Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast

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Episode 11: The price of leadership is criticism Jan 28, 2020

Show notes

In this week’s episode As your MSP grows and you take on more staff, there’s an increased chance you’ll be criticised by those that work for you. Paul explains how this can actually be a good thing for your business and leadership Also in this week’s episode, how a simple paperclip can keep your business on track; details of a monthly pack of marketing material; and James Newell joins Paul to share some amazing advice about improving sales techniques This podcast is fully interactive and listener Sam has a great question about how an MSP owner can force clients to stop bothering them with historic technical support! Show notes Out every Tuesday on your favourite podcast platform Presented by Paul Green, an MSP marketing expert Here’s a link to Paul’s Facebook group for MSP Marketing The MSP Marketing Edge is at www.mspmarketingedge.com Paul’s guest on the show talking about how to become even better at sales was James Newell from Clear Sales Message The question about how to stop clients bothering you with support issues came from Sam Veillet from Calibre Connections Our guest on the next show on 4th February to talk about how to sell more hardware to your clients is James Cust from Warranty Master 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, I’ve got a great one for you today. Here’s what’s coming up. James Newell: You might be too embarrassed to question me on what that actually means, and I’ll lose the sale because I’ve assumed that you know what I’m talking about. Paul Green: We’re also going to explore a very simple but very powerful idea that will help you and your team to do the things that grow the business every single day, even when they’re jobs that no one really likes doing. And I’m going to answer a question from an MSP about how you stop your clients coming to you personally for tech support when there’s actually a team that they should be going to. Voiceover: Paul Green’s MSP marketing podcast. Paul Green: I was catching up over the weekend with a really good friend of mine, John, who is a business owner as well. He has some kind of engineering business. I don’t quite understand what they do, but we were talking about the burden of staff and they’ve all worked together for a long time. And something happened to him a couple of weeks ago, which really has bothered him at quite a deep emotional level, which was he became aware that two members of his team were discussing him on WhatsApp. And I can’t remember the details of how he found out. I think someone might’ve referenced it or something. He certainly hasn’t seen the chat, but it became clear to him that actually there is a degree of criticism that’s happening between a couple of members of his team about him. Paul Green: Now let’s put this in perspective. He’s actually… It’s his business. He owns that business. He benefits from that and is also burdened by it at the same time, and only another business owner would know exactly what I mean by that. But because these people have worked for him for some time, it’s really bothered him that they are criticising him and they’re objecting to some of the decisions that he’s making. Now it’s bothered him even though it’s his business. And he loses his house if that business fails; they only lose their jobs, and they can go and get other jobs quicker than he can get another house. And he’s quite happy to stick with the decisions that he’s made, but it’s still bothered him at quite a deep level. Paul Green: And the conversation that we had at the weekend was that actually the price of leadership is criticism. It’s something that I had to come to terms with and I had 15 staff, of which about 14 were criticising me at any one time. You probably yourself have either come to terms with this or you’re realising, yes, do you know what? As soon as you have employees and as soon as you set yourself up as a leader, you have to expect that kind of criticism. Because when we run the business, and when we own that business, we have to be the leaders. Paul Green: In fact, the risk is if we’re not the leaders, we leave a leadership void. And I’ve met many business owners where the business owner is introverted and they’ve shrunk away from being the leader. And the business has ticked along and it’s done okay, but there is a leadership void. There’s no one saying, “Hey, this is where we should go. This is the vision for the future.” And in a leadership void like that, someone, a strong personality on the team, will rise and will take a position of authority, if you like, within the business. Paul Green: They’re not the owner, they’re not the manager, but they assume a de facto leadership position and can actually take the business off in completely the wrong direction. So you want to be the leader within your business. You want to rise up and you want to paint that vision of the future and say, “Hey, this is the way we’re going.” And most of your staff, most of the time, want you to be the leader as well, because it’s deeply ingrained into our ancient human psychology to expect leadership. We look for people to fall behind. We look for people to tell us a way to go. But that doesn’t mean that we have to accept every single thing that our leader says. Paul Green: One of the downsides of doing business in 2020 is we’re much more enlightened these days. It’s not like it was 150 years ago, where the owner, the boss, said, “This is what we do,” and everyone just had to do it and couldn’t have an opinion. These days we want collaboration, we want engagement, we want all of these things. They’re seen as good things. And they are, but they have a price, and that price is criticism. Engaged, collaborative employees criticise the leader. Paul Green: It’s part of the process for them of coming to terms with the lack of control that they have within the business, because they don’t really have any control at all. You do. You have all the control. You’re the owner. You’re the decision maker. You decide exactly what the business is going to do or not going to do. You have months to think about things, to ponder ideas, to move them around in your head, and then suddenly you announce something to your team almost out of the blue. And for them it’s a bit of a shock. So they have no control whatsoever. You do as the leader. No wonder they’re going to criticise you. Paul Green: And do you know what? I think you should expect that criticism and actually accept it, because strong leaders are confident people, and confident people allow others to be critical, especially the people that they’re leading. In fact, strong leaders, I believe, make constructive criticism a part of the whole organisational culture. Paul Green: I run a Facebook group which is just for MSPs. You can go and find it in Facebook. It’s called the MSP marketing group. So if you go into Facebook and type in “MSP marketing”. at the top and go to groups, and that’s my group and we’ve got more than 500 people in there, all MSPs from around the world. Come and join us in that group. Paul Green: And every now and again I’m criticised in that group, and there’s two or three strong personalities in there that criticise something I’ve written or my opinions on something. And I could, and it does cross my mind now and again that I could just kick them out of the group, but what would be the benefit of that for me and my personal growth, and what would be the benefit of that within the group? Paul Green: Because even if they don’t have a shared opinion that the whole group shares, actually that criticism makes me a better leader. I try very hard not to address that criticism defensively, but actually to have an open conversation about whatever it is that they’re criticising me for. Because if that’s their opinion and they’re accepting me as a leader, even just in a small way in just a Facebook group, then I’m very happy with that, because to me, being criticised shows that actually my leadership is being accepted. Paul Green: Because you need to keep criticism in perspective. Obviously I don’t get emotionally bothered by being criticised in a Facebook group, but I have a team still. It’s only a small team now and when my team do criticise me and I encourage it, I have to assume that, do you know what? Maybe they’ve got something here. Maybe they’re criticising me because I’m making a mistake. Maybe this is not the right thing for the business. Sometimes I ignore that criticism. Sometimes I go with it. What do you do in your business? Paul Green: You have to be careful not to give too much weight to one particular criticism that you miss what everyone else is saying. So it’s almost like looking for trends. If the people you trust the most in your business are criticising you and their majority are criticising you, then maybe there’s something in that. Actually if it’s one or two lone guns, then maybe it’s just a different perspective which you should take into consideration. I guess what I’m trying to say here is that as leaders of our businesses, we should actually appreciate criticism. We all want to be strong leaders, which isn’t something we’re born as. We have to grow and learn and train to become a strong leader. And strong leaders openly and quickly admit when they’re wrong. Paul Green: Because we’re not perfect. You and I, we’re not perfect. We never will be. We will make mistakes in the business. Even when we’ve done 40, 50 years running businesses, we’re still going to make mistakes. And part of that is accepting the criticism from the people that we’re leading, because it’s somewhat of an early warning that we’re getting it wrong. Paul Green: So I wonder if off the back of this, maybe you put in place something formal to try and draw out the criticism from your business. And this is what I recommended to my friend John. Because if they’re chatting about him on WhatsApp privately between themselves, maybe you should put something in place for them to formally have an opportunity to critique what it is that he’s doing as the leader. So we stop it being criticism and we turn it into a critique. And we went through a couple of different ideas, having formal meetings, team meetings, which I don’t think is the right forum. Paul Green: And we settled on one-to-one individual conversations: coaching conversations, as it were. If he could sit down once a week, or once every couple of weeks, with every single member of his team, and have a one-on-one conversation, that’s an opportunity for there to be a two-way critiquing. He can critique his staff, because of course he’s got plenty to criticise about their performance, but also they can critique him as well. And he will do with that is start to draw it away from the private WhatsApp conversations into actually very useful feedback conversations between him and individual members of his team. It’s a very powerful concept. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you could do that in your business? Voiceover: Here’s this week’s clever idea. Paul Green: We all have little daily jobs that we really, really should do because they move the business forward, but they’re painful. For example, ringing prospects. You might have hundreds or thousands of prospects in your audiences connected to you on LinkedIn or in your email list. And it’s a really good idea to just call those people now and again, because the phone moves those conversations forward. But none of us, none of us like picking up the phone and calling people in our network. It’s a horrible, horrible thing to do. So here’s a way that you can game-ify it. Make it fun for yourself, but also trick your brain into getting this work done. Paul Green: Now it’s such a simple idea, and all you need for this is three things. First of all, you need two glasses. Any two glasses will do. Just to make sure they’re exactly the same glasses. Get them out of your cupboard, put them on your desk. And the next thing you need is a bunch of paper-clips. Now the number of paper-clips will depend on how many things you want to do. So let’s say today you want to do 50 dials, you want to pick up the phone and you want to call 50 people. Well, you’re going to attempt 50 calls, anyway. We all know that those 50 dials will actually turn into about two or three conversations. So it’s a pretty good target for a day. Paul Green: So you start off with the 50 paper-clips in one of the glasses, then you pick up the phone, you do a dial, and as you’re doing the dial, or as the call’s connecting, you move a paper-clip from one glass into the other glass. So you’ve now got 49 paper-clips in one glass and one paper-clip in the other glass. And then as you did the second dial, you move the second paper-clip over, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Can you see where this is going? So very quickly, you get five, six, seven, eight calls in and you can see at a glance through the glass exactly how many calls you’ve done and roughly how many you’ve got left to do. Paul Green: And there’s some satisfaction in getting that number down. Well, this is the game. This is the gamification part of it, where you’re encouraging yourself to keep going because every single time you pick up the phone, the clips are moving over from one glass to another. So you get to about 10 or 15 left in one glass, and you’ve only got another 10 or 15 dials to do and you’ve hit your target for the day. How amazing is that? And your brain is going to want you to finish. Paul Green: Because it might not seem this way most days, but our brains are desperate for us to finish jobs. Our brains hate it when we don’t get jobs finished properly. So when it sees that there’s only 10 paper-clips left, it wants to finish that. It wants to get it complete and it’ll give you a little burst of the feel-good. I forget what it is. Is it endorphins that your brain gets when you do that last paper-clip over into the other glass? You get that burst of, let’s say, endorphins. You feel great because you have finished a job. Paul Green: Now the numbers game says if you attempt 50 dials in a day, you will have one, two, maybe even three conversations. In fact, imagine if you did that every single day. Every single day you picked up the phone, you dialled 50 people, that’s 250 attempted dials a week. You’re going to be having up to 10 conversations a week. Somewhere in there, someone is going to be ready to sit down and have a conversation with you about switching from their incumbent MSP to you, just because the numbers game says that is the case. It might not happen every week, but it will happen most weeks and it was made to happen through the paper-clips method. Paul Green: Very, very simple. Because it works on all our basic psychological actions such as gamification and such as starting a job so that our brain wants to finish it. One thing: don’t try and do this with sweets. I did have someone that replaced paper-clips for sweets and unfortunately more of the sweets went into their mouth than actually went into the other glass. So you don’t have to use paper-clips. You could use anything. Just make sure it isn’t something that you can eat, as you will find yourself eating to cheat. Voiceover: Paul’s blatant plug. Paul Green: So I was just talking there about building multiple audiences for your business, which is a great marketing concept. You get people to choose to join your email list, to connect with you on LinkedIn, maybe even join a Facebook group if you’ve got a clear vertical that can sustain a Facebook group. And then once you’ve got these people, you educate them over a period of time how to pick a good MSP. Because at a cognitive level, they don’t know the difference between a good MSP and a bad MSP. So they’re making the decision emotionally. Now the b…

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Episode 10: Cyber security first is the future Jan 21, 2020

