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The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge Welcome to Episode 290 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week… Can your MSP offer an easy first purchase?: One of the biggest MSP marketing hurdles is asking potential clients to go from nothing to a monthly recurring revenue contract. A better way is to give them an easy first purchase. Does your MSP do whatever it takes to keep clients happy?: Flexibility and initiative needs to be a culture within an MSP, not a policy. A culture of “do whatever makes technology easy for clients” would be a powerful retention weapon. Build a personal brand to build your MSP: My special guest is a personal branding expert and explains how it’s easy to build and can be incredibly profitable when you get it right. Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Ever wondered why your MSP’s marketing and sales are SOOOO slow? Let me explain and advise what you can do about it. Can your MSP offer an easy first purchase? Here’s something you know already, it’s just too darn hard to get new managed service clients. One of the biggest hurdles is that you are asking them to go from nothing straight to a monthly recurring revenue contract at the click of a finger. Surely convincing them it’s safe to start spending their money with you is easy. You just put a strong case forward and then dazzle them with the service that they’re going to be getting, yeah? If only it was that easy. So if the client finds signing a contract with you a bit scary, how do we fix that? Is there a way to make them feel happy committing to you and spending money with you? Absolutely there is, and let me tell you what it is. What we’re really talking about here is building trust. Trust is a massive currency within marketing and sales. The more trust you have, the more likely people are to sign a contract and throw themselves into your care. But the opposite of that is also the case. If you don’t have enough trust built with your leads and with your prospects, then asking them to go from no buying relationship with you straight into a managed services contract is a big ask. I know it can be done and it is done every single day, but surely we should be trying to make our lives easier. If you look at this from the point of view of the person buying, and by the way that’s always a great way to look at any of your marketing and your sales, always, always, always look at it from the other person’s point of view. So when they start looking for a new MSP or maybe even their first MSP, we call them suspects. They have their arms folded, they are suspicious of everyone they find and they are not overly impressed with anyone at all. And even if they’ve been given a warm referral from a friend or they find an MSP online that has tons of social proof, so it looks like a safe choice, they are still suspicious asking someone to trust you with their technology. And as we said, it’s a big ask. Now, they might not know what they don’t know about technology, but they do know that if you get it wrong their business is dead in the water. And this is one of the reasons why it takes so much time to build a relationship and warm up an arms folded suspect, turn them into a lead turn that lead into a prospect, that prospect into an opportunity. It takes time, it takes effort, and it’s exhausting because the risk is so big from their point of view. So let’s see if we can de-risk that for them. One of the ways that you could do that is with a risk reversal guarantee. I’ve seen only a small number, actually a tiny number of MSPs do a guarantee and the ones that do it the best, they have massive guarantees. They guarantee absolute complete delight, complete satisfaction. And if the client doesn’t experience that, they can walk away, in fact they will help them migrate over to another MSP. I’ve seen one MSP even do a money back within the guarantee, if you’re not happy in the first six months, we’ll let you move somewhere else and you’ll get your money back. Now, if you’re really confident about your delivery and your ability to create and maintain relationships with clients, then that’s a smart route to go. However, for a lot of MSPs, a guarantee like that and especially a money back guarantee is a very scary thing to do. If that’s you, maybe a better way is instead to give them an easy first purchase. What is this? It’s something that they can buy from you that’s a one-off. It allows them to essentially sample your business. They can see what your customer service is like, what your delivery is like, what the quality of your work is like before they even have to think about actually signing a contract with you. And this process affects them a little bit at a cognitive level, but it affects them massively at an emotional level. If you can persuade someone who doesn’t know you to give you just a little bit of money to do a one-off thing for them, then they are dramatically, and I do mean 10 times more likely to enter a long-term managed services contract with you. Do you like the sound of that? Yeah, me too. So the final issue that we’ve got to fix then is what do you sell them? What is this easy first purchase that you could get them to invest in? Well, there are lots of different things that you could try. So you could start