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Welcome to Episode 262 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• A mini masterclass on LinkedIn: Improve these three things on your LinkedIn profile to get people’s attention and encourage them to engage with you.
• The 3 tests to apply to new initiatives: The fear test, the regret test, and the comfort zone test – will these push you into taking the next big leap for your MSP?
• Should you start a podcast for your MSP?: Podcasts are a great way to grow relationships with an audience, but is it the right thing for your MSP?
• Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Stuart from an MSP in Atlanta has asked how much he should be paying for a content writer. Find out more on this and whether AI is a good tool to use too.

A mini masterclass on LinkedIn

It’s very easy to become complacent about social media and believe that it’s just a waste of time to a busy business owner like you who’s trying to build their MSP.

But the reality is that social media is still incredibly important.

Not all the networks, of course. I really don’t think most MSPs will get much from TikTok for some time, at least not until the generation that’s growing up with TikTok are the decision makers.

For B2B marketing in 2024 and next year as well the social media network to go for is of course…

LinkedIn – this is still the very best platform for MSPs looking for new clients, and I do highly recommend that you put in time on it every single day.

Let’s spend a few minutes now on a mini masterclass on LinkedIn, and I’ve got three things for you to look at.

The first is to improve three things in your profile. So here’s an interesting question. Based on your current profile, if you were an ordinary business owner or manager, would you want to be a client of your MSP? If not, here are three areas to spend more time on: The headline – focus on the benefit to your prospects rather than what you do. “I do IT for town businesses”, becomes “Helping town businesses grow with technology”. Then look at your headshot and don’t be cheap – pay a professional who does headshots every day and can make you look beautiful. Your about us bit – write it for your prospects, not other IT professionals. You want them to read it and think, ah, this is exactly the kind of person I want looking after my business.

Next up then, is to build your personal brand. And your personal brand is what others think about you. It’s not something you control, but it is something that you can heavily influence. And it’s based on a number of factors: the number of connections you have, the recommendations that you have, what you post about, and how often you post, the value of your contributions, the speed of your responses, and whether you do something like a LinkedIn newsletter or a LinkedIn live. Because people who are perceived as experts, they do these things. Now, like much of marketing, getting better results is about doing a series of small actions on a regular basis, for years. I spend no more than about 15 to 20 minutes a day on LinkedIn. I have a virtual assistant who does functional stuff like accepting connection requests. I just do new content and commenting.

In the early days, this felt like a waste of time, but today I have two sizable and engaged audiences – my connections and my LinkedIn newsletter subscribers. And these have only come from doing the work day in, day out for years whether I wanted to or no...

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Welcome to Episode 261 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• Stop clients calling you personally for first line support: You can’t grow your business while you’re delivering first line support. Find out how you can free yourself from these burdens whilst retaining great relationships with your clients.
• Why victory loves preparation: Planning small actions regularly will make the biggest difference to your business.
• How introverts can communicate more confidently – and feel better about it: Learn how to tap into your passion using this confidence formula, whatever your “vertness”.
• Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Greg from South Carolina wants to know what the Parthenon principle of marketing is and how to apply it to his MSP.

Stop clients calling you personally for first line support

When you are the person who started the MSP, one of the hardest transitions for you is to get away from delivering first line support to that very first set of clients that you won in your first few years. But it’s something that you absolutely have to do or otherwise you get trapped in doing technical work forever.

Now, don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with technical work, but you can’t grow your business while you’re doing password resets and setting up new users, right? This problem happens to most MSP owners and the reason it’s so hard is because you used to look after these clients yourself, you personally. So they feel that they have some kind of special bond with you. And even when you’ve employed first line technicians whose very job it is to sit there and help your clients, they will still email you directly or call your mobile directly rather than speak to the help desk.

Now, this steals your time when you should be working on the business, but also reduces your ability to sell more to them during a strategic review.

You can’t be the technology strategist and first line support at the same time. Clients’ minds will only let you sit in one of those boxes.

There are a number of different ways to tackle this problem without annoying your clients, and you’ll probably put a couple of the things I’m about to talk about together into a blended solution. In fact, here are nine things that I recommend.

The first is to set clear expectations. Now, this is really easy with new clients, but hard with longer standing clients. So just remember you have to educate them, constantly. What’s top of mind for you is item 1,058 in their mind’s list of priorities.

