Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast

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Episode 21: MSP KPIs to track Apr 07, 2020

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In this week’s episode Hopefully your MSP has been growing at a decent rate (current blip aside) and continues to be successful, but is it REALLY heading in the right direction? This week Paul lays out some of the best KPIs – Key Performance Indicators – that can provide you with the real answers IT Business Growth Expert Richard Tubb joins Paul to explain how much your MSP would be worth if you sold it tomorrow Also this week Paul looks at how to overcome objections at sales meetings. And answers a question for an MSP on whether or not to use Google adverts Show notes Out every Tuesday on your favourite podcast platform Presented by Paul Green, an MSP marketing expert In discussing the best KPIs, Paul mentioned his MSP Mastermind groups and a previous podcast episode featuring Joe Pannone from CW Dash Credit to MSP Anthony Thackray from AGT Computer Services for the great question to close a sales meeting Find out more the marketing content available from the MSP Marketing Edge Paul’s guest was The IT Business Growth Expert Richard Tubb (click here for his newsletter) talking about how to value your MSP During the conversation, Paul mentioned a previous podcast guest Jonathan Jay, who explained how to grow via acquisition Thank you to Steven Pretlove from CCS IT Solutions for the question about the best use of Google Ads Here’s the link to find the Google Ads course on udemy.com The guest on April 14th will be BBC radio producer Tara Dolby talking about how to gain media exposure 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, the MSPs around the world. This is Paul Green’s MSP Marketing podcast. Paul Green:Do you know this podcast has gone so quickly? We’ve made it through to episode 21 and this is what’s coming up in today’s show. Richard Tubb:How can they look at extracting themselves from the business so that business is actually worth more without them? Paul Green:We’re also going to be looking at how to overcome objections at sales meetings and answering a question for an MSP. Should you or should you not be doing Google adverts? Voiceover:Paul Green’s MSP Marketing podcast. Paul Green:One of the downsides of running your own business is that it’s very easy to lose the bigger picture. You can have really, really busy days and weeks, but you can get to the end of them and sort of ask yourself, have we made any money this week? Are the clients happy this week? Are the staff happy this week? Are we doing better this week as a business than we were last week? And there comes a point in everyone’s business ownership career where they look to put in place KPIs. They’re a bit jargony KPIs but they stand for Key Performance Indicators, and you might choose to put them together in a dashboard or just in spreadsheet, or even just on a scrap of paper on your desk. You remember paper, don’t you? So 2004 it really is, but the points of KPIs is that they give you a visual indicator of what’s happening within the business, and therefore what the trends are in the business. Paul Green:Cause you see KPIs aren’t just about the snapshot of what’s happening now. It’s what’s happening over a period of time. What’s going up? What’s improving? What’s getting worse? What’s going down? Which are the areas that you need to focus your valuable management attention on because you can’t be on top of everything all of the time. So the KPIs, particularly when married up to a really visually easy to read dashboard, make it easy for you to know where you should be spending time, what’s broken, what’s soon going to be broken or what’s just generally a bit lackluster right now. Paul Green:Now I have had many conversations with my MSP master minders in the UK over a period of time about which KPIs that they should be tracking, and I’ve got a list here, two lists for you really. One of them is a list of tech KPIs and then the second one is a list of management KPIs. Paul Green:Now, caveat to this, as I’ve said many times on this podcast, I’m not a technician, I love technology, but I’m not a technician so this tech one is not going to be a particularly exhaustive list, but it’s certainly got things such as billable hours. How many hours are you billing out right now? SLAs? How close have you come to breaching SLAs? If you’ve got Service Level Agreements, you should certainly be tracking the number of tickets opened and the number of tickets closed, and also the average ticket length because the average ticket length is an indicator of quality, and also probably customer satisfaction, which is also one of the technology KPIs that you should be tracking. Now, there are lots of different ways to do these. If you’ve got a good PSA, then you should be able to extract this data out of them easily. A couple of weeks ago on the podcast I had on Joe Pannone from CW Dash, which is a free dashboard which links into ConnectWise and does exactly this. Paul Green:It extracts that information out of ConnectWise and shows you a dashboard. You’ve got Bright Gauge, which of course is owned by ConnectWise now and there are various other dashboards that you can find. It’s fairly easy to present the information if you can get the information out. Oh, but you’ve got to make sure the information is good quality as well because there is a phrase isn’t there, which is crap in, crap out. So if you’re going to be tracking things like billable hours, or tickets opened and close, you’ve got to make sure, in fact there’s got to be a culture within the business of your technicians tracking data properly because if they’re not tracking data properly, they’re not billing the hours properly. If they’re not managing the tickets properly, then you’re going to get a skewed picture from your KPIs. Paul Green:The customer satisfaction one by the way, there are things like customer thermometer that you can use to just get, if you like a thumbs up or a smiley face from your clients and some of the PSAs have their own versions of that is certainly worth just tracking to see, again, trending over time, how happy or unhappy are your clients, how’s that changing over a period of time? Paul Green:Then we get into the sort of the management ones. Now with the management ones, I’d be looking to track the number of new leads, new leads coming into the business. So a lead isn’t necessarily a prospect, a lead like someone joining your email database, or maybe even connecting to you on LinkedIn. So how many leads are you generating and how many prospects are you generating? The prospect is where someone puts their hand up, where a lead puts their hand up and says, “Can we have a conversation please?” And you actually start talking to them about their specific circumstances. That’s the difference between leads and prospects and you need to be tracking both because you might only get one or two new prospects a week, but you potentially could get 20, 30, 40, 50, maybe even 100 new leads a week. Next year should be looking at the number of new sales appointments, and not just the number of sales appointments because someone could have three sales appointments in the same week with the same prospects. Paul Green:That doesn’t really count, but what are the number of new ones that we’re starting? What’s our lead, to prospect, to appointment conversion rate? In the business that I sold, it was a marketing business I sold four years ago. We knew exactly what our conversion rate was from the number of new leads joining the database, to the number of sales meetings that we had, to the number of new clients. I can’t remember what those are off the top of my head, but we worked that out over a number of years and they were fairly consistent figures. By tracking those figures every single week, we were able to see A, if the system was broken in some way because typically when the figures changed quite dramatically and quite suddenly it meant that someone somewhere was not following the system that was laid out, but also allowed us to know with confidence if we spend a thousand pounds on lead generation, we know exactly how much revenue, and therefore gross profit, and potentially net profit that can turn into. Paul Green:So that’s definitely something you’d want to track those conversion rates. Then you’ve got your sales conversion rates, which is all part of the same thing. You definitely want to track your monthly recurring revenue because that is the dream goal for every MSP is to grow the monthly recurring revenue. So track it. Let’s see it in your dashboard. What about monthly recurring revenue per user per month? So this actually gives you a quality score across the whole business. If you’re supporting, let’s say a thousand users and you’re generating, I don’t know, 10,000 pounds worth of monthly recurring revenue, then that’s 10 pounds MRR per user per month. And again, over a period of time that could become a KPI that you’re focusing on. How do we grow a MRR, a monthly recurring revenue per user per month? And that’s where you’d use things like the profit matrix to go out and sell more to your existing clients. Paul Green:In fact, it will motivate you to do so because you will make more money this way, and you’ll know from the figure that it’s going up. You could measure an upselling rate again for each client, how much are you growing their business every year? Upselling isn’t so much about hardcore selling, it’s about finding opportunities, finding things that your clients might want or need, or that might remove some fear for them, and just putting it in front of them in the right way. Some of them will go on to buy some of those things. Paul Green:You should definitely be tracking your net profit percentage. So net profit is the bottom line of the accounts. It’s the money that’s yours, it goes to the owners, you just have to pay the tax on it sure. But one of the main goals of the business is to generate enough net profit to keep your interest over a long period of time. All of us have run businesses that don’t make money and it’s not fun. It’s not fun doing that at all. So you should be absolutely tracking your net profit percentage. The percentage again is a quality score and what’s happening to that month by month, year by year. Paul Green:Then the final one, I think you should be tracking is staff satisfaction. Now there are lots of different ways of measuring staff satisfaction. You just have a good Google search to figure that out, but you might get them to put scores together in appraisals, or in reviews, or something like that. The more you can track how satisfied your staff are, the earlier the warning signals will be when things are going wrong because you will have key members of your team that you would be gutted if they left. You maybe have other members of the team you’re not so bothered about, but if you’re tracking whether it’s individual, or whether it’s team, staff satisfaction, it gives you an indicator of, “How am I doing as a boss? How are we doing as a business making this a great place to work?” Paul Green:As I said, this is not an exhaustive list, but certainly if I owned an MSP, these are some of the KPIs that I would be tracking. Voiceover:Here’s this week’s clever idea. Paul Green:We don’t talk a lot about actual sales meetings on this podcast because my experience with most MSPs is that once you’ve got the sales meeting, you go and do your magic. Most MSP owners are pretty good at selling because they talk with passion, and with vigour, and with interest about how technology can solve their potential client’s problems, but it is worth I think just having a look at objections. Objections at sales meetings are, I believe, the prospect telling you they haven’t yet got all of the information that they need to make a decision, be that cognitive information or emotional information. Paul Green:Because of course, most of the people that you’re meeting are making the decision emotionally. They’re making the decision with their heart, and then they’re rubber stamping it with their brain. So with objections, I always think there’s a four step process that you can use to overcome objections. The first of them is to listen fully to that objection. You’ve got to ask them, because the temptation is to jump in. Someone says, “Oh, but what about blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,” and the temptation is to jump in and just try and kill it dead and answer it. Actually what I think you should do is you should take time to listen to the objection properly. You should explore the objection. You should ask questions, what, how questions, not why questions, because why questions can come across as defensive, but “What does that look like? How do you think that would affect the business? What is it about that that concerns you?” Those kinds of things. Paul Green:You need to make sure that you understand the objection completely, and that’s about exploring it properly with them. It’s about asking them for examples. Most objections come out of previous experiences or lack of experience. So you’ve got to quite understand, “Is this because of something that’s happened to them in the past, or is this because they haven’t got something to compare this against?” And only after you’ve uncovered all of those objections, can you respond properly. Then you have to look at the objections and respond to the biggest things first. Resolving objections and responding properly isn’t about being defensive. It isn’t about just being dismissive. If they’ve got an objection, it’s a real thing to them. To you, it might be nothing because you know it’s not a big deal at all, but to them it’s big and it’s everything. Paul Green:So you’ve got to throw out the evidence. You’ve got to give them the emotional evidence that they need, that this is not a problem. You’ve got to back that up with some cognitive evidence. You mustn’t be swayed by the fact you know it’s not a big deal, because if it’s a big deal for them, it could potentially kill your sale. By the way, you’ve got to do all this without talking for 20 minutes because long winded responses just seem really insincere, and then once you’ve done that, I think you’ve got to confirm that you satisfy their objections. So that’s about testing it, it’s about asking them, “What do you believe about that? How do you feel about that? What do you think should happen from there?” Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Paul Green:Now I have to give a shout out to one of the MSPs that I know Anthony Thackray who came up with an amazing question to pull up all the objections in a meeting. It’s something that you use towards the backend of the sales meeting when you believe that the client is on board, and this is the question, “What’s standing in the way of us being your IT partner?” Let me say that again because it is a great one. “What’s standing in the way of us being your IT partner?” That I believe, is the ultimate objection identifying question, “What’s standing in the way of us being your IT partner?” Because they have to put on the table everything that potentially bothers them about working with you. Why don’t you try it at the next sales meeting you do? Voiceover:Paul’s blatant plug. Paul Green:Far too many MSPs really struggle with their marketing, which is crazy because there’s so much help out there to help you with your marketing. Now, one of the big challenges is to build a relationship with prospects before the point that they are ready to have a serious conversation with you about switching from their incumbent to you. Paul Green:This is where my service, the MSP Marketing Edge comes in, because what we do is we’d give you a whole bunch of stuff, marketing content that you can use on all of your marketing channels. So basically you don’t have to write it, you don’t have to think of i…