Show notes

In this week’s episode Find out how MSPs are starting to make small changes to their business, but larger changes in their marketing, to be front-of-mind in a future where cyber security comes first This week’s big interview is with business acquisition expert Jonathan Jay. Find out how it’s possible to grow your business via acquisition but without the off-putting costs Also this week, Paul asks if now is the right time to out-source more of the ‘hassle’ work, plus there’s a great question from listener Olly about how to find time to improve a business Show notes Out every Tuesday on your favourite podcast platform Presented by Paul Green, an MSP marketing expert Paul talked about outsourcing specialists, including Continuum and Inbay Find out more about Paul’s blatant plug for MSP Easy Tools Paul’s guest on the show talking about how to grow through acquisition is Jonathan Jay from The Dealmaker’s Academy Check out some of the books from the brilliant aforementioned Stephen Covey The question about how to find time to work on the business came from Olly Denhard from IT Trouble Free Our guest on the next show on 28th January to talk about how to become even better at sales is James Newell from Clear Sales Message Please send any questions, ideally in audio-form (or any other feedback) to hello@paulgreensmspmarketing.com Here’s a link to Paul’s Facebook group for MSP Marketing Episode transcription Voiceover: Made in the UK for MSPs around the world. This is Paul Green’s MSP Marketing podcast. Paul Green: Hello. Here’s what’s coming up in this week’s show. Jonathan Jay: As soon as you realise that the amount of money that you have in your bank account is not going to influence your ability to make an acquisition, you realise that yes, you can grow via acquisition. Paul Green: We’re also going to look at whether you should be outsourcing more from your business. Certainly something as simple as your NOC and we’re going to answer a question from an MSP on how to get more stuff done. Voiceover: Paul Green’s MSP Marketing podcast. Paul Green: If you look at the evolution of IT support over the last 10, 20 years or so, it’s very clear for us now to look back and see that break/fix, which is still a business model used by many people, but break/fix was not a great business model because you’re inherently sitting, waiting for work to come in. And I know there are many pure break/fix operators that are very, very busy. But it’s still a very haphazard way of running a business, isn’t it? It’s the reason I’d never want to own a shop, any kind of retail shop, because you’re just sitting there waiting for people to come in and you don’t know whether or not you’ve sold anything. Now compared to the monthly recurring revenue model of an MSP, break/fix absolutely is a different world. And it’s no surprise to me, you look back 10, 15 years when the vast majority of IT support was done on a break/fix basis and there were just a few people operating this managed services model. Paul Green: It’s no surprise to me now that many people, I would say a majority, are running managed services because it just makes life easier. Let’s be honest, how many of us now lie awake at four in the morning and worry about how are we going to meet payroll when we know the money’s coming in because of all the contracts, because of all the direct debits or the card payments or however you take your monthly recurring revenue. If you just look at how the world has changed over the last 10 years, we’ve gone generally, typically over to a more subscription business model. Netflix, TV, mobile phones, all sorts of things, it’s now all done on a subscription basis and this certainly makes for running an easier business. Well, Office 365 is another great example of that. Microsoft have created an amazing subscription business out of what was once before a case of having to sell stuff all the time. Now the money just rolls in for Microsoft and it makes it a more robust and a safer business. Paul Green: So that’s where we are today. I think it’s very clear if you look forward the next five to 10 years, what the next iteration of IT support is going to be. We’ve gone from break/fix over to managed services. I think the next thing is going to be cybersecurity first. And I already have two or three clients that have not quite pivoted, but have just shifted their marketing a little bit so that rather than competing with all the other MSPs out there, they are taking very much a cybersecurity first stance. So they’re talking to people right from the get go about their cybersecurity, about their email, about protecting their data. And of course as part of that, when they do the projects and then take them on board, they’re delivering managed services to them. Paul Green: So, the actual delivery hasn’t changed dramatically, but their marketing has and they’re very much going in cybersecurity first. And I think you can look forward and say that most of today’s MSPs are going to end up as MSSPs eventually. You could very much argue that’s where it’s going to go. It’s just a case of how long is it going to take to go there. And actually, if you look at the trends of technology, hardware, software, most people don’t try and repair a lot of hardware these days because it’s too difficult to repair. It’s pretty much unrepairable, some of it. It’s just easier to get another unit in. Well that’s not how it was 10 years ago. Going forward, that’s going to get worse. You know there’s going to be less and less hardware to fix. You could look at software and say, “Well, there’s a lot of software around, there’s a lot of services that need to be tweaked and configurations. And it’s not perfect yet. It won’t be perfect for a long time.” And I’m not a tech and even I can see that it’s going to need humans in there. But eventually that software is going to be smarter. It’s going to just work better. It will fix itself. I think that’s where it’s going to come. Paul Green: There comes a point where they’re not going to need you so much for the hardware and we’re already at that point really, they’re not going to need you so much for the software, but they are going to need someone somewhere who’s going to look after their cybersecurity. Because we all know that breaches and hacks are getting worse and worse and worse and that just creates an opportunity. Paul Green: So, the reason I’m talking about this today is even though I think this is years off, when everyone will have to shift over to an MSSP model, I think this is the point to start thinking about this and saying, “Right, as we’re planning out the next three to five years, what kind of extra qualifications do we need? What kind of capabilities do we need to add into the business? What kind of people do we need to hire? What kind of products do we need to be reselling? Are we reselling a robust enough solution for this, for this, for this? Are we reselling a training solution?” If this is what more people want and okay, it’s only the early adopters that really want it at this stage, but if this is what people want, what’s the reputation that we can be building up right now to make us a really robust MSSP in three, five, seven, 10 years time? And I think the businesses that really embrace this, the MSPs that really embrace this right now, are the ones that are most likely to pick up some good market share on this in the time ahead. Paul Green: So, this is a great time, especially this time of year as you’re starting to plan out what you want to achieve over the next 12 months. Looking at your security offerings and how you can improve those and how you can improve your marketing to position yourselves as cybersecurity experts. That would be a great use of your time. Voiceover: Here’s this week’s clever idea. Paul Green: So, one of my goals for this year is I want to acquire one or two businesses. Now I’m not interested in being the operator of these businesses. As I said back in the podcast back in November, I’m interested in being the owner, not the operator. I don’t want to be running it every day. I just want to be helping a management team to excel and financially benefiting from that. So, I won’t acquire marketing or sales businesses because I know about that. I certainly won’t acquire an MSP business because that’s just too much of a clash with the work I’m doing here and I’m enjoying this work. I want to keep doing this for another 10 years. Paul Green: So, I’m looking outside, I’m looking at all sorts of businesses. Currently looking at the care sector, adult care, either in the home or people going to live in care homes because I think it’s an interesting market with a lot of opportunities. And as I’m looking at all these different businesses, I’m constantly looking at how can I improve this? So how can I reduce some costs within the business? But at the same time, how can I make it a better experience for the customer, a better experience for the staff? Because if I can reduce the cost of delivery and I can make it a better delivery, make it a better experience, and from a marketing point of view, differentiate myself from my competitors. Well whatever I buy I’m going to improve that business. And it reminds me of when I first came into the MSP world in late 2016 and I discovered fairly quickly that there is the ability to outsource a great proportion of the hassle work that you have to someone else. Paul Green: And of course I’m talking about Continuum and Inbay, and I know there are other people out there that you can outsource it to. You know, my first realisation that you can outsource your NOC, that you can if you wanted to, outsource your First Line. And I have a whole series of clients who love Continuum, who love outsourcing. Some of them are very open with their clients. Some of them aren’t so open. Some of them allow their clients to actually talk to America, or is it Manila where the other base is? And some of them they don’t allow them to, so they talk to, they have people in England who are talking to the clients, but the work is still being done in America. And there’s lots of different ways of doing it. But I remember being so excited when I first discovered this, that you can outsource much of the hassle. Paul Green: And as I’m looking at these different business models of other companies outside of our world, I’m looking at it thinking, “How can I outsource much of this? Is there any way that this can be done elsewhere?” Because as I talked to business owning friends and I talk about different business models and what I’m seeing and what I’m discovering, they are genuinely gobsmacked that in your world you can outsource so much. And this is one of the things that makes an MSP a great business to run. And I know there are many downsides as well, but the ability to outsource hassle work to someone else who specialises in that is just beautiful And I know it’s not perfect. I know there are upsides and downsides and I’ve had many conversations with MSPs who their points of differentiation is they don’t want to outsource it. They want to keep it all in house and there’s nothing wrong with that. But I think this is one of those things that you should revisit on at least an annual basis and look at it and say, “Do you know what? If we’ve got to take on another first line tech or if we’ve got to take on this and we’ve got to add to our own resource base, is that the right thing to do?” Paul Green: I think every time you lose a member of your team, you should be constantly reviewing, do we really need to replace this human being sitting in this office? Or could we outsource much of the work that that human was doing to one of the outsource providers and perhaps hiring a young keen apprentice who can be our dispatcher as it were, who can sit on the phone to clients, giving them great customer service and ultimately that difficult technical work is being done elsewhere. Now, if that’s not your cup of tea, there’s nothing wrong with that. But I do think it’s something you should be reviewing on a regular basis because this is the way the market is going. And you could argue there’s a downside, if all MSPs are outsourcing all work to all sorts of companies. Paul Green: Yes, that does take away a point of differentiation, but you know, the fewer humans that you have to manage, the better. Really. Humans are great for getting stuff done, but there is a burden. There’s a burden of having staff. There’s a burden of having to have all these difficult people. And I don’t know what it’s like in the States right now or around the rest of the world, but in the UK right now, recruitment is an issue, especially as you go up the ladder. Your second, your third line recruitment is hard and it becomes easier for you. If you can say to your second and third line people, “You’ll never have to do any first line stuff. We will never ask you to do that because we outsource it.” So, there are X hundred people sitting in a center in this country waiting to do this. Paul Green: I know if I was acquiring an MSP tomorrow, I would definitely ask myself that question of “Can I outsource some of this work? Does that save me some money? Can I improve the customer experience by doing this? And does it make us more profitable?” Because actually if it ticks all of those boxes, then maybe it’s a good thing to do. Voiceover: Paul’s blatant plug. Paul Green: Some friends and clients of mine, Andrew and Jean Eardley, built a set of tools over a number of years within their MSP. Every time they came across a job that frankly could and should have been automated, they got a coder to build a tool and it meant that their first-line techs were able to do much more complicated work because they could just press buttons. And they also discovered along the way that they could resell some of these services to their clients. Now they’ve put this on sale for other MSPs and they’ve bundled it together into a whole set of tools called MSP Easy Tools. And there’s a link to their website in the show notes on my website. All the details are at paulgreensmspmarketing.com/podcast/. But they’ve put these tools together and these tools themselves are generating thousands and thousands of pounds worth of monthly recurring revenue in their MSP. And they’re starting to do the same in other MSPs as well. Cause that’s what this toolkit does. It saves your techs some time and it also gives you a whole series of different things for you to sell to your existing clients. It’s a beautiful set of tools designed by an MSP for MSPs such as you. If you want to get all the details, you can check it out on my website. As I said, it’s paulgreensmspmarketing.com/podcast/. Voiceover: The big interview. Paul Green: One of the reasons I want to acquire a couple of businesses this year is because I’ve spent 10 years learning from this guy. He’s now become one of my best friends and he’s one of the most inspirational people I’ve ever met. Jonathan Jay: So I’m Jonathan Jay and over the last 25 years I have made my money from buying and selling businesses. And in recent years I’ve been helping other business owners do exactly the same. Paul Green: So Jonathan, we all know that the MSP world is going through very early stage consolidation. A lot of the big players are of course buying themselves. We know that the ConnectWise bought Continuum last year and our sort of level, you see acquisitions happening tends to be the higher businesses but some smaller ones as well. Now you’re a big fan of growing a business through acquisition rather than through the traditional route, aren’t you? Jonathan Jay: Yes. I think this is the secret strategy. You see what most businesses do is that they grow one customer at a time. They gain a few customers, they are losing customers as one step forward, two steps back and that’s a slow process. So, what I always say to people is “What if you coul…

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Episode 9: The one sales question you must ask EVERY prospect Jan 14, 2020

Show notes

In this week’s episode If you’re looking to get more new clients you need to be sure your time is spent as effectively as possible. So Paul talks about the one killer question that can save you from wasting time chasing prospects If there’s one prospecting tool that can help you stand out in the market and attract new clients, it’s dark web monitoring. Paul chats to Matt Soloman from ID Agent who pioneered the service and explains how to use it in the best way In this week’s episode Paul also identifies the one thing your website really needs. And there’s a great question from listener Ben from the ITGUYS about running campaigns on LinkedIn Plus, with the start of a new year, it’s a great time to take a fresh look at personal future financial planning and embrace any new perspective it may bring to your MSP Show notes Out every Tuesday on your favourite podcast platform Presented by Paul Green, an MSP marketing expert Find out more about the video production services for MSPs websites at mspvideos.co.uk This week’s guest talking about the power of Dark Web Monitoring is Matt Solomon from ID Agent The question about LinkedIn campaigns came from Ben Schneider from ITGUYS Find out more about the tool to help generate LinkedIn connections called Dux-Soup Our guest on the next show on 21st January to talk about how to grow through acquisition is Jonathan Jay from The Dealmaker’s Academy Please send any questions, ideally in audio-form (or any other feedback) to hello@paulgreensmspmarketing.com Here’s a link to Paul’s Facebook group for MSP Marketing 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 this week’s show. Matt Solomon: You’ve trusted us with your business and I’m telling you this wasn’t a thing that we were worried about two years ago, but now it’s absolutely a risk to your organisation. Paul Green: We’re also going to be talking about how to run an effective LinkedIn campaign. And I’ve got a sales question so powerful you must ask it of every single prospect. Voiceover: Paul Green’s MSP marketing podcast. Paul Green: I want to start off by talking about something slightly dull but actually very important and that’s financial planning. You see I’m moving house at the moment and I’m using the opportunity to review my will and just to look at my insurance policies and general finance planning in general. And I think this is something that as business owners, we don’t really take very seriously. I think because we’re in charge of our own destiny. And to a certain extent in charge of our own income, we never get round to planning things like pensions, life insurance policies, all of that kind of stuff. Paul Green: And actually this stuff’s really, really important. Not so much for now, but in case something does happen to you. Or in the happy event that you make it to pensionable age and you don’t want to be working at the pace you’re working now when you’re 65, 70. Because I don’t know that many of us that really want to do that. Paul Green: So as I say, I’ve just revised my will. It’s always good to revisit that every two to three years. And I’ve been working with my financial advisor on three potential scenarios for my life from here on in. And as I’m just talking you through these, just go through in your own head these three scenarios. So I’m 45 now. All being well I should have another 25, 30 years left. That’d be great. Paul Green: And scenario number one actually is living a long and healthy life. So I’ve been going through with my advisor what my income would look like at the age of let’s say 65, 70. Now, I’m not sure how it works in the USA or in other countries, but essentially pensions have changed completely in the UK from being a place where you put money and hoped you live to take, to these days you can buy some very smart pension products. Paul Green: And my IFA’s been talking to me about some pensions that I can put a lot of money in. And then in the event that I can’t take that money out for whatever reason, then actually that money can be left for my dependent, for my daughter. So there’s some really good different pensions out there. Paul Green: So the first scenario we’ve talked about is living a long life. And the way that they’ve positioned it to me is to think of a pension these days as a tax wrapper and not just something you pay into. So it’s just a very tax efficient way to put money aside. And in fact we’ve come up with a figure at the age of 45 because I’ve got not a huge amount of pension. Two or three old company pensions. One I’ve been paying into a little bit for the last few years, but nothing substantial. And my financial advisor’s given me a sum and it’s around about £2000 a month. Paul Green: If I can put up £2000 a month into a pension from now, then by the time I hit 65 I’ll have a £1,000,000 in my pension pot. Now that’s actually quite an exciting figure because I don’t have to pay £1,000,000 in. Due to the wonders of compound interest and investments, over 25 years, £2000 a month plus what I’ve already got becomes £1,000,000. Paul Green: And then I can choose to take out a lump sum or I can turn it into an income or just do something else with it at the age of 65. So that’s going to be one of my goals is to get that going in the next few months. So scenario number one is living a long and healthy life. And that’s the scenario that we all tend to think about. Paul Green: Scenario number two, kind of a bit more depressing but something we need to plan for, because scenario number two is that you are dead. And some point in the next few years you die. And you know it happens and I don’t know how old you are, but at the age of 45 now, I know a couple of people who’ve died from cancer. And it’s real, these are people I’ve known quite well. Paul Green: So you have to consider what would happen if you were dead. Obviously this doesn’t concern you so much as it concerns your other half, your dependants. And you have to think about things like debt. So I’ve got some buy-to-lets and my plan for the buy-to-lets was always to enjoy capital growth and to sell a couple of them near the end and pay off. Paul Green: But what if I die? What if I died in a car crash tomorrow? We have to think about these things. So actually I’ve just signed up for a number of different life insurance policies which pay out lump sums in the event of my death or if I’m given less than 12 months to live. So that’s great. So I can lie under a taxi in my last few moments. I hope it doesn’t happen like that, but I can lie there and at least have the peace of mind that all of my debts will be paid. My daughter will get my assets unencumbered and because of my will she’ll be protected and can’t get that till she’s 30. Because I don’t want her having lots of money until she’s of a certain age. Paul Green: So we all know what would happen if you gave a 20 year old a significant amount of money. It wouldn’t end well. So scenario number one is living a long and healthy life. Scenario number two is dead. Scenario number three is the hardest one. And it’s that you’re alive but you can’t work. Paul Green: Now I don’t know about you, but that’s my personal idea of hell. To be alive, but to be in sufficiently bad health, whether that’s some degenerative disease or some kind of disability or something that I can’t work. And actually it’s the most expensive one to insure for. That’s when you’re into your critical illness and there’s a limit to critical illness. Paul Green: There’s only a certain amount of money that you can get from critical illness and it’s all to do with how much income you have. So if you currently earn, well, let’s say your business makes a 100,000 a year. You might only take 20,000 or 30,000 of that as your income on your tax return. They will have a look at your tax returns and assess what income you have. Paul Green: So often what you can get on critical illness insurance is completely different to what you are actually putting in your bank account. And this is where you need to do some extra planning. So if you can only get X amount on critical illness, you’re going to need to go and get either some more buy-to-let properties or just something else to give you an income. Maybe buy another business that you will own but not operate, to give you an income. Paul Green: And these are the kinds of things that a really good financial planner will just help you through, because they can’t sell you products for all of these things. But you need someone who takes an overall view of your life and what might happen in those three scenarios. So I’m in the process of doing that now, maybe, certainly this time of year mid-January, this is a good time to look at this and say, “Maybe we should just get this done.” Paul Green: And you and your other half should go and talk to some people and plan out what would happen in each of those three scenarios. A long and healthy life, being dead or being alive and not being able to work. And a bit of discomfort now and a bit of extra pain now and getting some stuff sorted out now, does mean that whatever happens with your life, at least you can kind of go to sleep at night knowing that you’ve got it sorted out. And that can give you great peace of mind. Voiceover: Here’s this week’s clever idea. Paul Green: Most of the MSPs I work with do their own sales and you can have companies doing well over £1,000,000 where the owner is still the primary new client acquisition person within the business. They might not be doing the account management anymore. They are the one out seeing clients. And that’s fine. There’s nothing wrong with that because it’s not like most MSPs are sitting down doing 10 sales calls a week. It tends to be one or two sales calls a week because obviously one client can actually bring on quite a fair, significant chunk of monthly recurring revenue. Paul Green: Now there’s a question that I developed a number of years ago. In fact, I developed this when I was running a sales team of two field sales supported by three telesales. And we wanted to get some instant information to help us understand exactly where the prospect’s mindset is. And this is something that you can use when you’re doing sales calls. Paul Green: It’s a question that you can ask of any prospect which will immediately tell you whether or not they are a prospect in dire need of help, someone who is warming up to the idea of moving away from their incumbent, or someone that’s just a tyre kicker. They’re just sort of fishing around for quotes. In fact, you might want to use this question at the qualifying stage. I’m sure you jump on the phone with your prospects before you physically go out and see them. This would be a great time to ask the question. This is the question. Paul Green: On a scale of one to 10, where one is awful and 10 is amazing, how would you rank your current IT support company? Let me say it again. On a scale of one to 10, where one is awful, 10 is amazing, how would you rank your current IT support company? Paul Green: Now the point of this is to get them to commit to telling us about their existing incumbent supplier. If they respond with a score of eight, nine or 10, there is no opportunity for you right now. So you may choose to meet them because there may be a future opportunity, but the chances are I’d park that one for a year or a couple of years because eight to 10 he’s happy. Paul Green: That’s actually, it’s the kind of score you would want your clients to give you. Eight to 10 means the level of dissatisfaction just isn’t there yet. And we all know that people switching from one MSP to another is a very slow process because better the devil you know. Inertia loyalty keeps them with someone before they’re ready to move. Paul Green: Now, if they answer five, six or seven, then an opportunity is coming. It might not be now, or it might just be on the edge of now, but it’s certainly coming at some point. Because actually five, six or seven is a level of dissatisfaction. Paul Green: In fact, if you asked your own clients this and they replied, five, six or seven, then there’s something wrong. Emotionally, there’s some reason they’re starting to disconnect. They’re unhappy. Let’s be honest, it’s probably the small factors isn’t it? Because often the clients become dissatisfied because of a series of small emotional factors rather than anything you’ve specifically done or not done. Paul Green: Now if they answer one, two, three or four, there’s a huge opportunity now. Because one to four means they’re hugely dissatisfied with their incumbent MSP and you want to get in in front of them as soon as you can. Now, once you’ve asked this question that one of on a scale of one to 10, there’s a followup question that you must ask and it’s this. “Can I ask specifically why you gave them that score?” And then you close your mouth and you go quiet and you let them do the talking. Because they will tell you exactly what it is that their MSP has done to upset them. Paul Green: In fact, they’ll blurt something out and if you keep quiet, it then encourages them to say something else and they’ll tell you. And it might be something like, “Oh, I don’t know. We just found we can never get them on the phone. And you know, it’s such a pain when we do get hold of them, everything’s just seems to take so long and blah blah blah blah blah.” And they will blurt out to you the reasons that they are dissatisfied with their current MSP. Paul Green: And take careful notes on those. Because when you go to meet with them in a couple of days time, you can use that information to poke the pain a little bit. It’s the pain they have of their current incumbent MSP. There’s some pain there and you can poke that and you wouldn’t be as crass as to jump in and say, “Hey, on the phone you told me X, Y, Z.” Paul Green: But you could say, “So one of the things that some people are unhappy with with their IT support company, is the time it takes to answer calls. How much of an issue is that for you right now?” I mean even that sounds like a bit of a crass question, but I’m sure on the day you’d come up with a great way of moving them around to their level of dissatisfaction before of course you ask them more open questions. Paul Green: So if you’re not currently asking this question as a qualifier, I would start doing this immediately. Not only will it save you some time not going out to see time-wasters, but I think it will make it dramatically more likely that someone will dump their incumbent MSP and move over to you instead. Voiceover: Paul’s blatant plug. Paul Green: This week it’s one for my listeners in the UK and it’s about getting an absolutely cracking video on the homepage of your website. So I’ve said in previous podcasts, you need two types of video. You need regular disposable video that can go on your blog, on your social media, all of that kind of stuff. And that you can do yourself. Paul Green: You can either get it animated or just get on your mobile phone. It doesn’t have to be a Hollywood production. But there’s a video that you should have on your homepage which should be as good as you could make it. And that’s a video, a 60 second summary of your business. And this video works best when it’s your clients talking about you. Paul Green: If you think about it from the prospect’s point of view, someone who comes to your website, who sees a video of your existing clients saying how great you are, that’s amazing social proof. And in fact they’re going to listen more to your clients than they will actually listen to you. Paul Green: So we have a service, it’s a joint venture between myself and a very good friend of mine called Darren Wingham. He does all the videos and I find people that can buy videos from him and it’s called mspvideos.co.uk. Now Darren will come…

