book Unstoppable Referrals by Steve Gordon Paul’s guest was BBC radio producer Tara Dolby talking about how to gain media exposure Thank you to Dan Martin from Platinum Business Systems for the question about authority sites The guest on April 21st will be Kevin Clune from MSP Growth Hacks and author of The MSP Growth Funnel, talking about how to pick the right marketing strategy for your MSP 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 back to the show, here’s what we’ve got coming up for you today. Tara Dolby:We often get contacted by people completely out of the blue. Sometimes when you talk to them, it’s a case of you’ve never listened to what we do. Paul Green:We’re also going to be looking at how to generate more referrals from your existing clients, and a great marketing concept to introduce you to is something called authority sites. Voiceover:Paul Green’s MSP Marketing podcast. Paul Green:Got a bit of a message for you today, and it’s that you need to be better at looking after yourself and keeping yourself healthy and well. And I’m not talking about everything that’s happening in the news and the world and all of that at the moment, I’m talking about just you running the business. Because I was talking to one of my clients last week, we had a chat on Zoom, he runs an MSP and he was exhausted, I could see it in his face, I could hear it in his words. He was mentally, emotionally, physically exhausted, and this person is normally very positive and you could hear it reflected in his speech that everything was negative, everything was a problem, every staff issue was just a major thing for him. The client that was causing them trouble, it was all just too much, too much and too much. Paul Green:He thought that call was going to be talking about marketing and dealing with some staff issues, and actually I told him to take the afternoon off despite how busy he was and to go to sleep sort of 9:00 PM and not have any beer, get a decent night’s sleep and have the weekend off. So often when I’m dealing with business owners, particularly if we’re talking towards the end of the week, they’re exhausted, I mean utterly exhausted, and of course we all know it’s a terrible vicious circle that when you’re tired you reach for the wine and the wine makes you stay up a little bit longer and you become even more tired, and the busier you are the harder it is to get out of that pattern. Paul Green:I was talking to a friend of mine and a couple of weeks ago who is a psychologist, and she was mentioning something called Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, and you can Google this, you can find it. Maslow was a psychologist back in the day and he came up with a… It’s like a little triangle, go and have a look at the image on Google, and it’s his hierarchy of needs. And basically we have to deal with things in the correct order. So for example, it’s impossible for us to even think about growing our business if we don’t have the basics, if we don’t have air, water, food, shelter, sleep, clothing. If we’re not safe, if we don’t have personal security, if we don’t have the feeling that our business is generating money for us, if we don’t have our health, it’s impossible for us to do all of these things. And I’ll put a link to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs in the show notes, but you don’t need to study psychology to know at a very basic level, you’ve got to look after yourself. Paul Green:The goal is to be the business owner, not just for 10 years but for 20, 30, 40, 50 years. And the only way you can do that is if it’s something that you can tolerate 50 weeks of the year, regardless of how many holidays you take, 51, 52 weeks of the year, you’ve got to be that business owner. It is about prioritising sleep, it’s about prioritising family, it’s about prioritising the things that really, really matter to you more than anything else even though the business is trying to drag you down all the time. And even those of us with the most well run businesses have moments where it just all becomes too much. I believe that’s actually a warning flag for you, it’s your body and the world telling you it’s time to just stop, address the balance and have a break. Paul Green:I think as business owners, having a break is the hardest thing for us to do. And yet interestingly, the business owners I know who have the fastest growing businesses, who are the most successful, tend to be the ones that spend the least amount of time trapped within the business. And I defined trapped within the business as you have to be there for the business to thrive. It’s a longterm thing to do, but if your business right now does not thrive unless you are there, that’s not really a business, it’s a job, and it’s not a particularly well paid job. In fact, you are locked in a prison of your own design, and being utterly exhausted at the weekend or just not having that work life balance right is an early warning flag that you need to do something about it. Paul Green:Because if