Full show notes at the publisher

Episode 20: If your MSP is hacked you’re screwed Mar 31, 2020

Show notes

In this week’s episode It’s devastating for any business to suffer an IT security breach, but when it happens to an MSP it could mean ‘game over’. Following a huge story in the channel about the foiled hacking of an MSP, Paul explains how talking about your security measures could improve relationships with clients and prospects alike Also this week, and on the subject of security, how a simple phishing test could lead to increased monthly recurring revenue There’s also a fascinating conversation with a special guest about how to see IT buying from a client’s point of view. And a great listener question on how to build trust with prospects Show notes Out every Tuesday on your favourite podcast platform Presented by Paul Green, an MSP marketing expert Read the article from CRN about the three vendors that foiled the hacking of an MSP While talking about security training, Paul mentioned Knowbe4 and also the phishing test from Phishing Box Order your free copy of Paul’s book Updating Servers Doesn’t Grow Your Business Paul’s guest was Tracy Pound from Maximity talking about the best way to converse with prospects Thank you to Raffi Jamgotchian from Triada Networks for the question about how to build loyalty with prospects The guest on April 7th will be the IT Business Growth Expert Richard Tubb (find out more here) talking about how to value 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 episode 20. Here’s what’s coming up in this week’s show. Tracy Pound:We can’t bandy around those types of terms, not knowing whether or not the receiver of our message really understands what it is that we’re trying to say. Paul Green:We’re also going to be talking about a great tool that will help your clients and prospects to self-identify if they need phishing training, and we’ve got a question from an MSP about how to build trust with prospects. Voiceover:Paul Green’s MSP Marketing podcast. Paul Green:I think one of the scariest things you can talk to any MSP about is the prospect of you being hacked. I mean could you just imagine how business ending it would be if you got hacked and through you, the hackers accessed your clients? There’s virtually no way back from that. I’m looking at an article on crn.com back from February and the headline is, “I’m Selling Access To An MSP: How Three Vendors Teamed To Foil Hacking Plot.” Now, you’ve probably heard about this. It’s how Datto, Huntress Labs and ConnectWise found an MSPs access credentials up for sale on the dark web, and they work together to find the suspect. The suspect was arrested, which is absolutely great. But maybe it’s the thing that keeps you up at night. Paul Green:I had this discussion a few weeks ago with my MSP Masterminders. These are small groups of noncompeting MSPs. We meet in the UK and we meet once a month, We sit around a table and we talk about everything that grows the business, and we talk about things that get in the way of growing the business. The fear of being hacked is such a huge one that we came up with a bit of a mini list of things that you could do to secure your RMM, for example. So simple things like enabling multifactor authentication and of course, making sure that that MFA is not email based and of course, it’s not text-based, because of course, SIM jacking is very much a thing. Paul Green:We talked about things like removing the ability for someone to click on “I forgot my password,” because if they’ve breached one of your staff’s email accounts and someone could go and click on, “I forgot my password” and reset the password link. We discussed that instead, having a couple of admins with the ability to manually reset passwords when required would be a better thing. We discussed removing things like “trust this device” capabilities. Even me, a layman who’s not a tech has looked at … I think it’s Xero, the accounting software system, is do you want to trust this device for 14 days? Even I’m thinking no, because what if I lose the laptop? Whereas if I have to generate a code every single time I log in, that seems safer. Paul Green:We talked about forcing stricter password requirements even on your staff using random password generators. Of course, using passwords management tools, at least minimum 12 character mixed passwords, or using pass phrases or sentences. Some of the other more technical things that my Masterminders discussed were setting IP restrictions for host access and admin, which apparently, is done through the admin console. You still have to be careful if get locked out of your RMM on that. But the point being that there’s lots of things that you can do within your business. Actually, all of those things that we’ve just been talking about there, aren’t they the things that you would want your clients to do? Paul Green:There is a concept and you’ll have heard it, it comes out of Apple, but when Steve Jobs was running it the second time round, which is do you drink your own Kool-Aid? The goal with the first iPhone and with the iPods and with the Macs was that those computers and those phones have to be good enough that Apple could use them every single day as their main devices. You think about 15 years ago, they wouldn’t have actually used their own devices because they just weren’t good enough. So do you drink your own data security Kool-Aid? Have you got multifactor authentication everywhere, proper MFA? Do you remove the, “forget my password” and “trust this device” capabilities? You recommend it to your clients. Okay, some of them ignore it, but are you doing it within your own business? Paul Green:I would say, as a series of basic things that you should do, you should just do those things. In fact, you should be telling your clients that you’ve done those things, and you should be recommending it as your standard best practice data security checklist. Maybe even you’d put one together and you’d say to your clients, “Look, we’ve got this basic checklist for data security. This is what we do. We run through this with every single one of our devices, every single one of our staff. We highly recommend you do the same.” Because when someone sees their supplier, their trusted partner doing something, and it’s the same things that they recommend that they do for them so that the seller, the vendor is doing the same things as the client is, that engenders a huge amount of trust and an enormous amount of goodwill. So this isn’t just good for security, this is actually good for marketing and sales as well. Voiceover:Here’s this week’s clever idea. Paul Green:They’re on the same vein. I’m sure you’ve recommended to many of your clients that they have phishing training whether you buy and resell the one that’s bundled into ID Agent or Continuum, or of course, there’s KnowBe4. There’s loads of phishing training out there, so you don’t have to physically go on site and do it. But of course clients go, “Nah, we don’t need that. We wouldn’t make that mistake.” Well now, there’s a tool that you can use. In fact, you can embed it into your website to show them whether or not they actually need to do some phishing training. It’s a website we found called PhishingBox.com, and if you go to phishingbox.com/phishing-iq-test … We’ll put that URL into the show notes on my website. Paul Green:I’m just on that website now and I’m looking at it. It says, “Is the image below of a real email or a phishing email?” It says it’s from QuickBooks. I’m just looking at the domain name, donotreply@quickbooks.com, and it’s about recent changes to your credit card. Yeah, that looks all right, so I’m going to mark that as a real email. The next one we’ve got is the image below of a real email or a phishing email, and we’ve got the same one here. This one says it’s from Wells Fargo, but it’s got a … ah, it’s got a secure mail attachment, but the word attachment that’s been spelled wrong. So I’m going to mark that as a phishing email. I’m 20% completed, so it looks like there are 10 questions in this. It’s quite clever because it’s making me have a look at it. So this next one from the email address, noreply@dropboxteam.com, so I’m going to say that that’s a phishing email. Be really interesting to see what score I get out of this. Paul Green:Anyway, this is a service that you can buy from PhishingBox. I believe that you can embed it into your website. I’m just having a look on the pricing. For a single company, it’s not a huge amount of money, so clearly you can sell this training. But the fact that you can embed that test into your website and actually use that as a way to show your clients, “You’re not as good at phishing as you think you are.” So often its the person at the top who tends to be a little bit more rubbish at phishing than some of the staff, but certainly a tool like this is a good way for them just to see how good or bad they are as an organisation, which is going to help you to actually sell some phishing training. Voiceover:Paul’s blatant plug. Paul Green:Surprisingly this week, my blessing plug isn’t going to cost you any money because it’s something that I would like to give to you. You see a couple of years ago, I wrote a book. It’s called Updating Servers Doesn’t Grow Your Business. As the title suggests, it’s about the need to work on the business rather than in the business. In fact, it contains within a whole series of suggestions, a whole bunch of advice, a whole load of marketing ideas for you to grow your MSP. Now, this is a physical print book. I had 5,000 printed in the UK, and we’ve given away around about 1,800 of those so far. Paul Green:The big news is we’ve just had some printed in the United States as well, because we all know that no one ever really reads PDFs. They just sit on laptops. We’ve been sending PDFs to the States for the last year, and now we’ve actually got physical print copies that have been printed somewhere just outside of New York City, and we are posting those around the US as well. So if you want to just go onto my website, you go onto paulgreensmspmarketing.com and right there on the homepage, there are details of how you can get a free copy of my book, Updating Servers Doesn’t Grow Your Business. Go on, go and get your free copy now. Voiceover:The big interview. Tracy Pound:Hi, I’m Tracy Pound, and I run a business and own a business called MaximITy, which is all services around IT and technology, but my background is I’ve been in the IT industry for 35 years. I sit on the board of directors for CompTIA worldwide, and I’m also part of the CompTIA Executive Council here in the UK. So I do a lot of work in and around the channel as well as with end users. Paul Green:I want to talk to you today Tracy, about how difficult it is for most MSPs to look at their business from the decision makers point of view. Yet that’s a critical skill that we have to develop, isn’t it? Tracy Pound:It is, absolutely. I think, in today’s world, end users and decision makers are much more informed about technology than they ever have been in the past, they want to know that their suppliers and the people that they work with understand their business. Not just the technology that supports it, but understand their business and their industry. That’s quite a hard thing to do for managed service providers because they’ll be looking after lots of different organisations and lots of different industries. So they’re going to have to become more chameleon-like, for want of a better phrase, in being able to use other industries’ language and terminology and really understand what technology means for the end user business. Paul Green:But doing this in a way where you’re not using jargon. I mean we know that even the word “the cloud” is jargon to people outside of our world, because the cloud can mean lots and lots of different things to them. What are some of the things that you see MSPs doing which almost moves them further away from a sale rather than moving them closer? Tracy Pound:That’s a really good question. Still talking about technology is really disengaging from an end user’s perspective. They don’t want to know that they need a such and such router or they need this speed of broadband. What they want to know is that they’ve got continuous protected connection to the internet, and they want that in their own words, so that it means something to them within their business. So you cannot use jargon in any way, shape or form. As you said, people talk about the cloud. Tracy Pound:People outside of the IT industry have a different perception of what the cloud is. Some people understand it, some people don’t, but we can’t bandy around those types of terms not knowing whether or not the receiver of our message really understands what it is that we’re trying to say. What are the pain points in the end user’s business and addressing those pain points. So people want to feel secure, they want peace of mind, they want to know that the technology that they are investing in is actually going to help move their business forward, or it’s going to help them avoid a painful situation. So you need to talk about what that pain is, not what the technology is that sits behind it. Paul Green:What’s the most effective way to gain access to their pain points? How do you understand their business when, as you say, there are hundreds, thousands of different types of businesses out there? Tracy Pound:There are. I mean there is some generic classing that apply across all businesses. So all businesses have to sell, they need to market. They either have products or services. They’ll have internal admin. They’ll buy stuff and they’ll need to account for it. So understanding the basic principles of how businesses work gives you that common ground, but it’s having conversations that assist at that business level that are more strategic, so being able to talk to somebody who runs finance. It could be the owner manager, it could be a finance manager, it could be somebody who isn’t from the industry that their business is from, but being able to talk on common terms. So talking about profit and loss, talking about balance sheets. I know that can sound a little bit off putting because then an MSP might think, well what do I know about that? Tracy Pound:But as a business, the MSP also needs to understand their balance sheet and their profit and loss and financials and how they work. So it’s finding opportunities to share that common ground, but being inquisitive. A lot of people I know who are in tech, they like to learn. So being able to learn about another industry is as fulfilling as learning about the technology that can be supplied into that industry as well. MSPs, they have help desk staff, they have engineers who might go out on site. They are great salespeople because they’re not seen as a sales person. So they’re not seen as threatening, which means that people will talk to them about what those pain points are, what’s going wrong. If you can teach your staff to listen out for warning bells that somebody might be struggling because they’re not using technology properly, they are great leads then. Paul Green:So how would you train your staff to look for those, bearing in mind that your staff are technical and are inclined to talk about things from a technical point of view? What’s the most effective training that you’ve come across? Tracy Pound:Anything to do with customer experience. I’d have to say 2020 seems set to be the year of customer experience, and there is a lot of training that’s been developed around that, so a lot of vendors will run training programs around how to improve customer experience. Distribution is changing and a lot of distributors are now adding the soft skills to their training programs. It’s…

Full show notes at the publisher

Episode 19: Physical helpdesk buttons for your users Mar 24, 2020

Show notes

In this week’s episode You could be getting the edge over your competitors by giving your clients something which will automatically market your MSP and also streamline in-bound service tickets – Paul explains more about physical Helpdesk Buttons As your MSP grows and the temptation increases to financially reward your staff, Paul suggests this might not be the best use of your money Also in this week’s show, how re-selling websites can be an easier source of monthly recurring revenue. And Paul answers a question from an MSP about the best way to test a direct mail campaign Show notes Out every Tuesday on your favourite podcast platform Presented by Paul Green, an MSP marketing expert The brilliant solution for giving your clients physical helpdesk buttons is from helpdeskbuttons.com Join Paul and over 600 MSPs in his Facebook group James Lyon from mspwhitelabelwebsites.com was Paul’s guest talking about selling white-label websites Thank you to Andy Newbrook from Crusade Computers Solutions for the question about direct mail The guest on March 31st will be Tracy Pound from Maximity talking about the best way to converse with prospects 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:Here’s what’s coming up in the show. James Lyon:We’re offering a refresh, completely free, which would encourage them to stay on board as well. It is very much about longterm revenue and that longterm profit generation as well. Paul Green:We’ve also got a very clever idea for some physical help desk buttons that you can give to your clients. And we’re going to answer a question from an MSP about whether or not he should test his marketing to a general audience or a very specific vertical. Voiceover:Paul Green’s MSP marketing podcast. Paul Green:Have you ever had that thing when you’ve been out for lunch or dinner with some of your friends, but people who don’t own their own business, people who are employees, wage slaves, and the bills come in and however much the bill is, you’ve just grabbed it and you’ve said, “I’ll get this.” And they’ve all looked at you with astonishment on their faces, because there’s actually a couple of things happening in this situation. Paul Green:The first thing is when you’re grabbing it, you’re fully intending to put that on your business aren’t you? You’re fully intending for the business to pay for it and essentially you’re reducing your tax bill. Yay, you’re generous to your friends and your tax bill goes down at the same time. That’s a huge bonus. So that’s the first thing and they don’t realise that. They don’t realise that we do that. Paul Green:The second thing that’s going off is you’ve looked at the bill, and however much it is, it hasn’t seemed as much as it does seem to your wage slave friends and the reason for that is because as business owners, our relationship with money becomes skewed over time. I know back in my last business, where we were turning over somewhere between about 80 to 90 grand a month, which is a fair amount of money, that kind of money became normal to me because there’s 80 to 90,000 pounds going in, there is whatever was going out at the time, which was certainly a lot less than 80 to 90 grand and you forget that 80 to 90 grand is a phenomenal, huge amount of money and I think the more successful you are as a business owner, the more skewed your relationship with money becomes. Paul Green:Also, you and I have the ability to just take money out of our business at any point, if the cash is there, of course. And again, this completely skews our relationship with money. In fact, I think this is a good thing in a way because it makes us less dependent on one source of income. If you can just go and get $5, $10 $20,000 out of your business, or pounds, at any point, then that’s a good thing. It’s the whole point of us having the business is to have the freedom to do that, but again, it changes how we think about money. Paul Green:Now, the reason I mentioned all of this is not really to do with you taking your friends out to lunch, it’s more to do with how much you pay your team. So I’ve had a number of conversations with my MSP mastermind clients in recent months where they’ve been talking about how much they should be paying their employees. Paul Green:Now, I’m not talking here about third line techs who, I don’t know what it’s like in the States, but certainly in the UK, third line techs command an absolute premium. They’re rare, or the good ones who aren’t strange are rare. When you get someone like that, it is very much worth paying extra for those people – A, to get them and B, to keep them. But for first line techs for example, or for admin staff or even for marketing people or for salespeople, where there are thousands and thousands of people that you could employ in those roles, I think you can overpay. Now, I’m a big fan of overpaying to keep the best people, but I believe when someone joins your business, you shouldn’t be overpaying them at all. Paul Green:And the problem is, here’s us as the business owner taking out five, 10, 15 grand a month out of the business, whatever it is that we take, completely skewed relationship with money because we’re used to handle handling big sums, completely generous because we’re used to just picking up the lunch bill or taking our family out or removing cash out of the business, and we forget that our staff don’t have that mindset. Their relationship with money is not skewed. They understand the value of money almost better than we do, and for that reason, we don’t need to overpay them until they get to a point where they’re so critical to the business that we want to reward them and give them more money for keeping them happy and also for retention. Paul Green:So anytime you find yourself thinking, “Oh, I’ll just give my team a bonus of a couple of thousand pounds each.” Or whatever it is, and you’re looking at the bottom line and you’re looking at the cashflow impact, I think you need to just run it by ordinary people first. Maybe that’s your other half. If your other half doesn’t run a business, what do they think? Do they think it’s an obscene amount of money that you’re going to pay someone or that you’re going to give away to someone? Don’t forget to an employee earning, let’s say £20,000 to £25,000 a year, £1000 for free is a stunning amount of money. That just doesn’t happen, so you’ve got to use that weapon very powerfully and wield it only when it has maximum impact and don’t forget that your relationship with money is completely skewed, but theirs isn’t. Voiceover:Here’s this week’s clever idea. Paul Green:First time I heard about this, I literally squealed because from a marketing point of view, it is just beautiful. What is it? It’s physical help desk buttons that you give to your clients and they sit on their desks so they can press the button, physically with their finger, press a button when they need support from you. Paul Green:Now there’s a website, it’s helpdeskbuttons.com and you can get these buttons branded up to your business. They’re very, very clever. They look beautiful as well, they look quality. And it talks you through what happens when one of your users actually presses the button. Paul Green:So, imagine you’ve got a user who’s struggling with something. Their help desk button is a USB port which is plugged into their computer and they can plug other USBs into that button. They don’t need to know your phone number, your email, they don’t need to know the URL of your website, they don’t need to know how to take a screenshot or anything like that. All they do is they use their finger to press the button, it’s beautiful, and then it comes up with the little form on their computer and it talks them through basic questions. Paul Green:So it asks them to describe the problem. It asks them to a tick box whether they want you to connect to the computer or whether they want you to call them. They can say how urgent it is. They can say whether it’s affecting just them or whether it’s affecting multiple people. It’s very well thought through. And then the help desk button actually does an amount of diagnostic work for you. So it starts to build a log of the last 20 actions that they took before the button was pressed so that you can reproduce the error, it collects all the system information, who’s logged in, all the real time processes, memory, CPU, disk usage, that sort of stuff. It does some network diagnostics. It does connectivity checks and it’s very clever, and of course it integrates with your PSA as well. So the idea is that you get a perfect ticket. They have a better experience because they’re physically pressing something with their finger and you get the perfect ticket, which makes it much more likely you’re going to figure out what’s going on and solve it more quickly. Literally everyone wins. Paul Green:Now, none of my clients who started using this yet in the UK, we talked about it a couple of months ago. The price, according to the website, is 30 cents per seat per month, which doesn’t seem a huge amount of money. I’m guessing you have to pay some money to actually buy the physical hardware as well, but I’d love to hear some feedback from you. If you’ve been using this in your MSP, what kind of impact that has had on your end users or if you go and try it, let’s have a chat and see what you think of this. This place to do that is I have a Facebook group and I’m on that Facebook group every single day. If you go into Facebook and type in MSP marketing at the top, and that’s how you join my Facebook group. Voiceover:Paul’s blatant plug. Paul Green:My intention when I created that community for MSP owners on Facebook was to give people a chance to come together and talk about marketing. I believe it’s one of the most under talked about subjects in the world of MSPs. Lots of chat about tech, but not enough chat about marketing and selling more and making more monthly recurring revenue and ultimately net profit as well. So as I said, you go into your Facebook app, you pop in MSP marketing at the top, go to groups and apply to join and me or a member of my team, we’ll just double check that you are an MSP because it’s a vendor free zone. We don’t allow vendors in or anyone else. We’ll just double check you’re in an MSP and then we will let you in. Paul Green:There’s over 650 MSPs in there right now and it’s a great place to discuss marketing, in fact, a great place to discuss stuff that we’re talking about on this podcast. I’m there every day including weekends. I’m happy to answer any questions that you have. Get on to the MSP marketing Facebook group. It’s another valuable resource as you’re trying to grow your business. Voiceover:The big interview. James Lyon:So I’m James Lyon, it’s MSP white label websites and we provide white label websites at outsourced prices. Paul Green:So you don’t build websites for MSPs, so that you don’t build the MSPs own website, you build websites for the MSPs to resell. How did you come up with this idea? James Lyon:So I’ve been selling websites for a long time. Websites itself is a great resell opportunity for MSPs. You’re in a perfect position to talk about digital transformation with clients and really I looked at what skills I could bring to the MSP market and that was helping you to sell websites and deliver them at offshore prices. So that’s why I created MSP White Label Websites. Paul Green:And we know that ordinary business owners and business managers, because MSPs are dealing with computers, they see that websites are about computers as well. And actually websites as we know are more of a marketing thing, but is this why you think so many MSPs get their clients saying to them, “Hey, could you do our website?” James Lyon:Yeah, it’s the trusted relationship that I think the MSPs have with clients. Websites can be a sore point for clients. They have their domain hosting with someone, their actual website hosting with someone else and their email hosting. And actually, it’s of much greater benefit to the client if everything can be condensed with one provider. And what we’ve found is that MSPs themselves are in perfect positions to look after everything under one roof for their clients. Paul Green:You and I know loads of MSPs who build their own websites for clients, but there’s also a whole chunk of people who don’t want to take on that pain, they don’t want to have to deal with designers, we know they’re getting content out to clients is a real pain. So, how does your service take that pain away for the MSP? James Lyon:In a real short sentence, we do everything for you. What we basically say is that all you need to do is manage the relationship with the client and we’ll do all the hard work for you. So we’ve got content writers and we’ll create order for content. We’ll do all of the backend management and project management for you, design the website, get it sent live. Within our packages as well we include 30 minutes maintenance a month. So any onsite changes that you have to do, you literally just push back onto us. We also sort out hosting. So really, all you need to do is resell our services and make a profit every single month from it. Paul Green:And of course as we’d expect, it’s all monthly recurring revenue as well. This isn’t a sell a website for a couple of thousand, this is turning it into an ongoing revenue stream. James Lyon:What we’re not looking at is just a 12 month here. The reason why we’re looking at reselling services as a monthly resale is not thinking about a £1000 or £2000 income revenue generation there, we’re looking at a three year period minimum. James Lyon:What we’ve done is, within our packages, include a 12 month minimum program. Thereafter, the clients can roll over monthly, which we found helps them to stay on board for longer. And at the three year stage we’re offering a refresh completely free, which would encourage them to stay on board as well. So yeah, like you said Paul, it is very much about longterm revenue and that long term profit generation as well. Paul Green:So the goal is the MSP has a longterm revenue stream that they do very little work for, you have a revenue stream, but you’re used to doing the word because you’re used to doing that and the end client, the MSPs client, is happy because they have a great website which is updated regularly and is refreshed every three years. James Lyon:Yeah, exactly that. What you’re doing here is just looking at another way that you can help your client and that is via websites. MSPs are in the perfect positions to talk about digital transformation and helping clients with their website and we’re giving you an opportunity to kind of make money from that without having to do any of the work. Paul Green:How do we get in touch with you, James? James Lyon:My website is www.mspwhitelabelwebsites.com. Voiceover:Paul Green’s MSP marketing podcast. Ask Paul anything. Andy Newbrook:Hey Paul, Andy Newbrook from Crusade Computer Solutions here. We are going to send some direct mail campaigns to our cold list to then eventually give out our ethical bribe in the book. Do you recommend sending the test of 30 mails to a specific sector or just 30 general companies? Paul Green:That’s a great question. Thank you Andy and well done on doing direct mail. Direct mail has such potential impact because we don’t have much post these days. So I think direct mail is a very good thing to do. One caveat with that is to make sure that you follow it up on the phone. Direct mail itself doesn’t get a great response, but it paves the way for easier phone calls. Paul Green:Now to answer your question of should you do a test to a general audience or to a specific sector, I would always do it to a specifi…

