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MSP marketing SPECIAL: Build audiences Dec 23, 2025

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We are kicking off a three part series based on the MSP Marketing Edge 3 step system, and in this special episode we focus on the first step: Build audiences.

Welcome to Episode 319 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge

Build audiences

Hello and welcome to a special episode of the podcast. We are kicking off a three part series this week. Earlier this year, I released my latest book, it’s called MSP marketing: Start Here, and it’s all about a 3 step lead generation system trusted by hundreds and hundreds of MSPs around the world. It’s super simple and yet incredibly powerful, and that’s by design. So starting this week, we’re doing a deep dive into it. Let me tell you what the 3 step system is, and then this week we’re going to look at the first step.

I see my job as making marketing super simple for you, which is why I’ve pulled together an entire marketing strategy, a whole 3 step system into just six words. Let me tell you what they are – Build audiences. Grow relationships. Convert relationships. Super simple. But as you’re about to hear today and over the next couple of weeks, there’s a lot of detail within these three steps.

This week’s special, we’re just going to focus on how you can build audiences. So let me start with the question. If I asked you right now to name 10 local business owners who would love to hear from you about their IT, could you do that? Most MSPs can’t, and that’s not a criticism, it’s just the reality of how most MSPs build their businesses. They focus on doing great work for the clients they’ve already got, which is great. They rely on word of mouth, referrals, and maybe the occasional inbound lead.

Here’s the truth, if you don’t have an audience to market to, then you don’t really have a marketing engine. You’ve got luck but you haven’t got control.

Building audiences is the foundation of everything else you’ll do in marketing your MSP. And yet, it’s the bit that most MSPs skip because it feels slow, it’s not sexy. You can’t post a selfie about it on LinkedIn and get a dopamine rush of likes. But when you’ve got an audience, a real audience of people who are listening to you, trust me, everything changes. Let me tell you where this hit me the hardest.

Back in my first business, a marketing agency that I built up between 2005 and then sold in 2016. Back in the early days, I was desperate for predictable leads and I tried everything… one-off campaigns, buying data lists, I was spending too much on ads and some things worked a little bit, but most of these things didn’t work. And then one day I realised something painfully simple. I didn’t have an audience. I had a client base, and I had some people on my email list, but I didn’t have a community of people who wanted to hear from me.

And that’s when I stopped chasing leads and started building lists. Lists of people who liked what I had to say. People who might not buy today, but who might remember me when they were ready to buy. And that’s when things really started to change in that previous business. So what does building audiences look like for you as an MSP? It’s not complicated. It’s small, deliberate habits that compound.

You start by finding the right people on LinkedIn. What if you were to attempt 10 new connections every weekday? And here’s the thing, it’s not about the numbers that you build up. It’s about doing this intentionally, because you’re not connecting to just everyone, you’re connecting to the right kind of people, the people you’d like to do business with – the decision makers, the people who run businesses that match your ideal client profile. Because when your connections are right, your content really starts to land in front of the right people. And then you engage with them, you comment thoughtfully on their posts, not just nice post or, yeah I totally agree, but something real, something that adds value to their posts.

So essentially you’re human. You show a bit of your personality, and gradually the algorithm does something magical. It starts to show you in their feeds. In fact, what’s happening here is a bit of a mix of outbound and inbound marketing. By making connection requests to people, which is outbound, and then by commenting on other people’s posts, which is inbound, some of those people will connection request you. And this is really good for telling LinkedIn that you are a popular and in demand person. Outbound, inbound, that’s the start of awareness on LinkedIn.

Now, here’s the clever bit, because you take that LinkedIn list, which is just one audience, and you use it to start building your own email database. Because one of the downsides of LinkedIn is that it’s a borrowed audience. At any point, the algorithm could change or you could even be banned from LinkedIn and lose that audience altogether. So to balance that out, you also build alongside it something called an owned audience. And this is where the data is yours. And the ideal owned audience for an MSP is your email list. You add the connections that you’re making on LinkedIn to your CRM. You find their email address, maybe even their business address so that you can reach them outside social media.

And of course, you can spend money on this and do it quickly by using plugins such as Lusher, Apollo or Hunter.io. And these are plugins which sit in your Chrome and will show people’s email addresses. Or you can just Google, you essentially do a brute force search. You Google to find their email address. Whichever way you use, now you’ve got multiple touchpoints. You have the ability to reach people via the borrowed audience of LinkedIn, which is where they are, and also via your own audience of emailing them. And this is how marketing becomes a system, instead of an event. Every day you add a few names to the pot. Every week, you’ve then got a few more people who know who you are. And every month that pot compounds.

Before you know it, you’ve got hundreds, maybe eventually thousands of people who know your name, they see your face now and again. And some of them will start to think of you as the local IT expert. So you’re not chasing them anymore, you are present in their world within LinkedIn and on their email. And that is the power of building audiences. You are not begging for attention. You are quietly, patiently earning it. Because every future sale starts here, with someone who’s aware you exist and who’s been quietly learning to trust you long before they need you. So when their current MSP messes up, when they wake up one morning thinking, do you know what, we need someone new, you are already in their mind. And that’s how you win before the selling even starts.

So if you do one thing differently in 2026, build audiences. 10 new LinkedIn connections a day, a couple of minutes commenting every day. Make it a habit, not a project. Because your audience is your future pipeline, and the MSP who builds one now will own their market in a few years time. If you want to go into a bit more detail on this, it’s all laid out in my book, MSP marketing: Start Here. You can get it on Amazon as a paperback and a Kindle, and it’s also on Audible.

Mentioned links

This podcast is in conjunction with the MSP Marketing Edge, the world’s leading white label content marketing and growth training subscription.
Join me in MSP Marketing Facebook group.
Connect with me on LinkedIn.
Recommended book: MSP marketing: Start Here by Paul Green.
Got a question about your MSP’s marketing? Let me know.

5 expert predictions for MSPs in 2026 Dec 16, 2025

Show notes

I’ve asked five people, who are both friends and MSP experts, what they think is going to happen to MSPs next year. Let’s jump straight into our experts’ predictions for what could happen in your world in 2026. Welcome to this SPECIAL Episode 318 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge. 5 expert predictions for MSPs in 2026 Hello and welcome to the first of four special episodes to take us through Christmas and into 2026. And that’s actually where we’re starting, with predictions for next year. You’re going to hear predictions about the demand for cyber security, how content marketing might die as a marketing channel, a really cool idea about creating free apps as lead magnets, why you should help your clients reign in the usage of SaaS tools, why you should invest into your leadership and how to beat much bigger MSPs in your marketplace. And as you’d expect, there’s a lot of talk about AI. Hi there, it’s Jamie Warner, CEO of MSP eNerds and SAS vender, Invarosoft. So what are my predictions for 2026 in the MSP industry? Well, I’ve got a few to tell you. First one is SMB, small to medium businesses, are always going to need an IT partner. I think people have been saying for many years, our relevance won’t be there in the future. As long as you have non-technical people that don’t understand technology, we’ll always have a huge amount of business to chase and a huge amount of opportunity there for outsourced IT services and to be an IT partner for them. I think the number one trend though will always continue to be cyber security. I’m definitely noticing in my world, in the eNerds world, that new clients are always very cautious and worried about their security posture. So certainly focusing on that and ensuring that you’re following one of the best practice frameworks so that you can articulate how your service delivery will meet those cyber security requirements is going to be important. Another one, artificial intelligence, obviously it’s a huge buzzword. How do MSPs get engaged? There’s a lot of people out there trying to tell you how you can just do certain things around AI. I think firstly, let’s get the platform right as MSPs, and then of course it’s going to be the Microsoft platform with Copilot. So making sure that you are crystal clear on how Copilot works. One of the things we are doing is running webinars with the big vendors and distributors with their experts around this space. Or you could become your own expert if you like, and making sure that you are being proactive with your advice around how to actually use AI in the Microsoft Suite. It tends to be 90+% of businesses are on the Microsoft platform unless you’re purely a Google shop or the like, but ultimately that’s a really good place to start and make sure that you are best in class around. The last one that I would say, and it’s that my biggest bug bear if anyone see me talk, is just how we articulate our services when you get a new business lead. One thing that will not change in 2026 is that when clients are looking for a new IT partner, they’re essentially looking for a step up in service delivery and in the experience they get. So when you get a new lead, your only job is to convince them that your service delivery methodology is going to be a step up. And so your job is to argue the case of how you are going to deliver a service that will be best in class. So what are you going to talk about? The big things is actually explaining and visually explaining, for example, your customer experience technology, how visibly you’re going to provide them with a one pane of glass. It could be your technology business reviews actually showing them how you’re going to do a gap analysis, a traffic light report, how you’re going to do your Essential Eight report or whatever the cyber security framework you are using and actually showing them how this looks. What does onboarding look like? How does account management look like? All of these different things are arguments and things that you need to put into your sales process to demonstrate that you are going to be a step up. I don’t think that’s going to change in 2026 and as an example, my company eNerds, we only target small to medium businesses just like you. It’s the same and last year we grew by a million dollars in revenue and this year we’ll grow by another million dollars in revenue just by signing up a lot of clients and being really efficient at doing our advisory with those clients. Making sure we’re having those relevant conversations and actually squeezing the lemon of getting that deal flow that’s out there that relates to advisory. These are things they need, not things they don’t need, and just being really efficient around that process. And you’ll find yourself growing by a quarter of a million, half a million, a million each year if you get your new business arguments right, and you sign up more clients and then of course you go and have a chat to them around advisory. So I think those things are going to stay the same in 2026. I wish you continued success and hopefully we all have a absolute cracker of a year next year. Take care. Here’s Matt Solomon from Channel Program. So my prediction for 2026 is that MSPs are going to battle a very similar challenge that they’ve had over the years, which is differentiation. The reality is that 92% of an MSP’s core stack is the identical stack to their competitors. And so MSPs who will stop selling tools and tickets and really start focusing on business outcomes, I think are going to be the ones who really set themselves apart by aligning services directly to their customer’s bottom line. MSPs will really need to rethink what efficiency means to their small business customers. It’s no longer about lowering internal labour costs. It’s about driving measurable savings, productivity, and profitability for your clients. Another major shift is the work on SAS sprawl. In 2026 MSPs will take a far more active role in helping customers reign in all of that chaos, not just from security and compliance standpoint, but also in managing the license utilisation, the renewals and the vendor contracts. The MSPs who can provide visibility and control access to that massive sprawl that they’re experiencing will earn the trust and get the margins that they need. The average SMB is using over 80 SaaS tools and they’re not managing them properly, and it’s only getting worse with AI tools because everybody’s adding them. I think the MSPs that will thrive will be the ones to connect the dots between costs, compliance and customer outcomes. 2026 isn’t about adding more tools. It’s about making every tool, every process and every relationship work smarter for the customer’s bottom line. Hey, this is Brian Gillette from Feel-Good MSP and the host of the MSP Sales Podcast, and here are my predictions for what will happen to the MSP channel in 2026. My predictions unfortunately are bleak for some, but they’re very optimistic for others. I think that with an increase in marketing resources that are being made available to MSPs, the amount of people who are trying to do marketing as a service or content as a service, and frankly with the exponential increase of AI slop that’s being generated, I think that the traditional content marketing methods for MSPs is going to flatline in its efficacy for the average MSP. If you’re just doing the same thing that everybody’s doing, you’re going to become even quieter or even less noticeable than you are right now because so many more people are going to be trying to do it the easy way. So what’s the result going to be? I believe that the MSPs who are traditionally and unfortunately smaller who don’t have their business development and their go-to-market stuff together, I think they’re going to struggle and frankly, I think some of them are going to go out of business. Because it’s getting harder and harder to get attention if you’re phoning it in, and frankly, the average technical acumen of the small business is growing. So if you’re only working with the five to 15 user clients, those people might not think they need you as much as they have in previous years. The inverse of that is that many of those small MSPs are going to start losing clients because they don’t know how to get their narrative and their value proposition together. Those clients are going to aggregate to the MSPs in your region who have the best go-to-market strategy, not the strongest stack, not the most experienced, the ones who have the cleanest, clearest narrative to the small business community of how that MSP is going to transform their life. So I do think there’s going to be an aggregation in some ways of clients towards the MSPs who have their stuff together. The second prediction I have that is also related to AI, is I believe that vibe coding is going to unfortunately or fortunately, become much easier, and I foresee that the pioneering the forefront MSPs are going to start using things like vibe coding to put together really functionally specific highly valuable resources that they can use as introductory offers or lead magnets. If you could give a practice manager or an office manager an application that could give her all of her resources in one place that’s HIPAA compliant and that could plug into all the apps that she’s already using, make it easier for her to organise her day, she’s going to use it. If you can come up with any resource like that, that can even help people do some basic helpdesk configuration themself, they’re going to use it. So I foresee that some MSPs who are jumping on iterative and generative AI in a really thought provoking way, deploying all of their expertise, rather than just trying to make a bunch of stuff as fast as they can, I think they’re going to develop resources that will become powerful lead magnets that will create more conversation and it will be a tractor pull in their entire MQL funnel. So that’s what I think the opportunity is for managed services in the next year, and I think that there is going to be an opportunity cost for anyone who doesn’t have the wherewithal and the gumption and the courage to take advantage of those ideas. Either way, I hope 2026 is an amazing year for you and your MSP. I sincerely wish you nothing but the best. Hi, this is Karl Palachuk, Owner of Small Biz Thoughts. Thank you Paul for giving me the opportunity to say a few things about what I think is coming in 2026 and how it’s going to affect your go-to-market strategies. I think there are two big trends you’re already aware of them, that you should consciously think about and say, okay, how do I go to market with intention controlling the message and deciding how I want to show up to clients and prospects? The first one is very easy – artificial intelligence – and the good news is small businesses have overwhelmingly said, wait, wait, wait, we don’t think it’s ready for prime time, we think it’s dangerous, we want to go very slow into it. What that means for you is that instead of pushing them into AI, you can actually make a fair amount of money by saying, hey, let me be your artificial intelligence advisor. I am not going to push you into AI, what I am going to do is help you determine how you might automate things in your business more effectively with or without AI. And how you can evaluate AI enabled pieces of your business that are being pushed by other vendors. As a technologist, you only have to stay one step ahead of your clients in order to lead them through new technologies. And also know if you are not leading them, somebody else will. Many people made a lot less money on the cloud because they basically waited until it was a commodity, figured out what other people were doing to make money and became the second tier of people following that business model. And that’s fine if you want to do that with AI, you’ve got some time. But it really is better to say, look, we are a leader in this industry. We lead with new technology for both clients and prospects. It’s good to put yourself out there as a professional investing in the industry and investing in new technology that comes along. You can rely on us for staying on the cutting edge and helping you make good decisions about your technology. That’s a powerful message and the SMB/SME market is absolutely ready to hear it. I think that’s a great go-to-market strategy for 2026. The other trend that’s happening is the massive mergers and acquisitions. And let me tell you the best way I think to go into market with that is to be a bespoke consultant. Literally say we are going to only automate when it improves service for the client, not because it makes life easy for us. The larger companies get, the more they have to treat their clients as just a number instead of human beings with problems and concerns and running a small business that’s got a thin margin of profit. Double down on client meetings. Make sure that you understand their business. Make sure that they engage you in conversations about what they should be doing going forward. Selling yourself as a hands-on consultant who really takes time to make their business as successful as possible, will really set you apart in a world where everyone else is saying, oh, I got to have 10% growth this quarter, so I need to get a whole bunch of clients and I will promise them anything and deliver very little, especially customer service. Customer service is the first victim of growing companies, and the larger they get, the harder it is for them to give one-on-one customer service that actually makes clients feel like someone is taking care of them. In other words, the fundamental skillset that got you where you are today is your most powerful tool as you move into 2026 and take on ever growing competition from global and national organisations that really just didn’t exist a few years ago. In either case, go with intention, decide how you want to show up in the market, make sure that you make a conscious decision by that, and do not just follow the trends and be a second tier money maker in 2026. I wish you all the best of everything you do in your company. This is Karl Palachuk, hoping you have a spectacular 2026. Hey, it’s Ian Luckett from the MSP Growth Hub. Here’s my predictions for 2026 for the MSP landscape and they’re going to be twofold. First things first is all around investing in your people and your leadership. Over the last year, we’ve been working with many high growth MSPs and really highly profitable MSPs. And the ones that are really winning are the ones who are investing in their people. They’re investing in the team that’s going to help you get out of the business and to help you to spend more time strategically rather than getting stuck in the business all of the time. How do we do that? We create our vision, our mission, our values. We are hearing people that used to poo poo this idea now thinking this is the best thing that’s ever happened. My team are connected, my team are aligned, everybody’s rowing in the same direction. We are employing people and they’re staying there not leaving after a short period of time. And the reason for that is because they’re in flow with you. They’re aligned with where you want to go with a business. You’ve been a bit of a vulnerable leader, and also we’ve got some amazing future leaders coming up as well. So how do you help your SDMs and your senior account managers and your senior people support you so that you can then lift yourself up? So I’m going to see a big insurgence in people actually spending more time on their leadership and spending more time on their people. The other one flips. That’s a little bit analog, isn’t it? That’s a little bit old school. The other one is around AI. Now, I know that with AI, you got shiny balls coming in from your left in your right up above an envelope, wherever it might…