Number two, make it easy. Put stickers with the help desk number on every single device. Put them on their hands so they can’t help but see them.

Number three, have a standard operating procedure to roll out each time a client contacts you directly. Make a plan in advance so you don’t have the emotional trauma of wondering, how am I going to deal with this?

Number four, play dumb. Tell them you don’t know how to fix that as you focus on strategy these days, but you’ll ask someone on the help desk to call them immediately.

Number five, change your voicemail to say that you’re not working today and for any support, please call the help desk on this number. You can then let client calls go to voicemail forever. Perhaps just follow up with them the first couple of times it happens or when their issue is being resolved just so that they know you are there, but you are not the one doing the work.

Number six, set up an email auto reply exactly at the same principle as the voicemail.

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Welcome to a very SPECIAL edition of the show, Episode 260, celebrating 5 years of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green.

This episode’s been released five years to the day since we launched the podcast on the 5th of November, 2019. It’s a birthday! Amazing. Well back then, producer James and I figured it would run for a few months when we launched the first episode.

“Hello, this is Paul Green and welcome to the first ever MSP marketing podcast. Now, my aim every single week is to give you some motivation, some ideas, some clever stuff that you can take that other MSPs are doing around the world and you can bring it into your business and really make a difference to your business quite quickly and quite dramatically.”

Five years on, I’ve talked to some of the guests who’ve appeared over the years and asked them a big question – What’s the best idea you have to help MSPs make more money? We’ve split their answers into four different sections, starting of course with Marketing and Sales.

Hi guys, it’s Jamie Warner here, CEO of eNerds and Invarosoft. And here’s my tip for how your MSP can make more money. Well, the good news is I’ve got two tips and as an MSP owner, this is coming from experience. I’m actually in the saddle selling at the moment. So my first tip is that you must learn how to increase your percentage success rate of converting new customers. Your only goal is to essentially convince that new client opportunity that your MSP is going to be a step up from where they went before. That is why clients look to change. They don’t look to change for technical reasons. They only look to change for a step up in the service experience. So that’s your job, to figure out what are the things that you can say in your IT services presentation that will demonstrate that your service methodology is a step up from where they’ve gone before.

Now, obviously in the Invarosoft world, we use our customer experience technology to demonstrate to that customer how visually they’re going to get a step up in their service experience. And interestingly, we also use our QBR or our roadmap, TBR, whatever you want to call it. We use the methodology and the software that we use to do that and we demonstrate that to the customer as well, so they can see how our methodology and how our roadmapping and our gap analysis and our reporting is going to be a step up, and we show them examples of that when we are presenting our services. So that’s tip number one and that’s going to help you sign up more clients and grow your MSP.

The other thing that doesn’t get spoken about, so tip number two, is that you absolutely have to treat your clients as a pipeline of opportunity from a QBR perspective. So every client essentially has a huge amount of things that you need to help them improve. It might be new switches, routers, firewalls, a project to go to the cloud with Office 365, whatever it happens to be. Put all your clients in a list, down the left hand side of an Excel spreadsheet, look at how much you think you could possibly sell them. Workstations and desktops tends to be a big part of that. And then look at the enormous pipeline you’ve got. Now, these are things that clients actually need. These are not things that they don’t need, and so the best MSPs that grow faster, there’s this concept of sales compression. It’s understanding you have a pipeline as it relates to the QBR side of things, going out and actually having a conversation with the customer to get them to make decisions.

Which is what we do, the buying psychology of good, better, best when we present those recommendations to get buyers to ma...

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Welcome to Episode 259 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• Golden rules of MSP sales & marketing: I asked my MSP marketing Facebook group what their golden rules of sales and marketing would be, and I’ve got the highlights for you.
• 3 ways to kill your MSP’s sales: There are many mistakes MSPs make that stop them from winning new clients. Here are three that I see holding back MSPs everywhere.
• How MSPs can build self managing teams: If you have to turn up every day in order for your business to function, then you need to start paying special attention to your team and developing them. My guest explains how.
• Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Jonah in California wants to know whether to include trust badges on his MSP’s website and I have a very clear answer.