Full show notes at the publisher

Episode 18: Coronavirus special – protect your MSP + actually grow MRR Mar 17, 2020

Show notes

In this week’s episode In a change to the advertised programme, Paul introduces a special panel discussing the effect Coronavirus may have on MSPs and their clients In this special episode industry experts Nigel Moore, Glenn Robertson and Andrew Eardley join Paul to highlight how MSPs can protect themselves during this challenging time; the potential benefit to client relationships and why it’s important to keep your marketing going right now Show notes Out every Tuesday on your favourite podcast platform Presented by Paul Green, an MSP marketing expert Paul’s panel featured Nigel Moore from The Tech Tribe, Glenn Robertson from Purechannels and Andrew Eardley from MSP Easy Tools The Coronavirus statistics came from the free Worldometer tool The video conference and virtual meeting tools mentioned included Zoom, WebEx and 8×8 The guest on March 24th will be James Lyon from mspwhitelabelwebsites.com talking about how to increase MRR by selling websites Please send any questions, ideally in audio-form (or any other feedback) to hello@paulgreensmspmarketing.com Join Paul and over more than MSPs in his Facebook group Episode transcription Voice over:Made in the UK for MSPs around the world. This is Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast. Paul Green:Hello and welcome to this special edition of the show. Now a change to the advertised programme, we’re going to be discussing the business impact of the coronavirus and how MSPs around the world can protect their businesses now and actually use this maybe as an opportunity to grow turnover and net profit. Paul Green:So I pulled together a panel of people that I trust to talk about four things. We’re going to talk about the short-term impact, the longer term impacts, the need more than ever before for more and more monthly recurring revenue, and why you must never ever stop marketing, especially at a time like this. Paul Green:Before I introduce my panel, let’s just set some context here. So normally this podcast is recorded weeks ahead, but not this special edition. In fact, if you’re listening to this on the day of broadcast, we recorded it yesterday, Monday the 16th of March in the morning, UK time. Right now, according to worldometers.info or worldometers.info. There’s been 170,000 cases of coronavirus worldwide and 6,500 deaths. Already, 77,000 people have recovered from it. Now, if you look at the number of cases per million of the population, is tiny. So the UK is just 20.5 cases per million people. The USA is just 11.5 cases. Australia is 14.7. Now Italy, obviously, is far more serious. They’ve got 409 cases per million people. Paul Green:What’s clear now is that most of us are going to get the coronavirus at some point. And the vast majority of us, we’re going to be absolutely fine. In fact, most of the people I know are more worried about their elderly relatives than they are worried about themselves or their children. The real problem with this virus and what we’re going to talk about on the podcast today is the economic impact. Paul Green:So the world’s healthcare systems simply couldn’t cope if the virus spread at speed if we allowed it to just naturally spread. Most of the shutdowns and the changes that we’re all seeing, they’re all designed to slow down the spread. And virtually overnight that’s had quite a huge impact on the way that people act and the way that people buy. We’ve all seen stockpiling. We’ve all seen empty shelves in supermarkets and we all know that toilet paper is the new gold. Paul Green:But already some businesses are suffering. There’s a lovely village pub that’s near my house, they had 72 table cancellations over the weekend, 72. We went in on Saturday night when it’s normally, it’s quite difficult to physically get in is so full. And it was so quiet, they only had two bar staff on. There’s a guy I know who owns a car crash repair centre. He says his work has just totally dried up in the last couple of weeks. Now I realised these are consumer facing businesses and these are businesses that need to sell stuff every day to stay alive. But maybe they’re the kind of clients that you support. Maybe there’s an impact on your clients. This is certainly where I’m seeing some of the panic from MSPs, right now. It’s not necessarily them, but it’s their clients. Paul Green:Certainly when we look at the MSP business model, we have to look at it and say, “It’s beautiful.” You’re mostly B2B hopefully, you’ve certainly got plenty of monthly recurring revenue or I hope you do. And it’s definitely very easy for you and your teams to work remotely. So let me introduce today’s panel and we’ll start to talk about what’s happening right now and where we think this is going to go. I’m going to start by introducing you to a Nigel Moore – Nigel tell us about you and the tech tribe. Nigel Moore:Good day. Nigel here. Based out of just North of Sydney, Australia. I host a community of MSPs all around the world called The Tech Tribe. It’s born out of my love of the community. I used to own and run my own MSP for many years. It was acquired in 2016 and I have built the tribe up as a resource for MSPs around the world to help them learn from all the mistakes that I made over the years running my own. Paul Green:Andrew. Andrew Eardley, would you like to introduce yourself? Andrew Eardley:Oh yes. I’m Andrew Eardley from MSP Easy Tools. I also run a MSP called Prompt PC. So MSP Easy Tools was born out of Prompt PC developing cyber security tools for Office 365. Something we’ll talk about a bit later, Paul. Paul Green:I’m sure we will. Thank you very much. And Glenn Robertson. Glenn Robertson:Hi, I’m Glenn. I’m MD and owner of Purechannels. We’re specialists dedicated channel marketing agency that worked with a number of MSPs worldwide in helping them take their own proposition and joint vendor propositions to market in the most effective way. Paul Green:Brilliant. Thank you all three of you for assembling pretty much at the last minutes and Nigel, we’re going to start with you. I’m a member of The Tech Tribe and I was just this morning actually reading your coronavirus threads. You’ve done a great thread in there, putting it in context and talking about what MSPs can do. What are you seeing MSPs doing to prepare themselves, because we are still at that point where it hasn’t really impacted massively on us, but what are people doing to prepare right now? Nigel Moore:At the early stages we’re in right now, most MSPs are just scrambling to help their clients with remote access and so they haven’t popped their head up to think at the 20,000 foot view, what’s coming next? They’re getting a ton of requests and a ton of help and a ton of people wanting them to be able to get them access to their businesses from home and at the moment that’s where the most MSPs have got their head space. Paul Green:Do you see that most MSPs are ready or are a lot of them just coming around to starting to think about getting ready, but in your mind this has all happened very, very quickly. Nigel Moore:It is a mixed bag. A MSPs are very lucky incredibly because they know what needs to be done technically wise to be able to operate their businesses from home end. And most MSPs that I know of over the last couple of years have transitioned to being remote friendly. The culture in work environments has lended recently towards moving towards a remote culture and most MSPs have adopted that in some way, shape or form. So it’s not at the moment seeming to be a tough transition for MSPs to go through to keep their business continuity plans in place or to start enacting their business continuity plans to start working remotely, working from home, working wherever got to so that they can continue supporting clients that are desperately screaming out for help at the moment. Paul Green:Andrew, you own an MSP obviously as well as MSP Easy Tools. So what have you done with your team to make sure that you guys are fully ready to carry on business as usual, even if you have to work from home? Andrew Eardley:To be honest, because we’re cloud based anyway and our phone systems are VOIP, they can work from home as of any time. So for us it’s so easy. Paul Green:Wouldn’t it be lovely for the clients who are like this as well, which is a subject we are going to come onto in a second. Glenn, let’s talk about the vendors you work with MSPs and then vendors on the other side of the channel. Is it fair to say that the big vendors are already, because a lot of these, when you think of Microsoft and you think of thousands of people sitting in buildings in California, so how ready do you think they are? Glenn Robertson:Well, the way that we’ve seen it is that they are ready. I mean we’re having meetings canceled and we’re doing more and more video as we are today, the likes of Zoom, WebEx, 8×8 as well. But a lot of our clients are global, so we are regularly having conversations in Australia, in the US, other than actual people getting together in an office where we’re not seeing that much of a change as yet. Because a lot of what we do is conducted over video and over conference call anyway. Paul Green:So let’s talk about the longterm impacts and I think there’s two to three areas to look at. The first is, whatever happens and however this rolls out, whether this goes on for a few months or a year and no one knows how it’s going to go, eventually the world will return to normal. Eventually the economy will return to normal. Andrew, do you think this could lead to a longterm shift in the way that people run their businesses? Andrew Eardley:I think most businesses are still very office centric. The managing director, the financial directors might work occasionally from home, but if opened their eyes to the fact that they can operate just as efficiently from home office environments as they do from centralised offices. Paul Green:Obviously you’ve been beating that drum for your clients for years. Are you seeing your clients really jumping onto that now and actually listening to it because it’s real? Andrew Eardley:Yeah. I mean lots of them are coming back with, “You said some years ago when you sent out our sessions with Andrew, we could do this, this and this.” I’m saying, “Yeah, it’s there, it’s straight forward, won’t take much to change you over to working from home. As long as they’ve got something that we can work from there. It’s really straightforward and easy.” Paul Green:Nigel, what opportunities do you see for MSPs in the longer term? And I must just clarify, when I say opportunities, I’m not talking here about cashing in or profiteering off the coronavirus, but rather using things like people being aware of things like remote working suddenly. Nigel Moore:Over the last couple of years, a lot of MSPs have struggled to get their value propositions right with their clients so that the clients can understand the true value of what things like remote work and cybersecurity and these sorts of things are. And I think events like this, as horrible as they are, can help to solidify in clients’ minds that, hey, we do actually need to invest some of this stuff, we do need to actually take it seriously because in the past we might not have taken business continuity seriously and now we do. And so to me that’s a huge opportunity for MSPs to be able to step up and say, hey, well these kinds of things as you can tell, do happen and can happen, so let’s get you as prepared as we possibly can now for the next time around. Paul Green:One of the things that makes MSPs quite relaxed about what’s happening or potentially could happen with the economy is this monthly recurring revenue. Nigel, you’ve always been a massive fan of monthly recurring revenue. Well as anyone would be once the ones they come across it. Can you see now that those people who are, they’ve got more of the business stuck in break fix are going to be quite motivated to just get on and finish that transition over to MSP? Nigel Moore:150%. The MSPs that are out there that are there, either pure play managed services or they’ve got a very high percentage of managed services are some of the most incredibly lucky businesses in this current climate. They’re the most protected in some way, shape or form, especially from these early stages of issues. And for the ones that haven’t made the transition fully or even started to as yet, this is kind of the icing on the cake that you have to make some changes to things, not only for the greater good of your bank account, but for the greater good of your clients so that you’re still there to look after them in the future. Paul Green:And that’s just a great point, making sure that you left the client and that’s what I say is not profiteering. I think selling someone, as Glenn was saying, a lot more video solution or making sure though they’re set up correctly or upgrading them to a better plan. This is actually about helping them to do their work properly. So let’s move on to look at marketing and let’s assume we are going to into some kind of recession in the longer term, I think the speed at which we’ve had change in forced upon us, it’s going to be in a bit of a shock to everyone’s economy and that typically is what triggers some kind of recession. There are famously companies that do more marketing during the recession. There’s a company called Specsavers, which my American listeners won’t have heard of, but certainly in the UK and in Australia, you’ll know it as the national optician because Specsavers dominates the UK opticians. They are dominating Australia as well. Paul Green:It’s the equivalent of LensCrafters in the US and they love recessions. As a private business, they spend more on marketing during recessions and come out of recessions with greater market share. Glenn, if you as a marketing expert, if you owned an MSP, what would you do with your marketing during a recession or during a downturn? Glenn Robertson:From our point of view or something that we’re talking about here quite a lot, this is a great opportunity and as you said earlier, it’s not an opportunity to take advantage, but it’s an opportunity to basically look at behavior and this about a reminder of good behaviour. Look, the tools exist to be able to deal with all of the remote work and working from home, et cetera. It’s just the behaviour that doesn’t. So we should be communicating with our customers and our prospects on a regular basis. We should be helping them, we should be them and we should be enabling them anyway on a regular basis. Glenn Robertson:Let’s remember, marketing is not a short term tactic. There are very short term tactics that can be used, but ultimately marketing should be seen as a longterm strategy with various different ongoing methods that you can use in order to help educate and communicate with your customers. Paul Green:And Glen, you’re quite famous on this podcast for talking about MDF, which is Marketing Development Funds. And we’ve said in previous episodes that there’s millions and millions of pounds out there. This is a great time, isn’t it, To go in and talk to your vendors and say, “Hey look, we want to keep marketing through this. We want to keep selling your products and please can you help us to access your MDF?” Glenn Robertson:Exactly. That’s exactly why and all, shall we say, good, in inverted commas, good vendors should welcome that. Come up with an idea, present a plan and actually it doesn’t have to be a crazy thinking, funky idea, it can just be, as I mentioned, talking about good behaviour. This is about helping prospects and customers through this period and into the future. How we can help them to get their message to our customers. And we’re also talking about helping our customers in the best way that they can deal with and be catered for by us on a monthly basis going forward. Paul Green:So Andrew, again asking you to put your MSP owning hats on rather than the owner of MSP Easy Tool…