Full show notes at the publisher

Does AI recommend your MSP? Dec 09, 2025

Show notes

The way that prospects are searching for a new MSP is changing. AI is now playing a key role in the research phase, and I’ve got three things you can do today to keep up. Also this week, discover the one action that KILLS sales for MSPs, and the mistakes you’re likely to make hiring your first sales person. Welcome to Episode 317 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge. Does AI recommend your MSP? The way that prospects are searching for a new MSP is changing dramatically. The old way where people just went onto Google and did their own research is increasingly being replaced by the new way, where someone gets AI to do the research phase for them and then just validates the suggestions made. That means you need to understand what the AI insisted buying journey is and make sure your MSP has all the correct marketing resources in place. You know how for years we’ve all been obsessed with SEO, search engine optimisation. Getting your keywords right, building back links, and just ranking higher on Google. That’s been the game for years. The game’s changing again, and if you’re not watching what’s happening with AI discovery, you could slowly find your MSP disappearing from view. Let me explain. So I was recently reading a pretty cool newsletter and it was about a company called, I think it’s pronounced “Docebo”. They’re not in our world, they sell something called a learning management system, goodness knows what that is. But they’ve been quietly killing it frankly, in a new world of what’s got many different names but seems to be being called “answer engine optimisation” or AEO. You may have heard me refer to it before in videos or on the podcast as GEO, but let’s call it AEO, answer engine optimisation, from here on forward. In simple terms, this is all about being discovered inside AI tools like ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, or Perplexity. That’s where many people now are now going to do their research. So instead of just going onto Google and typing What’s the best MSP for me or IT support near me, they’re asking ChatGPT, What’s the best IT support for a 20 person business that’s a legal practice or something like that. To use the example I was reading in the newsletter, they’re going on to ChatGPT and saying, What’s the best LMS, learning management system, for a 500 person company with a remote workforce? And if you’re not one of the companies that the AI mentions, then you don’t even get a chance. So that company I was telling you about, Docebo, they noticed this some time ago and they decided to go all in on giving AI the resources it needs to make sure they come up in that AI research. And now nearly 13% of their high intent leads, that’s a bit of a marketing term for people who actually go on to book demos, so for you a high intent lead will be someone who books a 15 minute call into your calendar. For that company, 13% of their high intent leads are now coming from AI discovery that’s gone up 400% in a year. And they’re doing this, because they’re a big business, but it’s all being powered by one person in their marketing team using the right strategy and a bit of clever AI automation. And here’s what I really found fascinating from reading this newsletter. They realise that the real battle here is no longer about generic keywords or anything like that… it’s actually about brand. So when people are using AI tools, they’ll get a recommendation and then they’ll take the brand and they’ll go onto Google and search for the brand name directly. So this company Docebo, they shifted their focus from trying to rank on Google for best LMS, which is their keyword, to making sure that more people actually knew their name, Docebo, which is a big mindset shift in your marketing. And if you’ve had an SEO driven strategy, you might need a similar big mindset shift. Because it means that the most important metric isn’t how high are we ranking on Google, it’s how many people are searching for our own brand. In other words, your reputation becomes your SEO. So you run an MSP and you might be thinking, well Paul, this is fascinating, but we are not playing at Docebo level, and of course you’re right. But this shift does affect you too because over the next couple of years, as we go into 2026 and then 2027, your prospects are going to stop Googling IT support this town or near me, and instead they are going to ask their preferred AI tool, Which IT companies in my area have great customer service and specialise in cyber security. And if those AI tools don’t know about you, if they can’t find enough trustworthy, well-structured up-to-date content about your business, then you’ll vanish from the shortlist before it’s even written. And that’s why now is the time to start building your discoverability. So I’ve got for you three things that you can do… Number one: Keep your website content fresh, structured and factual. So AI tools, they love data tables, they love clear headings in blogs and they love real case studies. Make sure you’ve got plenty of that on your website. Number two: Make sure your brand name is mentioned in lots of the right context, so obviously on your websites, but also if you can get other articles written about you elsewhere. Obviously if you can get mentions on review platforms where they actually put the business name in, that would be fantastic if you can get your customers to do that. And you might even try and build up mentions of your MSP in forums like Reddit or Quora. Not because the humans are going to go there to look for you, but because it’s going to help with your AI discoverability. Number three: Focus your SEO more on who you are and what problems you solve, rather than chasing random keywords that don’t convert. So yes, SEO is still going to be a thing going forward, but I think this is quite exciting because it’s hard if you are one of 50 or 60 MSPs in a town and someone else is already dominating traditional SEO for keywords, this is great, because now you are focusing your SEO on making sure that more people know about your MSP. And this company Docebo’s research and success in fact shows what’s possible. They’re now generating pipeline and leads and clients from AI searches, and they’re doing it right now. And they’ve done it not by gaming the system, but by creating genuinely useful high-trust content that AI can easily understand and find and surface and pass and turn into research for people. So here’s my opinion, just as we all have to learn SEO as part of our marketing. It’s something we’ve all had to do over the last couple of decades. Now we’ll all need to learn AEO over the next few years, and this really is the start of the next big shift in online visibility. And if your MSP isn’t being mentioned by the machines, it might as well not exist. This one action KILLS sales for MSPs There’s something that all MSPs do because it quickly solves a problem for a client, but it’s a disaster if your client watches you do it. It can completely change their relationship with you and actually make it a thousand times harder for you to sell them more strategic services in the future. So what is this thing? You’re going to laugh when I tell you because it’s something so simple, yet it is so dangerous. And I promise you that by eradicating it, you’re going to make more profit from your existing clients. I subscribe to hundreds of different email newsletters. Anywhere I can see value in learning from someone, well, I’m happy to be on their list and I dedicate just a little bit of time each day to reading email newsletters that top up my brain. Now, recently I got an email from a guy who actually writes good advice about productivity for high achievers, but I did a massive double take when I saw this in his email. So let me read it to you. It said, Hey Paul, you’ve probably heard the hype. Wake up at 4am and you’ll dominate the day, crush your goals and unlock next level productivity, right? Well, let me tell you what actually matters. This is what he’s writing in his email. He says, I’ve been waking up at 5am since 2013 and recently shifted to 4am when I started driving for Uber in March of this year. And here’s the truth, it’s not about the clock, it’s about what you do with the time once you are up. So that’s the end of his email. Now, that’s actually really good advice, but just listen to this line once more. I recently shifted to 4am when I started driving for Uber in March of this year. So please don’t think that I’m criticising this guy, and I’m certainly not criticising driving for Uber, that’s not my intention at all. You do what you need to do to survive, right? But this guy, in all of his marketing on his website, he’s positioning himself as someone who offers productivity consulting for high achievers and high achievers do not value advice from someone who gets up at four in the morning to drive an Uber. This is a massive disconnect between audience and message. And it’s no different for MSPs who visit a client site and get their knees dirty, plugging in cables under desks, or they answer the help desk phone for a password reset. Again, this is not a criticism, it’s just an observation. If a client sees you on the floor plugging in cables or talks to you regularly for low level tasks, frankly they’re very unlikely to ever hire you for strategic technology advice. You and I know that you can do both levels to a very high standard, but the clients don’t. You’ll make more money and keep clients longer by positioning yourself at a strategic level than you will by being positioned as doing work that anyone can do. So here’s a question for you. If you don’t have the resources to hire someone else to do this work for you right now, what can you do to hide the fact that you still do it yourself? MSPs: The mistakes you’ll make hiring your first sales person Featured guest: Robert Gillette founded the MSP Dojo in 2022 after helping a San Francisco based MSP grow from $10mm to $30mm as their lead Account Executive. He also Co-Founded the MSP Growth OS in 2024. Since then he’s helped hundreds of sales professionals raise their sales confidence to have more, better quality sales meetings. At the Growth OS he and his team are leading growth-oriented MSPs on the journey of transitioning from owner-led sales to an organic, predictable, and repeatable Sales Engine. When I speak to MSPs who’ve been running their own business for 5, 10 years or more, and they’re still doing all the sales in the business, you can understand that one of their goals is to get out of the sales and hire someone else to do it for them. The thing is, when you come to do this, you are going to make a series of very predictable mistakes. My special guest today is going to tell you what those mistakes are, how you can avoid them, and how you can hire the right first salesperson for your MSP, who’s going to make your life easier and generate you more revenue. Hi, my name is Robert Gillette, co-founder of the MSP Growth OS. I’m the head of content these days. And it is so cool to have you back on the podcast, Robert, thank you so much for joining us again. You’ve been on the show before and that was under a different business name. You were MSP Dojo back then, and I want to know so much about the MSP Growth OS, we’re going to talk about that towards the end of the interview. You and I were hanging out just a couple of months ago at ScaleCon 25 in New Orleans. Actually, we were on a big paddle boat thing, which was the VIP night, and we were batting away the insects from the Mississippi river, and we were talking about MSPs hiring their first salesperson, and that’s why we’ve got you back on the show today because that’s a massive, massive subject. So before we talk about that and all the mistakes that MSPs make when they go and hire their first salesperson, let’s just first of all find out a little bit about you. So tell us who is Robert Gillette? Yeah, I’m just a dumb sales guy who sold a bunch of revenue for an MSP and then decided that was too much work. And so I now coach MSPs and help them figure out how to get their own growth because sales is really hard for MSPs for very complex reasons. Oh, it is. And I think that’s a recurring theme on this podcast. We’ve been going, well, we’ve just celebrated six years, and it’s crazy how difficult MSPs find sales. They find it difficult doing their own sales. They find it difficult hiring other people to do their sales. And let’s focus in on that aspect. I think the last time you were on, and we’ll find the episode number that was where you were talking about doing your own sales I believe. In terms of hiring a salesperson, what’s the trigger that makes an MSP think, right, it’s time for me to go and find someone to do this. Is it because they’re sick of doing it themselves or is it because they think someone else is going to do a better job or ramp up the activity? Or is it all of those things? I think it’s all of those things, but probably the most common one is people that they just hate it. They don’t want to do it. It’s really hard. It’s super discouraging. It’s just incredibly difficult. The activity, the rejection, everything about it is almost the exact opposite of what a traditional IT professional might want to do with their life. And so people start this MSP, and then it grows for a little bit and they get some referrals. And then that comes the point where they’re like, we need more revenue. And then they got to go do sales. And pretty quickly they’re like, I hate this. And so they oftentimes want to hire a salesperson just to abdicate the responsibility to someone else. And that shows up as hiring a salesperson or a marketing company or a cold calling company or someone. It’s just make this your problem and not mine and I’ll give you money. And then that way if it doesn’t work, I can blame you and try with someone else. And that’s probably the most common reason why people outsource this function. So I completely agree with you there. And actually I think what compounds that and makes it even more of a problem is first of all, when MSPs do hire a sales resource, they actually throw all of marketing and sales at it. So they’re like, oh, great a salesperson. So you can create some audiences, you can do some content, you can generate some leads, you can warm those leads up, you can close those leads, you can account manage them, you can do all of these things. And the other compounding factor that also makes it difficult is the MSP who only does two sales meetings a month, takes on a full-time person and has no other plan to increase the number of sales meetings. What other mistakes do you see apart from those? Oh yeah. I mean, first of all, two meetings a month would be a miracle for some MSPs I talked to. They’re lucky if they get 10 a year. But I think the other big problem is that they don’t give them any kind of a process or plan to follow. They hire these people that have been really successful in other industries in sales, hopefully. And then what happens is they step into this job and they’re like, okay, well whose example am I following? And they can’t really follow the owner because they’ve never been successful in that role. And so they oftentimes are just shooting in the dark at what may or may not work. And then again, when they’re not successful, the MSP owner has someone to blame that’s not themselves. Can I suggest something possibly controversial and you can agree or disagree with me on this? Yeah, please. You and I have spoken to enough MSPs who even though they don’t do more than let’s say 10 sales meetings a year, they will close six of those or seven of those. And so almost every MSP I’ve spoken to where the owner does the sales, they’ll say to me, if I can get in front of someone, I close loads, I close three out of four or 90%. And someone said to me a few years ago, and it was on this podcast,…