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Episode 8: You need to write a book (authors sell more) Jan 07, 2020

Show notes

In this week’s episode Welcome back to Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast and the first episode for a brand new year. As we take stock from 2019 and look ahead to an exciting 2020, Paul explains how writing your own business book could make the next twelve months for your MSP even more successful Spoiler alert – there may just be a lightbulb moment waiting for you in this week’s episode. Paul introduces you to the work of expert marketer Jay Abraham and his three simple steps to grow a business Nigel Moore is today’s guest. The successful ex-MSP owner, and founder of The Tech Tribe, discusses how he’d run an MSP differently with the benefit of hindsight There’s a brilliant question from podcast subscriber Krunal about how and when to do the marketing for your MSP Show notes Out every Tuesday on your favourite podcast platform Presented by Paul Green, an MSP marketing expert Find out more about marketer and business consultant Jay Abraham and his books You can order your free copy of the book Updating Servers Doesn’t Grow Your Business right here The likes of fivver.com and peopleperhour.com are great places to look for writers to help with your book An alternative to creating your own book is to be given one with your name already on it via the MSP Marketing Edge package This week’s guest is MSP expert Nigel Moore from The Tech Tribe The question about the Profit Matrix came from Krunal Patel from Onega Our guest on the next show on 14th January to talk about ‘dark web monitoring’ is Matt Solomon from ID Agent Please send any questions, ideally in audio-form (or any other feedback) to hello@paulgreensmspmarketing.com Here’s a link to Paul’s Facebook group for MSP Marketing Episode transcription Voiceover: Made in the UK, for MSPs around the world. This is Paul Green’s MSP Marketing podcast. Paul Green: Hello and welcome back to the show. Here’s what’s coming up today. Nigel Moore: Owned an MSP. I sold an MSP and now I teach and coach MSPs how to avoid the bajillion mistakes that I made when I had my MSP. Paul Green: We are also going to be talking about how this year you’re going to need your own book to help your MSP to stand out and be completely different to all of your competitors. I’m going to introduce you to a concept called the profit matrix. It’s the one tool that is going to grow your net profit this year more than anything else. Voiceover: Paul Green’s MSP Marketing podcast. Paul Green: So it seems a bit weird to be saying it this far into January but Happy New Year is our first podcast of 2020 and I hope you had a really good break with your family. I imagine now you’re back to work and your probably, you’re past that raring to go stage that we have past Christmas, but you’re a few days in and you’re quite focused on clearing up what’s happened over the break and just getting on with having a great 2020. Paul Green: I want to talk to you today about the three growth levers for your business. Now this is a classic piece of work which originally came from a famous marketer called Jay Abraham and he’s worth Googling. He’s not just a marketer actually. He’s an incredibly good business consultant who’s focused on helping people like ourselves. Jay’s American and I most of spent five, maybe 10,000 pounds on his stuff over the years. Paul Green: In fact, four years ago I bought his ultimate hard drive, which was literally a dump of everything on his hard drive, all his audio recordings, all of his books and everything, and every now and again I’ll just have a dip in and have a look and see what’s in there. Now, one of the things that I learned early on from Jay Abraham is that there are only three ways to grow your business. Think of these as your three growth levers. Paul Green: So the first one is to get more new clients and most business owners, we think that getting new clients, that’s the way to grow the business, but actually we’ve got to focus on the other two levers as well. The second lever is to get your clients to choose to buy from you more often, and the third lever is to get your clients to choose to spend more every single time they buy. Paul Green: Now, even for an MSP where you’ve got a very high level of monthly recurring revenue, you still need to be focusing on those three things. Get more new clients, get them to choose to buy from you more often and get them to choose to spend more every single time they buy. And the most successful business owners who are focused on net profit growth and growing the whole overall business they’re focused on those three things later on in today’s podcast, we’re going to talk about the profit matrix, which is a great way of growing your monthly recurring revenue and selling more to your existing clients. Paul Green: And you need to have an eye on all of these things at once because the reality is that getting new clients while it’s necessary because every MSP needs to add those new clients. It’s the most expensive type of marketing you’ll do. If you look at every single penny that you spend on marketing throughout a year, and you could track this, this year and then divide it by the number of new clients you’re getting, you’ll see that your acquisition costs, your cost of actually bringing a new client into the business is incredibly high. Because of course it’s every single penny or pound or dollar or cent that you spend on marketing and your time and your staff’s time, and you add all of that together and it will come to thousands and thousands and thousands of pounds or dollars. And you’ll probably only have a small number of new clients coming into the business because of course MSPs don’t win lots of new clients all the time, but they do keep the clients that they get for a very long time. Paul Green: So the challenge to you then this year is not just a focus on let’s get more new clients, but let’s get more new clients. Let’s get our existing clients to buy more from us and let’s get them to spend more. Let’s see if we can increase the average revenue per user. In fact, that might be one of the KPIs that you want to track and we’ll be talking about KPIs in a future podcast, KPIs being key performance indicators, your revenue per user. You should be growing that by a pound per month, per user, per month or whatever is the relevant thing to you, but you certainly got to do in your strategic planning for this year, making sure that you’re covering off all three of those growth levers. Voiceover: Here’s this week’s clever idea. Paul Green: Talking, of getting brand new clients then, I believe one of the most powerful tools in your arsenal is to be the author of your own book and this is a book that’s aimed at the decision makers that you want to reach. So the business owners and managers in your local area or your particular vertical. Paul Green: Now I’ve written, it’s either six or seven books and I’ve never sold a single one, but there are more than 20,000 of them in circulation. And that’s because I use my books and I give away my books to achieve two things. I’m trying to achieve positioning and I’m trying to achieve building up audiences and you should be doing exactly the same thing. By the way, if you don’t have a copy of my book, it’s called Updating Service Doesn’t Grow Your Business and just have a look in the show notes on my website and there’s a link there for you to get a free copy of the book. If you’re in the UK, we will physically post you a paperback, anywhere else in the world we’ll send you the PDF. Paul Green: So your book has two jobs as it were. Two things that it needs to achieve for you. The very first one is positioning because it is a crowded marketplace. There are lots of MSPs, there’s loads of choice for the business owners and managers. And by writing your own book or putting your name as an author on the front page of a book on the front cover, it positions you in a way that no other marketing can. Well, I say no other marketing can. It’s the same as going to speak at events. Being an author, being on the media, speaking at events these are all things that most people don’t do and yet actually they’re very easy things to do. In fact, once you’re an author, it’s a lot easier to get the media interested in you and it’s a lot easier to get speaking gigs at events because people perceive that authors are experts. Paul Green: I was a journalist and a radio presenter for 13 years and many of my friends still work in the media and even now they see that someone who has a book published is an expert. When they’re booking people for media interviews, they’re much more likely to trust an expert and experts write books, so you need to write a book. Paul Green: Now, the second reason you need a book is not just for positioning, but it’s also to build audiences. One of my favourite marketing strategies is to build multiple audiences of people who choose to opt in to your marketing. LinkedIn is a very clear audience and all MSPs should be all over LinkedIn right now. But another audience that you should build is your list of email addresses, your list of people who’ve chosen to get promotional emails from you or let’s call them educational emails. Now, no one likes just signing up for a newsletter, so what we can do is we can offer them something in return for them joining the list, and this is where the book comes in. Paul Green: In fact, the book can be considered something called an ethical bribe. You give them a copy of the book and in return you get their contact details and you get to market to them. And this is all above board and it’s a very simple transaction. When I say you can get a copy of my book, I ask that you join my marketing. That’s all I do. And of course you can unsubscribe at any time. Although my experience, 98 99% of people who join a marketing list then don’t unsubscribe. Particularly if the first transaction they’ve had with you is you give them a free book. Paul Green: Books aren’t difficult to write. They aren’t difficult to get printed and published. In fact, the writing is almost the easy bit. You’ve just got to get stuff out of your head and either get it onto paper yourself or just brief a journalist to do it for you. There are loads of writers, I mean literally thousands of writers on fiverr.com and on peopleperhour.com and they can do it for you. They can interview you about the stuff that’s in your head and then they can write the actual words for you. Paul Green: And even someone like myself who, you know, I’m a professional writer these days, I dictate more content than I actually write because it’s just faster and it’s easier and you can always fix it all in the edit later. Paul Green: In fact, the real challenge with the writing of the book is making sure that it’s relevant to the audience because you’ll probably a tech, you’ve probably got a very tech brain and there’s a whole load of detail out there that you know is important, but the people you want to reach don’t necessarily share your passion for the high level of tech that you can operate at. Paul Green: In fact, we already know that business owners or managers don’t know what they don’t know about technology and they kind of glaze over when you start talking at deeper levels about technology. So that’s the challenge when you’re writing your book is to make it so interesting that the business owners and managers that you want to reach read it and absolutely consume it and love it. Because we are trying to turn this book into a toilet read. We want this to be the book that they pick up when they’re on the toilet and they flip through and they read it because they’re consuming your content in their own personal time. And that is a very, very beautiful thing to so the writing is easy, the printing and the publishing and all of that is very, very easy. Paul Green: You know these days publishing your own book is a very mature industry. It’s a very routine thing to do. You don’t need to go and get a book publisher. You don’t need to get distribution to bookshops. You don’t even need to have it on Amazon really. I mean if you put an ISBN one of the barcodes on the back of the international standard barcode number, it will just be an Amazon anyway. It’s just Amazon can’t sell any cause they don’t have any stock of it, but you don’t want any of that. It’s just easy enough to just get a book published to get it printed and then you’ve got a book. And once you’ve got that book, you should use it everywhere. You should be carrying it with you at all times. You should take it on holiday in case you bump into prospects. You should have it on your website. You should have it on your LinkedIn should have it on your Facebook. Paul Green: You should literally be offering copies of that book to everyone you meet at every meeting because it is the most perfect positioning tool for you. Now, if you’re not quite sure how to get a book like that done or you’d like to shortcut it, there is actually something that I can do to help you- Voiceover: Paul’s blatant plug. Paul Green: Because I wrote a book for my clients and they can put their names on the front and their business name and use it in their local market as if they are the author of that book. The book is called Email Hijack and its attempts to teach business owners and managers about email security in a way that’s interesting to them. It tells the fictitious story of David, he’s a business owner and while he’s on vacation, while he’s on holiday, he’s email has an email forwarder set up and his staff accidentally pay a 12,000 or $12 pound invoice. Instead of sending it to the supplier, they send it off to a hacker. And of course that has an overall 24,000 pound or $24,000 impact on the business. And that’s pretty much the story. And then he talks about all the different email scams that can happen and how you can prevent these with a blended security solution. Paul Green: Now what’s interesting about Email Hijack is it might be something that you can help as well, having just talked about how important books are. This is a book that’s ready for you to go. It’s all part of my MSP Marketing Edge service. So I sell a whole series of content tools to just one MSP per area. And then we refresh those content tools every month. So the book is an evergreen is there for you to use throughout the whole of this year, but every month we give you a press release video, an educational guide, educational emails, educational social media, and a whole bunch of other stuff that you can use and only you can use in your local area. Paul Green: So this is something that you think would be useful? Email Hijack is actually a freebie that we give away for people when they start their first trial. The first month is a very low cost trial for you. Just go and have a look, see if this is something. Well, see if A, if your area is still available because there are a number of areas that are no longer available and we won’t sell it to more than one MSP in an area. But also just go and have a look at the details and see if this is something that you think would benefit your MSP. Just go to MSPmarketingedge.com Voiceover: The big interview. Nigel Moore: I owned an MSP, I sold an MSP and now I teach and coach MSPs how to avoid the bajillion mistakes that I made when I had my MSP. Paul Green: This is Nigel Moore. He’s the founder of the Tech Tribe, a very highly recommended community for MSPs around the world. There are several hundred MSPs active in that community every day. I’m a member of it as well. It’s an absolutely amazing place to be. Now, Nigel sold his MSP right about four years ago and I started by asking him that if he acquired another MSP tomorrow, what would he do to change that MSP in the first 90 days? Nigel Moore: Well, that is a great question and you know in the first 90 days there’s not a lot I would honestly do. Most of the time I would be observing how, be having a quick look at how things are wo…

