Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast

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As the tech authority, your job is to reassure

2025-01-2129:46

The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge Welcome to Episode 271 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week… How to influence what John Smith buys: Your prospects don’t really understand technology and that can create fear. The smartest MSPs build trust and ease those fears by positioning themselves as the go-to tech authority in their marketplace. Find out how… 3 more bootstrap marketing ideas for MSPs: Let’s explore how to strike gold by turning your existing assets into lead generators, using simple tactics to attract new clients and unlock hidden revenue opportunities… without spending a penny. How motion graphics make complex sales easier: Simple visual tools, like animated videos, can attract prospects by helping to explain complex concepts and products. Could this be what your MSP needs to turn your website into a lead generation machine? Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Are you struggling with writer’s block? Elliot from an MSP in Manchester (UK) is too. I have 3 suggestions to help. How to influence what John Smith buys Have you ever seen someone wrestle with a Rubik’s cube? Well, that’s how most business owners feel about technology. They’re fascinated by what it can do, but frustrated by its complexity. So here’s an exciting thought. If their mind is boggled, that creates a massive opportunity for your MSP to unboggle it. Let’s explore how the smartest MSPs build trust to ease those fears and position themselves as the go-to tech authority in their marketplace. And yes, you can do this too. Somewhere in one of the hundreds of business and marketing books that I’ve read over the years is one of my favourite phrases, and here it is – To influence what John Smith buys, you must look through John Smith’s eyes. And in this instance, John Smith is the ordinary business owner or manager that you want to reach and influence to buy from you and not one of your competitors. You have to really understand what it’s like to be John Smith, in order to persuade him that your MSP is the one he should choose. Let’s do that right now. Let’s imagine John lives in your town and he’s the owner of a small CPA, a small accounting firm. Let’s ignore that old joke that all accountants are dull, although actually we do know this to be the truth, don’t we? But anyway, don’t worry about that. What is day-to-day life like for John running his business? Well, of course technology is mission critical for an accountancy practice, and yet we can probably guess that John hasn’t invested well over the years. So he and his team, maybe they’re using older technology still – they’re definitely still on Windows 10, might even be a Windows 8 machine clunking away somewhere… maybe an XP machine, that might be pushing it too far. Their internet is okay at best, and cyber security is very much something that they just pay lip service to. John’s mindset is that he pays Microsoft, maybe an MSP, perhaps a break/fix company somewhere. He pays the money every now and again or every month, so surely all of the security and everything should be all sorted out, right? That’s his kind of accountant’s attitude towards it. And this attitude towards technology probably means that John suffers from lots of downtime or at the very least, interruptions to his productivity. And I bet his staff complain a lot too. The subtext of this approach to technology is that money is tight for John. And people tend to assume that accountants are great business owners, but actually that’s not the experience that well I’ve certainly had...

If your clients are happy, this KPI will be high

2025-01-1429:03

The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge Welcome to Episode 270 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week… If your clients are happy, this KPI will be high: Net Revenue Retention (NRR) is a quality score where you measure how well you have done at retaining revenue over the last 12 months and assessing whether it has grown. 3 bootstrap marketing ideas for MSPs: Marketing doesn’t have to cost a load of cash. If you have a member of staff with a spare few hours each week, you can invest their time into these low cost or no cost marketing tasks for your MSP. Your MSP’s growth priorities for 2025: My special guest, a turnaround expert, tells us how to plan the year ahead with clarity, focus, and fresh momentum. You’ll discover how to organise your priorities, craft a winning growth strategy, and create a story for 2025 that’s really worth celebrating. Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Ryan, from an MSP in San Diego, wants to know why it’s so important to fix his website as a matter of priority. If your clients are happy, this KPI will be high Your MSP’s bank balance might look great and you might be impressed with your other KPIs. But there’s a hidden one that I bet you $5 you never look at. Yet it could flip things completely. Most MSPs have never heard of this key performance indicator, and yet it’s the ultimate quality check for any recurring revenue business. In just a few minutes, you’ll find out what this secret KPI is, how to calculate it in under 10 minutes and exactly what score proves that you are running a truly outstanding MSP. One of the things I love about working in the channel is that every day is a school day and you never ever feel like you have finally learned everything. This, in 2025, is my ninth year working with MSPs and honestly, I feel like I learn so much every single day. And as someone who has a passion, and a need in fact, for constant learning, I do find this exciting and not at all tiring. In fact, just a few months back I was chatting to an MSP and we were talking about how much progress their business has made over the last couple of years. It’s been actually astonishing. And then he said to me how delighted he was with the performance of his NRR, and that’s N, as in N for November, not MRR, which is M for mother. And of course we know what MRR is. It’s monthly recurring revenue. What is NRR? It stands for Net Revenue Retention – essentially, which clients that we had last year are still here this year. It’s a quality score. It’s something that is used a lot by SaaS businesses (subscription as a service businesses) and all subscription businesses typically use it, just not normally MSPs. But if you are looking for more ways to measure how good a job you’re doing, this could be it. So let me tell you how you’d measure this and what good performance looks like. This will be a great time of year to measure it because you could kind of look back to the end of 2023 or the beginning of 2024 and look at the clients you had then and ask how many of those clients do we still have today? What was the value of their monthly recurring revenue a year ago? And has that grown today? That MSP that I was speaking to has an NRRR of 105%, which means that he’s kept all of his clients over the year, which is not unusual for an MSP, but it’s still nice to measure and know for a fact, and it means that he’s also grown their monthly recurring revenue – got the same clients, they’re spending more. And I would say for an MSP that anything under a score of...