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Episode 17: How to sell more cybersecurity Mar 10, 2020

Show notes

In this week’s episode There is an apparent shortage of cybersecurity talent and skills which is one of the key challenges MSPs have today in providing cybersecurity services to their customers. Special guest JP Kehoe from Skout joins Paul to explain how you can provide your clients with a better solution Everyone has lost out to a competitor at some point. And Paul explains a few simple techniques that can help stop this happening and make your MSP stand out from the crowd Also in this week’s show Paul tells you about a website where your clients can find out for themselves just how rubbish their passwords actually are. And answers a question for an MSP on how to track his competitors Show notes Out every Tuesday on your favourite podcast platform Presented by Paul Green, an MSP marketing expert While discussing better ways to stand out from competitors, Paul mentioned cakesnextday.com and betterproposals.io The tools to indirectly help sell password managers are howsecureismypassword.net and passwordsgenerator.net To sign up for a free place on Paul’s new UK tour, check out paulgreensMSPmarketing.com/lunch Paul’s guest was JP Kehoe from Skout Cybersecurity talking about how to drive MRR with cybersecurity Thank you to Jack Peploe from Evaporate for the question about tracking competitors The tracking tools mentioned were watchthatpage.com, followthatpage.com, fluxguard.com, agenty.com and visualping.io The guest on March 17th will be James Lyon from mspwhitelabelwebsites.com talking about selling website creation 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:Here we go for another week then. This is what’s coming up in today’s show. JP Kehoe:There is a tremendous shortage of cybersecurity talent and skills. That’s one of the key challenges MSPs have today in providing cybersecurity services to their customers. Paul Green:I’m also going to tell you about a website where your clients can find out for themselves just how rubbish their passwords actually are, and we’re answering a question for an MSP on how he can track his competitors. Voiceover:Paul Green’s MSP Marketing podcast. Paul Green:I think it’s fairly well established now that one of the biggest marketing challenges for any MSP is differentiating themselves from all of their competitors in the mind of the prospect. Because the problem starts with the prospect and most average business owners, managers, the decision makers that you want to reach, as we’ve discussed before, they don’t know what they don’t know about technology and about it support. So they will look at your business and you could have 20 staff and a building and 24 hour support and they can’t really see the difference between that and all of the other businesses in the area that do what you do, and they do different flavours of what you do. But for someone outside of our world, they don’t get that. And of course add to that the fact that there are no barriers to entry into this market, anyone can set themselves up as an IT support company from their bedroom and theoretically compete with you. This makes it a very hard thing to do. Paul Green:And add in as well, there is this other thing that most MSPs are really bad at marketing, and are really bad at looking at things from other people’s points of view, which is a core fundamental marketing skill. So this is where you need to differentiate yourself in a whole series of different ways which are very smart. I’m a big fan of videos because videos give you instant differentiation, particularly if you get videos featuring your clients, so it’s your clients on the screen talking to your prospects, it’s a very smart thing to do. And of course no one has your clients except you, so that is a great differentiation. Paul Green:I think also when you’re getting to the prospecting stage, and particularly when you’re up against two or three other players, you’ve got to be a little bit more cute than them. Got to be a bit smarter than them. So most people will do the same thing. They’ll go and have a meeting, they’ll put in a proposal, they’ll follow up that proposal and that’ll be about it. I think you’ve got to ask yourself, not only what can we do to be different before we have a prospect meeting, but once we’ve met with someone, what makes the difference? For example, could you be the MSP that, when someone has booked a prospect meeting, you send them an impact box, which we’ve talked about on previous podcasts, but you send them a box of stuff, and there might be some videos in there and you can either do that as an old fashion DVD or you could do a link to some online videos or better still put it in one of those video presentation cards. Paul Green:Could you send them some chocolate? Could you send them a brochure or some details of you and your team and say, “Hey, we’re looking forward to meeting you next Wednesday. Here’s some details about us and what our clients say.” Send them a testimonials book. Imagine if you did that just before you’d even met them. That would be so, so powerful. And then once you’ve actually been to see them, what do you leave them on the day? You’ve already given them a brochure and something else, don’t really want to just give them a business card. What else could you give them on the day? How about a copy of your book? Because of course you do need a book. You need to be the author of your own book. It’s an amazing marketing tool, and you could actually sign it there and then as as the author, sign the cover of the book or the inside of the book and give it to them during that prospect meeting. Paul Green:Now that might seem a little presumptuous to you and a little pretentious, but actually that’s a very powerful positioning thing to show that you’re the author of something and you’ve gone and signed the book and given it to them there and then at the prospect meeting. Then what else could you do differently from there? A couple of my clients are experimenting now with sending things afterwards. Some are doing the impact boxes. In the UK there’s a website called cakesnextday.com which allows you to put a personalised message on a giant cake and send that over to someone. That’s a very clever thing that you could do. What if you followed it up with more chocolate? Obviously you wouldn’t do an impact box both sides of the prospect meeting, but you could send them something. Paul Green:I would certainly, absolutely, send them a printed copy of the proposal. Now you might use something like betterproposals.io or one of the other many proposal software services that are available, and certainly getting people to use and look at a proposal online where you can track what they’re doing is a very smart thing to do. But I would always, always print off a proposal, high quality print, really make the packaging really high quality, one of those nice cardboard outers. Really put some time and effort into it and send a copy to them, either first class post or maybe even courier it to them or drop it off to them, again with something else. Because although we want to know if they’ve read it online, we also absolutely want to make sure that they have actually read it and nothing beats a physical print thing sitting on their actual desk. Paul Green:So there’s just a few ideas there and I bet you and your team could come up with so many more ideas. But where you’ve got this common problem that they can’t tell the difference between you and your competitors, it only takes being slightly different from everyone else to have a real impact. It’s really exciting when you think about it. Voiceover:Here’s this week’s clever idea. Paul Green:What we’ve got here is a very elegant answer to the problem of your clients using very, very weak passwords. It’s a website called howsecureismypassword.net, and it’s very simple. They go in and they enter their password and it tells them how long it would take a computer to brute force crack it. I’ve got the website up here. If I type in… Let’s type in fluffy123 and it says here it would take a computer about 42 minutes to crack your password. So let’s iterate that. We’ll take off the three and put on a four. No, it’s still 42 minutes, because of course it’s based on length. So let’s add a nine to that. It would take a computer one day to crack your password. Paul Green:What this is encouraging your clients to do is to use longer passwords and hopefully maybe even some more complex ones as well. Now it does say at the bottom it’s for educational purposes only, and it’s sponsored by Dashlane, which is of course a password manager. And yes, you’re going to look at that and think, hang on a second, that’s just surely sending passwords over the internet? Although it does say at the bottom that nothing is sent over the internet. But the point is you can demonstrate to your clients, in front of them, pull up this website and say, “Look, let me, let me do a password here. If we generate a 16 digit password…” In fact, let me do it now, I’m going to go to the random… Here we go. Passwordsgenerator.net. I’m going to generate a random 16 digit password and copy that, paste that into How Secure Is My Password, and according to this, a 16 digit random password would take a computer 41 trillion years to crack that password. Paul Green:I think that’s the point where you can show your client that there’s some very, very, very complex passwords which are so much more uncrackable or less crackable than fluffy123. That’s the point, is to show them this and off the back of that, maybe you could then sell them a password manager, because isn’t that really something we want all the clients to have? We want them all to have a password manager managed by you to give them more control over their passwords and of course more control when their staff leave. One final thing on How Secure Is My Password, go in and put in just random characters and you get some amazing numbers of years. We are up to quadrillion years here, and then quintillion years, sextillion years, and if I put it in, if I just keep putting characters in, I don’t know if I can even say this. 805 novemvigintillion. If you know how to pronounce that, you’re a better person than I am. It’s a very fun website, this, and actually if it can drive some monthly recurring revenue for you as well, everyone wins. Voiceover:Paul’s blatant plug. Paul Green:A quick heads up that this one today is just for my listeners in the UK. Now I’m guessing that your biggest challenge in getting new clients for your MSP isn’t actually getting the prospects to say yes. If you can get in front of the right people at the right time, then you’ll get the sale. If you’re like most MSPs in the UK, your biggest issue actually is generating good quality leads and then getting those people to agree to sales meetings at exactly the right point in the sales cycle. So if this is the issue in your business, then join me for something new. It’s called the MSP Get New Clients Roadshow, and it’s a new event I’m running through to the summer of 2020. Paul Green:It’s three hours of your day. You join me at a hotel near you, get a working lunch thrown in, and I’ll show you a proven five step system. It’s being used right now by dozens of MSPs across the UK. And the good news is even if you find marketing baffling, I will do it in a way that both educates you and entertains you. I’ve got a whole series of dates right through to the summer all across the UK. I’m so sorry, I’m not going international with this at this stage, it’s just in the UK. If you want to see all the details for that, you just gone to paulgreensMSPmarketing.com. Don’t forget the S on that. PaulgreensMSPmarketing.com, and then either go into the navigation and tap on free marketing lunch or just go to paulgreensMSPmarketing.com/lunch. You’ll see all the details on how you can claim your free place. Voiceover:The big interview. JP Kehoe:Paul, how are you? My name is JP Kehoe. I’m the general manager for Skout Cybersecurity here in Europe, and we help MSPs go to market with a managed security service. Paul Green:So we all know that cybersecurity is enormous. It’s getting bigger almost every week. The opportunity’s getting bigger, the the tactics being used are getting big. Everything about it is absolutely growing, and I think all MSPs now, whether or not the actively on board and selling it, they can see that this is an enormous opportunity, A to protect their clients, and B, to generate more of that lovely monthly recurring revenue. From your point of view, you specialise in cybersecurity, it’s all your business does. What kind of trends have you seen in the marketplace? JP Kehoe:There’s a tremendous shortage of cybersecurity talent and skills, and the personnel that are required to enable MSPs to deliver that expertise is quite expensive. Staff are hard to train and retain. That’s one of the key challenges MSPs have today in providing cybersecurity services to their customers. Paul Green:The end users, the business decision makers that MSPs wants to reach, what’s happened to their awareness over the last few years? You would imagine they’d be a bit more aware, but is it still enough to trigger more and more of them into action? JP Kehoe:There certainly has been an increase in awareness. It probably falls into three buckets for them and customers. One is general awareness of cybersecurity within both their sector and their market, or indeed where they’ve had an issue, it certainly brings a awareness to the fore. Number two, regulation now is driving a lot of requirements for companies to have managed cybersecurity service in place and to increase their cyber posture. And then number three, we’re seeing more and more third party due diligence, the need to have a mature cyber program in place, and MSPs are getting these questions. And as I said, the challenges for MSPs is providing that service at an easy and affordable way for the further end customers, and as you just mentioned on the recurring revenue, making sure that you tie that in with any other managed service that you have. Paul Green:I think the question that most MSPs want answered is how do you sell more cybersecurity? In this world where decision makers are becoming more aware, but they’re still very unaware, it’s still not a big thing to them, they’re willing to take huge risks with their system. How do you educate them about cybersecurity and ultimately sell more of it? JP Kehoe:Well, they’re both absolutely tied together. So education is key. Definitely having a conversations with your customers around cybersecurity, the issues that you’re seeing across your own customer base, asking them questions, trying to understand their network, try to understand their critical data and how you’re supporting them in building those concentric rings of security around that data, whether it’s a firewall or endpoint or other supports or point solutions that you might have in place. I think after that, then making sure that you educate around the importance of having visibility under security logs emanating from those point solutions. JP Kehoe:The average time to detect a breach now is 197 days. It’s a long, long time. Making sure that you have the right partner in place then as well to provide a managed security service. So they’re the two areas, education number one, that you have those conversations with your customers, and then number two, having the right partner with you to support you in those conversations. So there are MSSPs out there that have resources available to support you having those conversations and building up that credibility in your marketplace and having the right dedicated sales and marketing support. Paul Green:Tell us briefly what Skout does to help MSPs.…