with something that’s perhaps not directly related to the technology services that you supply. One idea for this is perhaps a lunch and learn what if you could get someone to give you 20 or 30 pounds or dollars and come and sit in a room with you for a couple of hours, eat a sandwich, sit there listening to you talking about, cyber security, productivity, something like that, the content of the lunch and learn doesn’t really matter so much, but that’s a very easy first purchase. And don’t forget, you are asking them not just for their money in this instance, you are also asking them for their time as well. And the prospect who gives you both time and money is actually a very, very high quality prospect compared to someone who perhaps just gives you a bit of money or just gives you bits of time, but not both of them. So you could then take that lunch and learn idea further and turn it into perhaps a seminar, maybe a webinar, although I do think in-person stuff is really better for this. You could even do onsite training. I do know of an MSP that does remote training for companies on how to stop their staff clicking a bad link in the email. So it’s only like a 20 or 30 minute session. They do charge for it, it’s done on Zoom typically over lunchtime. The real power of doing that training is as part of that process, as part of the delivery, the MSP has a review booked with the decision maker at the end of the training so he can go back and report to the decision maker on who struggled with the training, who may need further training. Here’s a kind of general assessment of what I think the business’s likelihood is that you may accidentally click a link. They can talk about other issues, other protections, and all of this training and the feedback. These are just tools to get this MSP I know onto a quality call where with a decision maker where they’re talking about that person’s business. And as you can imagine, a lot of sales meetings come out of that process. So the prospect has been paying for training that ultimately gets them to trust the MSP and then they’re very happy to go on, or many of them are happy to go on and have a sales meeting. And let’s take that onto one other idea and that’s to do some level of technology strategy consulting. So if doing seminars or training doesn’t excite you, then obviously don’t do it. You must always do things like this that get you excited, otherwise you just won’t do them or you will do them in a very lackluster way. So what about giving someone a 90 minute technology review and perhaps even pulling together a technology strategy for them. That could be a 60 or 90 minute meeting sitting with them talking about their business, their goals, everything that they want to achieve, everything that’s important to them. And then you go away and you build a technology strategy for them. And I appreciate that that’s going to be quite a light document because you’ve just had one meeting, you don’t know them very well. But here’s the thing, if you position it and price it accordingly, for most businesses that have no technology strategy whatsoever, and isn’t that the vast majority of businesses, something that’s been built with 90 minutes of your time talking to them and then you going away and doing a bit of thinking and a bit of writing and actually committing a strategy to document. For most businesses, that’s going to be way better than having no strategy document whatsoever. And remember the big picture here, the point of the strategy document is to open bigger conversations about their business, where they’re going, what support they’re going to need on the way. Please don’t overthink this. Don’t overthink what you can and can’t do for just a couple of hundred dollars or pounds. In fact, I suppose you’ve got to think about the bigger purpose here, which is to get them buying something from you. Something, anything, but then being delighted by the delivery. And a side note on this, if you can find businesses that will pay you a thousand pounds of dollars or more for that kind of strategy consultation that we were just talking about, as you can imagine, they will make much better managed services clients in the long run. Does your MSP do whatever it takes to keep clients happy? So what’s it like doing double the work? It’s hard work landing managed service clients and then there’s the constant hard work of making sure those clients are happy. You may be happy to bend over backwards to offer a great customer service. You’ve got a vested interest in it. But what about your staff? What if they don’t all share your passion for bending over backwards? What if that’s having a long-term impact on retention that you won’t feel until it’s too late? Good news, there is a fix. A few months back I was standing staring at huge amounts of delicious food in a brand new cafe that I’d never been in before. It was actually inside a meeting venue in central London and I’d been meeting some really cool people there. And we were delighted to discover that the in-house cafe was serving real food, not just the usual crusty old sandwiches. And the food was subsidised and it was really cheap, like a hot meal for £5 (about six and a half dollars), something like that. That’s a bargain, right? So the only problem was the complete lack of flexibility demonstrated by the staff. They