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Episode 7: Influence your prospects with Facebook remarketing Dec 17, 2019

Show notes

In this week’s episode Whilst LinkedIn is seen as the leading business marketing platform, Paul explains how Facebook can still do an amazing job for you, by using their remarketing tools On the subject of LinkedIn, special guest Fiona Challis (an MSP sales expert) shares some great tips on using LinkedIn to drive lead generation There’s a brilliant question from podcast subscriber Mike about how and when to do the marketing for your MSP Plus Paul explains how Christmas could be an extra magical time for your business The show is taking a holiday too – episode 8 is out on Tuesday 7th January 2020 Show notes Out every Tuesday on your favourite podcast platform Presented by Paul Green, an MSP marketing expert You can find out more about remarketing on Facebook here Here’s a link to Paul’s Facebook group for MSP Marketing Thank you to special guest Fiona Challis who runs the The Next Gen Sales Acceleration Academy The question about how to find time for marketing came from Mike Annesley from Mikrotek Solutions Ltd Our guest on the next show on 7th January will be MSP expert Nigel Moore from The Tech Tribe Episode transcription Voiceover: Made in the UK, for MSP’s around the world. This is Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast. Paul Green: Here’s what’s coming up in our last show before Christmas. Fiona: They’re sending these big, long and impersonal messages that, they’re really just taking what they would have said in a cold call and put that in a LinkedIn message and expecting a result. Paul Green: I’m also going to tell you how you can utterly dominate online advertising for a very select number of your hottest prospects. We got a great question we’re going to answer about, how do you find time to implement marketing stuff in your MSP every single day? Voiceover: Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast. Paul Green: So this is the last podcast I’m going to do before Christmas. In fact, we’re going to have a two week break, no podcast next week or the week after the next one, episode eight will be out on the 7th of January. What I like at this time of year, is we’re just a week or so away from Christmas. What I love is the the opportunity to disconnect from the business a little bit, really get back into family time and, really enjoy some policy time, not just with the people I love, but also in my own head, and to me that’s the power of holidays. I talked about this back in episode two and about how important it is for us to have quality holiday time. At this time of year, it’s a good reminder that actually, it’s good for us to mentally disconnect from the day to day stuff in our business. Because you and me, we’re business owners, we started something amazing, it’s our baby, we want to throw everything into it and make as much of it as we can and we tend to obsess over it. It tends to be a such a big part of our lives at all times and that’s a great thing until it becomes too much, until we lose the balance. Paul Green: I think Christmas is a great time for everyone who has a break for whatever reason, to just get away and stop thinking about the business for a few days, because it’s when you stop thinking about the business that the real magic starts to happen. You and I will have seen this before, for example, you take a week off, you go away on holiday and the first couple of days you’re not really yourself, you’re kind of coming down from being that person you are when you’re at work. On day three or day four, you reconnect with a different kind of view, a different version of you, and that’s when you start dreaming, and you start thinking, and you start having these big ideas and these visions. They are always there in the background, but you need that holiday time to reconnect with them. Paul Green: My wife always used to say that the person I became on day three or day four of the holiday, was the person she fell in love with. And, the person I was actually, most of the time when I was busy with work was a different version of that person. So it’s good for our families, it’s good for us, but you know what? It’s great for our businesses to just have some time off as well and to just disconnect and to focus on other things. Every single time I have a holiday, no matter what we do, where we go, whether it’s an activity one or sitting by sunbed warm, I come back and I’m more motivated, I’m more driven, I’ve got a greater vision, I’ve got more good ideas and the business is better for it. Do you know what? I see a kind of a of a short-term effect of this when I stop working Fridays, and it’s a habit I’ve got out of and I need to get back into that. Paul Green: But, for a long time I didn’t work Fridays at all, so I would have three day weekends and it was great because I had loads of quality time for my daughter, but also loads of quality time for me. I’d go to the cinema, I’d go and buy clothes, I’d go and have a sit and have a coffee and inevitably, as Monday morning rolled around, a great idea would be there or I’d have more drive or my motivation. In fact, I’m convinced I did more in those four days a week than I used to do right now, working five days a week. In fact, I’ve just now come up with my thing, there we go, there’s my thing for early next year, I’m going to stop working Fridays again, I’m going to go back to just working four days a week and it’s going to be a very power thing for my business. Paul Green: What are you going to do? How are you going to make sure you have a break over Christmas? What are you going to do differently in the next year? I would love to know, why don’t you drop me an email and let me know, hello@paulgreensmspmarketing.com. Voiceover: Here’s this week’s clever idea. Paul Green: So every now and again someone asks me, should I be using Facebook for marketing to business owners and to business managers? While Facebook is not really primarily a B2B marketing platform, it still has an incredible amount of power for you, to reach the prospects that you really want to speak to. There’s a number of different reasons for that, primarily, it’s because the people you want to reach are likely to be on Facebook. So yeah sure, LinkedIn is a better platform, but most people have a Facebook account and at the very least, have it on their phone, for that reason, you can reach business decision makers in their downtime. Your chances of reaching them on Facebook on a Tuesday morning, are pretty low, but on a Sunday afternoon when they’re at a family barbecue or something and they’re a bit bored and they pull out their Facebook, and they just sort of have a flick through, that’s a great time to put an advert in front of them. Paul Green: The biggest opportunity for you right now, is to use something called, a custom audience in Facebook to do something called remarketing. Let me explain what those things are. So a customer audience is where you upload data to Facebook. Now that data can be just a list of email addresses, it can be a list of mobile or cell numbers. What you do is you upload that data to Facebook, and you’re saying to Facebook, “If any of the people here…” So if anyone who has these email addresses, all these phone numbers, “Are Facebook users, please show them my advert.” So you could take just a couple of hundred people, upload them to Facebook as a custom audience, it might match 180 of those. So the other 20 it just ignores, the a 180 that is matched, it’s now going to show your advert just to those 180 people. Can you see the power of that? So it allows you to tell Facebook specifically, please market to these people. Paul Green: Now you may have experienced this if you’re on my email list, or you’ve been to my website in the last couple of months that I have been doing over the last couple of weeks, quite a lot of remarketing, quite a lot of advertising to people who have visited my website, and to people who get my emails and who I’ve got their contact details. I’ve uploaded that up to that customer audience, up to Facebook, and I’ve been doing adverts for the podcast on their. If you haven’t seen any for a while, don’t worry because obviously, different experiments, different adverts at different times. Paul Green: If you think about someone who has been onto your website, perhaps had a look at one of your service pages or your about us page, you have an opportunity to set up an ad campaign using a custom audience, to market to those people. What makes remarketing so, so powerful, is you know you’re marketing to someone who’s already checked you out, so these aren’t cold prospects, these aren’t people who’ve never heard of you, these are people who’ve either been on your website or maybe even have inquired to you in the past, and you are now putting your message in front of them via Facebook. Actually, using the Facebook ad platform, you can also do it via Instagram, which might be appropriate for them if they’re in a retail or hospitality business, so they using Instagram. You can also do it on the Facebook content platform. Paul Green: So, they might go on a new site and there may be adverts on there powered by Facebook, but they’re repairing on a news website, so it all comes from the same Facebook platform. So how would you use that in real life, what’s a practical example? Well, let me talk you through one. Let’s say for example, you’re doing a cybersecurity event. I do love events, I’m going to talk about events in a future podcast. Paul Green: So let’s say you’re putting on an event, and let’s say a lunch, and you’re trying to get people to book and come along so you can scare the hell out of them, the things they didn’t know about cybersecurity. Let’s say you’ve got a page on your website and you’ve also emailed it out to 500 people in your prospect list. So you email it out to 500 people in your prospect list, it’s there on your website, you’ve got some adverts driving traffic towards it, you could now go into Facebook and you could upload, first of all those 500 people that you have emailed out that’s your first custom audience. You can then set up a second custom audience, and that second custom audience would be anyone that’s visited that specific page on your website, in the last, I think you can do up to about, it’s either 90 or 180 days, I can’t remember. But essentially, the only people who are going to see that advert in Facebook and on Facebook’s partner sites, are people who at some level are aware of your cybersecurity lunch and then you just got to pick the right message. The message might be, “Hey, we’re down to four places left for this, book now.” You might do a video, you might do something else, but the beauty of that is that’s going to cost you a couple of pounds or a couple of dollars a day. Paul Green: It’s not going to cost you a huge amount of money because you’re marketing to a very, very small number of people, and this is what makes remarketing so powerful. You can pay very, very small amounts of money to get a specific message in front of a group of very specific people who you know have already seen the message. In fact, you should be doing remarketing campaigns all the time. Really, you should have a remarketing campaign that refreshes every single week aimed at people who visited your website in the last couple of weeks or so. Can you see the power of doing something like that? Now Facebook is, it’s an easier advertising platform than Google, and it’s one of those things that once you’ve done a couple of campaigns it’s fairly easy to do it. Go and start a Facebook ad account if you don’t already have one, lodge your credit card number and just have a go. Launch an advert tonight, it doesn’t have to be a remarketing campaign, could just be any adverts tonight, just to have a go. Because, Facebook is one of those that, a tweak here, a little tweak there, and you can make quite a lot of difference to the traffic you get to your website from the advert, and of course the response that you get. But, it all starts with just having a go, which you could do tonight while you were just watching something on TV. Voiceover: Pulls blatant plug. Paul Green: Talking of Facebook, that’s this week’s blatant plug, because I’ve got this amazing resource which is completely free for you, and it’s available to you on Facebook, it’s called the MSP Marketing Facebook Group, and of course I’ll put a link in the show notes. But, it’s a group of, well we’re more than 500 members now, all MSP’s, business owners, managers from around the world, and it’s a forum where I sit every single day. I’m there, pretty much six, sometimes seven days a week answering questions, suggesting things, passing on useful stuff, all to do with marketing your MSP, growing your net profits and of course, getting more monthly recurring revenue. So come on if you’re not already a member, do come and join me in that forum, it’s the MSP Marketing Facebook Group. You just go in there, you have to apply to join. I’ll just quickly chat that you are indeed an MSP, and I will add you into that group. Completely free, but a very useful resource for you. Voiceover: The big interview. Fiona: So my name’s Fiona Challis and I am a channel enablement expert, which is basically a very nice way of saying, I help MSP’s on resellers to sell more stuff. Paul Green: And, don’t they need the help, because one of the most- Fiona: Yeah. Paul Green: … common complaints I hear from from MSP’s, from IT support companies is, they would love to sell more, but sales is difficult. Is that a common thing that you come across? Fiona: Yeah, it’s the number one to be honest. I mean, if you look at even all of the research from the MSP market base, sales and marketing is still their number one challenge that they have. Paul Green: Why do you think that is, Fiona? Fiona: It’s a mixture of things. It’s because a lot of the current MSPs, they started the business off because they were a technical person, and then they set up a business. By their nature, they’re more techie than they are salesy, and the very word, sales, can actually scare them. So they’re trying to learn how to sell more, but their passion is technical, so that’s a lot of the problem. But, they also have this fear of not needing to sell. For years they’ve been able to rely on getting business from recommendation, or they focus on a small geographical area, and that’s kind of how they got the majority of their business. But, that was before the whole MSP marketplace got swamped, before, you had every reseller in the country trying to become an MSP. So, now they need to sell if they want to stay above board there, they have to learn how to sell, and they have to win and retain new business. Paul Green: Okay, so here’s an interesting question. Let’s say tomorrow for some bizarre reason you bought an MSP, and you walked in and they’ve got a great technical director and great help desk and all of delivery sorted out. You’re a selling experts, so what would you do to instantly double the sales within that business? Fiona: Oh, great question. So the first thing I would do, is nail a niche. So I would pick a vertical to specialise in, and kind of become that go-to expert in that niche. So say for example, it could be SMBs, which a lot of the MSPs focus on, or today, the more you narrow in on that niche, the more successful you will be. So it could be for example, accountants or it could be healthcare practices, but I’ll certainly pick a niche or a vertical that’s more prone to cybersecurity attacks. Then, I would niche in on security. So instead of just being a total managed service provider, I would niche in on managed service security provider where you become a security specialist for that niche. Because for me, that’s where the puck is going as such, that’s where the market’s going, that’s where the margin’s going. If you can really set yourself up as a go-to security expert in a given niche, for me, that’s quickest way to double your busi…