Full show notes at the publisher

Episode 16: Why clients stick with their MSP, even if they’re unhappy Mar 03, 2020

Show notes

In this week’s episode It’s massively frustrating for a promising new deal to evaporate because the client has decided to stay with their incumbent MSP, but it happens all too often. Understanding why this happens is the key to overcoming the issue and Paul has some fantastic insight and advice It may not be great for your waistline (!) but Paul also explains why making regular bookings for the best placed table in your favourite local restaurant could make the world of difference to your MSP’s net profit Also in this week’s show, a listener asks if physical direct mail has a place in the modern world. And Glenn Robertson from Purechannels is back with an update on the millions of pounds of free marketing money that you could be tapping into Show notes Out every Tuesday on your favourite podcast platform Presented by Paul Green, an MSP marketing expert Here’s a link to Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Edge service Paul’s returning guest talking about unspent MDF (Marketing Development Fund) was with Glenn Robertson, MD and owner of Purechannels Also hear Glenn in Episode 1 of Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast The question about direct mail came from Craig Sharp from Abussi The guest on March 10th will be JP Kehoe from Skout Cybersecurity talking about how to use security to drive MRR 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 the podcast. Here’s what’s coming up in today’s show. Glenn Robertson:Vendors want to sell as much of their stuff as possible and the MSP or the partner that can help that is going to be the one that’s well-treated. Paul Green:We’re also going to look at why you should be taking your clients to lunch at least once a year because it’s the most direct and reliable way to sell them more of your stuff. And i’m going to be answering a question from an MSP about whether or not you should be using more direct mail. Voiceover:Paul Green’s MSP marketing podcast. Paul Green:So currently the greatest stress in my life is the fact that I’m moving house. Sold my house back in November, found a lovely place to live in a little village just outside of Milton Keens in the UK and that’s all fine. It’s a very short chain. There’s only two transactions in the chain, should all have been done back at the beginning of February and it’s still currently going through and it’s still a little bit of a nightmare. Paul Green:Now the problem isn’t me because I’ve bought and sold several houses. I’ve got some investment properties. I understand houses. I know what the risks are. It’s not a great deal for me. It’s just finding the right place and making it happen. The people that I’m buying from equally, they’re in their sixties. They’ve bought and sold many houses. Everyone’s just quite relaxed. The problem is the people who are buying my house are first time buyers and they are… Well, there’s a phrase a friend of mine use, she said that they’re scared of their own shadow. Paul Green:So these people they’ve rented for a while, but of course we all know that renting gives you a security blanket. There’s a safety net, there’s a landlord that is there if anything goes wrong. As they’re going through this process of getting the surveys done and just thinking about things, they’re scaring themselves. The conversation I keep having with my estate agent is that they are scared and they’re trying to mitigate their risk. We have gotten to the point now where actually they’re trying to mitigate risks that exists just owning a house. Paul Green:We all know owning a house is a risky thing. I was reflecting on this at the weekend and it occurred to me that for them buying this house is the biggest, most dangerous, most scary thing. They want the house, but they’re also terrified of what owning the house might mean. When someone switches from one MSP to another, it is a house purchase size deal to them. Paul Green:Let me explain what I mean. When someone is with an MSP, even if they’re not happy with that MSP, there is a certain level of trust because from the point of view of the ordinary decision maker, the ordinary business owner or manager, the MSP has the power to destroy their business completely. Now they don’t necessarily think of it that way, but if you think about it from their point of view, they don’t really understand technology. They don’t really understand computers, hardware, software systems. They don’t have the ability to just jump in and fix stuff like you do. Paul Green:You are controlling their productivity. You’re controlling their ability to get things done. You’re controlling their access to their own data and their own information, and so for that reason, the MSP that they choose is a really big deal for them. Now, this is one of the things which makes the MSP sales cycles so slow. I’m sure you have previously had great in depth conversations with prospects who you’re convinced switch over to you because they’re really unhappy with their incumbent. Then you go a few months down the line, very frustratingly for you, they decide to stick with their incumbent for some bizarre reason. Even though they’re unhappy, they’ve stuck with the devil that they know. Better the devil they know. Paul Green:They’ve done this because it’s less risk for them because even if they’re unhappy with an MSP, they understand what it is that they’re getting. They know where they’re at, if that makes sense. This is why I’m a massive fan of you building relationships with prospects and with leads long before the point that they are ready to switch to another MSP. You might’ve heard me talk on this podcast before about the need to build multiple audiences so you get hundreds, thousands of people to connect to you on LinkedIn. You get hundreds and hundreds of people to choose to join your email mailing list so that they receive your marketing emails. Maybe if your active within specific verticals, you even start Facebook groups or if you’re dealing with retail businesses or hospitality businesses, you build some Instagram profiles as well or an Instagram profile and build an audience there. Paul Green:What this allows you to do is to build a relationship with people long before they’re ever thinking of buying from you. In the UK, I do a series of MSP marketing lunches where I go around the country and I meet with prospects and most of the time, not always, but most of the time it’s wonderful that someone walks in the room that I’ve never met before. Nine times out of 10 I don’t really know that person, I don’t know their name and they walk up to me and they shake my hand and they say, “It’s so good to meet you in real life. I’ve been following you for years. I’ve read your book, I read your articles, I listen to your podcasts.” Paul Green:What I’m doing and I recommend you do the same, is in a one to many kind of way, I’m building a relationship with thousands of prospects. My podcast, my articles on my website, my book, my LinkedIn following it’s all relationship building because I’m sending out educational, entertaining content and it builds a relationship. A tiny relationship, it’s not a deep relationship, but it’s the start of something. At the point at which people are theoretically ready to start spending money to actually buy something, they feel as though they know me in some way. It’s a foundation to start with. Paul Green:You need to do exactly this because so few MSPs do this. In any marketplace, the MSP that builds the biggest audiences, builds the best relationship with those audiences, and then markets them the most. Shakes the tree, commercialises it, sees what money is out there. The MSP that does that is much more likely to go on to be the dominant MSP in that area. Certainly from a marketing point of view. I know that you’re really good at what you do, and I also know that your competitors are really good at what they do. Paul Green:The plan and the challenge is to get better at the marketing because the product is probably good enough, but it’s the marketing that makes a substantial difference. The biggest marketing difference you could make in your world is to get better at building relationships with people months or years before they’re ready to even start thinking about switching. Voiceover:Here’s this week’s clever idea. Paul Green:Of course there’s a chunk of people that you already have a great relationship with and that’s your clients. In fact, most MSPs have amazing relationships with their clients and no wonder this is essentially a service industry. That’s what this is. Now, one of the challenges for you is to regularly tell your clients about new things, either that you’re offering or that they should be buying or just general changes. Things that are shifting within the marketplace and keep them educated and up to date about those things so that they can, if it’s appropriate for them, come on board with them, buy those extra services, protect their business. Paul Green:This is why I’m a massive fan of strategic reviews. A strategic review is where you go out on a regular basis. Probably six months or every 12 months and you sit down with your client and it is a forward looking review. Strategic review is not a backwards looking review of tickets or problems or issues because the risk is it could turn into a bit of a moan fest if you do that. We’re not interested in past performance. We’re interested in looking forward. We want to talk about your client’s favourite subject, which is themselves. Paul Green:Everyone’s favourite subject is themselves. We want to get your client talking about them, their business and talk about what’s coming up in the next couple of years. What are their plans, how are they going to expand? What new staff are they going to take on? Do they have new premises that could be coming up? Are they going to go and hit some new marketplaces? Does the current technology set up that they’ve got really support the growth plans that they’ve got for the next couple of years. Paul Green:Now strategic lunches are in my mind, best done away from their environment. They certainly shouldn’t be done in your environment because there’s a chance you could be distracted by your staff. If they’re done in their environment, there’s a chance that they’ll be distracted by their staff or that they’ll just see it as this 20 minute meeting that their IT company wants. What we don’t want is them sitting behind their desk, one eye on a computer monitor because they’ve got things to do and you desperately trying to talk more and more to keep their time. Paul Green:That’s not the point of this, In fact in a good strategic review is an 80 20 talking rule. They do 80% of the talking, you do 20% of the talking. No, I think if you’re going to do the best strategic review, you’ve got to take them out to lunch. You may find yourself getting fatter as you go out and do two or three lunches a week depending how many clients you’ve got, but nothing beats going out to lunch and buying lunch for your client, which essentially buys them a little bit of extra loyalty and buy 60 to 90 minutes of their valuable time. Paul Green:Now you might find a local restaurant, not a chain, so you can be seen to be promoting and endorsing local businesses and you might even do a deal with them where you say, “Look, I’m going to be coming in here 40 times, 50 times in the next year, maybe even more, and I’d like a deal please Mr and Mrs. Owner. Could you do me a deal where I get a 20% discount? Perhaps even you bill me once a month or something like that.” You’d be surprised how many restaurant owners are open to a deal like that. Paul Green:You can even dictate which table you’d like to sit down. You might permanently reserve that table for your lunches. I would recommend a table at the back of the restaurant. When you come in, you seat you with your back to the wall so you can see the restaurant and you seat your client with their back to the restaurant so they can’t see what’s going on. The reason for doing that, is so they can’t be distracted by things that are happening within the restaurant. The real purpose of the strategic IT review then is to ask a series of open questions. Paul Green:You’re trying to identify opportunities within that business. Opportunities really for you to sell them more stuff. You might ask things like, since we last met or had an in depth talk, in the context of your technology, what’s gone well? What’s not gone so well? What do you think is holding you back right now? What do you predict could be holding you back in the future? Looking at the business overall, what do you think your priorities will be in the next 12 months, 24 months, 36 months? What’s keeping you up at night? What do you think is going to keep you up at night? What do you think is likely to be your biggest headaches? Then the very best question, what can we do to help? Paul Green:These are some very powerful questions and your client is going to spend most of this lunch talking about his or her business and what they want to do with it and their plans and their dreams and their hopes and their fears. All of these things give you opportunities to satiate those needs, to fulfil those wants and also to protect them more. If they’re going to grow a little bit more and they might need X, Y and Z and you’ve got a specific technology stack that would help them to do that, that’s where you can have that conversation. Paul Green:Off the back of those strategic lunches you should be going away and doing proposals and ultimately following them up at a specified time. Let me get that to you by tomorrow afternoon, shall I give you a call on Friday and we can run through it. That kind of thing. Some of my clients that I worked with in my MSP mastermind do strategic reviews with all of their clients and two out of three times they really do well. They sell a lot of extra stuff to their clients and there’s all month the recurring revenue services. Paul Green:This is not about generating project revenue, which is fine if you need that project revenue, but the real power is generating more monthly recurring revenue. That is what you need more of and you know what? Your clients are very happy to give it to you when they can talk themselves into it because this is the real power of the strategic review. The strategic lunch is not about you selling stuff to them, it’s about them realising their life will be better if they buy this stuff. They do all the selling to themselves. Voiceover:Paul’s blatant plug. Paul Green:Quick shout out for my MSP marketing edge service because it is the most popular thing that I do. We’ve got more than 150 MSPs around the world now using this. It is primarily aimed at UK MSPs and also US MSPs. You can see all the details at mspmarketingedge.com. In a nutshell, it’s a whole bunch of content that we give to you every month so that you can use it to get more new clients. We’re talking a video, we’re talking an educational guide, promotional emails, social media content. There’s a sales letter and there’s a load of freebies as well. Paul Green:There’s a book called Email Hijack that you can put your name on the front and say it’s your book. You can edit the inside if you want to. You can get it printed. There’s also a ‘Have I Been Pwned’ plugin which goes on your websites and it acts as a form of data capture for you. It’s a whole bunch of stuff and it’s really dirt cheap as well. It’s £99 a month in the UK, $129 a month in the US. You can cancel anytime as well. There’s no commitment. Paul Green:We only sell it to one MSP per area. The best thing to do is go in and check to see if your area is still available. It’s mspmarketingedge.com. Voiceover:The big interview. Paul Green:This week I’m delighted to…