SPECIAL: How to own an MSP doing $7m a year

2025-01-0728:30

The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge Welcome to this SPECIAL edition of the show, Episode 269, of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week I’ve got the last of my special episodes for you, where you’ll discover how my guest grew his MSP to 450 clients, 35 staff and $7m revenue. How to own an MSP doing $7m a year Featured guest: Steve McNamara is the visionary founder and CEO of DTC, Inc., an MSP that has been a cornerstone of IT support for over 25 years. Established in 1999, DTC began as a small operation focused on serving the dental community, quickly evolving into one of the largest dental IT support companies in the Mid-Atlantic region. Under Steve’s leadership, the company has expanded its reach beyond Maryland to include clients in Virginia, Delaware, and Pennsylvania, now boasting over 450 clients and a dedicated team of more than 35 employees. Steve built DTC from the ground up with his first hire, Scott Leister, who now serves as the DevSecOps engineer. Steve has remained committed to the core mission of making IT work for clients through innovative solutions and meaningful connections. His philosophy of “doing the next right thing” has guided the company through various challenges, ensuring that client needs are always prioritised. DTC has a strong emphasis on values and culture. Steve believes in hiring individuals who align with the company’s core values rather than merely filling roles. This commitment to culture is reflected in initiatives such as hiring a Chief Flourishing Officer and conducting quarterly skill-building sessions and all-hands meetings, where every team member has a voice. This focus on values not only attracts talent but also fosters a loyal and engaged workforce. How would you like to own an MSP doing $7 million a year where you personally do none of the tech work? There’s nothing more motivating than hearing how other MSP owners have built up their business. And in this week’s special episode, you are going to discover how this guy grew to 450 clients, 35 staff, and $7 million revenue. What I think you’ll love is his unique approach to his people and how he’s kept the quality of the tech work really high without having to do any of it himself. Hi, I’m Steve McNamara. I’m the CEO and founder of DTC Inc. We are an MSP here in the Maryland DC, Northern Virginia region of the United States. We’ve been incorporated for a little over 25 years now and serving primarily into the healthcare and dental space, but now moving into the CMMC space as well. And that’s the very short, skinny version of who we are. I love it. Thank you so much for joining us on the podcast, Steve. I think my favourite episodes of this podcast over the last five years or so have been when we’ve had real MSPs on who have shared their stories of how they did it. So you’ve been going, I think you said more than a quarter of the century, what was it that made you start your first business or start this business in the first place? Well, we had a 2 year old son and my wife told me to get a bleeping job. Were you working in it before? Part-time, I actually, I had a health food store in rural county in Maryland and it was failing, but I was more interested in the natural food industry and alternative healthcare than I was tech. I did tech on the side to try to pay the bills and my wife was tired of us not having enough money to pay the bills and to eat. So that’s why she told me to get a real job. I love it. And obviously 25 years on, you’re still here doing tech and you haven’t gone back to natural foods unless that’s some kind of side hustle. So paint...

SPECIAL: Should MSPs hire a chief growth officer?