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MSPs: Do this daily… or fall behind Dec 02, 2025

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The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge Welcome to Episode 316 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week… MSPs: Do this daily… or fall behind: Find and protect a little bit of time every day to learn something that makes you better. Because if you want your MSP to grow, you have to grow first. Turn $1 into THOUSANDS for your MSP: Let me tell you the true value of every dollar of new MRR – monthly recurring revenue – that you generate. And how one small upsell today could still be paying you in 10 years time. Why your MSP doesn’t charge higher prices: There are all sorts of psychological and emotional reasons that MSPs don’t put up their prices. My guest is an expert at pricing and positioning, and he’s going to tell you how you can name your price. The Marketing Minute: Don’t miss this simple tip to reach your dream clients. MSPs: Do this daily… or fall behind The amount of information and ideas is increasing all the time, and it’s so easy as an MSP to feel like you are falling behind. But you don’t have to be a slave to all the digital noise out there. In fact, it’s much more powerful if you block it out and instead find and protect a little bit of time every day to do this core activity. Let me tell you how to ignore the noise, what this activity is and why the world’s most successful MSPs do this every day. Let’s talk about learning. Now, wait, before you roll your eyes and think, oh Paul, I just don’t have time for training, stick with me for a second because I’m not talking about signing up for an MBA or sitting in a three day marketing seminar with bad coffee and uncomfortable chairs. I’m talking about setting aside 30 minutes a day to learn something that makes you better… as a business owner, as a leader, as a marketer, as an MSP. Half an hour, that’s it. I mean, it doesn’t sound much, but over a year, even if you’re just doing it weekdays, that’s well over a hundred hours of focused improvement. Imagine what you could learn, what you could change in that time. And the best part is, learning doesn’t have to be formal. In fact, the best kind of learning often isn’t formal. You could be listening to a business audiobook just while you’re walking the dog – that’s learning. You could be watching a great YouTube channel or listening to or watching a podcast while you’re making lunch – that’s learning too. You could go for a coffee, sit outside and actually read that book that you bought six months ago. You know, the one that’s been sitting on your desk looking at you accusingly gathering dust. All of this counts. The point isn’t what you are learning or how you are learning it, it’s that you are building a habit, a routine of small daily improvements. Because that’s how the most successful business owners think. They’re constantly upgrading themselves, not in big leaps, but in consistent steps. And as you run an MSP, there is a lot to learn. Marketing, leadership, sales, strategy, systems, time management. I mean even personal stuff like mindset or communication. Every small improvement in all of these areas has a direct effect on your business, which has a direct effect on your personal life and your earning capacity. Here’s what I recommend. Treat your 30 minutes of learning as non-negotiable. I mean, literally put it in your calendar, protect it like it was a client meeting, because in a way it is one, it’s a meeting of you with your future self. And if you’re not really sure where to start, just pick one thing that’s holding back your business right now. Maybe you struggle with consistency in marketing, or managing your team, or handling sales conversations. So find a book or a podcast or an online course that helps you with that. And remember, you don’t need to finish it all in one go. Just start. Do a chapter a day, one chapter one episode, one video at a time. And soon you really will find that your thinking has leveled up. You’ll be coming up with new ideas, making better decisions and solving problems faster, all because you made that small daily commitment to get just a little bit better. So here’s your challenge then get in your calendar right now, schedule 30 minutes every day, every weekday at least for learning. And this could be first thing in the morning, it could be your lunch break or it could be after work. Just get it in the calendar and make it happen. Because if you want your MSP to grow, then you have to grow first. Turn $1 into THOUSANDS for your MSP We all know that monthly recurring revenue is key to your success as an MSP, but have you ever sat down to work out just how valuable it actually is? Let me tell you the true value of every dollar of new MRR that you generate. And once I do, you are going to look completely differently at things like quarterly business reviews and client update meetings. MRR is one of the best things about your MSP business model, but I bet you’ve never thought about it like this… Imagine you wanted to keep building your MSP for 10 more years and then you’re going to exit, you’re going to sell the business. And today you sell one additional service to one of your clients, and it’s just like $4 per user per month and they have 10 users. So that works out at $40 of new recurring revenue, four users at $4 a month, $40 a month of recurring revenue. You with me so far? That’s $480 a year. Now if they keep buying that over the next 10 years, that of course adds up to $4,800 of revenue, right? And that’s some lifetime value there in a $4 a month service. But this gets even better. Let’s say that you buy this service for $2 per user per month. So you are making a 50% profit margin and $2,400 of gross profit across the next 10 years, which is so cool. Now, I know you’ve got to keep the business for 10 years to deliver it, but it’s not like you have to do anything. I’m assuming you are buying that in at $2. You are selling it out at $4. We’ve not even talked about price rises here, $2,400 of gross profit over the next 10 years for doing nothing. And you know what? When you come to sell the business, this puts even more money in your pocket. So let’s assume when you come to sell it, you get one times annual recurring revenue. So you take a whole year’s worth of monthly recurring revenue. And a lot of MSPs when they sell, they sell for one times annual recurring revenue. So that simple upsell is going to add another $480 onto your sales price because if you think about it, that annual of that $4 x 10 users x 12 months is $480. So that’s going to go onto the money that is given to you to buy the business off you. All of that cash, huge amounts of cash from selling one $4 a month service. So tell me again, why aren’t you selling more monthly recurring revenue services to your clients every single day? If you just think about it that way, that one small upsell today could still be paying you in 10 years time and make your business more valuable when you come to sell it. Compounding doesn’t just work in finance, it works in your MSP too. So a question for you. What could you sell today that your future self will really thank you for? Why your MSP doesn’t charge higher prices Featured guest: Justin Neale spent 25 years in the aviation software space, supporting the world’s airlines and building global customer service teams before founding the Value Alchemists. He now helps MSP owners unlock their biggest profit opportunity, getting their pricing right. Through understanding customer psychology and value perception, he helps businesses increase their profits without losing customers. If you can be the most expensive MSP in your area, then you make more profit for the same amount of work, which is beautiful when you hear it said like that. But I know that there are all sorts of psychological and emotional reasons that MSPs don’t put up their prices. The same reasons that stop you being the most expensive in your marketplace. My special guest today is an expert at pricing and positioning, and he’s going to tell you right now how you can name your price. Hi, I’m Justin Neale. I’m the founder of the Value Alchemists. And thanks so much for joining me on the podcast, Justin. We met a few months ago, I seem to remember at the Managed Services Summit, which is a show here in London in the UK, and there were three or four speakers in a row. You were on stage, then there was another speaker, and then I was on stage. And we got to talk backstage a little bit, and we were comparing notes and I loved what you had to say about value, and I think all of the MSPs listening to this on the podcast or watching this on YouTube are going to love what you have to say as well. So before we jump into demonstrating value and why MSPs are so bad at demonstrating value and therefore so bad at collecting the extra money that you get from demonstrating huge value, let’s first of all just dive back into your career, because you’ve come out of a big long corporate career in the last few years. That’s right. So I was in IT specifically the aviation space for 25 years, last with Airbus Group and supporting all of the airlines around the world with their software solutions. But a big piece of that, and one of my roles was we did the revenue management and the pricing for the airlines, which was how I really got started looking at the psychology behind pricing and that kind of fascinating world of how much will people pay for something, and it can be wildly different depending on the situation. And so when I left corporate life, I kind of thought, well, what problem can I help other businesses solve, and pricing was one of them. That’s so interesting. So that’s just opened a whole new area of knowledge in my head. So it never occurred to me that the manufacturers of the planes would actually help the airlines with pricing. So in terms of that kind of assistance, is it a case of, right, you’ve got your standard Airbus A360 or whatever the model is, and you could get 400 seats in or you could get 380 in, and obviously that has impact on fuel and impacts on revenue and stuff like that. Was it that kind of modeling or was it a much more simplistic pricing advice? That software product was in another aviation company, but on the Airbus side of things, the airlines themselves will look for ways to differentiate and ways that they can look different to their competitors and make it very difficult to be compared on price. And you’ll only really see that when you start to try to find a flight and you’ve got competitive airlines that you could choose from. But equally, the moment you choose which cabin class you choose, the ancillaries, there are thousands of permutations for essentially the same thing that is going to take you from A to B. And yet the price point can go from 25 pounds on a cheap economy ticket to thousands of pounds for a first class ticket for essentially the same thing. Yeah, it’s fascinating. And I think airline pricing, I mean, it’s almost an obsession isn’t it, for people who like to travel. Here in the UK we have two budget airlines that are in competition with each other and anybody in the UK or who has traveled into the UK or through Europe using either EasyJet or Ryanair, which are the two sort of big budget airlines here, will know that an EasyJet is cheap. I don’t mind cutting corners and having to carry my bag on and not have any coffee and all of that stuff. And then you’ve got Ryanair, which essentially offers exactly the same service, but there’s something about it that seems cheaper. Cheaper in that people will choose it because it seems to be a cheaper way to fly, but you also feel that they care less. I’m sure I’ve read something somewhere that Ryanair was threatening to charge its customers to use the toilet on the plane. I’m sure that’s not legal. So when you talk about airlines differentiating themselves in anything other than price, that kind of positioning in my mind, that may not be the position that everyone has of those particular airlines, but is that the kind of thing that you’re talking about? Yeah, absolutely. And when you look at airlines differentiating on cabin classes, for example, but it’s not just that, it’s things like priority boarding, giving you the fast track security, but then if you’ve got fast track security, you’ve then got more time in the airport. So then you want lounge access. So it’s a bit like going to get a higher car when you go to the car rental desk. Yes, you get the car rental for $15 a day, but by the time you’ve left, you’re paying $100 a day because you’ve got the tyre protection, you’ve bought a tank of fuel, you’ve got the enhanced insurance, and you might drop it off at a different airport or have late check-in. There’s no end of the ways, but they’re always selling you things that you want at that point in time and they’re giving you that core service initially, but then it’s very easy for them to upsell everything else because actually they’re solving the next problem for you and it’s a step along the way. And I think this is where there are a lot of those models which I’ve seen in that aviation space, which apply brilliantly across other industries. It’s just that pricing maturity maybe isn’t just there yet. Yeah, that’s really interesting. The example you just gave there of the car hire is right at the beginning of Alex Hormozi’s newish book, which is called $100M Money Models, which I don’t know if you’ve heard of, Justin. Oh, I’ve not read that one yet. I need to, that’s on my list. It’s going to explode your head because everything Alex Hormozi does is fantastic. And I think he’s written a book that’s right in your world. He was selling bundles of 200 of those per person. So have a look on eBay. There’s bound to be some cheap ones on eBay, which is interesting. I’ve read his first couple, but yeah, not that one yet. Oh, if you love those, you’ll definitely love this. So let’s take this pricing and value idea and then transfer this over to MSPs because it would be very easy as an MSP owner to listen to this and say, well, yes, you rent a basic car and then they upgrade you to a better model and they upgrade you to the insurance and they say, would you like us to fill it with petrol or gas for you? And you can again see with the airlines that I’m happy to pay extra for priority service and express check-in and more legroom and all of that stuff. But when you apply that in a B2B sense and you look at that from an MSP’s point of view, where are the upsells there? Where is the applicable opportunity to add value and bump the price up? The majority of MSPs look like they do the same thing as one another. So they end up competing purely on price because it’s very hard for people to understand what’s different. And so where it really comes into play is when you start to really look at niching down and thinking about what problem do I want to solve? But more importantly for who? So if we take the case of veterinary practices, for example. Lots of people have pets, especially post COVID, everyone seemed to get a dog. But veterinary practices have their own specific software they use, their own specific kind of ways of working, their own specific challenges. Now, let’s say you are an MSP and one of your niches is veterinary practices, actually your knowledge and understanding of the tools they using their operational constraints, how important it is that if that system goes down or their access to that system, they can’t check in any patients, they can’t quote any work, they can’t do anything. And speaking their language, understanding their problems and being able to tailor your service very specifically to their requirements means that the conversation isn’t about price anymore. So they can’t really compare you to anyone else anymore because no one is speaking that same language. And if you can solve a problem for them, then you can charge a significant premium for it. Now, I believe that many M…

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Don’t miss out: Hot new MSP sales book Nov 25, 2025