Golden rules of MSP sales & marketing

One of the best things about working in the channel is just how collaborative MSPs are, and I see this in communities all the time. I’m sure you do too. In fact, I’ve watched people who are in direct competition with each other – they literally lose clients to each other – I’ve watched them collaborate and help each other in times of need. Recently, I asked a bunch of MSPs who are in my Facebook group what their golden rules of sales and marketing would be, and I’ve got the highlights for you right here.

So I have this Facebook group, which you really should join if you’re determined to improve your marketing and get new clients for your MSP. Just go into Facebook, search for MSP marketing, but do make sure you’re looking in the group search and not in the pages search, and it is free to join. It’s also a vendor free zone, something we did about five years ago, kicking all the vendors out. The quality as you can imagine, has been much higher since because there’s no one there doing any selling. There’s just people adding value.

I asked the two and a half thousand members of my MSP Marketing Facebook group what their golden rules would be for marketing and sales, and here are some of the many replies that we received…

So I kicked off with my own, which is to never discount. I think that you should add value when you need to do a deal, but never cut your prices. Cutting prices is such a dangerous thing to do. Now, sticking with pricing, Dan Baird said it’s better to over-price rather than under-price. I agree with you there, thank you, Dan. And Don Mangiarelli said, never disclose pricing in an email – you should always be at a sit down meeting.

Keith Nelson said, never price on commodity sales. Good, better, or best packages. Keith also dropped some more value bombs. He said, never think that you are too small for a big contract; never sell technology, sell business outcomes, enhanced with secure technical solutions; and never do a QBR on how great you are, only report on business outcomes and measurable business results. I love these, thank you very much, Keith.

Aaron Weir then dropped a comment, and Aaron always brings value to the conversation. He said, never send a contract over email, always present in person. I completely agree with you on that, Aaron. It is a lot harder to get the meeting and to sit down with someone, but you’re much more likely to get the sale if you do it.

Okay, a few more. Rob Williams said, never over promise. Jonathan Scofield said, wherever your prospect is, there thou shall also be – it’s quite hard to talk in kind of biblical text like that. And Jeff Weight said, have a yearly price increase called out in your contract.

Now there wer...

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Welcome to Episode 258 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• How notifications stop you from buying a better car: Your job as the business owner is to find quality time to work ON the business and make sure you’re operating in “the zone” where nothing distracts you. Your biggest threat to this is notifications… turn them off, all of them.
• Are you up against a Super MSP? This is why you have nothing to fear: Super MSPs are huge companies that buy MSPs and merge them together. But fear not, these present three opportunities for you.
• Why your brand is so much more than your logo: Your brand is actually how people feel about you based on everything they see or hear about you. This is why your brand tone must be consistent across every way you communicate with everyone.
• Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Terry, from an MSP in Pennsylvania, is concerned about the risk of forgetting the things that might help him grow his MSP. He wants to know the best way to keep great business books alive in the long-term.

How notifications stop you from buying a better car

One of the hard facts that you soon learn as a business owner is if you want to grow your business, you have to find and protect substantial chunks of time in order for you to work on your business. It’s this time where you make the forward progress because you are implementing things that will generate new clients, retain existing clients, and encourage your existing clients to buy more services from you. But there’s a problem, you see, I believe you have to spend this time in the zone completely focused on the task in hand. And this is especially true if you’re an MSP doing marketing activities, and that’s not a natural skillset for you. Yet the vast majority of MSPs, they never get into this state of full focus. And there’s a specific reason why.

Many, many years ago, I used to do one-on-one consults with MSPs here in the UK. We’d hire a business meeting room and we’d spend the day exploring their business goals, their marketing, what was going well and what was not going well. And I probably did about, I don’t know, 20 or 30 of these over about 18 months. And it’s not something I do anymore, but it was a great way for me to learn about MSPs and of course for me to help them with their marketing. That was before we had our MSP Marketing Edge service.

But I’ll never forget one of the meetings I had, which was almost like a comedy situation, like it could have been in a sitcom. So let’s just take the context of this meeting. The MSP that I’m meeting with has paid a few thousand pounds for my time and attention. And the whole purpose of the day is to examine their marketing and make it better so that they can win new clients and ultimately grow their business, which is the way that of course, they’ll grow their own personal income and ultimately have a better lifestyle. So to me, that makes the meeting a very big deal indeed. And in fact, most of the MSPs that I met with, they took their meeting very seriously. But one of them didn’t. And it wasn’t that he didn’t want to, he was desperate to grow his business and I knew that he valued my advice.