you don’t, ultimately you’re not going to be a business owner for the decades that perhaps you would like to be, because you just simply will not be able to cope with it longterm and that will impact on you, that will impact on your family and ultimately it will impact quite negatively on your business as well. Voiceover:Here’s this week’s clever idea. Paul Green:I’m going to try something new in today’s podcast. You see a couple of months ago I put on a huge training event for a bunch of MSPs in the UK, it was called my MSP Ultimate Net Profit Bootcamp. We audio recorded the entire thing, and today I want to play you a clip from that bootcamp. It’s about how you can get more referrals from your existing clients. Paul Green:Number three is referrals from existing clients. The best way to get new prospects and to drive traffic into your website is to get referrals from people. To save me talking about this for hours, get this book. This is the best book on referrals I’ve ever read. It’s by Steve Gordon, it’s called Unstoppable Referrals, and I can sum it up in 10 seconds for you, which is stop asking for referrals, start offering a referral pack. So you probably at some point, whether formally or informally have said to your clients, “Hey, look, if you know anyone that’s looking for IT support, would you send them our way?” There’s two big problems with that. First of all, the problem is there is a social risk in referring you. Let’s take Andy, let’s say Andy says to me, “Oh Paul, if you know anyone, would you send them my way?” Paul Green:And I say to Alex, I say, “Alex, your business is really screwed, you need a proper IT company, give Andy a call and we’ve been using it for years, he’s amazing. Give him a call.” And then you give him a call and it happens to be a bad day at that particular business, Andy’s actually a way that day, the 12 year old technician somehow got near the phone, “Hello?” “Yeah, hi. Can I speak to Andy?” “He’s not here.” “Okay, do you know when he’s next in?” “No.” “Okay, all right I’ll ring back. Thanks.” That’s happened in every single one of your businesses by the way. We could do… We’re not going to, but we could do mystery calls into your businesses today, and Steve’s is the first one. Your response to that, Steve, is immediately made me want to do it. Steve:That’s a fantastic idea! Paul Green:It is a fantastic idea. It might take some time to do the whole room anyway. So if that was the referral, I’d then go back to… Or Alex would come back to me and say, “Yeah, I run the Andy guy, it was just all a bit vague,” and I’m the one that’s taken on the social risk of that. This is why your clients don’t refer you, because the social risk of referring you is higher than the reward that they get. You will probably have one or two clients who are uber referrers, who refer you all the time, and those of you who go networking a lot will find that there are uber networkers who are really good at connecting people, but the vast majority of everyone else does nothing and doesn’t refer anyone, this is because of the social risk. Paul Green:The second problem with that is people refer in the wrong way. “Hey Alex, you’re looking for an IT support company, aren’t you? Give Andy a ring, he’s brilliant, right, you can ring him on a Sunday night at 10:30 if you server is knackered or anything and he’ll just fix it for you. He doesn’t care that his kids are crying and his wife’s leaving him, he doesn’t care about that stuff. Just give him a ring.” Can you see that’s the wrong referral, isn’t it? So what this guy suggests in his book, is that instead of asking for referrals, you offer a referral kit. A referral kit is a book, so you say to your existing clients, in fact maybe you even give them business cards and it’s got a picture of your book on it, and it says, “The guy whose team looks after my IT has written a book about keeping your business secure. Get a free copy at www.keepyourbusinesssecure.com.” First person to buy that domain, buys the beers. Speaker 5:I’m sure it’s been taken. Paul Green:Sure it has, I’m sure it has. But essentially that’s what that book is about and that saved you an evening reading that book. But existing clients are brilliant when they refer the right way using the right methodology. Voiceover:Paul’s blatant plug. Paul Green:How would you like to have direct access to me on a daily basis to help you with the marketing of your business? My blatant plug today is actually something free, it’s an extra resource for you, it’s a Facebook group. It’s only for MSPs, it’s a vendor free zone, and in that group we talk about marketing, we talk about things to grow your business, to give you more monthly recurring revenue and ultimately to get more net profit out of your business. So if you are genuinely an MSP, and I do ask you to prove it when you join that group, then just go onto your Facebook app, type in MSP Marketing in the search bar up at the top, go onto groups and apply to join. It’s a closed group so I will have to… You just