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The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge Welcome to Episode 315 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week… Don’t miss out: Hot new MSP sales book: If sales is one of the biggest headaches within your MSP, then heads up, you need good advice and a solid plan… and I’ve got just the solution. The worst advice for MSPs: MSP growth strategies should vary dependant on context. Do you know which plan is right for you? Let’s find out… How an MSP built £8m of recurring revenue: Let me introduce you to an MSP owner who built his business from nothing to £8m annual recurring revenue. He reveals the marketing that’s worked the best for him and what he would do today if he was growing an MSP from stratch. The Marketing Minute: Don’t miss this simple trust building tip that’ll win you more clients. Don’t miss out: Hot new MSP sales book If sales is one of the biggest headaches within your MSP, then heads up, you need good advice and a solid plan. And of course, there’s a lot of noise out there with a lot of conflicting advice on how to improve your MSP’s sales. Let me introduce you to a true expert who has some of the best sales advice out there. How do you plug his knowledge into your MSP? Well, he’s written a brand new book, let me tell you about it, and the difference it’ll make to your MSP sales. Most MSPs I meet really don’t love selling. But here’s the thing, if you can’t sell your services confidently, you are always going to be a step behind. Now, a couple of months ago, I was lucky enough to be at ScaleCon ‘25 in New Orleans, which by the way is a fantastic city. Slightly dangerous, but it is a really, really fun city. And the event was packed with about 400 smart MSPs. So we had loads of great conversations. There were so many ideas, I got loads of ideas and I know the MSPs there got loads of ideas about marketing and growing your business. And while I was there, I bumped into a whole bunch of people that I know, some based in the UK and a lot of the people I know in the channel are in the US or Canada or other countries. So I bumped into someone I’ve only met in real life once before, but I know him really well. He’s been on my podcast a number of times. His name is Brian Gillette. And he handed me a copy of his brand new book. I did actually wonder at the time if I was one of the first people on the planet outside of his team to get hold of this book. So it’s called, and it’s got a swear word in the title and I’m not going to say the swear word but bravo to Brian for being the first person I think in the MSP space to put a swear word in the title of his book, but it’s called How to Sell a Sh*tload of Managed Services (without selling your soul). I’ve got the book here, let’s have a quick flick through. I mean, this is absolutely packed with information and advice. And Brian is an absolute true genius at MSP sales. He really understands that it’s an emotional thing more than it’s a cognitive thing. He really understands how you can connect with and engage with and influence the ordinary business owners and managers that you are sitting down and having sales meetings with. So let me just flick through, have a look at some of the different things here. Here we go, so this is a good one, this is about pains and outcomes. So for example, if someone says to you, this is their pain – Our files didn’t sync, we almost submitted the wrong one to the IRS (in the UK of course that would be HMRC) – then the outcome, because in this section of the book he’s talking about turning pains into outcomes, he says – Well look, we monitor your backups and we monitor your syncs daily so there are no surprises. So essentially we will automate that problem away. Here’s another pain – A single broken device slows down the entire team – and he suggests you turn that into an outcome, which is – Well, we fix stuff fast or we swap it out in the same day. And that’s just off one page. There’s 170 odd pages here of absolute gold dust because it talks not just about the theory and how you should be influencing people and the process you should be following, but it gets right down into a whole ton of really practical stuff. So go and get this book. It’s called, again, editing the title, How to Sell a Sh*tload of Managed Services (without selling your soul) by Brian Gillette. You can get it on Amazon. And I really do think you should get this. You should get this if you are doing the selling in your business, and you should definitely get it if you’ve got other people doing the selling in the business, because let’s be honest, we know that MSPs don’t get enough practice selling. If you’re only doing one proper sales meeting every month or every other month, where do you get to do that practice and where do you get to improve and constantly tweak and change and make your sales process better? You don’t. So something like this, a book like this that helps you to sharpen your skills, even just a tiny bit, making the axe sharper as it goes, that’s very much worth it. Please do go and get that book. And honestly, even if you just take a few ideas from it, I reckon you’ll sell more, close faster, and feel way more confident the next time you’re sitting across from a prospect. The worst advice for MSPs There might be 40,000 MSPs in the world, but yours is unique because it’s run by you and it does things in the way that you want them to be done. Every MSP is like this in the same way that all humans are unique. We’re all broadly the same, but each of us is very different in our ways. So if you assume that this is the case, you must agree with me that when it comes to building your MSP’s growth strategy context is everything. Every week I have discussions with MSP owners around the world and often the conversation naturally moves on to which growth strategy they should use to grow their business. And while I have dozens of different growth strategies tucked away in my head, my job when giving advice is to figure out which is the right strategy for each of the business owners I’m speaking to. The growth strategy advice that I’d give to an MSP owner is dramatically affected by the context of their business. Well, let’s imagine there are two MSP owners, let’s call them MSP owner A and MSP owner B. So MSP owner A is 45 years old and he’s happy to do another 10, 15, maybe even 20 years in the business. He’s making good money, he’s enjoying the work, and he just can’t see himself leaving that business anytime soon. Plus he’s got young children and he wants to spend time with them, but also keep his really expensive car on the drive. He wants the nice house, he wants the regular expensive vacations or holidays with his family. So that is the context of him and his situation and his business. Now, MSP owner B is in a wholly different situation. So this guy is late fifties, so a lot older than the first guy he’s done his 25 years, he’s got one eye on the door and he’s ready to exit that business in two to three years time. So these two businesses could have exactly the same revenue, they could have the same staffing levels, they could even have the same resource levels, they could be the same businesses next to each other in the same street, in the same town. And yet I’d advise completely different strategies for each of those. So for MSP owner A, that’s the younger guy who wants to stay in the business, there should be some aggressive growth strategies in place, which means going after new clients because of course that business owner has got 10 to 20 years to capitalise on those new clients and take all of their MRR over the years ahead. And it can cost you thousands to acquire a new client. It’s probably a lot higher than you think it is. So that’s the right thing to do if you want to spend years more in the business and collect that money from getting the ROI (return on investment) from actually winning that new client. And side note here, if you want to figure out the cost of acquiring a new client for your business, take every single penny that you’ve spent on marketing in the last three years, including all of your time, every single hour of your time that you’ve put in, then divide it by the number of new clients you’ve won. And it’s almost guaranteed to be a four, sometimes even a five figure sum. Side note over, back to MSP owner B. So this is the older guy now he’s planning to get out of the next two to three years. So he’s only got a shorter period of time to recoup his investment in new clients. So in a business like that, I’d be advising him to focus on growing net profits by increasing MRR from existing clients. Because when he comes to put the business up for sale, he’ll get a multiple of his EBITDA, which is basically an accounting term – earnings before interest tax depreciation and amortisation – EBITDA, think of it as a kind of a net profit. He’ll likely get a multiple of that, or he might get a multiple of his annual recurring revenue, which is all of your MRR times 12. So of course he should keep winning new clients where he can because it shows that you are still actively doing sales if you win 3, 4, 5 clients over the year. But if he’s only won a couple of new clients in those three years, he’s working himself out. It’s no big deal really. In fact, it’s less of a deal than if his EBITDA was lower and his monthly recurring revenue was in decline because that shows a business that’s in decline. So as long as his EBITDA is going up and his monthly recurring revenue is going up and he’s winning new clients, even if it’s not as fast as he would like to, then that’s okay. So with MSP owner B, this older guy, I would focus him on upselling to existing clients using tools like the profit matrix and strategic reviews. And you can learn more about those at my website, mspmarketingedge.com, go to the knowledge hub and just type in profit matrix or type in strategic reviews. We’ve got hundreds and hundreds of articles about tools like those. And of course, MSP owner B should focus on fantastic account management as well to make sure that as few clients as possible leave. So do you see the difference between each of those situations? Do you understand why you need the context before you can start to look at what would be the plan, the strategy to grow my business? A question for you then. What would you advise in each of these situations? How an MSP built £8m of recurring revenue Featured guest: Mit Patel is the Founder and CEO of Assurix, a UK platform that helps Managed Service Providers (MSPs) prove cyber security and operational maturity through continuous, evidence-based assurance. A former MSP owner, he’s focused on raising professional and security standards across the MSP industry. I’ve got a real treat for you right now because I’m going to introduce you to an MSP owner who built up his business from nothing to 8 million annual recurring revenue and then sold that business. He’s going to reveal to us the marketing that he’s done over the years that’s worked the best for him and what he would do today if he was intensely growing an MSP. I think you are going to learn so much in the next 15 minutes or so as I introduce you to our special guest. Hi, my name’s Mit Patel. I’ve been in the MSP space for around 25 years now. I built and sold my MSP called Netstar, and now I have founded and started a new organisation called Assurix. And it’s so cool to have you on the podcast Mit because it’s funny how the universe sends you messages that you have to interview people because about four or five different people totally independently said to me, Paul, you need to get Mit on your podcast. Mit’s exited MSP, he’s done this amazing work, he knows loads about marketing. So it’s great to actually finally get you on the podcast and thank you so much. So you said you’ve been in the space for about 25 years, but you actually achieved something pretty fantastic and something that very few MSPs manage to do within that time. Do you want to just give us the brief version of your MSP, Netstar, and what you did and how you built it up and what the end game was that you reached with that? Yeah, sure. So Netstar was founded way back in 2002. We were incorporated I think in June, 2002. We went for 19 and a half years before exit. We got up to around 8 million recurring revenue, and we learned a lot along the way, And I learned a lot along the way of that whole journey breaking loads and loads of things all over the place. One of the key things to our success was that we always had a passion for sales and marketing, especially marketing, and I think that’s been really evident on the size that we were actually able to grow to. Yeah, I can imagine. And I mean obviously over nearly 20 years, marketing has changed. B2B marketing has changed immeasurably in those 20 years, but if you were to sort of look back and think, what were the big pieces, the big things you did that gave you the greatest leaps, the biggest jumps, what would you say those were? Yeah, so I think from a marketing perspective, the first thing that we really invested a lot of money in was pay-per-click advertising. And this was back in 2010, and maybe it doesn’t work as effective as it did back then, but we were getting lots of leads of pay-per-click advertising. We were spending up to £10,000 a month on it. And I think in my lifetime, I’ve spent almost £1million in pay-per-click advertising. So we’ve seen what’s worked, what doesn’t. So that was the first step really, the pay-per-click marketing angle of actually getting leads in. And then I think really focusing and harnessing down on what our ideal customer looked like, because in a really lucky position that we were getting so many leads, we could be really picky about the types of customers that we engaged with and worked with and made sure that they were always going to be a right fit for us. And we essentially built up lots of customers in concentrated verticals and were able to dominate that. And from a marketing point of view, tell us what the advantages of working within a vertical and really getting to know that vertical. I had the same conversation with someone this morning who was telling me that they service everybody, like five or six different sets of these target companies. And essentially when you have a vertical, your marketing message is so much easier, it can be targeted, your operational delivery can be easier as well. And back to why your marketing and sales can be easier. If you’re just dealing with financial service companies, for example, you know what they’re most likely going to need from an IT perspective, they’re going to have some type of FCA compliance they have to rely on, they’re going to have all sorts of rules and regulations that you are going to know about and you are able to talk about to them. So if you don’t mind, let’s drill into a specific example, and I appreciate you’re not in the MSP anymore, but if you look back at Netstar, tell us one of your most successful verticals and exactly how did you tailor the marketing to that vertical? So you’ve given us a great generic example, but for example, did you go to their trade shows? Did you do specific materials for them? Did you change the conversations that you were having with people within that vertical? Yeah, so I can tell you quite an interesting story. So we had a lot of organisations in real estate Grosvenor Street in London was where all the real estate people seemed to have offices. And we had 14 clients on one street. Some of them were door to door literally. And these are very big office spaces we’re talking about. So part of our messaging was always around who we already work with, why we’re good in your industry, even messaging around the type of software that they use in that particular industry, saying that we’re experts or we’ve worked with that vendor before. And it just builds a picture. I suppose if you are a…

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Danger! Never assume your MSP’s clients are loyal Nov 18, 2025

