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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 from the accountants that I’ve met. Just like with MSPs, you get some that do very, very well, some that do very badly and the bulk, they just sit in the middle doing okay.

John may have lots of clients, but that also means lots of work. And the margins and accountancy are not what they used to be. Also John doesn’t really understand technology and this is the core kind of heart of the matter that you need to understand. Because he understands that technology is mission critical and that at some point he’s going to need to buy new hardware for his team, but he doesn’t really understand even a fraction of the stuff that’s every day for you. Could he explain the cloud in a sentence that makes sense? Does he actually know what ransomware actually is? Would he know that malware stands for malicious software and what that actually looks like when it’s on the screen? Don’t even get me started on phishing. We all know that phishing is going to mean something completely different to him. The point here is that to win John’s business and to have any possibility of changing his attitude towards his technology and getting him to invest in his business properly will, you must understand all of these motivating factors. All of the stuff we’ve just talked about.

Selling managed services to the average business manager or owner is rarely about the technology. It’s about what they do with the technology and how it helps them win faster, or holds them back. When someone doesn’t understand the thing that’s really, really important to them, your job as the person influencing them is to position yourself as an authority in technology and then reassure that person that they can make brave decisions and they can make these decisions because it will all work out OK. How do you do that? Well, positioning yourself as an authority, that’s an ongoing task. Just look at what authority figures do – they write, they speak, they are published, they are interviewed, they are known for giving advice and answering questions. There’s no shortcut to being seen as an authority figure, you have to do the hard work. Whether that means buying in pre-written content and putting your name on it or actually generating your own content. There’s no other way around it.

Side note, in my MSP Marketing Edge service, we do have a number of different tools that our members can brand as their own, to help them with their positioning as a tech expert. A couple just off the top of my head, we’ve got our 2025 IT Services Buyers Guide, that’s incredibly popular. And there’s a book all about email security, you can put your name on the front of that. Have a look at mspmarketingedge.com for those. But if you want to be perceived as an authority, you certainly need to attend networking meetings, you need to go to events, you need to put on webinars, you need to run seminars, speak at events, get on the stage, all of the stuff like that. And if you do this consistently month after month after month for a number of years, you just assume the position of being an authority in technology. No one tells you you are, you just become one.

This happens a lot faster, of course, if you’re in a very specific vertical, but of course you can always just do it in your general area as well. So build that up, keep going at that, it’s a never ending thing unfortunately, there’s no shortcut to it. But once you have an authority position, how then do you reassure people that they’re doing the right thing? Well, this can only come from understanding where they are, and that can only be done by asking them open questions. Now, unlike closed questions where the response is either yes or no, open questions can have any possible answer. And I believe that open questions are one of the biggest weapons of influence that you could possibly wield in your marketing and your sales because everyone loves answering questions about themselves and their business.

And when these questions are coming from someone that they perceive to be an authority figure, they are doubly keen to take part. In fact, the more you ask them about their business, and the less you talk about you and your MSP, the easier it is to influence them, the easier it is to get the sale. Because not only will you start to really understand the world as they see it and as they perceive it, but you’ll also win their trust without actually doing any hard work. And I know that this is insane. I know that influencing someone just by asking them simple open questions rather than telling them what you know, is bizarre, that that’s an easier way to influence people. But hey, us humans are wired in a very strange way, and that’s what we have to work with.

What I’m talking about here is not a one-off tactic, it’s a strategy. No, actually it’s more than that. It’s a whole way of life. It’s you deciding that you want to be perceived and recognised as an authority in technology, and you want to influence people by being intensely interested in them and their business. You can start doing that today, and I highly recommend that you do.

3 more bootstrap marketing ideas for MSPs

Did you know your MSP is sitting on a secret gold mine?

Budgets can be tight at this time of year, so right now, you don’t need to spend a fortune to generate leads.

You just need to dig into the resources you already have.

Let’s explore how to strike gold by turning your existing assets into lead generators using simple tactics to attract new clients and unlocking hidden revenue opportunities, all without spending a penny.

On last week’s show, I gave you three bootstrap marketing ideas for your MSP and today I have three more.

First one is to get your local media talking about you. I get it, no one actually reads the local paper anymore, but the local media still has massive credibility. And