basically put your website address to prove that you’re an MSP, I will approve your membership within 24 hours, and it would be great to have a chat to you in that group. Voiceover:The big interview. Tara Dolby:Hello, I’m Tara Dolby and I’m a journalist working for the BBC in their local radio stations department, and I’ve been working at the BBC for probably about 22 years now, and I’ve produced some brilliant programs. I work with a lot of great presenters and yeah, we’ve won quite a few awards and we know what we’re looking for where we want a story. Paul Green:Which is what I’m interested in talking to you about, because the MSPs that I work with and that are listening to this podcast, they want to get onto radio stations like their local BBC because it’s great for PR and credibility and exposure, and they want to get into local newspapers and blogs and all of that kind of stuff. But the problem that most MSPs have is they will come up with a story and it’s very technology focused, and the journalists or the producers that they speak to just don’t seem to be interested. Why is that the case? Tara Dolby:Well I suppose what we don’t want in any story is for something to come across as dry. Unfortunately technical things can often seem a little bit dry, but they don’t have to. And I suppose when it comes to a press release, whether it’s a technology company or whoever it is, what we’re always looking for is something that’s going to grab our attention in the first sentence. And if you’re dealing with a local radio station, and I’ll talk on behalf of what my experience has been with local radio stations, I am initially looking for something that is going to be local. So I need a reason as to why I would look at this story, because if there is something that’s happening in the world elsewhere that has a technological bias, I probably won’t be that interested unless I am looking for a cyber crimes expert, for example. Tara Dolby:I want to mention that in a minute because that’s a useful thing to put across too, but one of the things I will probably do is I would look for a local angle and I would look for somebody who has either a local case study, or a really strong local guest who can give me the absolute categorical information that I want that is going to make the story sound exciting. So say if there was a Windows update, for example, would I want to put that out on air? No, unless something had gone wrong with that Windows update, which point, and this is what I go back to, I am looking for experts who speak really well on things, can put their message across to a lay person to explain why there’s been a problem with a Windows update. That’s what I’m looking for. Paul Green:So we’ll come back to the experts in a second because that’s a really interesting idea. But in essence what you’re saying here is you don’t care about the story unless it is potentially relevant to your audience, to the people that listen to your radio station. Tara Dolby:Right, well I produce a program that is very much about what people are talking about, and if there is a new story that I think they should be talking about, for example, because it’s enormous, I will find a way to make it relevant so that they all talking about it. So if I get a subject presented to me, and I do get loads and loads of press releases, I probably get 10 or 12 a day, now that’s a lot. So when I look at it, I don’t spend a lot of time, and in the same way that if you get 10 CVs through, you’re looking for something that’s going to make one in particular stand out. Tara Dolby:If it’s got a local line for me, I’m more likely to spend more time on it. If it comes with photographs, I’ll think, “Okay, how can I make this work?” There are things that add credit to a press release, and the local line, the photos, video that might make it more explainable, these are things that make me think, “Okay I will probably spend a bit more time on this. Is there something that I can get out this that will make it relevant to our audience?” Because at the top of my mind it’s always about the audience and whether it’s something that I can make workable for them. Paul Green:So you touched earlier on having experts, people to add comment on stuff, and you’ve mentioned cyber crime as well. Can you give an example of where you would go looking for an expert to comment on something and how would you actually source that person? Tara Dolby:Interestingly, there are a couple of universities, well, we’ve got quite a few who are in our patch. We cover quite a big patch, we cover Bedfordshire, Hertfordshire and Buckinghamshire, so we have a lots of academics out there who will provide us with information on lots of different subjects. I’ve also got a lot of law firms and there are lots of big business, now some of them already do this, if I’ve already got an est…

Full show notes at the publisher

Our TOPPODCAST Picks

Follow Us

Stay Connected

Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast

Related Podcasts

Links

Stay Connected