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The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge Welcome to Episode 314 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week… Danger! Never assume your MSP’s clients are loyal: It’s hard for MSPs to win a client, but when they do join you, they stay with you for years. But what if that retention leads to a false sense of security? The reason your MSP’s marketing is so hard: MSPs often struggle, not just with knowing what marketing to do, but also with implementing it. And yet implementation is the secret sauce. Does your MSP spend this much acquiring a new client?: My special guest is a true marketing expert and he’s very good at focusing the MSPs that he works with on two figures – the cost of acquiring a new client and their average lifetime value – and how these figures affect their marketing. The Marketing Minute: Don’t miss this game changing CRM marketing tip. Danger! Never assume your MSP’s clients are loyal As an MSP, have you been lulled into a false sense of security? It’s hard for you to win a client, but when they do join you, they stay with you for years, right? But what if that retention was not because they’re in love with your service, but because it’s such a mind blowing event for them to think about switching to another MSP, so it just feels easier to stay with you. If this hasn’t happened to you yet, are you confident that right now a client isn’t secretly looking into leaving? Here’s a simple solution to proactively work on your retention without having to do tons of extra work, and you might even generate some extra revenue along the way. Most MSPs I meet are rightly proud of how long their clients stay with them. You’ll hear them say things like, Oh yeah, we’ve still got our first ever client from 10 years ago, or, Our retention rate is 98%. And on the surface that’s brilliant, but here’s the uncomfortable truth… a lot of that so-called loyalty isn’t really loyalty at all. It’s just inertia. Your clients aren’t staying because they’re wildly in love with your service, they’re staying because it feels too hard to leave. Think about it, moving to a new MSP is a massive hassle. It’s complicated, it’s risky, and they don’t really understand all of the tech side of it anyway. So even if they’re not a hundred percent happy, it’s easier to just stick with what they’ve got. That’s called inertia loyalty. And the danger is it gives MSPs a false sense of security. You might think you’re doing a great job keeping clients happy, but the moment one of those loyal clients gets a real reason to look around, they will. Maybe a competitor reaches out at just the right time. Maybe there’s a big mistake or your main contact leaves. Suddenly that inertia disappears and the client that would never leave is gone. If this hasn’t happened to you yet, I promise it will at some point. It’s horrible. None of us wants to think about it, but it’s also a wake up call. And the way I see it, we can prevent it. So what’s the answer? Well, you can’t just hope that loyalty lasts, you’ve got to work at it. You’ve got to turn those stuck clients into bonded clients, the kind who stay because they genuinely want to. And the good news is this doesn’t take huge gestures. It’s about doing small things regularly that make your clients feel valued, connected and confident that you are on their side. Here are a few ways to get you started… Number one: Schedule regular non-tech calls. So not ticket reviews, not project updates, just a short friendly catch up every quarter. Ask them how their business is doing, what’s changed, what they’re focusing on, and just show that you care about them as people and not just devices. I mean, really this is basic account management and you don’t need a separate account manager to do it. You could make one call a week to a different client and achieve this exact effect. Interestingly, some of these calls will act as mini QBRs (quarterly business reviews), although I prefer to call them strategic reviews because quarterly is overkill. And what I mean by that is that when you’re chatting to your clients about their business and their future, some of them will give you opportunities to sell them something else. And when I say sell, I don’t really mean pushing something they don’t really want or need. I mean, giving them an answer to a problem that they already have. There are many more things that your clients would buy from your MSP if only you had more conversations with them and discovered what those opportunities were. Number two: Share micro wins. When your team prevents downtime or spots a phishing attempt or saves a client from an outage, tell all of your clients. Don’t assume they know how much value you deliver. A quick email saying, Oh, we caught this before it became an issue. And maybe even if you sorted that out for another client and therefore you could stop it being an issue for this client, that would just help to reinforce why they keep paying you. Number three: Celebrate milestones. Client anniversaries, staff birthdays, major business wins. Take a note of them and send a little message or a card or something like that. It’s simple, it’s human, and it helps you to stand out. Number four: Ask for feedback and then act on it. Not just surveys, but actual conversations. Hey, how are we doing? Is there anything we could do to make life easier for you? And then follow up when you do something about it because clients really do remember that. Number five: Keep showing them the future. Don’t let your relationship be about keeping things running. Be that MSP that nudges them forward. Show them new ideas, new tools and new efficiencies. Clients bond with the MSP that helps them progress. So if you do these things regularly, not as one-offs, but as habits, as a system that’s baked into the business, then you’ll build relationships that go way beyond inertia. Because real loyalty isn’t built on contracts or complexity, it’s built on connection, trust, and the feeling that their MSP is always looking out for them. The reason your MSP’s marketing is so hard Generating leads and winning new clients for your MSP has nothing to do with coming up with creative marketing ideas. It’s actually much simpler than that. To have better marketing and win new clients, you need one magic ingredient. Let me tell you what that ingredient is and how to bake it into the very core of your MSP. I’ve been back in the Wild West for a few months now. What’s the wild West? I mean the MSP sub Reddit, I do find it a mostly negative place where great questions are hijacked by angry people, hiding behind anonymity. They very quickly and frankly quite readily fire machine guns at other people just because they have differing opinions. Anyway, I digress. But recently I set up a new alerting system to tell me when anyone talks about MSP marketing on Reddit, and it’s been pinging away two or three times a week. So I’ve had a good look through months and months of threats for the first time in years. And it struck me once again, just how many MSPs struggle with their marketing. In fact, they struggle not just with knowing what to do, but also they struggle with implementing it. And yet implementation is the secret sauce. It’s the magic ingredient. I know lots of very smart business owners who don’t achieve anywhere near what they’re capable of because they can’t consistently implement well. And the opposite is also true. I know of lots of average business owners who are doing very well because they are excellent implementers. And this principle applies not just to your marketing, but to all aspects of your business. I’d rather be a less naturally smart but good at implementing kind of guy than the other way round. In fact, maybe I already am. Now, luckily, implementation is not a fixed natural talent that you are born with. It’s something you develop, you improve, and you grow. And if you are struggling to implement great marketing, please let me help you. Now that it’s November, most of 2025 has gone. So let me ask you a question. What progress have you made on implementing your marketing so far this year? If the answer is *hangs head in shame and admits*, actually, Paul, nowhere near as much as I’d hoped, then there are two ways that I can help you. First, let me give you an out and out plug. With my MSP Marketing Edge membership for our 700 plus members around the world, we give them a system for their marketing, we break that system down into easy to follow tasks and we give them all of the marketing content that they need. And for those who struggle to get it done, we have a done for you team so they can get their marketing done for them. So you can see if that’s available in your area or not because we only work with one MSP per area. Go to mspmarketingedge.com. And the idea behind that is if your marketing is implemented by other people – and my team, that’s all they do, they implement MSPs marketing for them – you can see that that’s a powerful way to get it implemented. You essentially just outsource it to someone that you trust. Now, the other way I can help you right now is by giving you three easy ways to make implementation less of a headache in your business. Easy way number one: Build marketing into your routine. So think of it like going to the gym. If you wait until you feel like it, it’s never going to happen, but if it’s on the calendar, let’s say every weekday at 9am or whatever works for you, then it becomes a habit. Book 90 minutes and protect 90 minutes every working day to work on your marketing. Close your PSA, mute Teams. Treat it like a client project, because it is in fact, it’s the most important client project you’ve got. It’s your own business and working on implementing stuff within your own business. Easy idea number two: Don’t do it all yourself. You are great at running an MSP, but not necessarily writing blog posts or creating social media graphics. So just get help. You can outsource marketing to experts or delegate parts of it internally. Maybe someone on your team enjoys writing or social media, so give them ownership of it. And if you’re using something like the MSP Marketing Edge, most of the hard work’s already done for you, your job is simply to make sure it’s actually implemented. Easy idea number three: Keep score, because what gets measured gets done. If you’re serious about consistency, track it. Use a simple spreadsheet or dashboard, list your key marketing actions and tick them off weekly. Sent your weekly email? Tick. Posted a daily post on LinkedIn? Tick. Asked a client for a Google review? Tick. You’ll be amazed how motivating it becomes when you can see visible progress even from small consistent actions. So that’s it. Make it routine, get help and keep score. And remember, marketing success doesn’t come from doing big one-off marketing campaigns because you just end up doing tiny amounts of activity across the year. Instead, it comes from doing dozens of small actions, doing them consistently and doing them day after day, week after week. The MSPs who win at marketing aren’t necessarily the best marketers. They’re the ones who implement the most. Does your MSP spend this much acquiring a new client? Featured guest: Nate Freedman runs two brands built for one purpose: helping MSPs grow. Tech Pro Marketing is the agency side: done-for-you lead generation. MSP Sites is the platform: websites and tools built from the same playbook he’s used for years. His focus is simple: take what actually works to get MSPs leads, strip out the fluff, and make it easy for IT business owners to put into action. Do you know exactly how much it costs to acquire a new customer for your MSP? If you do, you are definitely ahead of the pack because most MSPs don’t have a clue. There’s another side to this, which is what’s the average lifetime value of that new customer to your business? My special guest today is a true marketing expert and someone I’m delighted to call a friend, and he’s very, very good at focusing the MSPs that he works with on these two figures, and therefore how it affects their marketing. He’s also in the last year started being advised directly by Alex Hormozi, and you are going to love some of the big risks and the changes he’s made to his business since then. Hi, I am Nate Freedman from Tech Pro Marketing and MSP Sites. I help MSPs win new clients and it’s been my mission for the last eight years to do so. And thank you so much for joining me back on the show, Nate. It’s been too long. And actually you and I were together a couple of months ago at ScaleCon25 in New Orleans. We were the naughty table at the back. So Nate found himself a table off to the left, there were about 400 MSPs at this amazing show, and Nate got the table at the back off to the left where no one could really hear us and we were just whispering little ideas to each other and occasionally you heckled some of the speakers on the stage, which was pretty cool. But it was amazing to hang out with you and I said to you, you’ve got to come back on the podcast. There’s so many things I want to talk to you about today, before we jump in and we start talking about them. And particularly we’re going to talk about ROI and we’re going to talk about your experience with Alex Hormozi, which is a very cool story. But before we start talking about those, for those people who haven’t heard of you yet, just tell us who are you Nate Freedman. You haven’t listened to Paul’s entire back catalog because I think it has been about maybe five years. Six years. Yeah, so for me, I started a lot of MSPs where I was interested in computers in high school. Me and you, Paul, have a similar story where, interested in computers, got more interested in web and online marketing, that’s kind of where I developed my interest. So for me, long story short, I went on a website called Upwork about 10 years ago thinking about leaving my corporate career. And I got a gig doing a website and SEO for a hypnotist in Australia. Not going to go too deep into the world of quit smoking hypnosis, but every time that she got a new appointment, she made $500 and she loved the SEO work that I was doing because it was driving real revenue. Long story short, worked with a bunch of different niches, kind of similar to you. Eventually found my way back to the computer support world and then shifted my agency’s focus to only helping IT support companies, specifically MSPs mostly who serve their local market, generate leads and win new customers. It’s been a journey over the past eight years. I think when I started, like a lot of people I underestimated the challenge, thought it was going to be as easy as that quit smoking hypnotist deal. But what I realised it was a lot harder, but also where I thought that $500 for every session she got, I thought she was the richest person alive. I realised that MSPs have so much more potential and that they can actually, with one deal generate millions of dollars in new revenue. And I don’t think that’s a stretch for a lot of the audience listening today. So I think it’s a good segway into our topic of customer acquisition cost and lifetime value. Exactly that. And that’s one of the things that has always appealed to me when I’ve looked at, because obviously you and I are kind of slightly in competition with each other because you do marketing for MSPs and so do I, but we come at it from different angles. And what I’ve always loved about your approach and why I’m delighted to partner with Tech Pro Marketing, we send people to you, we send people to MSP Sites because you do lots of things we don’t do. And what I’ve always loved about your approach is it’s always been about ROI, that return on investment, and you and I know there’s like a thousand people that do marketing out there in the MSP world, and you are one of the few people who always brings every conversation back to ROI. So here we are as we’re st…

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Why people don’t believe your MSP’s reviews Nov 11, 2025