2024-12-3125:29

The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge Welcome to this SPECIAL edition of the show, Episode 268, of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week I’ve got another special episode for you. If your MSP isn’t growing, and you’re too busy running it to focus on growing it, this could be the answer for 2025. Should MSPs hire a chief growth officer? Featured guest: Jake Gregorich oversees revenue generation for Lyra Technology Group. He joined the team in January 2023 to help grow sales talent, increase collaboration among Lyra companies, and drive top-line revenue growth. Prior to Lyra, Jake worked with MSPs including Impact Networking, Ntiva, and Equilibrium IT. He also served as an independent consultant to private equity backed MSPs and private equity companies looking to enter the MSP market on sales & marketing, diligence, acquisitions, and integration. Outside of work, he enjoys time and good laughs with his wife Joanna, baby girl Sofia, toddler Charlie, golden retriever Bella, and large extended family. When he is not spending time with family and friends, Jake can be found outdoors hiking, biking, swimming, and playing team sports. This is an MSP Marketing podcast special. Could this be any more perfect. A fresh idea, for a fresh new year. So, you want to make more money from your MSP and you’re looking for new ways to do it. Well, as we bring on a brand new year, it doesn’t get much fresher than this. Welcome to a special episode dedicated to someone who’s found the solution to the problem of – how do you focus on growth if you are too busy with the day-to-day running of your MSP? Here’s a fresh perspective that’s definitely worth your time. Hi, I’m Jake Gregorich, SVP of Growth at Lyra Technology Group. And Jake, thank you so much for joining me for this special. It is of course your second appearance on the podcast. You were on, I think it was episode 205 back in late 2023, and ahead of having you back on the podcast again today I’ve just listened back to that, it was such a great interview and you were so very generous with the things that you shared. In our special today, we’re going to talk about what you guys are doing with this amazing MSP that you are building. And we’re also going to talk about the concepts of something called Chief Growth Officers. And not only in terms of how you’re doing that, because I think it’s really interesting how you are inspiring a large and growing number of people to grow their MSPs, but also we can look at it in terms of how the average MSP owner can take some of the concepts that you guys are proving are working right now and actually apply that within their own MSP. So let’s start right at the beginning. Let’s assume that everyone who’s listening to this or watching this on YouTube has not heard you on the podcast before. Tell us exactly who you work for, what you guys are doing, what your mission is, and what you’ve achieved over the last few years. Yeah, certainly Paul, great to be back, thanks for having me. Lyra Technology Group is a family of MSPs. We have now 77 companies across the US, Canada, the UK, Australia and New Zealand. Our business, compared to most highly acquisitive MSPs, is a bit different. What we’re doing is we’re buying these companies (MSPs) but we’re retaining their people, their legacy, their brand. And the Warren Buffett saying, first, don’t harm the investment in the business – and then we’re thinking about how we can help grow those companies. So our businesses are decentralised. Lyra is a shared service to those 77...

SPECIAL: How MSPs achieve a happy balance

2024-12-2415:22

The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge Welcome to this SPECIAL edition of the show, Episode 267, of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week I’m taking you for a walk near my home. And we’re going to talk about a subject that’s very important to us as business owners… How MSPs achieve a happy balance Running an MSP is like constantly spinning plates and there’s a good chance that you’ve dropped the odd one from time to time. It’s a dizzying challenge trying to keep them all spinning and in perfect balance. If you are trying to juggle your home life with everything your MSP throws at you and it often feels impossible, today’s special episode is just for you. Come for a Christmas Eve walk with me as we find the answer to this question – How do you achieve the perfect happy balance? Well, I hope you’ve had an insanely good year this year and you are really ready for Christmas tomorrow. Certainly if you’re listening to this when the podcast is released, what we’re doing today is kind of a bit of a new tradition, which we only started last year, but already it feels like the right thing to do every year is that you come for a walk with me. So last year, and you can go back and listen to last year’s special episode, we went for a walk round a lake near my home where I live. I live just outside Milton Keynes in the UK. It’s kind of in the middle of the UK. And today we’re just going for a walk near my house. Actually, I live near some fields. I live in a little village. It’s very nice around here. So it’s a beautiful, beautiful, sunny crisp December morning and I’m just taking you out for a walk to talk about the happy balance. So what is the happy balance? Well, I’m a business owner just like you, and I’ve been doing this, actually next year it will be my 20th year. It was February, 2005 when I started my very first business, not the one I have now, I sold that in 2016. But back then I started and I had all the hopes and fears and all the difficult times that everyone has when they start their first business. And it took me probably about seven years to achieve this thing called the happy balance. And the happy balance is a mixture of, or a combination of five things that you need to have in your life in order to achieve happiness. Because if your experience of starting your MSP was anything like my experience of starting my first business, you throw yourself into it with such gusto that it becomes almost an unsustainable beast. And you kind of look up a year, two, three years in, and you realise that you are spending so much of your time working that you have got all the other parts of your life out of balance. Things like, well, all the things we’re going to talk about today, but especially your family, your partner, your kids (if you’ve got them), your social life, your friends, all of these things, they take a backseat to the business and I think that’s okay for a year, maybe two years. But if it goes on any longer than that, the risk is that you are just out of balance. We cannot live our lives out of balance for a very, very long time. I do know business owners, MSP owners, in fact, who have been out of balance for years, decades in some cases. And yeah, some of them are sitting on very successful businesses, successful as in there’s lots of revenue coming in and there’s lots of profit going into their bank accounts. But I have business owning friends who are in that position and they go home to their luxury apartment in the evening where there is no partner and there’s no kids because the price of them building the business and making themselves a millionaire, the price of that was losing their family. And I dunno about you, but I would rather have the family and the happy life and...