Full show notes at the publisher

Episode 6: Watch what people are actually doing on your website Dec 10, 2019

Show notes

In this week’s episode Google Analytics is an extremely powerful tool, but using it can often feel daunting. Paul has found a simpler and more visual way to understand what people are really doing on your website Not that you should sell up and move on (well, not yet), but Paul introduces you to a couple of incredibly insightful books; one of which explains why a ‘ready to sell’ mentality could really help improve the way you feel about your business Paul welcomes special guest Andrew Eardley to talk about a package of tools that could be easily re-sold for increased Monthly Recurring Revenue (and they make life easier for your techs, too) And there’s a great question from the audience about whether virtual offices are really worth it Show notes Out every Tuesday on your favourite podcast platform Presented by Paul Green, an MSP marketing expert The two incredible books Paul talked about were E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber and Built To Sell by John Warrillow The book Paul mentioned in the previous episode was Influence by Dr Robert Cialdini To help systemise your business, Paul mentioned the tools called IT Glue and IT Boost The tool to better understand what’s users are really doing on your website is Hot Jar MSP Marketing Edge is the marketing content service Paul mentioned Thank you to special guest Andrew Eardsley, the MSP who has created MSP Easy Tools The great question about virtual offices was posed by Greg Micallef from GMA Next week’s guest will be MSP sales expert Fiona Challis who runs the The Next Gen Sales Acceleration Academy Here’s a link to Paul’s Facebook group for MSP Marketing 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 this week’s show. Andrew Eardley: In terms of security, I’m sleeping way better at night because I’m no longer worrying about if a client gets breached and they start threatening us with court action. Paul Green: I’m also going to tell you about an app which will allow you to watch videos of what people are actually doing on your website. And we’ve got a great question about expanding to a new city. Do you need to take on a virtual office? Voiceover: Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast. Paul Green: Got a couple of more books suggestions for you this week. So in last week’s podcast I talked about a book called Influence by Dr. Robert Cialdini. This week it’s two books which are very similar, although they’ve been written in completely different ways and in fact with decades in between them. Paul Green: But they’re both must read books for any business owner. And the two books are The E-Myth Revisited, and Built to Sell. So let’s talk about The E-Myth Revisited first. And this is the classic 1980s text by Michael Gerber about the hell of being a business owner. The E in E-Myth is the entrepreneur myth or the entrepreneurship myth, and it talks about how you work for someone else. Paul Green: One day you have what’s known as an entrepreneurial seizure and this is where you suddenly believe, I’ve got to work for myself here. I don’t work for myself. I’m going to go crazy. And we, you and I have been through this virtually everyone who owns a business has been through this and this had this seizure. And of course we all know that once that idea grabs you, you’ve got to act on it. So the E-Myth talks about how you get started in your business. In the first few months or few years, everything is hunky dory because you have this huge level of control. Paul Green: You’ve got the ability to put all your passion into your business, you’ve got this ability to create something that’s exactly as you would want it to be. And then of course you have to take on staff. And of course your staff never quite do things exactly as you would like them to be done, and they never operate with the same passion. Even the good ones, they just don’t have your ability and your passion and your drive and your vision. And that just causes a huge amount of frustration. Paul Green: And what Michael Gerber was really the first person ever to do was to capture the pure hell of being a business owner inside our heads because he absolutely got that it’s about seeing your vision and your control be watered down and diluted because you’re so busy, you need to have staff. And it’s what keeps a lot of people as one man bands because they just don’t want to go through that pain. Paul Green: But of course a business without a staff isn’t really a business. It’s just a job that pays well or doesn’t pay well and doesn’t allow you to go on proper holidays. So Michael Gerber uses some fictionalised examples from a hotel, and I think the other one is a bakery to talk through this hell, to talk through this difficulty. And then he presents the solution. And the solution is to look at your business as if it going to be a franchise. Paul Green: And you say, if I was going to go off and sell some franchises on this, I’d need to put together an operating manual. I’d need to put together some systems so you systemise the business. In fact, this really fits with what a lot of MSPs do with things like IT Glue and ITBoost, where they’re documenting everything. But this isn’t about documenting what you’re doing for the clients. Paul Green: This is about documenting how your business works. So everything has a standard operating process, a system, a checklist, all of that kind of stuff. So the E-Myth is a must read and make sure you buy The E-Myth Revisited. Michael Gerber wrote the book originally just as The E-Myth and it didn’t have those fictionalised stories. It was actually quite hard to understand what he was saying. And then he rewrote the book as The E-Myth Revisited. It’s an absolute classic and it’s on Audible as well. Paul Green: Now the second book I’m recommending, it’s a version of the same thing. It’s a more recent book, just a few years old. It’s called Built to Sell by John Warrillow. And again, it talks about the hell of running a business and particularly when you need to be there for the business to thrive. Rather than sort of repeating what’s in The E-Myth Revisited, what John Warrillow has very cleverly done is say, “Well, hey, you need to change the business and rebuild the business so that one day it can be sold.” Paul Green: Now I’ve sold a business. I sold a business in 2016 and that was a very systematised business that had lots of recurring revenue. I didn’t need to turn up every day in order for the business to thrive. I just used to go into the office one morning a week. That was a great business. Why did I sell it? I sold it because actually we got a very good offer and I was a little bit bored with it and it was just time to sell that business. It was the culmination of 11 years worth of hard work. Paul Green: And it’s funny, I read Built to Sell after I’d sold the business and realised that more out of luck than judgement, I’d put together a business that was easily sold. Because when someone buys a business, they don’t want to have to fix all your problems. They don’t want something that’s going to fall over. Paul Green: People sometimes think that a business that isn’t particularly optimised very well is actually more sell-able because someone else can fix it. But you know what? Most buyers, they don’t want to fix it. They want to bolt it on, they want to pay you off and they want to just add some profit streams. And we’d built a business that was a very systemised, that didn’t need the owner in order to thrive. And that’s exactly what Built to Sell is about. Paul Green: And it talks about how the more systemisable your business, and the more monthly the recurring revenue coming in, the easier it is to sell that business. What’s interesting is that when you’ve built that business, that’s also a business that gives you a great lifestyle without you being trapped in an office every day. So it’s exactly the same route with different outcomes. Paul Green: Maybe you want to sell the business, I mean you’re going to want to sell it at some point, because you will leave that business at some point. Either you’ll be carried out on a stretcher or the business will go bust or you’ll sell it. So you might as well build the business to be sold at some point. Because it can take up to a year to sell a business. Paul Green: It took a year to sell mine, so you want to have it in… It’s almost like having your house ready to sell at any point just for when it grabs you, you can sell it. Exactly the same with your business. Get it into a shape where it’s a sell-able entity and actually that sell-able entity gives you less stress. You can take more holidays, you can spend more time with your family, you can do more stuff. Paul Green: And this is what Built to Sell is about. And again it uses a fictional story. In this case it’s an advertising agency to tell the story of how you build your business up. Very similar solution to that recommended by Michael Gerber, which is to systemise the business and put in place processes for everything. If ever there was a sector, which I think is absolutely perfect for this. It’s the world of IT support. Paul Green: Because you think most jobs, yes, you’ve got complex things that need a lot of creative thinking, but most of the jobs, 80% of what you’re doing is systemisable work. It’s all done through checklists. And we live in a great age where there are so many tools around like IT Glue, like ITBoost and all the others that allow you to systemise the business. And it’s standard, it’s normal. Paul Green: So I think these are both great books. The E-Myth Revisited and Built to Sell, both available on Audible. I like nice paper books myself because you can draw on paper books and you can highlight them, but these certainly a two that you should get on your bookshelf and actually read them as well. Voiceover: Here’s this week’s clever idea. Paul Green: If you’ve ever spent serious time looking at the Google analytics for your website, then frankly you’re a better marketer than I am because my goodness, it’s just difficult isn’t it? I know that all the stats are there and it can show you some amazing things, and in fact I have a colleague called James who is very analytical, really into his data and he spends hours looking at the analytics for our websites and all the projects we’re working on. But me, I don’t know, I’m just not that kind of detailed guy. Paul Green: I find Google analytics a bit of a mystery and that’s why I was so excited to come across something called hotjar.com, because what Hotjar does is give you a bit more of a warm, fluffy view of what people are actually doing in your website. Because it videos people. No it doesn’t video them it doesn’t identify them at all. So it’s not like access is a webcam or anything silly like that, but it videos how someone is using your website. Paul Green: So we have the free version of hotjar.com on most of our websites and every now and again, just to see what people are doing. I’ll just go and watch some of the videos and I’ll often just do it in the evening. And I’m not looking for anything in particular, although you can use it to answer specific questions. Just looking to see where are people getting to, how far down the page they’re getting. Paul Green: And the answer by the way, is not as far as you think. Which pages are they clicking on? What are they doing that’s creating problems for them? Now, Hotjar isn’t a particularly scientific way of doing it. It does offer functionality called heat mapping where it will show you where people’s attention are. And that’s quite useful. Me, I just find that the real value in it is just sitting, looking at videos of people using your website. Paul Green: And you start to spot trends. My MSP Marketing Edge website, I completely revamped that about two years ago because the videos of the original website just showed us that people were not getting into the core guts of it. They weren’t really getting right down into the content. So we redesigned all the content to draw people in and to show them, what we wanted them to do. Paul Green: The same with the call to action, the CTA, the call to action on that wasn’t very clear. So we made the call to action, the page we wanted them to go to, to look at it, to buy. We highlighted that in yellow in the navigation, and that worked. More people spotted it and therefore more people went over to it. And we only know this, not just through the analytics and through obviously the increased sales, but also through watching people on the videos. Paul Green: Actually seeing mouse cursors on videos, going up and clicking on that navigation. So go and have a look at hotjar.com. There is a free plan, which for most people is good enough. If you have a serious website or you have a full time marketer or marketing team then the paid one might be worth looking at, but it’s one of those things you should just put into your website just because, just because every now and again you can go and have a look and see what people are actually doing. Voiceover: Paul’s blatant plug. Paul Green: So talking about the MSP Marketing Edge as I was just then, that’s my blatant plug for this week. It’s a service which gives you marketing content that you can use to promote your MSP daily, weekly, or monthly for a very low fee, it’s just 99 pounds a month in the UK, 129 dollars a month in the US. The idea is that you’ve just got content and it’s done for you and you’re the only MSP in your area that can use it. Paul Green: So it’s just simple concept really. So we’re making something once and selling it multiple times. That’s why we can give you so much content, because there’s a video in there, there’s a guide in there, there’s social media content, there’s emails, there’s a press release, and then every year we also give our clients a brand new book that they can use. We’ve just delivered to our clients about a month ago, a book on cybersecurity. Paul Green: It’s called Email Hijack. And the idea behind that is they put their name and their company name on the front and they can change the text and they can change the book name if they wish, print some off and now they’ve got a 48 page business card, and they can use it as an ethical bribe on their websites to get people to opt in. So there’s all of this stuff which is given to you every month. Paul Green: You can tweak it, you can just use it as it is. The point is, there’s marketing content. So you can build a relationship with people. We all know that prospects buy when they’re ready to buy. This is your way of being in front of them every single day, week or month. So that at that point they’re ready to buy, you’re very much top of their mindset as the MSP that really they should speak to. Voiceover: The Big Interview. Paul Green: I’ve been working with Andrew and Jean Eardley for a number of years now, and it’s been fascinating following their journey as they’ve transformed their business into something that’s chocker with monthly recurring revenue, and is a business that thrives without them having to be there. Now one of the things that they identified early on is that they needed to automate more jobs that were just taking up technician time. Paul Green: And they put together a very clever toolkit which works with Office 365 and just makes life easy for the techs. And a couple of years ago they figured out, hang on a second, we can also use this to generate revenue, because there were extra services in there that some of their clients wanted to buy from them. About a year or so ago, they realised that there were other MSPs that would want to access this toolkit, and so they launched MSP Easy Tools. They completely revamped those tools and they’ve scaled it up so that it can be used by any MSP anywhere in the world. And I interviewed Andrew about the launch of MSP Easy Tools. F…