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The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge Welcome to Episode 313 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week… Why people don’t believe your MSP’s reviews: People trust what other people say about you more than what you say about yourself. But if all your reviews sound the same they lose their power. Why your technicians won’t sell (even to help the client): One of the most frustrating things for MSPs is when your technicians won’t recommend a service you offer when talking to clients, for fear of appearing salesy. Here’s what to do… How ordinary business owners feel about AI: Let’s talk about AI attitudes of the people that MSPs want to reach. My special guest today is an expert in AI and he’s going to tell you how ordinary business owners and managers feel about it. The Marketing Minute: Don’t miss these tips to maximise your hard work in generating new leads. Why people don’t believe your MSP’s reviews People are so skeptical these days and when they’re looking at your MSP’s reviews, if they see certain words and phrases they might not believe the reviews are true. I know this sounds crazy because it’s not like you’re selling a product on Amazon and paying for fake reviews, but the reality is not all social proof is equal. You’ve got to make sure that people say the right things about your MSP. Let’s explore how to do that, how to collect social proof that always works, and the best way to guide people on what to say without your reviews ever seeming fake. Social proof is one of the most powerful tools in your marketing toolkit. People trust what other people say about you more than what you say about yourself. But here’s the catch, if your reviews all sound the same, they lose their power. Think about it, how many times have you seen a review that says great service or would recommend or very professional, and that’s all it says? I mean, there’s nothing wrong with those comments, but when every review looks like that, they stop feeling real. “Samey” kills sales and it’s the same as social proof, because these sound like copy and paste praise and prospects just ignore them. That’s what I mean by cliches in social proof. It’s those generic lines that don’t give your potential future clients any real reason to trust you. So what works better? Detailed, story-driven reviews. And I’m going to give you an example. Instead of great IT support five stars, you want something more like, Our server went down late on a Friday afternoon. We thought the whole weekend would be lost, but within 30 minutes the IT team had us back online and they even followed up on Monday morning to make sure everything was stable. That level of care is why we’ll never use anyone else. Do you see the difference between those two reviews? The second review tells a story. It shows the problem, it shows what you did to save your client and the end result, and that’s what makes it believable and therefore powerful. So how do you actually get this kind of social proof? Well, the trick is to guide your clients. Don’t just say to them, please, can you leave us a review. Instead ask them specific questions and I’m going to give you a few examples that you can use: Number 1: What was going on in your business before you came to us? Number 2: What made you decide to reach out to us instead of someone else? Number 3: Can you tell me about a specific problem that we’ve solved for you? Number 4: How did that make a difference to your business? How did it make a difference to your stress levels? Number 5: What’s the biggest benefit you’ve seen since working with us? Number 6: If a friend asked you why they should work with us, what would you say? Now, those prompts which you might use in real life, if you are videoing them or interviewing them, or you might just send across to them on email and ask them to answer those questions, they give you reviews that are rich in detail and importantly in emotion. It’s exactly what new prospects want to read. Oh, and one more tip for you, mix up your formats. Written testimonials are great, but video reviews are even stronger because people can see and hear the genuine emotion. A 30 second video clip of a client saying how you saved their bacon is worth 10 generic five star reviews. So avoid the cliches, go deeper and get your clients to tell their stories. That’s the kind of social proof that stands out and convinces prospects that you are the right MSP for them. Why your technicians won’t sell (even to help the client) I know that this is one of the most frustrating things for MSPs. When your technician is talking to a client on the phone and the answer to all of that client’s problems is a specific service that you already sell, but the technician won’t even mention it, let alone tell them the details of it and the benefits of it. Why does this happen? Is it that your technicians don’t care? Are they scared? Could you incentivise them to sell? Well, maybe, but I believe the actual answer here is to look at things not from your point of view, but to look at things from the client’s point of view and especially from the technician’s point of view, here’s how to do that. So here’s a question which comes up now and again when I’m talking to MSPs, how do we get our technicians to sell? Because they’ve got all of the selling opportunities right there in front of them. They’re sitting there every day speaking to people on the phone and dealing with tickets. And often they’re fixing problems that could be dealt with more proactively if the client bought a higher level of service or a different flavour of an existing solution. Yet as we know, many technicians just don’t want to sell. I know there’s always the odd one who’s very good at selling and just gets on with it, but how do you motivate the majority who hate selling? How do you motivate them to actually sell? Well, I believe that we coming at this from the wrong point of view. As the owners of the business, we all want more monthly recurring revenue, right? Because this is the lifeblood of any MSP business, and so that becomes the thing that we’re focused on generating when dealing with existing clients. But from the technician’s point of view, they’re not really interested in helping you to grow your monthly recurring revenue. Many of your staff look at you and the clothes you wear and the car you drive and the house you live in, and they already believe that you rich enough. I know that sounds crazy, but that might be how some of your staff really do think because all they see is the rewards. They don’t see the years of risk, the hard work and all of the sleepless nights. They don’t see the amount of business related debt that you carry and the personal guarantees that you might be burdened with. And they don’t even see that for every pound or dollar that comes into the business, only a small proportion of that actually reaches your pocket. So you need to stop looking at this from your point of view and instead try to reposition it from one of two other different points of view. The first being your client’s point of view. Most technicians most of the time want to do a good job for clients. Would you agree? They want to stop them from having problems, they want to fix their issues. They want their clients to be happy and to say, thanks so much for that, you did a great job. Because we are driven as people to seek that kind of feedback. If your technician can recommend something to a client that makes their life easier, then they’re much more likely to do this, especially when they can start to understand that unlike consumers, business decision makers don’t have to make all decisions based on cost alone. You owe it to your technicians to do some kind of weekly training with them. Perhaps just get them together as a group for Pizza Tuesdays to teach them about a specific service that you’re offering and what symptoms to look out for. In fact, if you did this every single Tuesday for the next year, that alone would help your technicians to sell more, because they’ll learn how to spot more symptoms of more problems, and they’ll learn how to understand that there is a solution ready for those problems. Position it from the Tech’s point of view and answer their question – “what’s in this for me?” Whether we like it or not, people operate in a selfish manner. It may not seem that way on the outside, but in the inside they’re asking themselves at some kind of level, what’s in this for me? why should I do that for you? So perhaps the right thing to do is to offer your technicians a little slice of the pie, if they can contribute to the business in a way that helps the clients. The client gets help, the business gets extra revenue and they get a top up to their Xbox fund, everyone wins. You could put in place a very simple scheme such as they get 10% of anything that they sell. If it’s a one-off project, they get 10% of the revenue. If it’s a monthly recurring revenue thing, then they get 10% of the first year’s value. And of course, they only get this cash when you’ve received the cash, so there’s no risk to you. Perhaps the most robust way to do this is a combination of the two – weekly awareness training for your technicians, with a simple reward scheme for those that feel comfortable advising the clients. And in fact, they don’t even have to do the selling, they could just tell the clients about it and then just send you an email saying, Hey, we’ve just told X, Y, Z client about this, could you please give them a call and see if it’s something they want to do? So you do the actual closing, but they’ve done all the hard work of educating and persuading the client. Tell me, do you think this is something that would work for your technicians? How ordinary business owners feel about AI Featured guest: John Bambenek began his journey with artificial intelligence through an unconventional path: a background in theoretical astrophysics paired with a deep frustration at the barriers of academic research. As a working professional and father of a blended family of eleven, he pursued a PhD in informatics while leading teams of data scientists. There, he recognised a critical gap between elegant theoretical models and the messy realities of practical application. This perspective drove him to develop a pioneering system for identifying criminal domain registrations, now relied upon by security companies around the world. With more than 20 years of experience in cyber security, Bambenek has built a reputation for making complex technical ideas accessible without losing their nuance. His work pushes past popular AI hype, focusing instead on how these technologies quietly reshape human behaviour and decision-making in an increasingly automated world. Do you know that compared to the average business owner or manager, you and I are somewhat experts in AI. Even just being aware of what’s happening week to week makes us ahead of the curve compared to them. In fact, you’ll know that there’s a huge opportunity right now for MSPs to advise their clients in a consultative capacity about how to roll out AI in the best way within their business. And right now, I’ve got a secret weapon for you. My special guest today is an expert in AI, a true authority, and he’s going to tell you how ordinary business owners and managers feel about it. The more you understand, the easier you’ll find it to sell them your AI consulting services. My name is John Bambenek. I’m a cyber security professional with my own firm and author of Lies, Damn Lies, and AI, based on my PhD work at the University of Illinois. And that’s such a great title of a book. Thank you so much for joining us on the podcast, John. We’re going to talk about AI attitudes of ordinary business owners and managers, so the people that MSPs want to reach. Are they using AI as much as we’re using AI? Is AI really a big thing for ordinary businesses out there? Or is it just something that in the channel, because we’re talking about Copilot and ChatGPT and Perplexity and Claude every single day, is it a bigger thing for us than it is for them? That’s what I hope that you’re going to be able to answer for us, John. But first of all, just tell us a little bit about your work as a cyber security expert. So what do you actually do and what kind of research have you done on AI? So for 26 odd years as threat researcher, how criminals abuse technology and how they go about doing the work of extracting dollars from our wallets, whether it’s personal wallets or business wallets, I tend to focus on financial fraud. Every time there’s a new evolution of technology, there’s new ways that people steal money. A few years ago we were talking about cryptocurrency. There’s a whole class of frauds and malicious activity that was enabled by that on top of the benefits of decentralised currency, right? Everything comes with its cost and benefits and human beings being what human beings are, there’s always a subset of people that’s finding new and innovative ways to extract people from their money. Yes, of course, and as we know, MSPs are there to help build up that cushion between those criminals and their end targets. By the by, I’m reading a book at the moment which I can almost guarantee you’ve read. It’s called This is How They Tell Me The World Ends By Nicole Perlroth. What a terrifying book. I think every MSP should read it. It’s a very long read, it’s taken me quite a few weeks to get through, but it’s essentially about state-sponsored cyber hacking. It’s a terrifying book and I’m sure you’ve hoovered that and many of them up. There was another one I read a few years ago by Kevin Mitnick, it was his book of how he got started hacking back in the seventies, which is a really entertaining read, especially when he became a pen tester. I’ll go and look that up after the interview, but great book. So let’s talk about ordinary people then. So ordinary business owners and managers who are out there running dentists, veterinarians, they’re running manufacturing plants, they’re CPAs, they’re lawyers… to them, is AI as big for them as it is for us? Obviously they must have heard about ChatGPT and everything because it’s been three, four years since it exploded. But is it as big to them as it is to us? AI is kind of polarised. You’ve got some who are well deep in it and think it’s going to revolutionise everything. You’ve got others who are thinking the Matrix and the Terminator will become reality. The truth is somewhere in the middle, but we’re kind of in a societal time where people are really passionate and energetic either to the positive or the negative. So I think for lawyers, for example, there’s a couple of lawyers who went off to the races and thought, you know what, I’m going to automate the tedium of writing pleadings, and got in trouble because they cited cases that didn’t exist. But other lawyers are risk averse by nature, and there are many that are like, I’m not going to touch this stuff ever because it’s too risky, but there’s no one in the middle. It’s either you’re really hot or you’re really cold about AI. There’s very few people who are like, Hey, it might work well here, might not work well there. There’s not a lot of balance. And do you know what, I see that with MSPs as well. For every MSP I meet who’s so into AI that they’re vibe coding their own PSA, I’ve met people that have done that, which explodes my mind, because you couldn’t have done that two years ago, but I also meet those who hate the fact, for example, that Microsoft is baking Copilot into everything, right down to, as you and I know, it’s on the keyboard, on the Copilot plus PCs. Just before the interview you and I were chatting and we were saying it’s in PowerPoint, it’s appearing within applications. For those business owners who are perhaps on that I don’t like AI side, do you think the fact that it’s being forced into the tools they use eve…

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Why being the cheapest MSP is a bad strategy Nov 04, 2025

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The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge Welcome to Episode 312 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week… Why being the cheapest MSP is a bad strategy: If your marketing strategy is to be the cheapest MSP around, what you’re actually doing is setting yourself up to attract the worst clients, who create the most noise and generate the least amount of profit. The #1 all time secret of epic MSP marketing: The marketing winners aren’t smarter and don’t necessarily work harder than everyone else. They just get more of the right stuff implemented really fast. DANGER: Most MSPs have confused messaging: My special guest is an expert at making messaging simple. Your eyes are about to be opened as to how confused messaging is killing your MSP marketing efforts dead. The Marketing Minute: Don’t miss this simple email signature marketing idea that can make a big impact. Why being the cheapest MSP is a bad strategy If your marketing strategy is to be the cheapest MSP around, then you’re setting yourself up for a world of pain. Lots of MSPs do this because when you’re not very good at marketing, which most MSPs aren’t, it just seems like the easiest thing to do… offer a good service, deliver it at a good price. But what you’re actually doing is setting yourself up to attract the worst clients, who create the most noise and generate the least amount of profit. If you don’t today, have the confidence to put up your prices, to be the most expensive MSP in your marketplace, let me tell you why you owe it to your existing clients, your future clients, yourself and your family to do this. On the surface, being the cheapest MSP feels like a good idea because everyone likes a bargain, but being the cheapest is not a winning strategy. It attracts completely the wrong kind of clients. The ones who are constantly haggling, they’re always looking for shortcuts and they just don’t value what you do for them. In fact, they’ll leave the moment that someone else comes along who’s a pound or a dollar cheaper than you. And that is not really a foundation that you can build a profitable stable MSP on. So instead, you kind of want to be at the other end of the scale, the most expensive MSP in town. Now, I know that you might maybe have tensed up when I said that and you might be thinking, Me, the most expensive, no way. I don’t want to be that. I don’t want to do that. But listen, just hear me out on this. The MSPs who charge the most are often the ones who are seen as the safest choice. It kind of seems crazy, doesn’t it? But actually, higher prices signal higher value. They signal better service, they signal more stability, more reliability, and guess what? The best clients, the ones who are really serious about their businesses and protecting their businesses and growing them with a proper partner, they want that reassurance. They don’t just want to spend money on a service and spend as little as they can. They want the best quality because they want a genuine partnership from someone that offers a very high quality of service. So how do you do this? Well, there are two main approaches that you can take overt and covert. So overt is where you’re very upfront about being premium. In fact, you build your whole brand around expertise, trust, and high standards. You’re never apologising for your price, in fact, you’re proud of it. But then the opposite is covert because this is a little bit more subtle. And in this with being covert, you don’t shout about being the most expensive from the rooftops. Instead, you just focus on value. One very smart way to do this is to use a three-tier pricing, like a good, better, best pricing where your good price, kind of like your entry level price is a very, very keen price. And when they’re comparing you to the other MSPs and you and I know they’re comparing apples to oranges, but when they’re doing that, they can see that you are a very good value price, but ultimately the package that you most want to sell than actually most people will want to buy because it’s the best value, there’s all of the stuff in there, it becomes your better package or your best package. And of course the price for that is a lot higher. So you’re the most expensive without essentially advertising that you are the most expensive. But what if you’re thinking, Paul, this is all very good, but I just don’t feel comfortable charging more. Well, maybe that’s something called imposter syndrome talking. And we all get that, it’s the little voice in the back of our head that says, You’re not good enough. And sometimes it’s there and it’s loud and we listen to it and we let it dictate us, and we think, well, if we put our prices up, people are going to see that we are in an imposter that we are not worth the money that we want to charge. But let me tell you something, you are worth that money. You really are. If you’ve been running your MSP for a few years, if you are good at keeping your clients safe, you’re good at not just the reactive stuff, but you’re good at the proactive stuff, you protect them. Sometimes you protect them from themselves and you help them to grow their businesses. If you do all of this and you’ve been doing it for a few years, you are already delivering huge value. You are not just fixing stuff here, you are so far past break/fix. You are safeguarding people’s businesses, you are safeguarding their livelihoods, you’re safeguarding jobs, you’re safeguarding whatever it is that they do for their clients. You are instrumental in this. And if you get it wrong, which you don’t most of the time, but if you get it wrong, it has lots of implications, but you don’t do this. You are a massive part of their success. So instead of asking yourself, Can I justify charging more? Why don’t you try asking yourself, What do I need to do so that my clients see the value in what we do and are happy to pay more for it? It’s a tiny little shift in thinking, but it can change everything. So here’s my big takeaway for today. Don’t ever play the cheapest game. You’ll always, always lose in some way, either by attracting the wrong clients or just having to deal with the noise and the hassle and the lack of profits that they generate. Instead, play the value game. Position yourself as the MSP worth paying more for. And even if you don’t feel ready to be the most expensive in your marketplace, at least make sure you are never the cheapest. The #1 all time secret of epic MSP marketing Would you like me to tell you the greatest secret I’ve ever learned about marketing an MSP? It’s the secret every MSP has been begging me to reveal, and you’ll be surprised to hear that it hasn’t changed over the last decade. What I’m going to say is exactly the same today as I would’ve said to you back when I got into the channel in 2016, and you won’t believe how simple it is, but also what kind of dramatic positive impact it can have on your marketing. So let me reveal the number one all time secret of epic MSP marketing. A member of my team recently paid me the highest possible compliment. Several months back I took over driving our MSP Marketing Edge development roadmap, mostly out of frustration at how long it was taking to just get things done. And my colleague said to me, it’s a lot more chaotic with you pushing things, but we’re getting so much more done, which is amazing. So obviously I gave him an immediate pay rise. No, I didn’t. I do pride myself as an epic implementer because everything I’ve achieved in the 20 years now that I’ve been running my own businesses has been accomplished purely by getting things done. So I’m not the smartest guy in the room and I’m never going to be. This is an average brain that I’m carrying here, and I’m certainly not the most driven person. I’ll be honest, I’m comfortable and I prioritise being a present parent and a present partner above driving a sick Lamborghini. But I’m also the most impatient person you will ever meet, I just hide it really well. And I have a hundred marketing ideas a day, and I want to implement as many of them as I possibly can as quickly as possible. Because this is the only way to find out which ideas work and which suck. Being able to rapidly implement marketing is a key skill to develop in your MSP. And the good news is that doesn’t mean that you have to do it all personally. In fact, it’s better that you don’t try to do it all yourself. I can get more implemented by inspiring, guiding and driving my team than I can by trying to do everything myself. Being able to step back and take in the overall picture is valuable and almost impossible to do when you’ve personally worked for hours and hours and hours on something. So here’s what that means for you. It’s one of two things. Number one, if you want to get more marketing implemented and you have the time and energy to do it yourself, then you must stay focused on implementing only the things that make the biggest difference. So what are those things for you? Well, it’s easy. What will help you generate a new lead? What will help you to turn a lead into a prospect? What will help you to get someone on a 15 minute introduction call? What will help you to sell more monthly recurring revenue to an existing client? Make a list of all the tasks that come into those things I just said, and then remove the clutter from that list. And then just make sure you review that list daily and be ready to implement any time that you can clear time. Easiest place to do that, 6am every single weekday. That is a great time to get things done. In fact, if you could knock out 90 minutes a day of pure implementation at 6 till 7:30 in the morning when the rest of the world is asleep and isn’t expecting anything from you, you could change your whole business in just 12 months. I promise you, that is so real. And then the other option number two, if you want to get more marketing implemented but you don’t have the time or energy to spare, just get someone else to do it for you. There are lots of people you could talk to. You could talk to Mark Copeman at Wingman MSP Marketing or Nate Freedman at Tech Pro Marketing and MSP Sites or Paul Charnock at Plexor. Or better still, you could join my MSP Marketing Edge if it’s not locked in your area, and you can ask our Done for You team to implement your MSP Marketing Edge marketing for you. But whatever you do, whichever of those two options you take, just remember this, the winners aren’t smarter and don’t necessarily work harder than everyone else. They just get more of the right stuff implemented really fast. DANGER: Most MSPs have confused messaging Featured guest: Jesse Flocken brings a unique and engaging perspective that resonates with audiences navigating personal and professional growth. His journey—from pre-med to a 15-year career in firefighting to becoming the founder and CEO of a successful marketing agency—is both inspiring and relatable. Jesse specialises in helping people turn big ideas into clear, actionable plans, drawing from his expertise in branding, entrepreneurship, and personal coaching. As a certified StoryBrand guide, Jesse helps individuals and businesses clarify their message so they can connect with the right audience and grow with purpose. He brings real-world insights, practical advice, and thoughtful conversation around life transitions, mindset, and business growth. His calm, grounded approach makes complex ideas feel accessible and leaves listeners feeling motivated and empowered to take their next step forward. If I looked at your website and your other marketing materials, what would I think about your MSP? Would it be really clear for me who you serve, what you do, what you are great at, and more importantly, why I should choose you instead of the 20 or 30 other MSPs in your marketplace? Well, most MSPs just don’t have that kind of clarity in their messaging. And I’ll tell you something, it’s killing your sales. So my special guest today is an expert at making messaging simple. Your eyes are about to be opened as to how confused messaging is killing all of your marketing efforts dead. Hi, I’m Jesse Flocken. I’m the CEO of Clearly Relevant, and I’m just excited to be here today. Not as excited as I’m Jesse, because we are going to be talking about telling stories, we’re going to be talking about getting your marketing message clear. And you and I both know, obviously we both work with MSPs, we know how difficult it is for most MSPs to understand what story they should be telling and get that message across, get any message across to their audience. You and I have both been on lots of MSP’s websites and seen the same thing again and again and again, and we know how damaging that is when you see the same thing again and again because to the prospect who’s trying to pick an MSP, they don’t which one to pick. So we’re going to explore those kinds of themes today, but you have an awesome backstory. Give us the brief version of your life up to this point. Yeah, the brief version is that I was a firefighter for almost 15 years. And the one thing that firefighters are really good at is just that overwhelming, excellent customer service at all costs. And so through that, I had taken customer service classes and other things, and as I started continuing my education, I actually was starting to go to medical school. I had not started yet, and I was in the process and we accidentally started a business and our first client was a Fortune 100 client. And so it was really just a wild ride and there’s a lot of pieces to that backstory, but it was really neat. That was the inception and now I’ve owned this business for 12 years. I left the fire department four years ago, and it wasn’t until I really found that radical purpose and clarity in what I was doing, and today we’ll talk a little bit about messaging, but in my own life, and even my wife and I did this little workshop that we do for people, and it was just about finding radical clarity about what I want to be known for at the end of my life. What does that look like? And if that’s going to be true, what has to happen today in order to help make those things come true? And so that was when I really just went all in and in the last 12 years, now I’ve been the CEO of the company and it’s been growing. We’ve had some twists and some turns and some evolutions, but it’s really been a wild ride. And now we’ve done everything from take 80 or so adults to Disneyland with some author and some other folks just to have a little bit more whimsy in their life to, we’ve taken people on marriage retreats all the way to Hawaii. So it’s really just this all encompassing crazy journey to where we started in customer service and the internal marketing space. And now here we are working with authors and speakers and financial advisors and MSPs and alike. Yeah, I love that you’re going to have an awesome next 30 years. It feels like you had an awesome first 30 odd years, however old you are right now. So let’s talk about messaging then. So we know that MSPs struggle with messaging. It’s one of the hardest things. In fact, it’s the question I get asked that I struggle to answer the most, which is, how do I differentiate myself from the 10 other competitors in town, the 30 in our surrounding area, the 40,000 that are out there? Because in theory, every MSP is against up against every other MSP, and a lot of that comes down to messaging. Why do you think MSP owners struggle with messaging so much? I think there’s a couple of things. The first thing, honestly, I think that most of the MSPs that I meet, they’re actually struggling with one or two things. And the first thing is they’re usually not struggling because they’re bad at tech. They’re usually stuck because their messaging is really confusing or they’re actually invisible to the people that need them the most. And so some of those common pain points I see is they’re actually com…