would only sell the set meals on the menu. And here’s how my ordering experience went, and I’m going to tell you line by line, I did write it down after it happened. I started by saying, Hey, can I have a jacket potato with just cheese please? And the server said, That comes with cheese and beans. And I said, Well, I don’t want the beans, so can I just have cheese please? And the server said, You don’t want beans? And I said, No, I don’t want beans. And the server said, But it comes with beans. And I said, Well, I don’t like beans, I just want to have cheese, please. And then I kind of paused the beat and I looked down and I spotted that there was broccoli. And I said, oh actually, can I swap my beans for broccoli? Don’t judge me on having a baked potato with cheese and broccoli, I just like that. But anyway, the server said, No, I’m really sorry, but it’s only cheese and beans. And I actually stared at her at this point and I was genuinely astonished. And I said, So I can’t have broccoli? She said, No. And I said, Well, can I pay extra for the broccoli? It looks really good and now I just want some broccoli. And this is genuinely what happened, she said, No, you can only have cheese and beans. And I said, Really? And she actually said these words, she said, It’s our policy. You get some side salad, but broccoli isn’t side salad. And I said, Well, what if I don’t have beans and I don’t have the side salad, but I have some broccoli instead? And she kind of thought for a second and then she said, No, no, we can’t do that. And I said, Really? But you’ll make more money on the meal, so let me pay extra. I’d like to have broccoli. And the server said, and I know this is how bad this conversation was going, she said, Look, if you want broccoli, you’ll need to order a meal that comes with vegetables, jacket, potatoes come with cheese, they come with beans, they come with a side salad. They do not come with vegetables. And at this point I was aware that there was a long queue behind me, everyone was starting to grumble, I was that guy. So I said, Alright, I’ll just have the potato and cheese then please. And I looked really sad and I had a glum face and also made a mental note to buy broccoli on the way home, it didn’t taste as good at home because it never does. Now, I promise you, I haven’t exaggerated that story at all. My gut feel is that the server showed this complete lack of flexibility because of the culture of that cafe. Maybe their whole day is geared around efficiently serving the hundreds of people who have meetings at that venue. So somewhere along the line, rather than do what’s best for the customer, they’ve developed a policy of never deviating off the menu. Because that makes sense, doesn’t it, for an efficient process. But surely the staff should be given initiative to do something simple that customers would like swap one dish for another. In my business, the MSP Marketing Edge, we do have a culture of you should do whatever makes marketing easy for our members. And this drives everything that we do. And it means that my team very rarely need to check in with me. So if a member asks them to do something that’s a little bit off piste, it’s not what we would normally do, if we can help and if it makes marketing easy for that person, then my team just do it. They use their initiative so we don’t have to have conversations about should we do this? It’s our culture, it’s our mission, and we keep it alive by feeding it every day and talking every day about what can we do to make marketing easy for our members. A culture doesn’t come from putting up a sign on office walls. It doesn’t come from telling your staff how to behave. It doesn’t come from standard operating procedures. It doesn’t come from what’s obvious to you as the owner. Because as a side note, what’s obvious to us as business owners is very, very rarely obvious to our team. If we don’t tell them exactly what we want and why we want it, they are constantly trying to guess what we want and then give it to us. And this is a huge source of stress both to you and to your staff. A culture needs to be nurtured every day, in every conversation you have internally, every meeting, every project – you have to openly talk about your mission. You have to remind yourself that everything you do is aimed at the thing you’re trying to do. This is what we do when we’re talking about making marketing easy for MSPs. Because we know internally here, the more that we do that, the more MSPs will join us, and therefore the more successful we will all be together, which is great and it’s no different within your MSP. So that leads me to an interesting question for you. Do your technicians have the power to use their initiative? And more importantly, do they know that they have that power? Flexibility and initiative needs to be a culture within an MSP, not a policy or a sign that’s on a wall. And I know there’s a fine line between what the clients think you should be doing for them and what you are actually doing for them. And expectation setting is a huge thing for you, but I promise you a culture of do whatever makes technology easy for clients would be a very powerful retention weapon within your MSP. Do you agree? Build a personal brand to build your MSP Featured guest: Alan Mc…
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