Full show notes at the publisher

Episode 5: The best MSP marketing book Dec 03, 2019

Show notes

In this week’s episode Reading of physical books maybe declining, but if there’s just ONE book you check out (or even listen to on Audible), Paul explains how Influence by Robert Cialdini could transform the way you market your MSP Some of the best potential sales people in your MSP could be the technicians. However you may find they either don’t want to do it or aren’t very good at it. Paul talks about something called the Profit Matrix that can easily help everyone contribute towards increased net profit Did you know there’s a free book all about improving your MSP’s marketing? Paul has all the details Nearly every MSP wants to grow their business. Specialist accountant Rob Bowden joins Paul to explain how not all growth is good growth There’s a great question about the amount of time that should be spent on LinkedIn and Paul shares some tips on how best to use it Show notes Out every Tuesday on your favourite podcast platform Presented by Paul Green, an MSP marketing expert Here’s a link to the book Paul mentioned Influence by Dr Robert Cialdini You can find more interesting reading on the Profit Matrix here This is the link to order your free copy of Paul Green’s book Upgrading Servers Doesn’t Grow Your Business The special guest was Robert Bowden from MSP accounting specialist Brooklands Accountants. His website is mspaccountant.com Thank you to Kevin Ackland from Systems & Solutions for the great question about how much time to spend on LinkedIn Next week’s guest will be Andrew Eardley from MSP Easy Tools who will be explain how they developed a some tools that MSPs can re-sell for greater MRR Here’s a link to Paul’s Facebook group for MSP Marketing Episode transcription Voiceover: Made in the UK, for MSPs around the world. This is Paul Green’s MSP marketing podcast. Paul Green: Have I got a cracker of a show for you this week, here’s what’s coming up. Robert Bowden: Can’t really turn around to your staff and say, “Well, I’m sorry guys, we’re not getting paid for 60 days on this. Can you wait until the end of next month and we’ll pay you double.” Paul Green: We’re also going to be talking about how something called the profit matrix completely, totally changes the profit situation in any IT support business and I’m going to be answering a question later on about how long you should be spending on LinkedIn every single day. Voiceover: Paul Green’s MSP marketing podcast. Paul Green: One of the things that I’m most proud of when I greet new people into my house is my book collection. So we’ve got so many books as a family that we actually converted one of our spare rooms into a library, which sounds grand, but it’s just a whole load of bookshelves and we have, I mean we must have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of books. My nine year old has an entire bookcase to herself. I’ve got a couple of bookcases. In fact, I’ve got books sort of almost in every single room of the house and mine tend to be more business and marketing books because for many, many years I’ve been in a pretty good habit of reading a book a week. Got to be honest actually the last few years it’s been more listening to books than reading books. Audible, it’s such a low investment of perhaps seven, eight pounds, probably I’d guess around the same dollars each month and you get one or two or three books a month depending on which package you subscribe to. Paul Green: So I listen to a lot of books, but if I really enjoy a book, I will go out there and buy it. And throughout the course of this podcast, however many months or years I’ll do this podcast, I will throw out to you some of the best books that I’ve read because there are some amazing books that make a real difference. I’ve got one that I’m going to recommend to you today. It’s one of my all time favourites, business and marketing books and it’s called Influence by Dr. Robert Cialdini. Now, Dr. Cialdini is a professor of psychology based in New York, but he’s dedicated his professional career to the psychology of sales and marketing and Influence was written, I think it was some time in the in the 1980s or early 1990s and it’s about how you can influence people to do things using a number of of different weapons. And the six weapons or the six principles of influence are reciprocity, consistency, social proof, liking, authority, and scarcity. Paul Green: And I’m going to go back over those and explain those in a second and you’ll have heard of some of these. You’ll certainly have heard of social proof. In fact, I believe that Cialdini, was the first person to coin the phrase social proof. Social proof describes our psychological need to do what most other people are doing. Now, not everyone acts like this, but the vast majority of us do. And it’s because at our core we are still, in our brains, using the programming that we had when we lived in caves a hundred thousand years ago. At that time, the safest thing to do was to stay with a group and stick together because if you were in big numbers you were less likely to be picked off by dinosaurs or saber tooth tigers or whatsoever. And we still have that programming today. So you’ll see this happen where you’re in a group of people and they’re doing something. Paul Green: It’s safer and easier to just go along with the group and do that. And in fact we feel sometimes a little uncomfortable if we’re doing something different to what most of the people are doing. So that’s what social proof is. It’s why you need more testimonials. It’s why you need more case studies, more videos of your clients on your website and in your marketing material talking about you and your business. Because then your prospects can see that other people like them trust you. Can you see the power of that? That’s the power of social proof. And by the way, if you’re one of those people who thinks, “Oh, that’s social proof, all those testimonials, it doesn’t work.” It might not work on you, but the vast majority of people, social proof does influence them. Paul Green: Let’s look at Cialdini’s other principles, and reciprocity is one, when you give something to someone, it sets up a need for them to reciprocate, for them to give you something back. It’s why freebies work very well, sampling. If you’re going to a supermarket and they give you something for free, a little taste of something, sales of that item go up. We don’t all buy it, but some of us do. And in actual fact, in a marketing terms, people have been doing sampling and dropping off vouchers and all that sort of stuff for over a hundred years and it has worked consistently throughout all of that time. How you would use that in an MSP is, I mean, I’m a big fan of giving away a book. I have a book to give away, so I’m going to plug in about four minutes time and you’re welcome to request a free copy of it. Does that set up a reciprocity? Maybe, maybe not. Is it generally just good marketing? Absolutely it is. So you would, within your MSP, you would certainly look to give away information. Paul Green: Consistency is another one of Cialdini’s principles. Consistency is where we prefer to be consistent with our own vision of ourselves. Well, here’s a great example, if you’ve got a bit overweight and you’ve decided to go to a gym, you’re much more likely to keep going to that gym and to succeed at losing weight if you have a gym buddy. What happens is you convince yourself that you mustn’t let that person down. You’ve got to be consistent with the declaration that you made with that person to go to the gym every day, week, whatever it is. We see where I worked with a mastermind groups, MSP mastermind groups where I have noncompeting business owners all doing the same thing, all running IT sport companies and we have them in the room and when people talk about they’re going to do something, whether that be fire someone or introduce a new service or whatsoever, they’re much more likely to do it because they’ve declared it to a bunch of people. Paul Green: They care about their opinion and people like to be consistent with the commitment that they have made. Then we’ve got another principle that of liking. Put it bluntly, if you’re a likable person, you’ll sell more because we’ve talked before on this podcast about how the people you want to sell to, they can’t tell a good MSP from a bad MSP, not at a cognitive level so it all comes down to an emotional decision. And when someone is more likable, when you are more likable to someone, it makes the emotional decision easier. The prospects, even the people running big companies are picking a new MSP or not picking a new MSP based on how much they like or dislike the person. It’s as simple as that. So you should be doing everything within your power to be more likable. And then the final principle of influence is scarcity. Paul Green: And scarcity is perhaps the greatest of all of these principles of influence because when there is less of something left and it is clearly finite and it is going to run out, we want more of it. In Easter Island for example, where there’s the great big Easter Island statues and as the resources started to dwindle and the indigenous population of Easter Island faced with the inability to bring in resources from elsewhere, but their resources were going down. As the resources dwindled, they build bigger and bigger and bigger Easter Island heads. And the reason they did that was to show off to each other and you can kind of see it now in humanity as our resources are starting to dwindle and become more scarce, we’re using more and more and more of them. And it is a human condition to do that. Now, the greatest scarcity that you’ve got within your MSP is of course that there’s only a finite amount of time. Paul Green: And particularly as we look at something like the 2020 problem, which of course is coming up in January. Most of that Microsoft software is expiring in January. You’ve only got a finite amount of time between now and then to pop all those new Windows 10 computers in to replace servers or move people to the cloud or whatever you do. And really at this point at this stage of the year with that deadline so close, this is what you should be pushing the most is, “Hey, we physically only got this many man hours or Mondays left. If you want to do this before the deadline, before this software reaches the end of life, you need to make a decision now. We can do it for you in January or February, but you’re at risk of being breached because of course your software will be out of life.” If you only read one business book a year, this is the book you really should read. Paul Green: It’s Influence by Dr. Robert Cialdini an absolutely top read and so, so handy in your business’ marketing as well. Voiceover: Here’s this week’s clever idea. Paul Green: I’m yet to meet an MSP owner who doesn’t want more net profit out of the business. Net profit being of course the bottom line figure that’s yours. You pay your tax on it and then that’s yours to take out and spend. And the quickest way to grow net profit in any MSP is to use something called the profit matrix. Now the profit matrix is a very, very simple device, but it’s a very powerful device because it takes information that you’ve already got, but it’s locked up in your PSA. It extracts that information out and it puts it in a place where you and your team are kind of forced to use it every single day. So the profit matrix at its most basic is a grid. Paul Green: And if you imagine a grid with sort of two axes along the top, you would write the monthly recurring revenue services that you sell and down the left hand side you’d put your clients. And the idea is that if you’ve got, let’s say client one and they buy additional service number one, they buy additional service number two, but they don’t buy numbers three and four so you’d put a little dots in their box. So client number one buys service one, buys service two and then you come on to client number two. Well they don’t buy additional service number one but they do buy number three. So you’d have a little dot in that number three and you do that for all of your clients. And the idea is that you build up this giant board and you can physically see exactly which clients are buying which service. Paul Green: Now I appreciate you have already got this in your PSA, but what we want to do is we want to extract this out, not put it in a spreadsheet, not put it up on a screen anywhere, but put it in on a board, on a physical whiteboard or on a bit of paper or draw it on a wall or something. And the beauty of this at a glance, we can instantly see not only who’s buying what, but really more importantly who’s not buying what. Because the power of the profit matrix is about having that information in front of people every single day. And there are three particular ways to use it to grow your net profit. So the first way is, and I would put that profit matrix in front of your technicians because the first thing is when they’re on the phone to the people that they’re supporting and they’re talking to them, they can literally look up and glance and see, is client number 17 buying service three, let’s have a look. Paul Green: No they’re not. And they can start conversations with the clients like, “Do you know what? We do actually have a premium service that would stop this kind of thing from happening and it would just take all of this away. Is this something you want me to get one of my team to have a chat with you about?” Because we all know getting technicians to actually sell over the phone is pretty hard. But it is certainly a lot easier to get them to generate leads, generate opportunities, and pass them to someone within the business to follow them up. And again, I know that information is there in the PSA and believe me, I’ve had so many discussions and debates with IT owners about, “Well, why would I want to replicate this information or pull it out the PSA?” Even though it’s in the PSA, it’s not presented in exactly the same way. Paul Green: Even when it’s on an Excel spreadsheet, it’s not presented in the same way. There is something magical and physical and it just brings it alive when you physically put it on a wall. So that’s your first opportunity. You get your technicians to just look and to think and to refer for sales. Now the second opportunity to grow the profit matrix is when you do strategic reviews with clients. A big fan of strategic reviews, we’ll cover off exactly how a strategic review should go in a future podcast. But I believe when you sit down with your clients and you have a review of them, of course you’re not looking backwards at tickets and stuff, you’re looking forwards at their business. What’s going to happen in their business in the next six to 12 months? And the more and more more you get them talking about their business, the more chances there are for you to sell them a monthly recurring revenue service that will help them, that will help them grow, have less pain and avoid problems, which is what everyone wants. Paul Green: Now that profit matrix becomes something that you study before you go out. Because for example, if you know by looking at the profit matrix, you can see, “Hmm, we’ve got basic backup, but they don’t have the premium backup.” We don’t have any kind of on prem backup. So the speed would be an issue if we had to restore and then you can look at the security services and it gives you an idea of where you want to steer the conversation because of course in your strategic view, you wouldn’t jump in and just be as unsubtle as, “Oh, I notice you haven’t got the premium backup.” Paul Green: But you might, for example, ask them a series of open ended questions about the speed of recovery. If a computer died and it took six hours to recover the data and restore that to a new computer, how much of a problem would that be when even that’s a bit of a blunt question, but you get…

Full show notes at the publisher

Episode 4: Should MSPs use direct mail? Nov 26, 2019

Show notes

In this week’s episode In a world where nearly every communication is digital, Paul talks about traditional direct mail, how to modernise its use and how it could help to get you in front of prospects Here are the keys to a time machine. What would you tell your 20-year-old self? Monthly Recurring Revenue is best kind of revenue. And Paul has found a couple of products that you could re-sell A lot of MSPs don’t realise the huge difference a well performing website could make to their new client enquiries. Special guest Louise Towler from marketing agency Indigo Tree explains Every single drive to work you’ll encounter branded commercial vehicles. You may even have your own. Find out more about the difference between good signage, bad signage and what it can do for your business Show notes Out every Tuesday on your favourite podcast platform Presented by Paul Green, an MSP marketing expert Here’s a link to the book Paul mentioned ‘The E-Myth Revisited‘ by Michael Gerber To submit the advice you’d give your 20 year old self, or for any other questions or feedback on the show, the address is hello@paulgreensmspmarketing.com Have you used Docmail? Here’s just a selection of the ‘video cards’ used for marketing on Amazon For more details on the suite of security and monitoring tools that can be re-sold for increased MRR, just visit mspeasytools.com The special guest was Louise Towler from the website & marketing agency Indigo Tree Thank you to Jon Cross from Crosstek for the great question about vehicle branding Next week’s guest will be Robert Bowden from MSP accounting specialist Brooklands Accountants who will be explain how to make your business more financially robust, even when there’s a steady stream of revenue Here’s a link to Paul’s Facebook group for MSP Marketing 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 this week’s show. Louise Towler: Really important that the words are very reassuring and you don’t just talk about the geeky stuff that perhaps people might be searching for in Google. Paul Green: We’re also going to look at whether your MSP should be sending out direct mail, more stuff in the post, to your prospects, and I’ve got a question from an IT support owner about how to best brand up his company vans. Voiceover: Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast. Paul Green: I don’t watch a great deal of television. When I do, it tends to be science fiction, absolutely adore good sci-fi. My all-time favourite show is Doctor Who, the British classic, it’s been going for 55 years, something like that, and it’s based around an alien who can go anywhere in time and space. They’ve got a special ship, it’s called the TARDIS, and they can go back. Paul Green: And, in fact, I was having a conversation with my nine-year-old daughter just a few weeks ago, if you were given the keys to the TARDIS, you had the keys to a time machine, and we started talking about how interesting it would be for me to go back and talk to my 20-year-old self, I’m 45 now, what would I tell myself? Perhaps some girls to avoid, and then I’d want to really talk about business and I’d want to talk about finances and wealth, quality of life, and all that kind of stuff. Paul Green: And I would tell my 20-year-old self to start a business earlier, the things that I know worked, the stuff that you know with the benefit of hindsight. The big one I’d probably tell my 20 year-old-self, which I think is relevant to every IT support company, every MSP, is if you’re going to have a business, which is both the best thing in the world and the worst thing in the world, it really is both of those things combined, and I’m sure you agree with me, if you’re going to have a business, make sure that you are more owner than you are operator. Now, what do I mean by that? If you look at how most of us have got into business, I started mine in 2005, my very first business, and I started off doing something that I was good at. Paul Green: If you think about The E-Myth Revisited, which is a great book by Michael Gerber, he talks about three different levels of business owner: technicians, managers, and entrepreneurs. And the technician is good at a thing, and when they start their own business, they go and start up a business doing that thing. You, yourself, you may have been particularly good with computers, perhaps with tech support, maybe you worked for someone else, and when you started or acquired your first business, the chances are pretty high that you started a business doing tech support, and that’s how you got into it. This is how we get trapped as operators. Paul Green: I was good, at the time, at public relations and marketing, so I started a PR and marketing company, and I got trapped in that as the operator. And it’s being trapped as the operator for decades is what emotionally kills us. We’re locked in a business that is based around us because, typically, the owner is the best operator within the business. You’d love to clone yourself and have 10 little yous running around doing the business, but it doesn’t work that way. A lot of our frustrations, as business owners, come when we have staff who don’t quite do the things we want them to do in the way we’d like them to do them. Paul Green: I would go back and tell my 20-year old self, “Don’t start a marketing business, start a different kind of business, or go and buy a business where you cannot be the operator, where you can only be the owner.” And in fact, in early 2020, I’m going to start a long-held dream of mine, which is to go and acquire some businesses, and the last kind of businesses that I’m going to acquire will be businesses I know how to run. I won’t be acquiring marketing businesses. I won’t be acquiring anything at all where I can jump in and do that work because then I would just get trapped as an operator again and I don’t want to do that. Paul Green: And, possibly, I’m looking at the care sector, the adult care sector, and go and acquire a business that I couldn’t run even if I wanted to, which then forces me to acquire a business of a certain size and scale that will have a management team, and I can then focus on improving the management team, improving the overall feel and and productivity and profitability of the business without getting trapped being the operator. That’s what I would tell myself. Paul Green: I’d really love to know what would you do, if you could go back in that TARDIS in that time machine, talk to your 20-year-old self, what advice would you give that person? Do you want to email that through to me? Because maybe, if we get enough, we can feature some of these in a future edition of the show, hello@paulgreensmspmarketing.com. Voiceover: Here’s this week’s clever idea. Paul Green: In a world of digital where everything comes through a screen, through a device, there’s a real place for taking it offline and making it physical. I’ve just realised the start of that sounds like a bad movie trailer. In a world where everything is digital … but it’s true. If you think about it, 20 years ago, we had all of this stuff coming through our letterbox everyday. We had junk mail, flyers, leaflets, and we had very, very few emails and, 20 years ago, one of the most effective ways to reach someone was to send them an email because it was unusual. Well, 20 years on, we all have far too many emails. You never hear someone sitting and complaining because they haven’t had enough emails. And yet the amount of posts that I get is very low, very, very low indeed. Paul Green: I don’t even get bank statements anymore. That all comes digitally. I get perhaps two or three items of post a week, still get catalogues and things like that from clothing companies, but really it’s almost, almost getting to the point of becoming a lost art. And 20 years ago, it was a very, very beautiful and lucrative thing to do to send stuff out in the post, but these days, because it’s cheaper and easier, people just stick to the digital platforms, the email, the social media, that kind of stuff. Paul Green: Now, where you’ve got a trend where everyone is doing something, one of the opportunities to you is to look at that and say, hey, I’m going to do something completely different, and that’s why I always recommend to MSPs and IT support companies to go physical, to make it real, to print stuff. And I’m a big fan of direct mail. I’m a big fan of books. I’ve written a whole load of books myself. I’ve never sold a single one. I’ve given away tens of thousands of books and it’s probably coming up to 15, 16,000 books, and they’ve funded many business ventures by using them as introductions, as business cards rather than books. Paul Green: I’ve sent out hundreds of thousands of pieces of direct mail, and some of it’s been a bit rubbish and some of it’s worked quite well and there’s been a lot in the middle. But the point is it’s a hell of a lot easier to get someone’s attention when you send them something in the post or when you make it physical than it is just trying to do it through another digital platform. What I want you to do is I want you to think now, who are the people you’d most like to reach? What are some of the things that you could send to them, you could post to them, mail out to them, that would impact them and just make it easier for you to follow them up? Because you’re not going to sell to people using direct mail, but what you will do is you’ll get their attention and you’ll get a chance for them to read some stuff. Paul Green: I’ve worked with some clients over the years who’ve done some amazing things. I’m working with a client now who sends a box out in the post, it’s, and this is an MSP by the way, a specially designed box designed to go through the letterbox so there’s none of that hassle of having to pick it up from the delivery office. And inside, there’s some chocolate bars and there’s a very specific message related to the chocolate bars and there are stickers on it and it has a stamp and a handwritten envelope and it costs them probably about 10, 15 pounds per unit to put that together. But for every X units of those that they send out, they ended up sitting down in front of people and having the conversation about their IT support, which is exactly the point of that. Paul Green: I have other clients who send out just basic mail merge letters, some that do it in the office, some that use services like Docmail which is a UK service. I’m sure there are American services equivalent, but Docmail is just a mail merge in the cloud essentially where they will do the posting for you. I’ve got one client who did a very clever piece. He would take a toy, a radio-controlled toy, and send out the toy, but not the remote control, not the radio control, and the letter inside would say, “Look, can I come over to your office for half an hour, share a coffee, and we’ll get to play with the toy?” Some of the people that got that, it was so intriguing that they thought, “Yeah, do you know what? We’ll do that.” Paul Green: These things, you never get 100% response, but isn’t it all just about standing out? These exact same messages sent on email or through social media just wouldn’t be as compelling as sending it in the post because it allows you to stand out. Or we have another client, just remembered another client that sends out videos by post, so rather than just relying on YouTube or Vimeo to get their video out there, they actually send it in the post, and they’ve got some special cards. They’re quite widely available. You can get them on Amazon and from special places and they’re video cards. I don’t mean a video card in the sense you would think of a video card in a PC. I mean it’s actually a greetings card with a video element, upload an MP4 to it and you physically post it out. It’s like a mini-player that arrives in the post. Paul Green: There’s so many things that you can do. There’s got to be an opportunity for you to integrate direct mail into your business. Maybe you would do it to people at the prospect stage, maybe you’d do it to people that you’re just trying to keep in touch with, maybe you’d do it to brand new clients, but somehow there’s some imaginative, very, very clever direct mail that you could do, which will give you a massive point of differentiation in an over-saturated market and would also move your relationship with prospects forward, which means you’re closer and closer to sitting down with them, talking about taking over their IT support. Voiceover: Paul’s blatant plug. Paul Green: I have some lovely clients I’ve been working with for a number of years now, their names are Andrew and Jean, and it’s been an absolute pleasure following along, watching them change their business, putting so much more monthly recurring revenue, completely change their relationship with their clients, and remove themselves from the technical delivery. One of the pleasures of that has been watching them automate common problems. And, in fact, I remember having a conversation with them, I think it was about three years ago, where they developed a piece of software internally to just solve problems that were happening again and again and again. And they were mostly Office 365 things where the fixes were were there, but they were hidden somewhere inside Office 365, and they just developed software which made it easier for their tech team to do this. And what it allowed them to do is it meant that level one technicians could do some level two work. Paul Green: Now, around about a year ago, they realised that this was a set of tools that other MSPs could benefit from, and they went ahead and redesigned all those tools so that it could be sold on to other MSPs. And a few months ago, they launched that tool set and it’s called MSP Easy Tools. I don’t know technically how it works, but it’s a very big bag of tools that just makes life easier for your technicians, but it also gives you the opportunity to generate new revenue streams. And, in fact, Andrew and Jean, they’re generating thousands of pounds of monthly recurring revenue using their own tools. For example, one of them is called Prompt Mapper and it allows you to keep drives mapped. Prompt Mapper, if it falls over, it just fixes it. Paul Green: They have another one which detects email forwarders being set up in either an Outlook or an Outlook Web Access, which obviously is a great security tool. We all know that that’s an email hijack entry point, and they have that tool and they sell that tool on to some of their clients. They might use it with all of the clients to help the MSP do its job better, but they sell that on and have reporting for all of their clients. They’ve put together this whole set of tools and they all either make lives easier for your techs and/or become revenue streams for you. I’m going to put a link in the show notes to MSP Easy Tools. Go and have a look at that because it’s one of those things that you think, oh, do you know what? The cost of that is completely justified by X, Y, and Z. Paul Green: And in fact, the way they’ve priced it as well is very smart because this is the beauty of buying a toolkit from another MSP is they understand your world. The cost is fixed every single month regardless of how many users you put on, so the opportunity to you is to put this on to as many users as you can, the price never goes up. Have a look in the show notes. Go and have a look at MSP Easy Tools, could be some very nice monthly recurring revenue streams for you there, as well as something to make your staff more efficient and make their lives easier. Voiceover: The big interview. Paul Green: We’re talking about websites with today’s guest. Her name is Louise Towler and she runs a marketing agency in the UK called Indigo Tree. Now, Louise actually works quite closely with a number of m…