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Is your MSP wasting time on marketing? Oct 28, 2025

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The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge Welcome to Episode 311 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week… Is your MSP wasting time on marketing?: Here’s a tactic that all pro marketers use, yet very few MSPs are even aware of. It’s going to save you time and it could even help you find a brand new client. 7 MASSIVE mistakes that stop MSPs generating leads: Most MSPs make a series of huge mistakes that hobble their lead generation. Here’s how to change that. This old MSP lead gen tactic never fails: Let’s look at an older way of finding clients for your MSP. My guest is going to explain why this still works and how you can beat the other MSPs who don’t even know that this is still a thing. The Marketing Minute: Don’t miss these two questions that will add power to your sale pitch. Is your MSP wasting time on marketing? If you want nothing more than a new client for your MSP right now, just be careful that you’re not wasting your time in the way that you go about it. Because some MSP’s marketing is a complete waste of time, often because a vital element has been missed out. Wouldn’t you love to hear about a massive time saver that all pro marketers use, yet very few MSPs are even aware of? You are going to love this because it’s going to save you time and it could even help you find a brand new client. So what I’m talking about here is repurposing content, and this of course means taking something you’ve already created, let’s say a blog post, and then you turn it into other bits of content so you get more mileage out of it. You’ve already done the hard work once, so why not squeeze every bit of value out of this? And here’s the thing, it’s something that some people frown upon, but trust me as a full-time marketer of 20 years now, it’s an essential thing to do. The only person who is consuming all of your content across all of your platforms, is you. Different people consume content in different ways. Some like reading blogs, other scroll LinkedIn, some just glance at Google when they’re looking for a new MSP. So by repurposing content, you can meet people where they already are without having to reinvent the wheel every single time. Let me give you a few practical examples of how this works. Let’s say you write a blog article about a new ransomware threat. First, you publish it on your website as a blog article, which is great because now Google can find it, it might have some SEO benefits, search engine optimisation etc. But next, you can take that exact same blog article and you can then adapt it into a LinkedIn newsletter. And that way the people who are subscribed to your LinkedIn newsletters get a notification in the feed, they also get an email copy of it as well, and it’s great for authority. You’re seen as the helpful, local, knowledgeable IT expert. Then you can take that LinkedIn newsletter and you can cut it down into a shorter version and post it on your Google business profile. Now that’s really powerful because when prospects do Google your MSP, they’ll see fresh, helpful content right there on their profile. It’s also really good for your Google Juice. In fact, I suspect that Google sees more of your Google business profile content than humans do, but ultimately, anything that helps you perform better in search results is good, right? And you could also record a short video on this same subject where you just talk through the same advice that you were giving in your blog, in your LinkedIn newsletter, and of course, in your Google business profile. Same content, it’s just repurposed, it’s changed in some way. You could take that video that you’ve just created, you could put that on LinkedIn, you could put it on YouTube as a short, it doesn’t have to be Hollywood quality. People just want to see you and see the real you. And then finally, you could take that content and you could break it into bite-sized social posts to go on LinkedIn. Now, let’s say you did five pieces of advice within that blog article. Each of those five pieces of advice could go on to be a standalone post. In fact, you could use them as a standalone post, and then you could take those five posts and you could repurpose them into five graphics, or you could repurpose the whole thing into a PDF carousel or just stick with plain text or do a video on each one or do an image and a bit of plain text on each one. Can you see how this is almost limitless? From one single blog post, from one idea, you’ve suddenly got a whole week’s worth of content to go across multiple platforms, or you could take it even further and you could take that content and you could spread it out across a couple of months. So you have a variety of different types of content across different types of platforms all the time. And all of that can be organised by something called a content calendar, which is literally planning in I’m going to do this on Monday, I’m going to do this two weeks on Tuesday, I’m going to do this 3, 4, 5 weeks on Wednesday. It’s as simple as that. It’s just a plan of how you’re going to use your content. Now, this is the magic of repurposing content, and the key thing for this is please don’t think that you need to constantly come up with brand new ideas. You’re not a full-time media company or a full-time marketer. You’re running and trying to grow an MSP. So repurposing content saves you time, gets your message seen in more places and positions you as consistent and reliable, and as the local tech authority, which is exactly what clients want from their IT provider. 7 MASSIVE mistakes that stop MSPs generating leads If you’re pulling out your hair because you just can’t generate leads for your MSP, this could be the reason why. Most MSPs make a series of huge mistakes that just hobble their lead generation. Don’t you do the same? Let me tell you the seven biggest mistakes that MSPs make that stop them from efficiently generating brand new leads. Massive mistake number one: You are not 1000% clear on what kind of clients you want. You’ve heard the old joke, haven’t you? The one that says, I’ll work with anyone who has a pulse and a wallet. But actually, do you really want one-person-band businesses running Windows 7 for budget reasons? Will your MSP thrive servicing lawyers? Can you cope with the out of hours demands of hospitality businesses? The most successful MSPs build something called an ideal client profile, an ICP. It includes very specific details about your dream clients, such as their industry, size, pain points, budget, IT maturity, and how they make buying decisions. Massive mistake number two: You struggle to tell prospects what makes you better than all the other MSPs. Now, I’ve got another acronym alert here, but you should know this one. Do you have a USP, a unique selling proposition? It’s a reason why you ideal client would buy from you. Most MSPs struggle with this because the answer has nothing to do with the service you offer and the way that you deliver it, or the vendors that you work with, or your tech stack. In fact, all of these are internal things that don’t affect the decision-making process of ordinary business owners and managers. They don’t care what services you use, they don’t care which vendors you choose. What they care about is what you can do for them. And this is most easily put across in your USP. Massive mistake number three: Your marketing messaging is inconsistent. And this mistake happens because of mistakes one and two, if you haven’t figured out your ICP and your USP, the messages you send out will have little consistency, and that makes it hard for you to build up messaging momentum. To be the MSP that your ideal clients keep coming back to in their minds and their hearts when they’re thinking of leaving their current MSP. Massive mistake number four: You’re not building audiences of people to listen to you. Once you know what you want to say, you need lots of people to say it to. And that means building audiences. For most MSPs just start with your LinkedIn connections and your email list. Building audiences is unsexy and sometimes tedious work. My LinkedIn newsletter has come out every single Thursday for three and a half years. That’s an audience for me. My MSP marketing podcast has come out every single Tuesday for nearly six years. It’s a treadmill, I tell you, but it is worth it as it’s exactly the same work to put content in front of 10,000 people as it is to put it in front of 10 people, only of course, the results are a lot better. Massive mistake number five: You’re not growing relationships with people. The purpose of collecting all of those people in all of your audiences is to build a relationship with them. Ordinary business owners and managers don’t know what they don’t know about technology, and that means they make buying decisions with their hearts, not their heads. And the heart doesn’t buy on facts, it buys on feelings. They’re picking you, or not, based on how they feel about your MSP. If they’ve spent two years reading a little bit of your content on LinkedIn, a few of your regular emails and some of your blog posts, then in a very, very small way, they’ll feel as though they know you. They’ll certainly be more likely to respect you as a technology authority. This is how you get a place at the sales table. Massive mistake number six: You don’t have a solid sales process to convert them from first touch to bonded client. The goal is to turn attention into leads, into prospects, into sales meetings, into clients, and then into bonded clients. And these are people who would rather lose a toe than leave your MSP. So that process I was just talking about, is that mapped out for your MSP? Is that being turned into systems and automated processes? Or do you lose sales, like most MSPs, because you don’t have a proper process and it’s all a bit haphazard? If you run your marketing in a way that frankly, you would never run your service delivery, then you have a problem. Massive mistake number seven: You’re trying to figure it all out on your own. Marketing is massive. So many things to do, lots of different requirements and lots of different skill sets needed. Which means a lot of trial and error, a lot of wasted time and missed opportunities. If you are trying to figure it all out on your own, why would you do this? When you find someone who’s talking sense and you can see that they would help you jump ahead, then grab that person, shake them hard and say, how can you help me? In essence, what I’m saying is that you should go looking for wisdom, not information. There’s plenty of information out there. All the information you want is out there. Your goal is to find wisdom and someone who can help you figure this out for your MSP. If you think that I’m the person that can help you, I would love to do that. Go and see what I can do to help you and your business at mspmarketingedge.com. This old MSP lead gen tactic never fails Featured guest: Eric Smith helps brands diversify their media mix and acquire new customers in podcasts, email newsletters, package inserts, shared mail, and more. When you’re hunting for new clients for your MSP you’ll notice the sheer amount of lead gen tactics out there. Some of them are exciting and brand new. Some just seem as old as time itself, but so what’s the one question you want to ask when introduced to a lead gen tactic? Yeah, that question you want to ask is does this work? My special guest today is going to introduce you to an older way of finding clients for your MSP. He’s going to explain why it still works and how you can beat the other MSPs who don’t even know that this is still a thing. I’m Eric Smith. I’m the president and COO of Incremental Media, and we’re a 20 plus year old marketing agency that helps brands diversify their media mix into a lot of offline marketing channels that I’m sure we’re going to talk about. And yes, that’s exactly what we’re going to talk about. Thank you so much for joining me on the show, Eric. So did you start the business yourself 20 years ago? For those watching this on YouTube, you seem like a pretty young guy. No, I definitely did not start the company. Our CEO started the company. He was CMO of a bunch of big marketing companies before starting Incremental Media. But no, I joined five and a half years ago and I moved into the present COO role in January. Okay. That’s reassuring. I was thinking I was going to have to improve my face cream so I could look as young as you do. So we’re going to talk today about the non-sexy stuff. We’re going to talk about the stuff that people were using in the nineties, in the eighties, in the seventies, possibly even in the 1870s and 1880s and 1890s. We’re going to talk about the non-digital marketing stuff. Now, I’m going to put a caveat on this, which is I love the offline stuff. I see that the offline stuff, the value of it has gone up and up and up as digital marketing has got bigger and bigger and bigger. And I think you and I are going to explore why that is the case today. But let’s just first lay out what do we mean when we talk about non-digital marketing? What kind of marketing tactics are we talking about? Yeah, so for us, we call it offline marketing. People have different terminology for it, but that means basically anything that physically reaches another person from a marketing standpoint. So meaning direct mail, people that are most familiar with, you get a piece of mail that ends up in your mailbox, or if you’re trying to reach a business owner, an MSP, getting that to be delivered to their office ideally. But then there’s also shared mail, what’s called package inserts if you ever get a package, and then there’s offers from other brands inside. All those things fall under what we call traditional channels in the offline marketing side. And 25 years ago, that was marketing wasn’t it really, that and placing adverts in newspapers and radio and stuff like that. So I appreciate you weren’t doing marketing 25 years ago, but is this still a place for that kind of offline marketing today? Yeah, it’s been really interesting. Our business, a lot of the brands we work with, of course, do the basic search, social, that type of advertising, but for a variety of different reasons, those channels have gotten more challenging or more expensive than they used to be. So they’re sort of coming back to some of those more traditional channels that they used to use to your point, like 25, 30 years ago in an even bigger way. So a good thing for our business. But yeah, definitely a unique way, especially if you’re trying to reach an MSP as a way to break through the clutter. We’re so ambushed with information in the digital age that receiving something physically is a great way to break through the clutter compared to any of your other competitors that are just doing the typical digital advertising. Yeah, absolutely. And in a second, let’s talk about some practical things that MSPs can do to try and reach business owners and managers in their area or in their vertical. But I agree with you as the amount of digital noise has gone up and the amount of junk mail that you actually physically get in your mailbox has gone down. If we think like 30, 40 years ago, you used to get tons of post every day or tons of mail every day in the mailbox, and there’d just be so much junk mail and you hardly get any these days. So if someone does send you a sales letter or some kind of promotion in the mail, the actual physical mail, you’re holding it, you’ve got something. I’m just waggling a piece of direct mail that I actually had from my optometrist this week, it really stands out. Unlike the email where it’s one of 200 emails that you’ve had today. Do you think people are scared of doing offline stuff because it’s difficult, time consuming and expensive? So it’s almost like the complete opposite of digital stuff. I think it is a little bit intim…