3 big MSP marketing priorities for 2025

2024-12-1731:30

The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge Welcome to Episode 266 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week… 3 big MSP marketing priorities for 2025: The silver bullet to getting new clients and growing your MSP lies in consistent and persistent marketing. Make it easy by prioritising these three things. And 3 big questions to ask yourself: Before the new year begins, take some time to answer these questions and focus yourself on your future goals, in life and in business. This MSP is using a clever backdoor marketing tactic: My guest this week tells us what his special marketing tactic is, how it makes finding clients easier, and how you can do a version of this in your MSP. Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Graham, an MSP owner in Omaha, reflects on how little he feels his MSP has achieved in terms of lead generation this year. He wants to know why his marking projects take so long to implement. 3 big MSP marketing priorities for 2025 Did your MSP sales engine feel broken in 2024? Well, here’s the fix. The best new revenue comes from lead gen that’s driven by a marketing machine, but don’t be scared. It’s dead easy and it’s built with just a few simple parts and it’s going to make 2025 your best year yet. Right now let’s go through why your current marketing isn’t working, how to find more people to speak to and how to make all your marketing easier. I do love this time of year because everyone has a collective pause and after you’ve had a few days off to enjoy some time with your family, you move on to time to just kind of take stock of what’s happened in the last 12 months. And you figure out what it is that you want to improve next year. Most of the MSPs that I’ve spoken to this year just want to win more new clients, and keep their existing ones and make sure those clients are happy. And of course, make sure their staff are happy and service quality is important too. These are all important things to MSPs, but ultimately, if you nail it down to what’s the one thing that you would do to improve your business, if you could wave a magic wand, for most MSPs it would be to win new clients. So let me suggest to you three marketing priorities to focus your business on next year. These are not difficult concepts to understand. In fact, I’ve deliberately made this as easy as I can, as I try to do with all the marketing that we talk about in our podcast and on the YouTube videos. My first recommendation is to create a marketing system rather than a series of one-off activities. Now, the reason I suggest this is because the whole channel seems to be geared around helping you to do one-off activities. You get big vendors giving you marketing campaigns or social media that you can just roll out in one go. Now, don’t get me wrong, I think doing a one-off campaign or being all over social media for a couple of months is better than no marketing at all. But the very best kind of marketing is consistent and persistent, and that comes from having a marketing system. A system means you have a series of tasks that are happening on a regular basis. Ideally, you personally as the owner of the MSP, is not doing them. You have someone doing them on your behalf, whether that’s someone who works for you or a trusted outsource person. If you’ve been listening to my podcast or watching my videos for a while, you’ll know the marketing system that I recommend. I suggest you build audiences of people to listen to you, starting with your LinkedIn and your email list. And then grow relationships with those people using education...