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Episode 3: Fire a client for Christmas Nov 19, 2019

Show notes

In this week’s episode It may sound drastic, but getting rid of one of your worst clients could be transformational for your business. Paul’s done it and the results were ASTONISHING How are your sales team selling? Special guest Scott Tyson of Auvik talks about how to increase revenue by adopting a simple sales process, how to trust your team and when it’s time to walk away from a potential customer Also in this episode, there’s a brilliant question answered about how to reach business owners on Facebook… details of a video service for MSP websites… and Paul explains how you can link personal goals to your business goals Show notes Out every Tuesday on your favourite podcast platform Presented by Paul Green, an MSP marketing expert Here’s the website for the service MSP Videos, that produces excellent video content for websites The special guest talking about how to run a world-class sales operation is Scott Tyson of Auvik who also mentioned Sandler sales training and the Frankly MSP podcast Thanks to Murray Thorpe from network and AV solutions specialist Cablers Ltd for the question about reaching business owners on Facebook Here’s the link to Paul’s Facebook group for MSP Marketing Find out more about the Pareto Principle (the 80/20 Rule) Paul mentioned Next week’s guest will be Louise Towler of IndigoTree, who will be explain the essential ingredients for a great website The email address for show feedback or any questions is hello@paulgreensmspmarketing.com Episode transcription Voiceover: Made in the UK, for MSPs around the world. This is Paul Green’s MSP Marketing podcast. Paul: Here’s a look at what’s coming up on this week’s show. Scott Tyson: There’s no good going into a Mercedes dealership looking for a sports car and the guy comes out and says, “I’ve got this great station wagon for you to buy.” Paul: We’re also going to look at how the actions that you take or don’t take every single day directly affect the lifestyle that you have. And I’ve got a question from an MSP owner about how to reach business decision makers on Facebook. Voiceover: Paul Green’s MSP Marketing podcast. Paul: Now some will see this as controversial. You should fire more clients. And my reasoning for that is the 80/20 rule. Basically, input and output aren’t equal. And it was Alfredo Pareto who was an Italian economist and I think in the 19th century, and he one day standing on his balcony, probably having an ice cream or Cornetto, and he looked out and he realised that 80% of the peas in his garden came from 20% of the pea pods. And being an economist he went off and looked into landownership and realised that at that point 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the population. And this is where the 80/20 rule comes from, the Pareto Principle. 80% of the hassle in your business comes from 20% of the clients, and you can do 20% within themselves. If you’ve got a hundred clients, 20 clients, who create most of the hassle, 20% of that 20% are the real hassle ones, which is of course four people. Paul: So the majority of the hassle in your business comes from four clients, if you’ve got a hundred clients, does that make sense? Most business owners in fact just get a bit scared of firing clients because all we see is the loss of revenue. But what we don’t see is the impact of that revenue. In the last business I had where I had lots of staffers, I had 15 staff in a marketing business which I sold in 2016, and we had one particular client called Steve. Steve was that client that when his name came up on the VoIP phone, you literally felt the whole atmosphere drop in the office. People were looking at each other to see who was going to pick up the phone and no one wanted to speak to him, because Steve was just wholly unreasonable. It wasn’t so much what he was asking for is the way he was asking and everything was difficult and nothing was never good enough for him. You know that because you’ve probably got a client like that too. Paul: I was so removed from doing day to day work for the clients by this point of the business’s history that I wasn’t feeling the Steve pain, but my staff were. Two or three of them mentioned this over a couple of weeks and then I fired Steve, so I fired the client. The effect on my staff was amazing, it was like the whole office just suddenly came up again. Suddenly they felt that I had really got their back. So I was their leader, I was their boss, I was the owner of the business, but they felt like I had got their back. And actually if you look at how human psychology works, because we are all programmed with a hundred thousand year old programming in our brains. And so a hundred thousand years ago we lived in a cave as part of a tribe and there was a tribe leader. And our whole psychology is based around that leader protecting us and us helping that leader. Paul: What we have today in our office is the same psychological setup as we had living in caves a hundred thousand years ago. So when the leader fires someone, which is the same as the leader slaying a dragon, of course everyone feels a lot closer to the leader. What was interesting was that that revenue from Steve, it was about eighteen thousand pounds. That revenue from Steve was replaced within a week. Because of course suddenly my team had so much more time to do stuff, they weren’t sitting around being unhappy doing stuff for Steve or whingeing about Steve. They were just getting on with doing it and we replaced that revenue very quickly. So my challenge to you as we start to hurtle towards Christmas is wouldn’t it be a great Christmas present for your team if you said to them, “Do you know what? For Christmas I’m going to fire the client that you all hate the most.” And you probably know who that’s going to be and you’ll probably know the revenue impact. Paul: But could you imagine what a great Christmas present that would be for your staff to be able to fire the person that they hate the most? Also, what affect is that going to have on your retention in January? People have some time off over Christmas and they come back to work in January and they think, “I don’t want to do this anymore.” What a great motivator for people to have their worst client fired just before they go off, they have a little bit of a break. It’s going to affect your retention in a positive way in January. So, fire a bad client for Christmas, let your staff decide who it’s going to be, take the revenue impact on the nose. You will replace the revenue, the business will be easier to grow, everyone will have a better life apart from the client you fired. They’re probably used to being fired by suppliers all the time because if they’re rude to you, they’re probably rude to everyone. Voiceover: Here’s this week’s clever idea. Paul: One of my lifetime habits is getting up really early in the morning and working on the business. Early in my life I was a radio presenter. I did 13 years in media, 10 of them on the radio. And for many of those years I was working in some capacity on breakfast shows, either reading the news or actually doing the breakfast show in the morning. It got me, kind of late teens, early twenties developed this habit of getting up at four in the morning and that hurts. That’s painful. But when I started a business in 2005 I translated that into getting up at five in the morning. And the reason I did that was not because I couldn’t sleep, but because I was so keen to build that business. I knew exactly what I wanted to achieve with it and I knew that that was going to chew up a whole load of time. And pretty much since then, I only do it four days a week now, I do it Monday to Thursdays. I get up at five in the morning and I work on my business. Paul: Not in, so no emails, no social media, no paying invoices, admins, because that’s working in the business. No, doing the delivery work and working on the business is things that get you more new clients. Things that get those clients to buy from you more often and things that get your clients to spend more every single time they buy. Now what’s interesting is, if I look at everything I’ve achieved in the last, what is it 14 years business wise, I don’t consider myself particularly smart. I don’t consider myself to be more switched on than the average business owner. I’ve met a lot more smarter operators than me. Everything I’ve achieved in the last 14 years, which is building up a business from nothing to over a million turnover, selling that business and then obviously what I’m doing now with MSPs and IT support companies, it’s all come down to 90 minutes a day. . Paul: And that’s really my big idea. My clever idea for today is that if you think about the lifestyle that you want to live and what you want to achieve with your life, it’s the stuff that you do every day that directly gets you there. And I have a lovely diagram that I do with my clients. Get a sheet of paper or flip chart or something and you right at the top the life stuff that you want to achieve. For me right now I’m moving house so I just want a bigger house and there are specific things I want in that house. I want the gravel driveway and I want to a place where I can park a Tesla model S next to that house and a, specific charging points. And I could get the Tesla now, but it’s the Tesla and the house together are a vision in my head. Paul: There’s some of the life stuff regarding holidays and lifestyle and stuff as well. Now all of that life stuff has to be funded by my businesses. So the next step underneath the lifestyle goals is to write down the business goals. We can all make a bit more net profit by cutting costs and doing things on the cheap. But I mean sustainable long term net profit that will exist year in, year out. So already now I’ve directly linked my lifestyle to how the business performs. If your business is going well, you’re mentally and physically happy and healthy, and when business is bad, you know you’ve been there. When business is bad, everyone knows about it. And as much as you try not to take it home, you do, you can’t help but do it. Then if we come down the line, we come down to strategy. Paul: So for an MSP would be increasing monthly recurring revenue and getting onboard new clients, and the strategies are right for most MSPs. And then you come down to the tactical stuff and the tactical stuff is the stuff that people always want to jump into, and that’s where you’d look at getting new clients would be LinkedIn, it might be Facebook, it might be going to events, it might be networking if you can handle it, increasing monthly recurring revenue would be about strategic reviews with clients. It would be about finding more services to sell. It would be using the profit matrix, which I’m going to cover off in a future edition of the podcast, et cetera, et cetera. And then the final thing at the bottom is what do I do every day? And this is how I filled my 90 minutes every morning for the last 14 years. Paul: It’s having a bit of paper like that and saying, okay, my 90 minutes this morning is going to be implementing and executing some of the tactics. The tactics of course support the strategy, the strategy supports the goals and the goals support the lifestyle that I want. And you can draw a direct line from the stuff that you’re doing every single morning directly up to the lifestyle that you want to live. In fact, you kind of have to, because that’s the direct link. We don’t realise when we have these big lifestyle goals, this, “Oh, I’d love, I’d love to go to so and so next year for, for a couple of weeks. That would be great.” Or, “I wish I could do this.” You can do anything. But you’ve got to link it down to the actions that you take every day. This podcast is a really important way for me to reach MSPs around the world and this podcast is, is a difficult thing for me to do. Paul: It’s two hours of recording time every week, I’m spending money on editing and hosting and all that kind of stuff, but I do it because the action of doing this podcast over that period of time will help me to reach my lifestyle goals. It really is as simple as that. So whenever you can find time every day, whenever that is, and 60 preferably 90 even better, 120 minutes every single day to do stuff working on the business, and it’s implementing tactical stuff that supports the strategy, that supports the goal, that ultimately gets you the things you want in your life. Voiceover: Paul’s blatant plug. Paul: So this is one for my listeners in the UK and it’s about getting more prospects engaging with you faster. The easiest way to do that is with video. For 2019 video is the engagement tool to use. Now, you personally may not like watching videos from businesses, but you have to remember not everyone is like you. And many people will happily sit and watch a good 60 to maybe 70 second video when it’s on a website. Paul: So we have a service called MSP Videos and the URL is mspvideos.co.uk. It is only in the UK at the moment because it is a joint venture between me and my very good friend Darren Wingham. Now Darren, what makes him good is he’s a storyteller. So for example, we’ve just produced some videos for one of the MSP, one of the IT support companies I’m working with and he’s filmed their clients talking about the MSP. So the video that goes onto their homepage will not be the MSP talking about themselves. It will be the MSP’s clients talking about how good the MSP is. What a great point of differentiation. And Darren’s gone out and he’s told a story in that video. So if you would like that kind of thing for your business, go to mspvideos.co.uk. Paul: You can see all the details. You can see some sample videos. You can see Darren, I think I’m on there as well and you can contact Darren and you can chat to him about getting that done for your website. Now if whether you use Darren or not, and certainly if you’re outside of the UK, you need videos on your website, so there are two types of videos. There’s the one that goes on your website which is the professional polished version. That’s, if you like, the sampler of your business, better as I say to get the clients talking about you than you talking about you. But then on social media you don’t need polished videos. That’s where you can be literally you just talking to your mobile phone. The more video you can do, the better engagement you’ll have with the prospects and it’s building a relationship with them. Because down the line some of those people who are engaging with your videos today will become the clients of the future. Voiceover: The big Interview. Paul: I live in a new city in the middle of the UK, which is called Milton Keynes. 10 minutes from my home, completely by chance is the UK and EMEA office of Auvik Networks. And I came across Auvik Networks in January when they actually interviewed me for their podcast, which is called Frankly MSP. It’s a great podcast by the way, you should go in and seek that one out. It’s one of the best MSP podcasts there is. And a couple of weeks ago I just nipped over to the offices to interview this guy. Scott Tyson: So my name is Scott Tyson. I’m the managing director of Auvik Networks. I look out for all the business that’s in the EMEA region. Paul: You’ve made a career out of running sales teams, growing businesses, and most MSPs really struggle with this. So if they’re in front of someone, it’s easy because you can talk with passion and with knowledge. The difficulty they have is getting enough leads and just getting enough sales. And when they start taking on sales teams, often there’s a feeling of what are my sales people doing? Am I being mugged off? Scott Tyson: It’s a very common thing to feel that way. It depends on the people you bring in. It depends on the induction and the training that you give and it depends on the support that you give on a day to day basis. So I’m dead against micromanagement.…

