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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...

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Welcome to Episode 254 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• 9 MSP marketing ideas to break into a new vertical: One of the easiest ways to grow your MSP is to target a vertical. Marketing to a vertical is so much easier than marketing to a general audience.
• How to stand out at networking meetings: To get the most from networking meetings you have to stand out but in the right way, in the most authentic way. And I’m going to tell you exactly how to do that.
• How to find another MSP for sale, and start a conversation: One of the fastest ways to scale a business is to acquire competitors and absorb their clients into your business. My guest, Jonathan Jay, shares his expertise on this subject.
• Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Fiona, from an MSP in New Hampshire, wants to know more about exit intent popups – do you use these on your website yet?

9 MSP marketing ideas to break into a new vertical

One of the easiest ways to grow your MSP is to target a vertical. Marketing to a vertical is so much easier than marketing to a general audience because you know exactly who you are marketing to, exactly where they are, exactly what their problems are, and how you can solve those problems. So you can make your marketing message sound so much more relevant to them. A lawyer, for example, is much more likely to listen to you if you are using the word lawyer than if you are just talking about business owners.

Let me give you nine, rapid fire marketing ideas to break into a new vertical. So there are many benefits of marketing to a vertical. You can do it alongside your general business, and once you’ve picked a vertical, there are a number of actions that you should take to get your marketing properly set up.

Here are the first nine actions that I recommend, in the order that you should do them.

Number one: Build a website just for that vertical. Not just a new page on your existing site, do it properly. Put together a four to five page website just for that vertical. The goal is to appear to be a true specialist to your target prospects, and a proper website is a basic MSP marketing fundamental.

Number two: Set up a vertical specific LinkedIn or Facebook, depending which platform most decision makers in your vertical use.

Number three: Start posting regular content so that you have a presence. Make sure to put the name of the vertical into the headline and/or the intro paragraph. Now, sometimes making content seem relevant to a vertical is as simple as mentioning that vertical and also look for how they refer to themselves and their business. So for example, accountants have a practice, not a business.

Number four: Start networking and meet as many decision makers as you can. Look for relevant vertical business shows or other events that you can attend, as nothing beats pressing the flesh when you’re just getting started in a vertical. I promise you’ll have a marketing revelation at every event.

Number five: Build your email list. It’s easy to get started with a vertical because you can just buy targeted data. You can also scrape Google or get a virtual assistant to just go through Google searches and make a database up for you.

Number six: Get your marketing machine working, generating prospects that you can speak to doing all the things we’ve just been talking about, and then pick up the phone and call them. Phone calls will always get you to a new client faster.

Number seven: Once you have a vertical client, turn them into a case study or a testimonial a...

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Welcome to Episode 253 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• MSP owners: Why do we make our lives so hard?: Business owners often hinder their own success by running a marathon while carrying an anchor, meaning they knowingly hold themselves back through overwork, limited thinking, or mismanagement.
• The most powerful MSP marketing question to ask any lead: Asking this is a great way to prioritise your leads and create a follow-up list for the future.
• How to do marketing within the CIS security framework: One of your challenges is making ordinary business owners and managers realise how important good security is. Find out how you can achieve this using the Center for Internet Security controls. My guest, Zach Kromkowski, explains all.
• Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Sean, who runs as MSP in Houston, wants to learn more about AppSumo and what it has to offer.

MSP owners: Why do we make our lives so hard?

You and I as business owners, we are in this for the long run, right? Whether this is your first year in business or your 30th, you know that owning a business is a marathon and not a sprint. So that being said, why do we constantly make life hard for ourselves? Far too many MSPs decide to run the marathon while carrying an anchor. It’s nuts. Let’s talk about why we do this and how to give ourselves a much easier life, yet still achieving the things that we want from our business.

So I was listening to this book a few months back. It was written by the guy who built up the Burger King chain back in the 1950s and 60s if you’re interested. It’s called The Burger King. It was, okay, not the most instructive business book in the world, but I do believe you can get huge value from any book as long as you get one big idea from it. Do you agree with me on that? Anyway, my big takeaway from this book was a phrase I’ve never heard before, but I instantly understood what it meant.

Business owners make life hard for themselves by running a marathon while carrying an anchor.

And I completely relate to this, do you? It means that even though we know it’s not a sprint race and we know we have to keep going for years and years and years, we seem to noble ourselves in as many ways as we can. Perhaps it’s by continuing to work 60 hours a week despite being surrounded by very competent staff who are actually looking for more things to do. Or perhaps it’s by not taking enough vacation, enough holiday time each year, which means that when we do take a break, we are utterly exhausted. Or perhaps it’s by thinking too small.

There are many ways that we hold ourselves back and don’t think this is just an MSP thing. All business owners everywhere in all sectors do exactly the same thing. But the thing is, the clues to long-term success are there if you go looking for them. Just listen back to any of the fantastic interviews that I’ve done in the MSP Marketing Podcast over the last five years, and you’ll hear very, very successful people talking about how they broke out of the “hell phase” of running a business, where you’re trapped doing 60 hours a week, and they entered a new phase where they’re working primarily on the business rather than in it. And often the massive growth of their business starts to happen at exactly that moment. And this is not really a surprise – there is a direct correlation.

So let me ask you – maybe it’s worth you pausing this podcast or this YouTube video to ask yourself this question – what do you do to hold yourself back? What’s the anchor that you are carrying...

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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...