Successful MSP owners exercise

2024-12-1035:05

The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge Welcome to Episode 265 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week… Successful MSP owners exercise: Our bodies are amazing, but they’re even better when we use them on a regular basis. Even just a 20 minute walk every single day keeps your body sharp – and also your mind. How one client question can turn into 7 pieces of content for your MSP: To do great marketing for your MSP, you need great content. There’s tons of it around and there’s a simple way to extract it from everyday conversations with clients and prospects. This guy phoned 1,000 decision makers… and learned these hard lessons: Making more outbound calls is essential to win new business for your MSP. If you HATE picking up the phone, this interview is going to blow your mind. Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Steven, from as MSP in London, UK, is looking forward to getting organised in 2025 – his question is: Which project management software do you recommend? Successful MSP owners exercise MSP Running Shoes on. Have you ever felt that owning an MSP business is like running a marathon in more ways than one? And if you prioritise looking after your clients and their technology ahead of looking after your own body and health, then you have a very low chance of completing the marathon that is being a business owner for the next 20 years. Let’s find out why successful business owners exercise, how they do it when they have zero time, and the benefits of doing it to you, your clients and your staff. A few months back, I had my dad come and stay with us for a couple of nights. Now he lives about 150 miles away and we don’t really see him more than a couple of times a year. So it was lovely having him stay. My daughter and I, we took him to London for a full day being tourists in our own capital city, and we went to see a theatre show and we went to some museums and it was great fun. But we walked about 20,000 steps, which is about 10 miles, and we do a lot of walking because London is a walking city. It’s so much easier to walk around and just catch the tube. You wouldn’t drive around London. No one does that. My dad is in his early seventies, so he’s not really that old and he’s kind of fit and kind of healthy as he has been throughout his life. But he has let his fitness slip in recent years and he was really struggling. So at the end of that day, he just looked ill. He was sitting down, his back was hurting, his knee was hurting, his hip was hurting, and he won’t go and see the doctor about his dicky hip. And I got him to admit that he doesn’t really do any regular exercise. He’ll have a walk now and again. Now all the medical advice from all the doctors everywhere is that someone of his age, in fact, someone of every age should be going out for at least a 20 minute walk every day. And I told him that even last year when I couldn’t exercise much because I’d injured my knee and I needed surgery on it. I couldn’t go running or anything like that, but I still exercised every single day. I’d go for a 20, 30 minute walk or go on the treadmill for a mile, or I actually bought an exercise bike, which I’ve since sold. But you get the idea. I was telling him how the most successful business owners and MSP owners I know, they always make time for exercise regardless of how busy they are. Do you do this? Do you make time no matter how busy you are and force yourself to do exercise on a regular basis? Maybe you prioritise looking after your clients, you prioritise your partner if you’ve got one, your kids, if you have them, your staff, you prioritise all of this stuff. And it’s very easy...

Why MSPs procrastinate (and how to cure it)

2024-12-0331:41

The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge Welcome to Episode 264 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week… Why MSPs procrastinate (and how to cure it): Don’t confuse busyness with business. Keeping yourself busy doing things that you really shouldn’t be doing, at the expense of the things that matter is a form of procrastination. What technicians write in tickets can damage your brand: Your brand is YOU, and your team, and the way you communicate. And critically… how that makes people feel. Why successful MSPs use PowerPoint to tell stories: Eliminate death by PowerPoint using story telling to simplify complex information and help your presentations come to life. Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Want to fire a problematic client but don’t know how? I have the answer… Why MSPs procrastinate (and how to cure it) One of the dangers of doing a podcast every week and appearing in lots of YouTube videos is that at some point your friends and family stumble across your content. And every now and then I get a message from a friend saying, Hey, I just watched your latest video on YouTube, I’ve no idea what you were talking about Paul, but it seemed okay. Now, the reason that this is a risk is because I do try and put a lot of my life into my content, because as a working parent and a business owner myself, that helps you and me to relate to each other. So the story I want to tell you today is about a friend who I hope never stumbles across this recording because I know he will recognise himself immediately and no one likes to be talked about in a negative way. Now, this friend of mine runs his own business. Don’t worry, he’s not an MSP. In fact, what he does is almost irrelevant, but times sadly are not very good for him right now. He’s lost a lot of clients over the last few years and his business is not in great shape. We do occasionally talk about marketing. Of course, I give him as much advice as I can, but he rarely takes action on it. I think the problem is that he hasn’t yet emotionally dealt with the fact that a business that he’s been building up for decades has flattened out. In fact, it’s in decline now. He needs to do things differently to rescue it and turn it around. If you were in a situation like this where you’re actually struggling to meet payroll in some months, you’d think that your full attention would be on the rescue and the recovery, right? I mean, that would certainly be the case for me, but not for my friend because the other day when we were chatting and I asked what he was doing that day, he said he was going on a training course. Not a training course on anything that would be useful to him in terms of turning his business around or improving the service. It was a very low level training course around some minor changes to regulations regarding the service that he sells. So really, he could have just sent one of his staff or just skipped it altogether. It really wasn’t an important training course, but it was an entire day of his time. I was utterly gobsmacked when he told me about this because just a few days before, he was telling me that he didn’t have any time to implement all of the new marketing ideas that we discussed to help him win new clients. And then I had an epiphany. Him going on a training course was a form of procrastination. My friend had confused busyness with business. To him going on a training course, was doing some work, but the reality is it wasn’t productive work. It was just him passing the time and maybe not even having to think about his problems for a few hours. Maybe that was the appeal.