Full show notes at the publisher

Episode 15: A powerful FREE dashboard for ConnectWise Feb 25, 2020

Show notes

In this week’s episode If you use ConnectWise, there’s an extremely powerful and FREE tool that can extract and display information in a way you may never have seen before. Paul’s joined by the Joe Pannone to explain more about CWDash There’s understandably still nervousness around being GDPR compliant (in the UK anyway), however Paul has details about a brilliant service that can not only find you virtually any email address, but also use that email for marketing too Also in the week’s episode Paul discusses the power of taking action. And answers a listener’s question about whether MSPs should use Instagram Show notes Out every Tuesday on your favourite podcast platform Presented by Paul Green, an MSP marketing expert The emailing finding tool Paul mentioned is called Hunter.io To book a place on one of the free MSP marketing lunches, just go to paulgreensmspmarketing.com/lunch Paul’s guest was Joe Pannone from Forza Technology Solutions talking about extracting useful data from ConnectWise using the brilliant free tool CWDash Find the video Paul has also recorded with Joe Pannone here The guest on March 3rd will once again be Glenn Robertson, MD and owner of Purechannels. with an update on unspent free MDF (Marketing Development Fund) 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 this week’s show. I’ve got a corker for you this week and this is what’s coming up. Joe Pannone:It made a dramatic change. And our clients saw it by the way, they saw it and they loved it. It really, really helped us and most importantly our clients. Paul Green:We’re also going to be talking about whether or not you should be using Instagram to get new clients and how to find anyone’s email address and drop them a cold email. Voiceover:Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast. Paul Green:I truly believe that life is better when you are an action orientated individual. And I say this after working quite closely with a lot of business owners for nearly 15 years, and the ones who take action, who get things done, who have an idea and then act on it almost immediately, regardless of what else is happening in their lives, they seem to be the ones who make the most progress. And because they make the most progress, they get the most satisfaction from their businesses, from their lives. And because they get that satisfaction, they take that happiness home and you can see it’s a virtuous circle. Now I do meet a lot of business owners, a huge amount of MSP owners who have really good intentions, and we all have those good intentions sometimes, but they fail to translate them into action. So many people talk about the things they would like to do, but they never get past that stage. Paul Green:In fact, it’s one of the reasons that I choose to work only with business owners and high level business managers and not work with employees. Because the few times in my life where I have worked with employees, I just get so frustrated by this, Oh, I’d love to do this someday or I want to do that. And you know, we’re not talking about them going up into space or sculpting a life size Statue of Liberty out of clay. We’re talking about fairly mundane, ordinary things. But it frustrates me when they’re not there taking action. You and I as business owners or as business managers, we should, most of the time, desire something and be able to take action on it so quickly, and it is this action which makes the difference. I’ve said before on this podcast, I don’t consider myself to be particularly highly intelligent. Paul Green:I certainly, at school I did okay, but it was only okay. I never actually got off to university, but the thing that has allowed me to achieve things I want to achieve, which by the way is my definition of success. The reason I’ve been able to do that is just purely because of action. I get up early most days to take action. I don’t overthink things. I take action. If I have an idea, I will clear stuff that isn’t as important as that brand new idea, which is suddenly there and woo in my head, and I take action on it. Now, if you’re someone who would like to take more action, there are often some things that typically hold people back from taking enough action. And we do all of us ebb and flow into this. I’m not a 100% action taker all the time. Paul Green:When I’m tired, I find it very difficult to take action. But the majority of the time it’s become a way of life for me. And you can make it a way of life for you, because you can train yourself to act differently. Some people don’t take action because they think about stuff too much. Essentially they overthink it. They have an idea, they think, Oh, that’s an amazing idea. And so, they think on it and they sleep on it, and there’s nothing wrong with sleeping on it, but there comes a point where the sleeping has got to stop and the action has got to start. Sometimes it’s fear of failure which stops you from taking action, because if you don’t take action, nothing can change, and if nothing changes, you can’t fail. Does that make sense? That fear of failure is a very real thing for people. They start to think through all the bad things that could happen if they take action on it. Paul Green:Do you know what? I’ll be honest, half of the stuff I take action on doesn’t work. It doesn’t pan out. And actually I’m delighted, because when something doesn’t work, especially if it’s a public failure, and I have plenty of public failures. When something doesn’t work, you’ve discovered one way not to do it, and now you can go off and explore different ways of doing it. One of those ways is going to work eventually. That’s typically how it works out. You just need to discover lots of ways if it doesn’t work first. So, overthinking can be a very, very negative and very destructive thing to stop you taking action. Our minds don’t forget our programmed to stop us from failing. This goes right back to when we were cave people, living in caves, fighting others for food. We didn’t want to be seen to be failures because that affected our social standing. But in 2020 failure is good. Paul Green:Failure is a great thing. Find an idea, act on it fast, fail fast, and then you can iterate it from there. Something else that stops some people from taking rapid action is the ability to act immediately. Again, this is why I love working with business owners because we can suddenly decide, Whoa, this is a great idea. I want to act on this. I’m going to clear my diary, I’m going to push all the other things to one side. All these projects are on hold, because I want to act on this now, and you know what? Acting on something immediately is a secret of getting things done. People who take action immediately, whether they have a great plan or not, are more likely to succeed with that thing. And this isn’t just in your business, this is in all areas of your life. Have you ever had that moment when you think, God, I’d love to go to, let’s say, the Maldives, and then you immediately find yourself on your laptop, and you’re looking it up and you’re researching it. Paul Green:And an hour later you’ve booked that holiday. It’s in your calendar. You’ve fixed it. You’re going to do it and your family are happy and you’re happy. That is what we mean by urgent action taking, and it’s awesome because you’ve gone from having that great idea, to booking it, to it being done instantly. It doesn’t hang around in your head. You don’t have to overthink it. You don’t have to worry about it. You don’t have to have the fear of failure. It’s instant and it’s beautiful. One of the most wonderful side effects of taking action is that it obliterates fear. Fear is something that we all suffer from to various different levels. I certainly know that I suffer from fear if I overthink things, which is why I try to be a very action focused person. If I get stuff done, I don’t have to be afraid. In the business that I sold four years ago, in 2016, there were moments where we had such negative cashflow, where there was so much money going out and just not enough money coming in, that I was gripped with fear. Paul Green:What happens if I can’t pay the bills? What happens if I lose a member of my staff? Or worse, what happens if we lose a client? And that fear was incredibly crippling, and the only way I found to get rid of that fear was to take action. If I found myself waking up at 2:00 in the morning worrying about cashflow, I discovered it was better for me to get up, go downstairs, turn my laptop on and do some work. Not just any odd work, but work that would help me get more new clients. Because if your fear is that, if you lose a client you’re screwed. Then taking some action on getting new clients removes that fear. Action is the most wonderful thing to remove fear. And in fact, if you are plagued by fears, whether that’s a longterm thing or just a short term thing, action is the way to get rid of that fear. Because you can’t be fearful of something if you’re taking action to mitigate it. Paul Green:The final two things that I’d recommend to you are that, you surround yourself with action takers, and that you make action a daily thing. So, my best friends are all action takers. My best friends, Jonathan, Ed, and all of my other friends, most of whom are business owners, they’re all rapid action takers. I try very hard not to associate myself with people who don’t take rapid action, because that can be contagious. I don’t want to know people who don’t take action. I want people who get it done. I want people who aren’t afraid to have a great idea and stay up three or four hours into the night to do it, if that’s the right thing to do. Remember that you are the sum of the five people that you spend the most time with. Now, I don’t physically see Jonathan and Ed more than two or three times a year, but I’m chatting to them every day. And we’re talking about the things that we want to do and the things that we have done, and we’re surrounding ourselves with action-takers. Paul Green:The same with my other friends. So, surrounding yourself with other action takers is really important. They’re probably not going to be your employees, but the other thing is to do daily action taking. Action, taking action is not something you can leave for a once a week thing, it’s got to be a daily thing. You’ve heard me speak before about me getting up at 5:00 AM. I only do it Mondays to Thursdays now, but I get so much done in that time. And my brain has organised itself by the evening, by the morning, so I know exactly what I’m going to do in the mornings to get me closer to my goals. If I can get me closer to my business goals, I’ll get me closer to my lifestyle that I desire. If I get myself closer to that, I don’t feel the fear, and I feel as though I’m moving my life forward and I’m happier. And this is the whole point of action. Taking action makes you happy. Voiceover:Here’s this week’s clever idea. Paul Green:As much as it’s a pain in the backside sometimes, email does have an enormous value, especially, for reaching out to people that you haven’t spoken to before. And in the last couple of months we found a tool, and actually I’ve started using a tool which I think you’ll find very useful to get virtually anyone’s email address. Now the tool is called Hunter.io and that’s the website address as well, Hunter.io. I’ll put that URL into the show notes, and you can use it for a number of different things relating to finding people’s email addresses. So, you can do a domain search, to which you’d literally go into a domain and it shows you all the email addresses of everyone in that company. Or you can use it as an email finder. So, let’s say for example, you’re connected to someone on LinkedIn, you can go in, and you can put their details in there. And Hunter, if it has an email address for them, it will show you what their email address is. Paul Green:And you can also use it as an email verifier. So, you can actually pop in an email address you have, or that you think that you have and it will verify that email address for you. Now, there’s a whole different set of tools that you can use as an extension that you can add into Chrome. It’s actually an add on to Google sheets as well, and they have all sorts of integrations and there’s an API. And it’s relatively low priced as well for what it is. There’s a free plan and that’ll allow you to do 50 requests a month. And a request is where you ask for a piece of information. We’re using the starter plan, which is 34 my pricing is euros probably because I’m looking at it from the UK. Paul Green:That’s 34 euros a month. We’ve actually bought a year’s worth and we can do a thousand requests a month. We can also export CSVs and we can do some campaigns as well. And this is where I think Hunter has its real value. You see, we’ve got a whole bunch of old email addresses that I’ve bought over the years. So, I want to reach more MSPs. I want to tell people about this podcast and my book and my Facebook group, and I want to welcome them into my audiences. You want to do exactly the same thing. You want to welcome people that you want to do business with into your audiences. So, I’m actually using Hunter to validate and to clean up old email addresses that I’ve got. So, we’ve got, I mean, thousands of email addresses in the States and in the UK, and we’re feeding these into Hunter, a thousand at a time. Paul Green:So, we’re doing a thousand a month. We’re asking Hunter to validate those, to clean those up for us. And then because they have cold email campaigning abilities, we’re then going to send some cold emails to those people. Now for those people based in the UK and in Europe, yes, this is GDPR compliant, because it is using email addresses which are out there. And you can read more on Hunter’s website about the GDPR compliance about it, but I’m certainly quite relaxed about that compliance. What it does, is it doesn’t email from its own servers. It actually integrates with a Gmail account. So, of course I recommend that you set up a brand new Gmail account for this, so you’re not doing any damage to any existing domain names you have. But I would pop a domain name in there rather than using a Gmail address. And you can get Hunter to send cold emails for you. Paul Green:Now you can either do that to send people emails, just to have a chat with them, or what you might do is try and clean up those emails by getting them to opt into your email campaign, to your MailChimp or your MailerLite perhaps. And there’s lots and lots of different ways that you would use it, but certainly we found in the last couple of months this to be quite a handy tool. If only because, even though people don’t reply to emails all the time, once you’ve got someone’s email address, it is a lot easier to try to start a conversation with them. So go and have a look at Hunter.io. I’m sure there are other services around that you found… I would love to know actually what you think of this, if you do start using it, even if it’s just the free one. Or if you use a competitor and you think a competing product is better. Do you know, just drop me an email and let me know it’s hello@paulgreensmspmarketing.com. Voiceover:Paul’s blatant plug. Paul Green:Now if you like the idea of tools like hunter.io, and you’re based in the UK, I’ve got a way for you to meet up with me and I’ve got a whole series of different things that I will share with you. You see every week or so I put on, what is essentially, it’s a lunch and learn. It’s an MSP marketing lunch and I’m doing them all across the country. I’ve been doing it for the last couple of months. I’ve got about another two and a half months left to go before we end this current tour. And it…

