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Welcome to Episode 314 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• Danger! Never assume your MSP’s clients are loyal: It’s hard for MSPs to win a client, but when they do join you, they stay with you for years. But what if that retention leads to a false sense of security?


• The reason your MSP’s marketing is so hard: MSPs often struggle, not just with knowing what marketing to do, but also with implementing it. And yet implementation is the secret sauce.


• Does your MSP spend this much acquiring a new client?: My special guest is a true marketing expert and he’s very good at focusing the MSPs that he works with on two figures – the cost of acquiring a new client and their average lifetime value – and how these figures affect their marketing.


• The Marketing Minute: Don’t miss this game changing CRM marketing tip.

Danger! Never assume your MSP’s clients are loyal

As an MSP, have you been lulled into a false sense of security? It’s hard for you to win a client, but when they do join you, they stay with you for years, right? But what if that retention was not because they’re in love with your service, but because it’s such a mind blowing event for them to think about switching to another MSP, so it just feels easier to stay with you.

If this hasn’t happened to you yet, are you confident that right now a client isn’t secretly looking into leaving? Here’s a simple solution to proactively work on your retention without having to do tons of extra work, and you might even generate some extra revenue along the way.

Most MSPs I meet are rightly proud of how long their clients stay with them. You’ll hear them say things like, Oh yeah, we’ve still got our first ever client from 10 years ago, or, Our retention rate is 98%. And on the surface that’s brilliant, but here’s the uncomfortable truth… a lot of that so-called loyalty isn’t really loyalty at all. It’s just inertia. Your clients aren’t staying because they’re wildly in love with your service, they’re staying because it feels too hard to leave. Think about it, moving to a new MSP is a massive hassle. It’s complicated, it’s risky, and they don’t really understand all of the tech side of it anyway. So even if they’re not a hundred percent happy, it’s easier to just stick with what they’ve got. That’s called inertia loyalty. And the danger is it gives MSPs a false sense of security.

You might think you’re doing a great job keeping clients happy, but the moment one of those loyal clients gets a real reason to look around, they will.

Maybe a competitor reaches out at just the right time. Maybe there’s a big mistake or your main contact leaves. Suddenly that inertia disappears and the client that would never leave is gone. If this hasn’t happened to you yet, I promise it will at some point. It’s horrible. None of us wants to think about it, but it’s also a wake up call. And the way I see it, we can prevent it. So what’s the answer? Well, you can’t just hope that loyalty lasts, you’ve got to work at it. You’ve got to turn those stuck clients into bonded clients, the kind who stay because they genuinely want to. And the good news is this doesn’t take huge gestures. It’s about doing small things regularly that make your clients feel valued, connected and confident that you are on their side.

Here are a few ways to get you started…

Number one: Schedule regular non-tech calls. So not ticket reviews, not project updates, just a short friendly catch up every quarter. Ask them how their business is doing, what’s changed, what they’re focusing on, and just show that you care about them as people and not just devices. I mean, really this is basic account management and you don’t need a separate account manager to do it. You could make one call a week to a different client and achieve this exact effect. Interestingly, some of these calls will act as mini QBRs (quarterly business reviews), although I prefer to call them strategic reviews because quarterly is overkill. And what I mean by that is that when you’re chatting to your clients about their business and their future, some of them will give you opportunities to sell them something else. And when I say sell, I don’t really mean pushing something they don’t really want or need. I mean, giving them an answer to a problem that they already have. There are many more things that your clients would buy from your MSP if only you had more conversations with them and discovered what those opportunities were.

Number two: Share micro wins. When your team prevents downtime or spots a phishing attempt or saves a client from an outage, tell all of your clients. Don’t assume they know how much value you deliver. A quick email saying, Oh, we caught this before it became an issue. And maybe even if you sorted that out for another client and therefore you could stop it being an issue for this client, that would just help to reinforce why they keep paying you.

Number three: Celebrate milestones. Client anniversaries, staff birthdays, major business wins. Take a note of them and send a little message or a card or something like that. It’s simple, it’s human, and it helps you to stand out.

Number four: Ask for feedback and then act on it. Not just surveys, but actual conversations. Hey, how are we doing? Is there anything we could do to make life easier for you? And then follow up when you do something about it because clients really do remember that.

Number five: Keep showing them the future. Don’t let your relationship be about keeping things running. Be that MSP that nudges them forward. Show them new ideas, new tools and new efficiencies. Clients bond with the MSP that helps them progress. So if you do these things regularly, not as one-offs, but as habits, as a system that’s baked into the business, then you’ll build relationships that go way beyond inertia. Because real loyalty isn’t built on contracts or complexity, it’s built on connection, trust, and the feeling that their MSP is always looking out for them.

The reason your MSP’s marketing is so hard

Generating leads and winning new clients for your MSP has nothing to do with coming up with creative marketing ideas. It’s actually much simpler than that. To have better marketing and win new clients, you need one magic ingredient. Let me tell you what that ingredient is and how to bake it into the very core of your MSP.

I’ve been back in the Wild West for a few months now. What’s the wild West? I mean the MSP sub Reddit, I do find it a mostly negative place where great questions are hijacked by angry people, hiding behind anonymity. They very quickly and frankly quite readily fire machine guns at other people just because they have differing opinions. Anyway, I digress. But recently I set up a new alerting system to tell me when anyone talks about MSP marketing on Reddit, and it’s been pinging away two or three times a week.

So I’ve had a good look through months and months of threats for the first time in years. And it struck me once again, just how many MSPs struggle with their marketing. In fact, they struggle not just with knowing what to do, but also they struggle with implementing it. And yet implementation is the secret sauce. It’s the magic ingredient.

I know lots of very smart business owners who don’t achieve anywhere near what they’re capable of because they can’t consistently implement well.

And the opposite is also true. I know of lots of average business owners who are doing very well because they are excellent implementers. And this principle applies not just to your marketing, but to all aspects of your business. I’d rather be a less naturally smart but good at implementing kind of guy than the other way round. In fact, maybe I already am. Now, luckily, implementation is not a fixed natural talent that you are born with. It’s something you develop, you improve, and you grow. And if you are struggling to implement great marketing, please let me help you.

Now that it’s November, most of 2025 has gone. So let me ask you a question. What progress have you made on implementing your marketing so far this year? If the answer is *hangs head in shame and admits*, actually, Paul, nowhere near as much as I’d hoped, then there are two ways that I can help you.

First, let me give you an out and out plug. With my MSP Marketing Edge membership for our 700 plus members around the world, we give them a system for their marketing, we break that system down into easy to follow tasks and we give them all of the marketing content that they need. And for those who struggle to get it done, we have a done for you team so they can get their marketing done for them. So you can see if that’s available in your area or not because we only work with one MSP per area. Go to mspmarketingedge.com. And the idea behind that is if your marketing is implemented by other people – and my team, that’s all they do, they implement MSPs marketing for them – you can see that that’s a powerful way to get it implemented. You essentially just outsource it to someone that you trust. Now, the other way I can help you right now is by giving you three easy ways to make implementation less of a headache in your busines