How to create the perfect MSP about us page

2024-11-2627:53

The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge Welcome to Episode 263 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week… How to create the perfect MSP about us page: An about us page must be about the people and the core values of your business. But it’s not really about us, it’s about the prospect. It’s a selling page. It takes 50+ touchpoints to get a new client for your MSP: Don’t run marketing campaigns – set up a marketing system. Long-term a system will outperform any campaign you could run, I promise you. A Google ads strategy for MSPs: If you want to try Google ads, don’t try to be all things to all people. You need to be very specific to stand out in a competitive market. Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Christine from an MSP in Portland wants to know why I’m so insistent that MSPs hire a phone person to contact prospects. How to create the perfect MSP about us page The two most important pages on your website are the homepage and the about us page. Why? Because those are the pages that most people are going to look at, the ones they’re most going to be influenced by because they’re most likely to land on your website on the homepage. And then of course they want to know what you’re about. They want to know who the people are behind the business, so they’ll head over to the about us page. Let’s have a look at some of the elements that you should have on your MSPs about us page to make sure it delivers the most value to your business. Now, where a homepage is almost like a summary of the whole business, the about us page is about the people and the core values of the business. So of course you still have an attention grabbing headline, although a different one to the one that you have on the homepage. And of course you’d still have your social proof, data capture maybe, and certainly a call to action, plus of course videos and photographs of real people. It’s just that you present those in different ways than you would do on your homepage. The most important thing on your about us page is your story. But it needs to be presented in a way that’s relevant to the reader. And actually it’s not really about you – you can talk a little bit about you and how you are really into tech, and as a child and you are obsessed with computers, and as a teenager and you’ve been doing it now for 800 years and then 20 years ago you had an entrepreneurial seizure and you decided you’ve got to do your own things, your own way, etc, etc. I mean, all of that is good. In fact, actually you can take that backstory, you can embellish it, you can enhance it, but you have to tell it in a way that makes it interesting to the reader. Because you being obsessed with computers, that’s not really of interest to them until they realise or you tell them that it means that you are across every technology detail in your business, and you only hire people who are incredibly attention focused, very good technology people, and they’re very good at following systems and documenting success, and all of that kind of thing. So, you take your story and you keep flipping it round and looking at it from a different angle so that actually your story is about the reader. Even an about us page is not really an about us page, it’s about the prospect. It’s a selling page. That’s what it really is. So of course something else you’d do on there is you’d put some case studies on there. Now, if you’ve got case studies on your homepage, you can repeat those, and video case studies are absolutely fine, you can repeat those across the site. You can also repeat just sort of normal prin...

A mini masterclass on LinkedIn for MSPs

2024-11-1926:22

The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge 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...

Stop clients calling you personally for first line support

2024-11-1227:19

The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge 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....

SPECIAL: How MSPs can make more money

2024-11-0520:25

The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge 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...

Golden rules of MSP sales & marketing

2024-10-2925:28

The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge 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...

MSPs: How notifications stop you from buying a better car

2024-10-2127:56

The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge 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...

What the yellow car game teaches MSPs about marketing

2024-10-1421:09

The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge 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...

Warning! This friction kills MSPs' sales

2024-10-0727:28

The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge 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...

MSPs: How to minimise interruptions from staff

2024-09-3025:59

The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge 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...

9 MSP marketing ideas to break into a new vertical

2024-09-2319:26

The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge 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...

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

2024-09-1627:05

The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge 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...

MSPs: How to influence what John Smith buys

2024-09-0925:16

The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge 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...

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