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Welcome to Episode 304 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• 3 big pricing mistakes that kill MSPs’ sales: MSPs inadvertently make these blunders with the way they price up their offering and it often kills sales. Here’s what to do about it.


• This video MUST be on every MSP website: Videos on your website are really important. And a testimonial is the single most important type of video that could help a prospect decide to sign a contract with you.


• The truth about SMS marketing for MSPs: Every single business owner has a mobile phone and yet not many MSPs are using that to their advantage. My guest is an SMS marketing expert and is going to tell us whether SMS text messaging is a viable marketing tool for MSPs.


• Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Do you have trust badges on your website? Find out how to use them to get the most credibility for your MSP.

3 big pricing mistakes that kill MSPs’ sales

Getting new clients for your MSP is hard enough, so you should do everything you can to avoid making mistakes, right? Often I see MSPs inadvertently making blunders with the way they price up their offering. It’s a complicated subject with many traps you can get caught in. So let’s look at three common price mistakes that MSPs make that are killing sales.

Let’s talk about something that makes a lot of MSPs uncomfortable… pricing. It’s not the most exciting topic, but wow, it can make or break your sales. I’ve seen so many great MSPs – really solid, technical, brilliant businesses run by brilliant people – struggling to grow simply because they’re just making the wrong moves with their pricing. So let’s fix that.

These are the three big pricing mistakes that can kill your sales, and of course, how to avoid them.

Mistake number one: charging too little because you’re scared of losing the deal, and this is so common. Have you done it? You’re sat in a sales meeting, the prospect starts questioning your price and suddenly you’re talking yourself down. You say that you think you can find a way to shave some money off the price by reducing the package, or maybe you can find them a discount. But by doing this, you’re kind of leaving money on the table just because you want the client to say yes. Here’s the thing though, when you undercharge, you actually scare off the best clients. They kind of think, why is this MSP so cheap? What corners are they cutting? Plus, you’re setting yourself up to resent the work later on when the numbers just don’t add up. So here’s what you should do instead… price confidently, know your value. If you’re delivering 24/7 monitoring, a great help desk and really strong security, don’t price it like you’re just fixing printers on an ad hoc basis. That’s crazy.

Mistake number two: making pricing complicated. I’ve seen some MSP proposals that are like three entire pages of line items. So here’s your base support, this bit’s extra, this is going to cost you this, we forgot to include this. It’s just so confusing. And the problem is that confused people don’t buy. So what you do instead is you bundle things, you create clear packages. You could call that bronze, silver, gold. You could call it something else, it doesn’t really matter what you name it. But the point is that when it’s all put together and prospects can look at it and go, Oh, right, yeah, I see. So we’ve got this or we’ve got this, which is a bit more, or we’ve got this, which is even more, do you know what, we’re going to go for the middle package for us. They’ve got to feel confident. They’ve got to be able to make decisions faster without overthinking it, but going on that gut feel. And packaging everything together, bundling it up and taking out a lot of the detail that they’re not really interested in anyway, that’s the right way to do this.

Mistake number three: hiding your price completely. Some MSPs think they’re being really clever by refusing to talk numbers until the very last moment. Perhaps you’re in a sales meeting, you’ve presented your proposal, and the only thing to discuss now is the price. But the reality is, that just creates friction. Buyers today like to know roughly what they’re in for before they even commit to a meeting. If they can’t get any sense of cost at all, they might never engage with you at all. So here’s what you do instead. You don’t have to plaster exact numbers on your homepage, but you do need to give people a rough estimate. You need to say something like, Our typical clients invest between X and Y per person per month. Or better still embed a price calculator on your website. Just a heads up, I’m going to be talking about price calculators a lot more in the weeks ahead. I’ve got a little announcement for you on that soon. Either way, you’re setting expectations early, and by doing that, you’re attracting people who are a good fit. And by the way, giving pricing at the point that people are doing research into which MSP they might even want to talk to, that is absolutely a competitive advantage right now.

So let me give you a quick summary of those three things to do. Number one, stop undercharging out of fear. Number two, keep your pricing simple and clear. And number three, don’t hide your price at all, be upfront enough to build trust. Get those three things right and you will close more sales with better clients without ever having to fight on price.

This video MUST be on every MSP website

If your competitors have videos on their website and you don’t, there’s every chance that they’ll win sales and you won’t. Yes, videos really are that important. However, are all videos equal? Well, no, not really. The single most important type of video that could help a prospect decide to sign a contract with you, is a video testimonial. But if the idea of trying to create a video with your happiest most satisfied client fills you with dread, this is how you make it a walk in the park.

Collecting lots of social proof is one of the most important things that you can do to persuade someone to pick your MSP. Social proof in the form of reviews, testimonials and case studies influences people at a very deep psychological level. In fact, it talks to us at caveman level, right at the core of what drives our behaviour. Let me explain that.

A hundred thousand years ago, we were not at the top of the food chain. There were big scary monsters with huge jaws and jagged teeth that could and did eat us. And so the cavemen and women who survived to breed and essentially lead on to us today, they were the ones who were better than the others at not being eaten. So we know this today as survival of the fittest and how it drives evolution, but one of the most powerful tools to avoid being eaten is to watch what everyone else is doing and do the same.

It’s a kind of a herd mentality that you still see today in animals at the bottom of the food chain. If one sheep runs all the other sheep in the flock do the same. Now, importantly, they don’t think about this. They just feel very strongly compelled to act and copy. It just feels safer that way. So that’s what cavemen did back then, and 4,000 generations later, it’s what decision makers still do today.

Most of the time people prefer to do what most other people are doing, and that in a single sentence explains why social proof is so powerful.

When we see other people and we perceive that they’re like us and they clearly trust a business, it feels safer for us to do exactly the same. And just a side note, by the way, if you, you’re one of the tiny, tiny minority who proudly claims, oh, social proof has zero influence on me, then look out for the Saber-Tooth Tigers because they are watching you closely and they are licking their lips. Now, the most powerful form of social proof is a video testimonial. You get a happy client on camera telling your prospects why they trust your MSP, and you want that, right?

I’ll be honest, there’s a fair amount of work to get it, and of course you can throw money at the problem to outsource it. There’s a couple of services, one I found is remote videotestimonials.com. That’s not a recommendation by the way, that’s just a suggestion. Or you could use a platform that prompts your clients like storyprompt.com, which I think is risky for an MSP as it’s so easy for your clients to ignore a platform like that, and let’s be honest, you only have dozens of clients to ask, not thousands. Or you can follow my step-by-step instructions and do it yourself. So I’ve pulled together 10 steps. In fact, I did this a few weeks ago while personally interviewing 16 of my MSP Marketing Edge members about their experience with us. And it was such fun. In fact, we’ve compiled a series of video testimonials that are now on our website. You can actually see those at mspmarketingedge.com/reviews. But here is how to get your own testimonial video made.

Step one, be very clear what you want to achieve. So the perfect video testimonial is about 30 to 60 seconds long. It tells a story about how someone went from A to B with your help, and it makes the viewer feel happy that they could achieve the same result working with you. Now, never forget that someone hires your MSP because they want a specific outcome. They want ease of growth, extra profit, incre