Full show notes at the publisher

Episode 14: How passphrases help you sell more password managers Feb 18, 2020

Show notes

In this week’s episode Windows Virtual Desktop is gaining some traction with MSPs as a re-sellable product, but a lot of people still have questions around best practice. Special guest Joseph Landes from Nerdio is an ex-Microsoft employee and is back to share some brilliant tips Paul’s also got an idea for you to integrate Have I been Pwned into your website as a data capture tool Plus find out how to sell more password managers; get clients excited about telecoms; and identify (and fire) your Internal Terrorist Show notes Out every Tuesday on your favourite podcast platform Presented by Paul Green, an MSP marketing expert Read more about Gallup’s research on employee engagement types Paul has researched and written a series on employee engagement, read it here The tool to create pass-phrases is useapassphrase.com Paul discussed the site to help check if an account or password has been breached haveibeenpwned.com The API from Have I Been Pwned has been turned into a free WordPress plugin available with Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Edge service Paul’s guest talking about the best way to re-sell Windows Virtual Desktop was Joseph Landes from Nerdio (you can find part 1 of his interview discussing how to improve margins selling Azure here) The guest on Feb 25th will be Joe Pannone from CWDash talking about extracting useful data from ConnectWise 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 14. Here’s what’s coming up in today’s show. Joseph Landes:A few months ago, Microsoft released Windows Virtual Desktop. Since then we have been fairly overwhelmed with demand. Paul Green:That’s Joseph Landes from Nerdio. We’re going to be playing the second part of his interview talking about how to sell more Windows Virtual Desktop. I’ve also got an idea for you to integrate, Have I been Pwned into your website as a data capture tool. And a way to tell clients how to set passwords which seems easier to them. But will actually sell you more password managers. Voiceover:Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast. Paul Green:Once you’ve got about five or six staff, that’s when you start to realise that you’re almost a full time parent-manager. As much as you are the owner of the business. I say parent, not of actual children, but of your employee children. Children … excuse me, freudian slip there. Employees do have a tendency to act a little bit like children. The thing that had always used to frustrate me was when I had 15 staff. I had a very highly systemised business. It was a business where, I didn’t need to turn up every day and the business thrived. Paul Green:Yet still the second I walked in on a Thursday morning, some of my staff would ask me stupid questions like, “Paul, we haven’t got any milk. What should we do?” These are the questions which they would answer quite well if I wasn’t there. But the second I’m there, it’s like the switch flipped in their brain and we must go and ask daddy. Because the second you have staff and it’s a number of staff, you do become daddy or mummy to them. It’s kind of depressing. Paul Green:As you get more and more and more staff, what happens is your staff actually start to fit into three types of category. Now this came from some research which is actually is done every year by the research company, Gallup. They’ve noticed that once you get past a certain number of staff, and I forget how many. But your engagement of your employees fit into one of only three categories. So the very best kind of employee that you’ll have is your engaged employee. Now this is actually … when you’ve got five or six staff, this should be the majority of your staff. But by the time you start getting up to … certainly when I had 15 I only had really three or four engaged staff. Paul Green:Essentially they treat the business like it’s their own, but in a good way. So they’re on your side, they’re the kind of people who use their initiative. Which becomes rarer and rarer the bigger the organisation gets. They’re the kind of people you can trust with the keys, with the alarm code. If they’re on a scheduled holiday day, a day off, and there’s a big problem. They’re the first kind of person who’s likely to come in on that day off, if it’s in any way possible. Paul Green:When you’ve got three or four staff, it is possible for them all to be engaged. Once you go pass, I think he’s about seven, eight. You start to lose the ability to have everyone being engaged. Because the reality is, people just aren’t engaged with your business in the way that you are engaged. It’s your business, it’s your baby, we’re doing things your way. Therefore, that gives you a massive level of engagement and that’s quite infectious in your first staff. As you get more and more staff, some of them stay as engaged. But increasingly, you start to hire people who will ultimately are not engaged. They’re not engaged, is the Gallup label for these people. Actually you go into any big organisation and the vast majority of people are not engaged. Paul Green:My last job I had before I started my first business in 2005. I worked in the digital department of a major newspaper group in the UK, it’s called Johnston Press. There were about 40 people in my department back in 2004. They were building website platforms for all the newspapers to do their websites. It was a very highly not engaged environment. Just because the entire company was trying to reinvent itself for the digital age. As it turned out, it failed. We’d got a lot of developers, we’ve got a lot of tech people, we’ve got a lot of managers in that business. There was a lot of toing and froing, and direction changing. We had some solid leadership for a while and then the leader retired, moved on to something else. And we had a bad leader. It was surprising how quickly people who were engaged became not engaged. Paul Green:Not engaged is the defacto for most employees. The symptoms of not engaged are they turn up and they do a job. Sometimes they do a good job, but then that’s it. The second it hits five, six o’clock, whatever time it is for them to go home, they disconnect. They literally, they switch off. It’s almost like as they walk over the threshold of the door, that internal switch in their head, click. It flicks and they don’t really care. They could have a day off and you could ring them and you could be desperate for help and they’d lie. Even though they’re planning to sit there and play Call of Duty all day. They would lie and say to you, “Oh no, I’ve got a big family thing on today.” These people just are not engaged in what you’re trying to do. Paul Green:It is scary that the bigger the organisation, the more of these people are there. In fact, it’s believed that not engaged people make up more than 50% of the workforce. They’re literally turning up for the money. Isn’t that scary? Well it’s scary for us as business owners. It’s also scary that so many people just waste their life away. I mean, I love work. I wouldn’t do this work if I didn’t love it. Would you? I know you wouldn’t. You’d go and do something else because you’ve got the control over what you do. Paul Green:We’ve got engaged people, who are the best people. We’ve got not engaged, who are sadly the silent majority. Then we’ve got the very worst people. When you’ve got four, five, six staff, you know when you’ve got one of these. When you’re at 15 it’s very hard to spot them, 15 or more. These people are called actively disengaged staff. I prefer to call them internal terrorists. Because knowingly or unknowingly, they are working against the business. I say knowingly or unknowingly, some of them do it deliberately. I’ve had a couple of internal terrorists who got fired. Ken, you are the worst. I know you won’t be listening to this podcast because you hate me. But you are the worst and it was a pleasure to get rid of you. Paul Green:Internal terrorists sometimes don’t realise that they are destroying the business from within. Because what they do is they just basically tell everyone about their unhappiness. They’re unhappy and they wear it on their sleeve. Now, the unhappiness might not just be at work. I’ve had internal terrorists in the past who actually quite enjoy their work. But they’re so unhappy at home, they bring the unhappiness into the workplace. Which is actually quite hard to deal with. Whereas the ones who are unhappy with their work, it’s easier to deal with them because you just performance manage them. I say it’s easy to performance manage them, because people who are actively disengaged, who are internal terrorists. It is physically impossible for them to do a great job at work day after day after day. Paul Green:You can give them a telling off. You can start to manage their performance and they will up their game. But it will only be in the short term. Actively disengaged employees are physically impossible of upping their game long term. You’ve got to just have a look at your staff right now. I don’t like appraisals, I see why big businesses do appraisals. Me, I prefer just sitting down with members of the team on a regular basis. However regular that needs to be. It could be weekly, it could be fortnightly, maybe monthly. Just having a little chat, an one to one, a structured chat. Paul Green:But as you’re talking to your staff, as you’re looking at them, as you’re thinking about them now. Just have a look and think, who doesn’t show initiative? Who could so easily, when the initiative is there in front of them or the ability to change something. But they’re just not acknowledging it and then they’re just not doing anything. Because that is a sign of disengagement and potentially actively disengagement. Who are taking part in lots of unhealthy activities? Paul Green:When I was working for Johnston Press, and I’ll admit this now, 15 years on. I used to sneak off to the toilet and sit in the toilet. Not because I needed the toilet, but because I could go in there with my phone and I would play solitaire. Actually, that was where I started my first business. I started my first business in the toilets of my employers. How amazing is that? I would go for 30-40 minutes and no one noticed I was gone. Which encouraged me to go longer. Isn’t that crazy? Paul Green:So who’s doing that in your business? Are the smokers going out more often for cigarettes? Are they spending more time making coffee? Here’s one to watch out for. Who’s the person who is making coffee for everyone all the time? Because it’s a sign of active disengagement. It’s a way for them to get away from their desk for 20 minutes, making coffee for everyone else. Another one to look out for is silence. Maybe you have … well you probably do have lots of introverts. But sometimes a really silent workplace is a sign that people are disengaging. I know lots of people like sitting with their big headphones on and listening to their own music. But it can be a pretty bad thing for a team. Paul Green:When your team getting out there and go and put themselves on courses. Are they pushing you to improve their skill set? Or are you having to push them? Because if they’re pushing you, that’s a good sign. That’s an engagement sign. If you’re having to push them and you talk about stuff and they’re very reluctant to do it. That’s not a good sign, it really isn’t. Paul Green:Then finally, the final one is to just look out for is, what’s happening in their lives? I think I’m a big fan of people leaving their home life at the door. Unless it’s a major issue that we need to help them with. But at the same time, if they’re having bad weekends and they’re coming in grumpy and hungover and tired on a Monday morning. That can easily overflow into the workplace. Because if they’re exhausted on a Monday morning, what are they going to be like on Friday morning? They’re going to be triple exhausted. I know that some of your techs perhaps have an unhealthy relationship with gaming or with other activities. Sitting on the computer till three in the morning. I appreciate that that’s their idea of fun. But if they’re coming into work every day with six hours sleep. That’s not only not healthy for them, but he’s not healthy for the business either. Paul Green:Which of your staff are engaged? Find those people, give them more mummy love or daddy love, and keep them engaged. Which of them are disengaged? What can you do to have a chat with them? To give them some of your time, even if it’s just 20 minutes every month. Who are the actively disengaged people? What can you do to fix them? Because if he can’t fix them, you do know that you’ve got to fire them, don’t you? Voiceover:Here’s this week’s clever idea. Paul Green:Clients hate passwords. We all know that. They hate the fact that they have to be difficult and random. They hate the fact that they can’t just do iterations of them. They hate the fact that they have to have passwords at all. They also hate multifactor authentication. We know this. Because what seems like a great idea when you’re pitching it to them and it’s safe and secure. Is just a real pain for them. Paul Green:Now I’ve got something which I’ve tested on a couple of clients, which seems to work quite well. It’s to say to your clients, instead of using passwords and using random password generators, to use a pass phrase. In fact, there is actually a website, useapassphrase.com. Where you can randomly generate a passphrase. I’m on this website now and I’ve just randomly generated a four word passphrase with spaces. It’s come up with yin molehill unfitting syrup. The time it would take to brute force crack that is apparently 3,785,568 centuries. That’s a fairly un-crackable one, yin molehill unfitting syrup. Now, theoretically the human brain should be able to remember yin molehill unfitting syrup, rather than it will DX7!B, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Paul Green:Here’s the thing, because you say to your clients that they need to use a different password for every single system. They could go onto something like useapassphrase.com and they could come up with lots of different passphrases. We all know that within three or four passphrases, their brain is going to be full of random gobbledy goop. Yes, it’s easier to remember yin molehill unfitting syrup than anything else. But not when you’ve got four or five of those going around in your head. This is when we get the opportunity to talk about a password manager. Paul Green:See I think every single one of your clients and every single one of their users should be using a password manager. You should be reselling that as monthly recurring revenue. You probably agree with me. But what is it that stops people from doing it? I’ll tell you what it is, it’s their theory that they don’t need it. Because passwords are easy. Yet we all know that fluffy123 or hang on the iteration, fluffy124 and fluffy125. Are the easiest things in the world to crack. There are various other websites online which will show you how long it takes to crack a password. You can just go in, paste a password in order or put a random password in. It will tell you how many months, or years, or weeks, or whatever it takes. Paul Green:This is something that when you’re sitting down with clients and you’re talking about improving their security. Showing them just how important passwords are, proper random passwords. This is the kind of tool that really, really helps you to sell more password managers. Because you only need the person at the top to realise, “My goodness, everyone needs to use random passwords and you know what? Let’s make their life easier. Let’s hire in a password manager. Let’s make it secure. And when they leave our employment, let’s make it easy for us to just switch off all of their password…

Full show notes at the publisher

Episode 13: Don’t kill your technician… give them a checklist instead Feb 11, 2020

Show notes

In this week’s episode MSPs thrive or dive on the successful completion of small technical tasks. Paul suggests an easy solution for those times when a simple small mistake can be devastating to the business Check out the first of a two-part interview with an ex-Microsoft employee who can help you sell Azure with fantastic margins Also in this week’s episode; how to spend more time out of the business with the Three Plus One plan. And the best way to run an email marketing campaign Show notes Out every Tuesday on your favourite podcast platform Presented by Paul Green, an MSP marketing expert Find copies of the book The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande on Amazon Paul mentioned services and tools including IT Glue, ConnectWise & AutoTask Find out more about the video production services for MSPs websites at mspvideos.co.uk Paul’s guest talking about the best way to re-sell Microsoft Azure was Joseph Landes from Nerdio (who will also be back next week talking about Windows Virtual Desktop) You can order your free copy of Paul’s book Updating Servers Doesn’t Grow Your Business right here The concept of the ‘Learning Zone’ was in reference to previous guest Fiona Challis who runs the The Next Gen Sales Acceleration Academy The question about the best type of email campaign to run came from Andrew Eardley from Prompt PC 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 on today’s show. Joseph Landes: Taking advantage of these five suggestions that we’ve made. You can easily make up to 80% margins on Azure. You can save up to 80% off the list price of Azure. Paul Green: That’s Joseph Landes from from Nerdio. He’s going to be telling you later on how you can sell more Azure and make a lot more profit on it. We’re also going to be talking about checklisting everything in the business using paper, not screens, and I’m going to be answering a question for an MSP about the most powerful form of email marketing. Voiceover: Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast. Paul Green: One of the common themes of this podcast is that the business is there for you. That’s the purpose of the business, to feed your life. And yet actually far too many MSPs, in fact, just general business owners, treat it that their life is there to feed the business. It’s a very easy trap to fall into. In your first few years, you get busy, you throw yourself into your work, you’re doing 60-hour weeks and it’s the right thing to do at the very beginning of the business or when you first acquire the business. But long-term, it’s not a healthy thing to do. It’s not good for your health, it’s not good for your mental health, certainly not good for your family and for the people who love you and who are supporting you. Paul Green: And I think as you develop your business over time, you need to readdress the work-life balance. And there does come a point where you have to say, if this business can’t give me sufficient money, and sufficient time, and sufficient fun, then I need to change the business. I either need to get rid of it, or I need to dramatically change it, or I need to do something different. Paul Green: And I was talking to one of my clients a few weeks ago and he was telling me about his plan for this year for what he’s going to do for the rest of this year and next year. And it’s very much about addressing that balance and making sure, in fact guaranteeing, that he has enough fun and enough downtime in his life for him and for his other half to go and enjoy. And he’s come up with something called the three plus one plan. Now, this is a very simple plan. You have three weeks of work and then you have a week away. Three weeks of work, week away. Three weeks of work, week away. Paul Green: Now this particular client doesn’t have children or certainly not school aged children, so he doesn’t have to worry too much about that. So they are literally going to spend three weeks working in the business, good quality weeks, then they’re going to have a complete break, a complete week away. And in the early days for this year, he’s planning on going to lots of different holiday destinations. The long-term plan is to find somewhere to live. So they are looking for a second home in the sun somewhere that they can go in that one week off and they can enjoy their lives, him and his partner together. Because they realise at their age, and with all the work they’ve done in the business, that actually that’s what life is all about. It’s about enjoying themselves. Paul Green: So that’s the plan for this year and for next year. What’s really interesting, is if you look at their plan from 2022 onwards. Because their long-term plan is to flip the three plus one plan around, so that actually they’re spending three weeks away and then one week in the business. Three weeks away, one week in the business. Three weeks away, one week in the business. Now that sounds like fun, doesn’t it? That sounds like a good lifestyle. Of course, it’s not possible to completely run your business in just one week a month, which is essentially what that works out at. So they do intend to be in touch with the staff, to have video calls, but the goal is to flip their lifestyle so that they are spending more time enjoying themselves, living where they want to live, doing the things they want to do, and less time being frustrated with the business. Paul Green: Now, that’s the plan for, as I say, two to three years away. But what’s interesting is that they have to start working on that plan now. So even though the business can quite safely sustain them going away for one week a month now, as the business stands today, it can’t sustain them being away for three weeks of the month. And so they’ve got to start that work now to make that business more resilient without them. In fact, isn’t that the goal? Isn’t that the dream? But the business thrives, not just survives, not just ticks along, but thrives whether you personally are there in the business or not. This is a great goal. I mean, this is a truly life-changing goal and this is the real purpose of a business. The business does really well. It thrives whether you are there or not. Paul Green: And you get to choose whether or not you spend the time in the business. And the key thing there is the choice. I love work. I love throwing myself into projects and doing stuff. But do you know what? I love my family more. And I love holidays more. And I love going for long walks and running and all the things I like doing. And that’s the point, It’s about the choice. It’s about the choice to say, “I’m going to go and spend a couple of weeks back in the business because I enjoy it.” I’m going to go and take on this big project, or do this big upgrade, because I want to do it. It’s all about the choice. Paul Green: Now my clients in two years time or three years time when they’ve got that business restructured, there’ll be at that position where the business runs without them. So they know already, they’ve got to get someone who can run that business day-to-day when they’re not there. They’ve got to put in place systems, standard operating procedures so that decisions can be made when they’re not there. This is actually quite exciting. We’re going to be talking shortly about checklisting things and systemising things, and this is exactly what they’ve got to do within that business. Paul Green: What makes that particularly exciting is the more they do that, the more sellable that business becomes. And we’ve talked before about the fact that we’re all going to have to leave the business at some point and either we sell the business or the business goes bust, or we die at our desks, which is not a great way to exit a business. The most sellable businesses thrive without the owner needing to be there. In fact, it’s interesting that it’s exactly the same set of things you do to a business to sell it, to make it more sellable, as it is to create a business that feeds your lifestyle. And this is the challenge for you this year, next year, the year after whatever stage you’re at, however many staff or however few staff or however many clients or few clients you’ve got, that’s got to be the long-term goal to make the business so good, so self-sustaining, that it creates an income and allows you to have a lifestyle regardless of whether you turn up or not. That is a true business. And really it should be the goal, something that we’re all working towards. Paul Green: Now as I say, you may choose to still go and work in that business for three or four weeks of the month. That’s fine. That’s your choice. But the day that you change your mind, the day that something happens in your family, or you and your other half just decide, let’s spend more time away or you want to go away on a six-week holiday just you and your kids. If you’ve already done that hard work and that business thrives without you, you don’t have to go through the two or three years of pain to reposition that business. You’ve already done it. And that’s why for every single one of us, that should be our goal going forward. Voiceover: Here’s this week’s clever idea. Paul Green: So staying with the same theme, let’s talk about checklisting things. And I have another client who I work quite closely with. I’m not going to name him, but I know he listens to this podcast, and I know he’ll have a smile and a chuckle as he hears me talking about this. Because we had a conversation, oh it must be a couple of months ago now, and it was about one of his engineers who is a perfectly competent guy. He’s experienced, he’s pleasant with customers. And the only thing wrong with this guy is when he goes out to a site, he will always miss two or three tiny things. Let’s say setting up a new server. He’ll get the installation done correctly. He’ll do all the big things properly. Then he’ll miss one or two. It might be just one or two little tick boxes. And it’s been frustrating my client for years, I mean literally for years. And when you get him talking about this subject, he will go off on a 10-minute rant talking about this engineer and how he’d like to just gently put his hands around his neck and squeeze a little bit. Paul Green: Because I’m exaggerating a little bit, but you get the idea. And maybe you’ve had a similar thing in your business where you’ve got great staff, who can do a great job most of the time, but they make tiny little mistakes. In fact, maybe you even do it yourself. Maybe you make tiny little mistakes when you’re doing jobs that you do very often. There’s a great book called The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande. Highly recommend that you get this book. Think I’ve talked about it before on the podcast. It talks about systemising things. Paul Green: Now, Atul Gawande is a medical doctor based in the States. He looked at why doctors and nurses make the same mistakes time and time again. Whereas in aviation, obviously a mistake in aviation has fairly far-reaching effects. In aviation, they’ve pretty much pushed mistakes out. They’ve created a culture of openness regarding mistakes, and every single mistake is investigated and it’s used to improve the systems. And he attempted to put in place in his hospital, a series of systems to stop the small things from going wrong. Because what he found was that, heart surgeons can do a four or five-hour operation, do absolutely brilliantly, but they’ll make a small mistake at the end. Paul Green: It might be something like leaving a swab inside someone, or the patient might not be given the right drug or something like that. So they started to checklist in his hospital, all the small things. You don’t check just the big complicated things that would require extensive flow charts and people train for years to do. I’m thinking installing servers, that kind of thing. It’s the small things that you checklist, such as setting up a new user or changing a password. Now, the conversation I had with my client was that these checklists, I know you can do them within things like IT Glue and Autotask and ConnectWise and stuff like that, but these checklists really come to life when you put them on paper. And I know that’s heresy. I know that paper is evil and we try and have a paperless office and all of that stuff. Paul Green: But as humans, we respond better to paper. Even technicians respond better to paper. I helped my client put in place a checklist. He put it onto whatever system they were using, his engineer went out, it was on an iPad and he still didn’t do it. He still didn’t complete the checklist. He still made the small mistakes. And it made my client even more frustrated. And the last conversation we had about this was, “Put it on paper.” Because when you checklist something like that, you put it on paper and the engineer has to print it out before they go out to do the job. And then they have to tick all the boxes. And then, and this is what makes the paper one so powerful, they have to sign it at the bottom. When they have to do this, suddenly it becomes real. Paul Green: Taking a pen, physically ticking a piece of paper and signing your name at the bottom, that’s more real than ticking boxes on a screen. Especially when you sign it. The signing it is an act of committing your name to the work. If you’ve ever looked at some luxury cars, I think Aston Martin does this, and there’s a whole load of other top end manufacturers do it, they get the people who are making the engine, say, to sign their name or to print their name on the engine. It’s a very powerful thing to do. Because it makes sure that those craftspeople absolutely check every little thing that they should be doing, because it’s their name on the engine. When the engine goes wrong and to mistake that they made during the construction and production of it, their name is on it. So putting their name on it makes it of a higher quality. Paul Green: You think of the psychology of a signature, what do we sign these days? We sign contracts. We sign things that we’re committing ourself to. You’re getting your engineers to commit themselves that they have completed the checklist. And it actually makes the HR side of things very easy. Because if they have said that they’ve done all these things and they’ve ticked them off and they’ve signed it and they simply haven’t, is very easy for you to pick that up and for that to become a disciplinary matter. Paul Green: So, as much as it torments you, as much as it creates you pain, as much as you don’t want those checklists going around on paper, paper checklists work. I highly recommend you pick up that book, The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande and I highly recommend you try some paper checklists. Don’t try and checklist everything in one go. Just pick one thing that’s a little bit broken right now. Could be a password reset, could be a new user, could be a tiny little job that you and your team do day-in, day-out. Pick one thing. Paul Green: Write the checklist of exactly how you want it to be done, the perfect way it should be done. Introduce that checklist to your staff. Make it the new law that they tick all the boxes, they sign their name, and then they put the checklist in a tray on your desk or somewhere for you to collect. And then perhaps once or twice a week you should just pick a checklist at random and go and check that job. You don’t have to check all the checklists. They just need to know that your checklisting some of them now and again. So long as they see you in enforcing it, they will fall into line with this system and they will do a great job. Voiceover: Paul’s blatant plug. Paul Green: So this is one that’s just for my listeners in the UK and it’s about videos. I have a joint venture with a vid…