The trouble was he was caught up in the notifications of what was happening in his business at that exact moment. The first hour or so, I could barely drag him away from his laptop. He was looking at Teams messages, he was looking at his PSA, and he was just generally distracted. And I challenged him on this when we had our coffee break and I said, look, I don’t believe that you can spend quality time working on yo...

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Welcome to Episode 257 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• What the yellow car game teaches MSPs about marketing: There’s a part of our brain called the Reticular Activating System which acts as a sensory filter. You might see and hear everything, but you only perceive it if it’s relevant to you.
• Here’s a simple marketing cadence that your MSP can swipe and adapt: How to build a marketing system around repeatable daily, weekly and monthly tasks that will work for any MSP.
• How offering custom development boosts client retention for MSPs: Retaining a client is so much easier than to getting a new one. Is this a potential gap in your MSP’s offering?
• Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Dale, from northeast England, has a website question for his MSP – Should I buy a website domain ending in .io?

What the yellow car game teaches MSPs about marketing

You must often have conversations with ordinary business owners or managers and be gobsmacked just how little they’ve absorbed about stuff from our world, such as cyber security breaches that are in the news or critical updates that need to happen. Have you ever wondered why that is? It’s not just that they don’t care, it’s actually more that their brain has been trained not to tell them about it. You see, the brain has a kind of bodyguard that stops information from getting in and it actually explains why most people don’t perceive your MSP’s marketing. Good news – there is a way around this bodyguard, and the easiest way for me to explain that is to tell you about the yellow car game.

Every time we travel in the car together, my 14-year-old child and I play a really cool game, when we see a yellow car, we have to punch the other person on the arm and the first one to land a punch wins that round. I’m very pleased to tell you that I am the current yellow car champion. Now, this game makes long journeys just whiz by, believe me. And what’s really fun is playing the game with other passengers in the car because my daughter and I absolutely slaughter them. And no wonder because our brains have been trained to actively look for yellow cars, whereas of course our passengers are seeing yellow cars but not perceiving them.

This is because the bodyguard that stops information getting into their brain has not yet been trained to look for yellow cars. Now, this bodyguard has a name, it’s called the reticular activating system, and it has lots of functions, but the most important thing from a marketing point of view is that it acts as a sensory filter. If you had to consciously deal with all of the information coming in from your five senses, you would very quickly go insane. So instead that information goes through the Reticular Activating System, which acts as a relevance filter.

For the small number of things that are relevant to you, it allows you to perceive them. Everything else you might see it or hear it, but you don’t perceive it. And this is why when you go to, let’s say a new town, you see the break/fix shops, you see the vans belonging to other MSPs, because as far as your reticular activating system is concerned they are relevant to you. But you don’t see the dentists and you don’t see the lawyers, unless of course you are marketing to those kind of people, because they are not relevant you. When you understand that everything you do and say to anyone goes through their reticular activating system, and especially your marketing, then you get a blinding realisation why people just don’t seem to take in the things you’re trying to say to them.

And in understanding how th...

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Welcome to Episode 256 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• Warning! This friction kills MSPs’ sales: When you have someone making contact with you, your job is to make sure you’ve removed every single piece of friction from the sales process.
• Can your MSP’s technicians close this many tickets?: I interviewed the awesome Jason Kemsley from Uptime Solutions, an outsourced help desk, who gave us the stats to assess what good performance looks like for all three levels of technician.
• How MSPs manage the conflict of business and parenting: My guest, David Ask, tells you how to live a great life, while still achieving everything you want with your business.
• Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Chris from San Francisco wants advice on a good meeting structure to grow his MSP.

Warning! This friction kills MSPs’ sales

As an MSP, you’re hardly inundated with calls from people who want to buy from you. Well, that’s my experience of the MSPs that I work with, certainly. So when you do have someone making contact with you, your job is to make sure you’ve removed every single piece of friction from the sales process. Let me tell you about my experience of the exact opposite of this, where I was desperate to buy something and the friction in doing so was so great, it drove me into the arms of a competitor.

