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Welcome to Episode 252 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• Get the right message in front of the right person at the right time: To attract new clients you need consistent, well-timed marketing to ensure they choose your MSP when they’re ready to switch.
• Do you employ any Sales Prevention Officers?: That’s anyone who avoids suggesting beneficial services to clients so they don’t appear salesy, but they’re unintentionally hurting your business by missing opportunities to improve client satisfaction and increase revenue.
• The common service mistakes that can damage client retention: My guest this week, Michelle Coombs, highlights the common service mistakes that can damage long-term client retention and how to stop them from happening in your MSP.
• Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Alec, who has an MSP in Nashville, would like to hire a virtual assistant to take on his admin tasks but doesn’t know how to hire one that he can trust.

Get the right message in front of the right person at the right time

There’s a reason that getting new clients for your MSP takes so long. It’s because of what’s happening to the ordinary business are owners and managers that you are trying to reach. And when you understand what’s going on in their heads and their hearts, you can figure out why they’re so slow switching from one MSP to another. Let’s talk about the importance of getting the right message in front of the right person at the right time.

Now, one of the most critical marketing skills that you can develop is the ability to look at your MSP and what you sell from the point of view of the people that you are trying to sell it to or put another way. If you can get in their heads and their hearts, you can better understand what’s driving them to make a decision. Or maybe more importantly, what’s holding them back from making a decision. The best phrase that I ever heard to describe this is…

To influence what John Smith buys, you must see through John Smith’s eyes.

When you really look at why a business owner or manager switches from one MSP to another, you suddenly get a startling insight into why switching MSPs is a distress activity for most people. You see, they don’t really understand technology at all. In fact, compared to you, they are literally the other end of the scale. You have such in-depth technology and abilities and that makes you an incredibly talented technology person, but the client you’re selling to, well, they’re more like me. I’m not a tech I never have been. That by the way means it’s easy for me to represent the ordinary people that you sell to. And sure, I understand a bit about technology and I love it. And actually I probably know a lot more about technology these days because of course I’ve been working with MSPs for eight years, but I can’t set up a server, I can’t configure a cloud service and I bet you a rather large amount of money that I’d be the guy that would get the setting wrong and I would take down the entire business. So please, no one ever give me the settings of anything important, I beg you.

Anyway, because they don’t understand technology, but they do know it’s incredibly important. They are less willing to muck about with it. So something major has to change at their incumbent MSP for them to want to switch to someone new. And we do see this, don’t we. We see small businesses being sold and kind of merged into super MSPs and maybe customer service goes down and maybe prices go up and the dissatisfaction creeps in very, very slowly for the c...