Full show notes at the publisher

Episode 12: The Impact Box Feb 04, 2020

Show notes

In this week’s episode Not many people have heard about the Impact Box, but Paul talks about some MSPs are using them to tip prospects over the edge and turn them into happy clients Also in this week’s episode; you may not realise it but you have a Hassle Bucket in your brain. And Paul explains how to stop it overflowing Plus special guests join Paul to discuss selling more hardware to customers and finding time to get the important stuff done Show notes Out every Tuesday on your favourite podcast platform Presented by Paul Green, an MSP marketing expert There is more on the concept of a ‘Hassle Bucket’ and how to manage yours here Here’s a link to Paul’s Facebook group for MSP Marketing Paul’s guest talking about how to sell more hardware to your clients was James Cust from Warranty Master They discussed services and tools including IT Glue, Kaseya, ConnectWise & AutoTask The question about how to prioritise important work came from Andy Price from Initial IT Our guest on the next show on 11th February to talk about the best way to re-sell Microsoft Azure will be Joseph Landes from Nerdio 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: Got another cracker for you this week. Here’s what’s coming up. James Cust: And we’ll be able to see real live data about their estate, and see an overview of devices which are in warranty, get the idea of the proportion of their estate, which ultimately is unprotected. Paul Green: We’re also going to be talking about something called an impact box. It’s a bunch of stuff that you send to them in the post to push them over the edge. And I’ll be answering your question about how to prioritise what’s most important every day. Voiceover: Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast. Paul Green: I want to start today by talking about hassle buckets. I believe that every single one of us has a hassle bucket inside our head. So what’s a hassle bucket? Well, it’s a measure for how much hassle, how much grief and stress we can deal with at any one time. Paul Green: And some people’s buckets are very deep. They can take enormous amounts of hassle before their bucket overflows and they run into problems. Other people’s buckets are more shallow. I don’t believe that you’re born with a specific depth of hassle bucket. I think it’s something that appears in your head when you’re a teenager and it develops as you become an adult. And in fact, you can deepen your hassle bucket over time, but you’ve got to beware, because it can also become more shallow. It can block up and overflow quite often, sometimes unexpectedly. Paul Green: Anytime your hassle bucket gets so full that it overflows, you suddenly become unable to deal with all the things that you need to deal with in your life. Now as business owners, we do have quite deep hassle buckets, you and me as business owners and managers. So we can take on enormous amounts of hassle at any one time. Paul Green: I think it’s something that we learn in the first few years of running a business. You think about all the things that you have to do, all the hats that you have to wear in the first few years. And the depth of the bucket is what marks out someone who’s able to be a successful business owner for decades, versus someone who does it for a few years and really struggles with it. Paul Green: But here’s the thing about being a business owner. Your hassle bucket might be deep, but it’s also 80% full most of the time. In fact, wouldn’t you argue that part of the curse of being the business owner is that your hassle bucket is so full, so often? Because you think about all the things that you and I have to juggle all the time. We’ve got the burden of cashflow, which we have to juggle, and cashflow mentally is one of the most destructive forces when you’re running a business, if you have a bad cashflow. If you have a positive one, it’s one of the most liberating ones. Paul Green: There’s the burden of staff, of course, because our staff are our children and no matter how old they are, no matter how experienced they are, they are looking to you as their parents. That’s psychologically how the staff/boss relationship works. Paul Green: There is of course the burden of winning new business and it’s not so bad for an established MSP as it is for a newer one, but winning new business is difficult for all MSPs. And then of course, there’s the burden of just keeping your existing clients happy and trying to be on top of all of the work. And you can have as many systems and PSAs and processes and tools as you like, but ultimately it is a burden. Paul Green: And the bigger you get, the more the burden is, the greater the burden is. In fact, if any sane person was to look at the hassles and burdens of running a business, they’d be like, no thanks. I’m not doing this. I’m going to run a mile. But you and I and lots of people like us, we take on that burden, and we embrace it thoroughly because we love the freedom and the flexibility and how we can grow personally. Paul Green: Plus, of course, financially what it can do for our family and for our staff as well. If we can pay them better than someone else could pay them. So the positives of course, of owning your own business absolutely outweigh the negatives. Paul Green: But there are various times of the year when our hassle bucket overflows. And you think back to about a month ago, when perhaps you went back to work, early January, maybe you’d had a break and you felt great. Because you’d had a load of time off. You are really buzzing and you were just desperate to get back to work and do some stuff. Paul Green: And a month on from there, maybe you’re a little bit worn out again. I know I am at this time of year, just maybe you need a little rest again and your hassle bucket is getting near the brim, it’s getting higher. It’s a difficult thing to do. Because if the business owner’s hassle bucket is normally at 80% and yours is currently at 90% or 95%, that’s when you start to feel stressed. That’s when we start to feel overworked. It’s when we start to feel like everything’s getting on top of us. Paul Green: How would you grade your hassle bucket right now? What level is your hassle bucket at right now? Maybe that’s a question you should be asking yourself every morning. What level is my hassle bucket right now? Paul Green: When the hassle bucket overflows, we find it very, very hard to cope with things. In fact, it’s the small things that are more likely to push the hassle over the edge of the bucket. You’ve heard that phrase about the straw breaking the camel’s back? It’s spot on, isn’t it? You can have all these major projects and you can cope with all these major projects and then what pushes you over the edge one day is one tiny, tiny little thing. Paul Green: Now I believe that the answer to this isn’t to stop more things coming into the hassle bucket. What you’ve got to do instead is you’ve got to install a DOA relief tap further down the bucket. Now, we traditionally see DOA, and we’ve talked about this before on the podcast. We traditionally see DOA when we’re watching a crime show on TV and the victim is DOA and it stands for dead on arrival. And we don’t want to be dead on arrival as business owners, because we want to stay alive and healthy as long as we can. Paul Green: That’s what we’ve got business for to allow us to do that and to enjoy our lives. So we’re going to change that acronym from dead on arrival to delegate, outsource, automate. And DOA means acknowledging that despite the fact that we are the business owner or manager and we are spectacular and we do have amazing superpowers and no one can do it as well as us, and by the way, of course, no one ever will do it as us. Despite this, we can actually delegate, we can outsource and we can automate many of the things that really we don’t personally need to do. Paul Green: Again, I’ve mentioned this before on the podcast, but it’s a great mantra to live by. You should only do what only you can do. And in fact, the business owners who thrive for decades, not just last for decades, but thrive for decades, are the ones who are constantly looking at the work that they’re supposed to be doing, the jobs that are sat in front of them and they’re asking themselves, who on my team can do this better? Who can do this quicker or easier than I can? Or, who out there in the wonderful world we live in where we can outsource nearly anything on Fiverr or on PeoplePerHour, who can do this job for me so that I personally don’t have to do it? Paul Green: Or, how can I automate this? And thank the good Lord for APIs. The goal is to remove hassle, it’s to simplify things and give yourself an easier life. To keep that hassle bucket at no more than 80%, so actually every day is a really good day, no matter what crops up. Voiceover: Here’s this week’s clever idea. Paul Green: Marketing and sales are very much a science, rather than an art. They may seem sometimes like a bit of a mystery, that there’s this mystique around them, but that’s not the case. They’re just a series of processes, of procedures, of systems. They’re really no different to technology. Isn’t technology just a series of processes and systems? Paul Green: Sure, now and again you have to apply a tiny little bit of mystique, of art, of experience, of woo and it’s exactly the same in marketing, but actually 95% of it is systemisable. 95% of it is a process. It’s following it. Paul Green: You take someone who is a stranger and you want to turn them into a lead, which is where they’re aware of you. You want to build a relationship with them. You want to from that relationship, turn them into a prospect, where you’re starting to have a one-on-one conversation with them, and then of course turning them into a client. Paul Green: All of that is just a process. It’s a system. You can tweak that system. You can change that process. You can make it better any time. This is why much of your marketing can be delegated or outsourced, so that other people do it for you. You retain control, but other people physically do the work for you. Paul Green: Now, there’s a clever idea that a number of my clients have been looking at. A couple of them have put it into place and it’s called an impact box. And it’s a bunch of stuff that you send to a prospect to push them over the edge. Paul Green: So let’s imagine that you’ve been out to see a prospect. You’ve had a great sales meeting with them and you know that they’re talking to a couple of other people, but you just want to give yourself that edge. Because the problem you have is that you could have spent two or three hours with them and they could be, oh yes, absolutely. You are the right people for us, but they have a very, very low awareness of technology. They have a very short memory. You’re reliant upon them remembering how you made them feel, because someone picks you or doesn’t pick you based on how they feel about you. Paul Green: Now I’m excluding selling to internal IT managers. Internal IT managers, it’s not really a normal sales process because they know that technology. So exclude that for a second. Paul Green: But when you’re selling to normal business owners or managers it’s very much about how they feel about you, because 99% of these people don’t know what they don’t know about technology. They don’t know what the right solutions are. They don’t really care. They just want it to work. But they want to put their trust in someone and we all know that get the technology wrong, and you can massively disrupt the business. So they are putting their trust in you. Paul Green: And you could have spent a couple of hours with them. They could feel very, very warm about you, and feel that you’re the right people to trust. But three weeks later when they’re going to make that decision, do they remember that memory? Do they remember that feeling? Paul Green: So an impact box is something that you can send to them to tip them over the edge, to make them remember you, and to make them believe that you are the right people to trust. When we say it’s a box, it’s physically a box that you send to someone, be it a cardboard box that you would fill. It’s almost like a gift pack. Paul Green: But what you put inside is designed to make them feel special. It’s designed to make them feel that you have absolutely got their back. So what kinds of stuff would you send them? Well, perhaps the first thing you’d do is you’d send them your book. Every MSP needs to have a book, and it’s a book that you have written or that has been written for you and has your name on the front, which is of course called ghost writing. Paul Green: Now, a book is not really a book, it’s just a business card. It’s a 48 page or whatever page business card. And it’s a way of positioning you as something special in your marketplace. People love buying from true experts and true experts become authors. So you need to have your own book, or you need to get that book written. So you’d certainly put your book in there. Paul Green: And perhaps you’d put some other credibility materials in there, perhaps you’d put some case studies. Perhaps you’d put some testimonials. Again, all of these physical printed materials. Paul Green: Maybe you’d have some videos. Now, if you have some of those videos, I would put them on a USB stick. Those videos being video testimonials from your clients, from your happy customers. The reason you put them on a USB stick, because it’s physical, we want them to plug them into their laptop and watch those videos. Let’s not have the conversation about the fact you could have had a virus on that USB. We’ll save that conversation for another day. Paul Green: Some other stuff you’d put in your impact box would be some stuff they can eat, maybe some chocolates or some biscuits. Quality stuff, something that’s fun, not too expensive, but not too cheap. Maybe you could put a whole selection of chocolate bars in there. Maybe if you’d had a conversation with them about their favourite chocolate, let’s say, okay, this would be a great thing to do. Let’s say during parts of the sales process, you systemise to find out what their favourite chocolate bar is. Let’s say it’s a Snicker’s. How would they feel if you sent them 25 Snickers? Maybe 25 is too many, but you get the idea, a whole bunch of Snickers. Paul Green: Maybe you’d put in there some cans of Coke or some cans of Diet Coke. Again, maybe you’d find out what their favourite drink is. What’s the emotional impact you’re going to have on someone if you send them a whole bunch of their favourite chocolate bars, a whole bunch of their favourite drinks, a book to read, some videos to watch? Paul Green: And then the cream of the impact box is a hand-written note. Now you don’t personally have to hand write this. I try personally not to hand-write anything because my hand-writing hasn’t really developed since I was 14, but I would get a hand-written note written by someone else and again, you can just outsource this or delegate it to someone on your staff or outsource it to someone in your area to just hand-write this note for you. And the hand-written note is from you to them and it’s not just a hi, nice to meet you. Here’s some stuff. It’s a hand-written note about their business. Paul Green: It might be a two or even a three page note and it might say hi, prospect name. It was great to meet you last week and to chat about your business. I remember you saying that Snickers were your favourite chocolate bar, so I thought I’d send you a few, plus some Diet Cokes while you’re reading my book and looking at the testimonials that my clients have happily recorded for me. Paul Green: I know that picking a new IT support company is a very big decision…

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