So I’m not going to name the company that I was trying to buy from as that’s not really fair on a podcast and YouTube video like this, just know that it’s not an MSP and it’s not a company in the channel, but it is a supplier of marketing services based in the US. I’ve been doing some research recently into a new marketing initiative that we are doing to promote the MSP Marketing Edge and this service was the perfect solution.

I’d managed to answer all of my questions online, on their website, which is actually the first piece of friction that you and I need to talk about. If an ordinary business owner or manager goes onto your website, will you answer as many of their questions as you can? I’ll be honest, for most MSPs, the answer to this is sadly no.

Most MSPs don’t have the basics in place, such as explaining what you do, how you do it, what makes you different from the other IT companies they’re looking at. And most importantly, you probably don’t have an indicative idea of pricing on your website.

Now, I know that this is a very emotive subject because the price depends upon how long the string is. But when it comes to websites, I very much follow the advice of Marcus Sheridan. In his book, They Ask, You Answer, which definitively says you should put prices on your website because it’s one of the most basic things that people are looking at.

Anyway, I digress. So I answered all of my own questions on this potential supplier’s website and I was ready to buy, and that was where I ran into real trouble because it really wasn’t obvious how to buy from them. There was a call to action button, so the thing that they wanted me to do, and that took me through to a page, which did actually talk about their pricing and their packaging or their packages, but you couldn’t actually select one of the packages and go through with the purchase, which was really weird.

So I thought perhaps the website was having some kind of blip. I refreshed it, I left it for 24 hours and I came back the next day, but nothing had changed. It was exactly the same. Here’s the thing, sometimes what seems obvious to us, what seems obvious that we want them to do, is not obvious to every other human o...

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Welcome to Episode 255 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• How to minimise interruptions and stupid questions from staff: It’s important to invest time every day on growing your MSP without interruptions and I’ve got a 3 step fix to help you do just that.
• 5 big ugly MSP marketing myths: BUSTED: Improving your marketing becomes much easier when you wipe these common myths from your head. Just like IT, marketing should be logical and systemisable.
• The 3 most important growth things you can do in the final 3 months of the year: My guest this week, Ian Luckett, unveils his expert advice as a Business Growth Consultant, to achieve the most from the rest of 2024.
• Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Francis from an MSP in Washington wants to know how to find the motivation to do work he doesn’t enjoy.

How to minimise interruptions and stupid questions from staff

One of the things you hear me regularly talking about is the need to invest 60 to 90 minutes every day working on your MSP rather than in it. And that means doing activities that win you new clients, encourage them to buy more from you and encourage them to spend more when they buy. Now, one of the biggest problems with this is when your staff constantly interrupt you with questions that really they could answer for themselves, do you have this problem? If so, you are going to love my solution.

Staff interrupt you all the time, often with stupid questions. Now, I’m not being rude about your staff, this is a fact, but interruptions kill progress. Why do they do it? Well, partly it’s to show that they’re working. Partly it’s because they’re too lazy to look up the answer for themselves. And partly it’s because…

Staff want your attention, as they are the child. And as their boss, you are the parent.

Now, there is a three step fix for this, and you have to make a very long-term commitment to all three of these steps so that this becomes, if you like, a way of working and not just your current thing.

Step one – find your own space. It’s impossible to do your work on the business when you’re in the same physical space as your staff who are working in the business on your behalf. So you need a separate office at least, or maybe even an office away from your building. There’s nothing wrong with sitting in with your staff sometimes, but not all the time because it’s exhausting and frankly unproductive.

Step two – answer every stupid question with a question of your own. So let’s say you are asked – Boss, we’re out of milk. What should we do? – which of course makes you want to pull out your sword and with one swift chop end their miserable life, but this isn’t Game of Thrones. So instead you ask this question back – If I wasn’t here, what would you do? – And then you repeat that question or variations of it for each of the follow-up stupid questions until they realise that they had the answer inside them all along. Yeah, I know this is the slow way to tackle the problem because the fastest thing to do is just tell them the answer, that’s quicker and easier, but it also reinforces their need for you. And we want your staff to thrive without you.

And then step three – make yourself available at fixed times of the day because not all staff questions are stupid. Some will be totally valid, especially the technical ones. So make yourself available to your team once, twice, or three times a day at fixed times. And ideally these will be t...