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MSPs: This simple upsell generates new MRR AND boosts retention Oct 21, 2025

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The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge Welcome to Episode 310 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week… MSPs: This simple upsell generates new MRR AND boosts retention: This is something that almost every single client wants but rarely gets from their MSP… a 24/7 at-home support package. And it’s such a simple upsell. MSPs who do this win new clients faster: If you want to sell your services you have to move people from being someone you talk to mostly on LinkedIn, YouTube, and email, to being someone you talk to on the phone. MSPs: Use marketing AI like Iron Man, not Terminator: Many MSPs actually do damage to the marketing messages they’re putting out because the AI doesn’t really understand what their end goal is. My guest today is an AI marketing expert and he’s going to tell you how to get it right. The Marketing Minute: Don’t miss this quick and easy LinkedIn messaging tip. MSPs: This simple upsell generates new MRR AND boosts retention Could this be the most valuable upsell any MSP could deploy? It’s something that almost every single client wants but rarely gets from their MSP. And it not only generates new monthly recurring revenue for you but also has a huge and positive effect on retention. Let me tell you what this upsell is and an easy way you can roll it out in the next seven days. The upsell I’m talking about is an at-home support package. Now think about how most of your clients work these days. They might have an office, they might be completely remote, and of course you are already looking after their office tech, their business tech. But the reality is, as we know, people just work from anywhere these days and they also work at any times – in the evenings, on weekends, sometimes even when they’re on a vacation, on holiday. And here’s the problem, when they’re working from home out of hours and something goes wrong with their IT, they don’t have anyone to turn to, not unless they wait till Monday morning or something when you and your team are back and we all know that that must be deeply frustrating for them. We also know that you don’t want to do support in the evenings and the weekends for work-life balance. So this is a source of friction for both parties. You should be doing everything to remove friction between you and your client. This is where your at-home support package comes in… and it’s such a simple upsell. You could do a setup project perhaps by bundling a couple of things together. You could maybe have a laptop doc, a wireless keyboard, maybe do a WIFI survey for their home and install some boosters, something like that, maybe even a check in on their home security. But the real winner and the monthly recurring revenue is a 24/7 help desk. And the secret sauce to this is that you don’t have to provide that 24/7 help desk yourself. You can outsource it. There are plenty of white label providers out there who will handle those calls in the evening and at weekends for you, often under your brand. So your clients still feel like they’re talking to your MSP. You might choose to be very clear with your clients that it is an outsourced help desk, but they have access to all of your systems and you train them and you’re constantly working with them and updating them. Because no human expects another human to provide genuine 24 hour service from their local office. I think you’re almost being a bit disingenuous with your clients if you’re not honest with them about how you do this. But if you didn’t want to use a white label provider, you could always team up with an MSP on the other side of the planet, so you can handle each other’s out of hours calls. However you do this, the important thing is to focus on the impact to your client. Imagine being able to say to them, You know when you’re sat doing some work at like nine on a Sunday evening because you want to get ahead for the week, but there’s something wrong with your IT. And normally you’d have to wait until Monday morning to contact us, and that means you’ve lost productive time. But business no longer works like that anymore, so with this at home support package, you can get help whenever and wherever you’re working. I mean, that’s a very, very compelling pitch, isn’t it? It makes sense for your clients and it creates ongoing monthly recurring revenue for you. So everyone wins. And the best part is you don’t even need every single client to buy it. If just a fraction of your clients take up this package, it becomes a lovely new stream of profit with very little extra effort. So here’s my suggestion… put together a simple offering, brand it properly, and make it available to all of your clients. Talk about it at every strategic technology review and in all of your marketing. In fact, this could even become a front end USP, a unique selling proposition for you. If you are the only MSP in your area who offers genuine 24/7 support, that’s a fantastic differentiator. In fact, it’s a reason right at the beginning of the relationship that someone would pick you in the first place. So position this as peace of mind because that’s what it really is. Is this possibly the perfect upsell? Is this something that’s genuinely valuable for your clients, easy for you to deliver because you’re outsourcing it and something that builds monthly recurring revenue for your MSP? MSPs who do this win new clients faster There’s no way I could make this any simpler. MSPs who use this marketing strategy win new clients faster. So why isn’t everyone using it because it’s not new, it’s not sexy, and I’ll be honest, it’s not fun to do. It’s something that has to be done to speed up new client acquisition. But look, let’s give you the business case for it to see if it’s something that you want to implement. Let me tell you what it is, why it works, and how the best MSPs implement it. I love marketing. I mean I literally love it. Marketing has not only paid my mortgage over the years, it paid off a mortgage back in 2016 by letting me build up a business and sell it. It allowed me to acquire rental properties. It allowed me to try my hand at property developing, which actually was a disaster, but we won’t get into that. It’s also allowed me to get involved in a few other people’s business ventures. And I say this not to boast at all because my success is modest by most standards. In fact, I consider my work-life balance and my solid relationship with my 15-year-old child, Sam, I consider that to be my greater marker of personal success than what I’ve actually achieved in terms of bank accounts and businesses and all of that kind of stuff. I’m just trying to show you the sheer life-changing power of marketing. I want to inspire you to take marketing more seriously in your MSP. When you get marketing right, it allows you to find people who could one day buy your services. It gets those people to choose to start a conversation with you, join one of your audiences and be educated and entertained by you with your content marketing. But there does come a point where if you want to sell them your services, you have to move them from being someone you talk to mostly on LinkedIn, YouTube, and email, to being someone you talk to offline. And the single most powerful tool to do that is the phone. In that business that I sold in 2016, which was a healthcare marketing business, we had 12,000 leads, which back then we emailed twice a week, so that’s 24,000 emails a week going out. And we used a CRM to track every single open and every single click from every single person on that list. I then had a team of three telesales people sitting looking at that list, using their brains and figuring out who we haven’t spoken to for a few months and then they just called those people. I mean that was all they did five days a week. And that was how we generated £1 million, which is about $1.3 million a year of revenue in that business. And we did that every year because we could see who the leads were, who was active, and by phoning them, we could find out who was ready to buy. Good marketing puts the right message in front of the right person at the right time and using the phone accelerated that process. Of course, yes, the phone is inefficient and it’s difficult. More often than not, we couldn’t get hold of the person we were calling… gatekeepers could be very, very effective. But when we did get hold of them, we attempted to have a relationship building conversation. At least once a day or once every other day we would have a very high quality conversation with a lead and we were able to book a sales appointment with them, turning them from a lead into a prospect. Now, if I owned an MSP like yours, I would do exactly the same thing today, yes, even in 2025. I would build audiences of people who were willing to listen to me. And these audiences will be the decision makers and influences in the businesses I wanted to work with. And then I would educate and entertain those people using good marketing content, building up a light relationship with them and building up my business’s profile as well. But ultimately what would make me money would be having a telephone person looking at all of the marketing activity, picking up the phone and making outbound phone calls to these people. This is the three step lead generation system my MSP Marketing Edge service is based around. Number one, build audiences. Number two, grow relationships. And number three, convert relationships. I know this is a very hard thing to do within an MSP. You don’t already have this kind of function set up. It really isn’t easy to get started. And telephone people are the hardest people to hire. This certainly isn’t the kind of job that you would want to do yourself, right? Most of us started the business so we didn’t have to do this kind of thing, but I promise you making outbound calls is essential to turn leads into prospects in the same way that sales meetings are essential to turn prospects into clients. MSPs: Use marketing AI like Iron Man, not Terminator Featured guest: Mike Montague is a leading voice in Human-First AI Marketing. His company, Avenue9, is an AI-powered marketing agency helping small businesses scale without burning bridges or blowing out their budgets. Mike has worked with giant brands like LinkedIn, Uber, Zoom, Bud Light, and the Kansas City Chiefs. He’s authored two books: LinkedIn The Sandler Way and Playful Humans, and his podcasts have over 3.7 million downloads. Now, he uses his decades of past marketing experience and the AI tools of the future to help small businesses amplify their marketing impact. Of course you’re using AI tools, but are you using them the right way to help your marketing? Many MSPs get this a little bit wrong and actually do damage to the marketing messages they’re putting out because the AI doesn’t really understand what the end goal is. My guest today is an AI marketing expert and he’s going to tell you why you must use AI like Ironman and never use it like Terminator. Hi, I am Mike Montague, founder of Avenue9, an AI marketing agency. And thanks so much for joining me on the show, Mike, because we are going to talk about how to use AI tools to tell better stories about your MSP, to boost your marketing by telling better stories. And we know that the better the stories you can tell, the better the response on the humans that you’re trying to reach. And ultimately, those MSPs who are more emotional and tell great stories with their marketing, they tend to win more clients because ordinary people can connect with them better. So before we start talking about that, let’s hit the low down on you because you are not just your average marketing guy, are you? No, not quite. I’ve had a long interesting journey. I won’t go all the way back and tell you all the details along the way, but I was on the radio in my twenties and I was the prize guy, so it was my job to go out to some random car dealership or something and figure out what their story is and then find an interesting way to tell it in a minute or less on the radio right away a couple of times. And so I practiced literally thousands of commercials that I had to write on the spot over a 10 year period, and then I moved to be a professional sales trainer because the paying hours are much better, by the way, if you’re wondering. And it was basically my job then to write stories and help people craft their pitches and their 30 second commercials and their marketing copy in a way that connects with people in a human first way, in an audience centric way rather than just like the normal marketing slop that happens with AI now, but also the marketing slop that happens with humans when they start going into resume speak, Our company’s been in business for 37 years and we have 200 blah blah blahs. MSPs can get into technical speak and acronyms real fast and make their audience tune out instead of lean in. And that’s what I help people with. That’s really cool. And I also was on the radio in my twenties for 10 years, but not doing the prizes, luckily I was able to sit in the studio and actually just talk nonsense while other people were doing what you were doing. And of course, radio in the US is so much different to radio in the UK. So I think you got some fantastic training. In fact, I’ve always said that I trained as a journalist originally and that journalism training and then 10 years on radio was the best marketing training I’ve ever had because it teaches you to look at everything from someone else’s point of view and to, as you say, to shape messages and learn how to communicate more effectively is great. Maybe every MSP should go and get trained as a journalist and go and work on radio. I think so. I mean every sales and marketer should because it’s about asking questions, not giving the information, and it’s about listening to other people’s stories and finding out what the emotional hooks are and the interesting parts and the problems that you can solve or need to highlight. And so I do think it was an amazing sort of bootcamp and training ground for the rest of my career. But the money’s rubbish, which is why we’re both doing something else right now. So talking about stories, I think you and I both have seen probably 3000 examples of bad ways to use AI to generate content. You mentioned AI slop earlier, that’s a common thing you can tell when content’s come out of AI, and I think you could also tell when an MSP or any business has used AI to try to tell their story because something just not inherently human about it. And even though AIs understand how we communicate, I think they’re missing that ability to just tell a story and just be able to communicate it one human to another. What is it about storytelling that’s so important in your marketing? I’ll give you the story about this one. Have you heard the Terminator vs Iron Man analogy yet? No, I haven’t. Go for it. Oh, it’s a popular one, but if you remember the Terminator movies with Schwarzenegger, he is an AI agent. He’s a robot that is completely AI, and you give him a mission and he’s going to go out and do everything in his capability to accomplish that mission. That’s what a lot of people are trying to do with AI agents and AI bots, is have them just in one line, I’m going to give it a mission, I want you to go write my website copy and then expect it to go and do all the website copy for you, and you never have to touch it again, you don’t interact at all. You’ve just given the Terminator a mission. The opposite is Iron Man from Marvel, which is Tony Stark is a billionaire who’s smart, funny, charismatic, he wraps himself in the Iron Man suit and surrounds himself with technology and he has Jarvis AI in his ear that gives him information and data that he wouldn’t otherwise have as a human being. And it turns Tony Stark into the superhero that can solve the problems and accomplish the missions. And I think tha…

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