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Episode 2: Two MRR services you could easily re-sell Nov 12, 2019

Show notes

In this week’s episode MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue) forms a CRITICAL part of your business, Paul tells you about two great services that could be an easy re-sell It’s time to stop selling the same way to different people. Special guest Andy Edwards helps you to sell more effectively, by understanding the 4 main personality types. Every prospect fits into one of the types Also in this episode, there’s a brilliant question answered about the type of video to put on your website… details of some free marketing lunches to help boost your business… and Paul explains how a good work / life balance is easily achievable Show notes Out every Tuesday on your favourite podcast platform Presented by Paul Green, an MSP marketing expert Check out the book Paul mentioned called “The Top Five Regrets of the Dying” Here’s a link to get Paul Green’s book “Updating Servers Doesn’t Grow Your Business“ Find out about the productivity and monitoring service Activtrak here Visit uptimerobot.com for employee monitoring Details on the FREE marketing lunches are right here The special guest talking about the 4 different personality types was speaker, coach and trainer Andy Edwards. The website about the 4 personality types is Yoo or you can visit Andy’s personal site here Thanks to Jamie Seviour from IT support and consultants Geeking It Simple for the question about the type of video to have on your website Next week’s guest will be Scott Tyson of Auvik, who will be explaining how to systemise sales for greater revenue The email address for show feedback or any questions is hello@paulgreensmspmarketing.com Episode transcription Voiceover: Made in the U.K. for MSPs around the world. This is Paul Green’s MSP Marketing podcast. Paul Green: Here’s what’s coming up on this week’s show. Andy Edwards: Be brief, be bright, be gone. Recognise those four different personality styles, and your sales will go up. Paul Green: Plus, we’ll be looking at two monthly recurring revenue services that you really should be selling, and asking what kind of video content works best on your website? Voiceover: Paul Green’s MSP Marketing podcast. Paul Green: Hi. This is Paul Green, and welcome to the show. Now, what I’m about to tell you I don’t want you to judge me on this. I’m not telling you this to boast. I’m not telling you this for any other reason than I want to help you to get away from your business a little bit more. Paul Green: You see, my nine-year-old daughter, Matilda, and I, we’ve just been sitting down planning out what holidays do we want to have next year. Now, I am a single parent, and that means that for about 10 weeks of the year, she’s my problem and not the school’s problem. And I don’t mind that, really. Paul Green: But for around about six to seven of those weeks next year, in 2020, I want to be on holiday. It’s been a longstanding goal of mine, actually, to not work at all in the six weeks of the U.K. summer holiday that we have every year. I don’t think we’ll do that next year, but the year after we’ll definitely do that and we’ll go somewhere like Sydney, or somewhere hot, and kind of go and live in another country just for six weeks. Paul Green: The reason we were looking at holidays next year and the reason we’re doing it at this time, is partly because, obviously, you can get better deals if you book further ahead. But partly as well is, I want to lock into my diary: We are going away to these places, and these become like the building blocks that I put work around next year. Paul Green: So, we’re looking at two to three weeks in Orlando at the start of August. It’s going to be very expensive, but it’s going to be worth it because she’s never been, and she’s of that age if we don’t do it now, in a couple of years time she might be a little bit too old to hang out with me for three weeks in Orlando. Paul Green: We’re going to do that, and then off the back of the summer holidays we’re going to go to Pompeii. She has a real passion for seeing lots of ancient dead people, which is a bit weird, but we’re going to go to Pompeii, a bit of a European tour. We’ve got we’re going back to Cypress in there for next year, and we’ve probably got some visiting the south coast of the U.K. And there’s another holiday we have yet to decide. Paul Green: I’m not telling you this to boast about, “Oh, look how many holidays I’m having.” This is all about putting life in perspective, and I love my work, I really love my work, and the work that I do with MSPs I do for fun first, and I do it for income second. If ever it switches around to the other way, that I’m doing it for the money, I will lose my passion for it. Paul Green: I know, because I’ve been a business owner since 2005; and any of us that have had a business for a while, we know what it’s like to lose the passion. I realised a long time ago that you’ve got to put the life stuff in first, so we book many weekends ahead. We have so many trips, and shows, and events, and plays, and cinema events and all sorts of stuff, and they all go in. Things like Sports Day, parents’ evenings, and that whole, you know, “Daddy, can you come and see me in assembly?” That all goes in the diary. Paul Green: The work stuff is very much secondary to the life stuff, and I believe that’s the balance that most business owners get wrong. Most business owners are there for the business, and actually it should be the other way around: that the point of the business is to be there for you. I see this in the IT world so much, because of course the very nature of running an MSP is that it’s a reactive job, isn’t it? You’re reacting to other people’s problems, and no matter how proactive you are, there’s always something broken. Paul Green: But I think this is how you fall out of love of your business so quickly, when the business sucks the best of your life out of you. It happens to me now and again, but most days I get home and I’m looking forward to seeing my daughter, and we have some fun together. It might just be baking a cake, or just doing a little craft project, or even just sitting reading. Well, I read, she plays Minecraft, but you get the idea. The point is, we’re together. And I remember back earlier years in different businesses, when I was so tired because I’d done a twelve-hour day and I hadn’t had enough sleep the night before. I’d got home and, you know, I could barely look at my family I was so tired. I just wanted wine. Paul Green: That’s not a great life. We have to go through that sometimes, for a short while, to get to where we want to be. Life is about life. Life is not about business. The curse of the business owner is that we forget that. We get the balance wrong. Not all of us, but many of us. I could see that I would ever so easily go back to that, because it’s fun growing a business and running a business, and you can throw yourself into it. But it’s not what life is about. Paul Green: There’s a book that I’ve recommended to thousands of MSPs over the years, and it’s not a very well-written book but it’s got an interesting message. It’s called, The Five Regrets of Dying People. Just go and look it up on Amazon. To be honest, you don’t need to read the book. I’m going to give you the 30-second summary. That’s enough. The lady that wrote it is a palliative care nurse. She looked after so many people at the end of their lives in Australia, and she realised that their regrets could be grouped into some very same groups. Paul Green: The one that hit me the most is, “I missed my children’s youth.” Apparently, no one misses their children as adults, but they miss their kids when they’re young. You get ones like, “I missed my partner’s company.” Not your business partner. No one misses their business partner at the end of their life. But, “I wish I’d done more of the stuff I wanted to do.” You get the idea. So, you’re not going to be on your deathbed and look back and wish that you’d fixed more servers, or you’d done more Windows 7 to Windows 10 updates. This is just stuff that has to be done, but it’s not the stuff that you look back and think, “Oh, yeah.” Paul Green: In fact, this is why I called my book, Updating Servers Doesn’t Grow Your Business, and if you don’t have a copy of that book, just go onto the website. The link is in the show notes, and you can see that. So, a challenge for you then, and maybe it’s to sit down with your family, maybe it’s your kids, maybe even if it’s just you, to just sit down with you and say, “Well, what do I want to do next year? What holidays do I want to take? What events do I want to go to?” You know, “Oh, I’d love to have a four-day weekend in New York or Paris.” Or something like that. Paul Green: Put it in the diary, make the work stuff work around it. Because when it’s in the diary and you’ve booked it and you’ve paid for it, or at least paid the deposit, it is then going to happen. That was a trick I discovered. That’s why we plan so far ahead. We put it in the diary, we book it with a travel counsellor person, we pay the deposit. It’s then in. I’m not going to break that. I’m not going to have anything work-wise that’s going to break that. And suddenly you’ve had an amazing, enormous year, and that’s because you prioritised the right stuff. Life stuff first, business stuff second. Voiceover: Here’s this week’s clever idea. Paul Green: The very best thing about running an MSP is, of course, the huge amounts of monthly recurring revenue. There are literally so very few businesses out there, outside of subscription businesses, that have just such enormous amounts of monthly recurring revenue. In the weeks ahead, I’m just going to drop in a whole load of different suppliers, many of them you’ll have heard of, some of them, perhaps, you’ll have looked at but not considered it. So, as I meet with MSPs and we talk about what they’re reselling, I will sort of share those with you. Paul Green: I’ve got two for you today. They’re not obvious ones. They’re fairly small ones, but they fit into your product offering so that as you’re doing strategic reviews and you’re talking to people, when they say, “Oh, we’ve got a problem with XYZ,” or “We need this,” or “We want this,” you’ve got something that you can say, “Hey, do you know what? We might be able to help you with that.” Paul Green: The first of them is something called, “ActivTrak,” and I’ll put the URL in the show notes. What this does is, this is a bit of software that goes onto their PC and it essentially monitors their activities. Now, it’s positioned as a tool for productivity. We can also see … and I think it’s kind of pretty obviously designed for monitoring what employees are doing. So, for someone who’s got problem employees, or perhaps they’re doing stuff on their computer that they really shouldn’t be … They shouldn’t be on Facebook, they shouldn’t be doing this, and your client would love to know what they’re doing. Or it’s maybe a performance issue. Then ActivTrak can be installed, and I’m told it’s very hard to detect that it’s running in the background unless you know specifically what it is that you’re going to look for. So, that’s the first one. Paul Green: The second one is something called uptimerobot.com. Now again, this isn’t a standard MSP offering, but even though you maybe have nothing to do with the web, you do computers, and as far as the clients are concerned computers and websites are the same things. So it’s a fairly sensible thing is to offer a series of low-impact, high margin tools that support websites, and Uptime Robot will give you an alert when someone’s website is down. Paul Green: So, you could set this up in a number of different ways. There is a free plan. I believe there are premium plans, as well. You could set this up to notify the Helpdesk. You could set this up to just come into one of your systems and use some kind of automation to perhaps send that straight out to the client. I guess it depends on whether you’re involved in the serving of the files, or not. Paul Green: But again, you know, it’s another five pounds per month per client. You get 10 clients on that, it’s another 50 pounds, 50 dollars, 100 dollars, whatever. And it’s money for nothing. You’re providing a service to them that they didn’t know existed. Yes, they could go and get this themselves, but how many of the clients actually do that. It’s a very small number. Paul Green: You should be looking out for all sorts of stuff. Where is there something I could find, which is very low cost, there’s some good margin on that, and it’s very low impact on the business? And how could I resell that to my clients? Because do you know what? For many of them, I’m going to be doing them a massive favour. Voiceover: Paul’s blatant plug. Paul Green: This one’s for my listeners in the U.K., because they are physical events that I’m putting on around the U.K. Maybe we’ll go international with them at some point, but certainly for this year, they’re just within the United Kingdom. Paul Green: There’s some free MSP marketing lunches. I’ve got a whole series of case studies, five case studies about growing your net profit. In one instance, it’s about growing your net profit by up to 200%. At these three-hour MSP marketing lunches, I show you some case studies, I play some videos, I reveal what other MSPs are doing and how powerful it is, and it’s a whole bunch of stuff that you can copy into your MSP. Paul Green: In fact, it’s the results of a whole series of experiments that I’ve been doing with loads of MSPs over a period of time: I would say more than around about 150 marketing net profit growth experiments. A load of them didn’t produce results. I’m not going to tell you about those. I’m going to show you the ones that did work, and in three hours just basically give you a whole series of new tools very heavily geared around, “How do you get more clients?” Because that’s the single biggest question I get from MSPs. There’s also a whole load of stuff about selling more monthly recurring revenue, particularly using things like the profit matrix, using videos. All of that kind of stuff. Paul Green: So, in the show notes you can see the link to go and have a look at this on my website. I’ve got events around the U.K. up until just before Christmas, and we will do some more next year as well in some different locations. Go and have a look at that, and if you’re in the U.K., I would love to buy you lunch. I’d love to meet with you, and show you more of about how you can grow the net profitability of your MSP. Voiceover: The big interview. Paul Green: So, have I got a real treat for you with this week’s guest, because a couple of weeks ago I met up with a very good friend of mine in London. His name is Andy Edwards. Andy Edwards: I am a speaker, a trainer, and a coach, all that stuff you might expect of somebody like me. Recently, I’ve gotten into behavioural psychology, the idea that people are different and should be treated as such. I’m one of those people that hates the idea that we should all be treated the same. Paul Green: From a sales and a marketing point of view, this is a very powerful concept. But you don’t have to learn 50 or 60 different types of people. You can actually narrow it down to four. Paul Green: I had lunch with Andy. We sat in an outdoors restaurant just near Tower Bridge, actually. It was a very sunny day, it was very lovely, and I asked Andy about the mistakes that we make when we’re trying to sell to people. I said to him, “Surely one of the biggest mistakes that we make is believing that other people buy things, buy services, in the same way that we buy.” Andy Edwards: It is a mistake. I suppose, at a point, we recognise that money has to exchange hands no matter what circumstances you’re in. Behavioural psychology suggests that if somebody is more extroverted than introverted, they will make a decision based on a little bit more intuition. Whereas somebody who is a little bi…

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