The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge

Welcome to Episode 292 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• Does your service desk manager really need to be a tech?: A service desk manager’s job is to make sure your MSP’s clients are delighted while freeing you up to grow the business. It’s possible that the best person for this job isn’t a technician.


• How your MSP can break into a new vertical: It’s easier to do marketing, find new clients, and make more money for your MSP, if you choose a vertical. Here’s how to get started.


• The framework MSPs can use to be more efficient: Visionary leaders are notorious for moving at such speed that they leave a trail of chaos behind them. My guest helps such visionaries put an end to operational chaos and create operational excellence in their business.


• Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Have you considered how your MSP would respond to a supply chain attack and what marketing actions you would take? If not, it would be a very wise idea.

Does your service desk manager really need to be a tech?

You may just have to tear up that job ad, and let me tell you why. We all know a service desk manager is a critical role. It’s their job to make sure the clients are delighted while freeing you up to grow the business. But whoever said that a service desk manager has to be a tech. What if there’s a different kind of person who’s much more suited to this kind of role?

I really do talk to a lot of MSPs. In fact, it’s one of the most wonderful things about the work I do. I get to talk to lots of different people about lots of different things. And because of my work in my MSP Marketing Edge where we are working with 700 MSPs, I talk to people in all sorts of different circumstances. So we have startups, two businesses that have been going for 30 years. We’ve got one person bands, two businesses with 200 employees. We’ve got all of these and everything in between.

But there’s one thing that I notice again and again and again, and that’s that the most successful MSPs, and let’s define successful as, the owner can do what they want to do with their life. They’ve got enough cash and they’ve got enough time, that’s success is to have that.

The MSPs who are most successful are those where the owner is surrounded by a very good team who take on the burden of the work for them.

Because it’s just too difficult to do everything yourself for more than a couple of years. What’s acceptable for our first few years in business gets tiring and boring as time goes on. And I’m sorry if that’s disappointing news for you because you never wanted to have staff, but it is the difference between just working for yourself and having a business that can survive and thrive without you.

And of course, one of the most key hires in there is a service desk manager or change that job title to whatever is appropriate for you. But basically someone whose entire role is to keep the clients happy and make sure that the work happens as it’s supposed to. Now, different MSPs have different ways of doing this, but they all come down to the same things. You’ve got some technical resource and you’ve got customers who want things to be done, and the service desk manager sits in the middle of that making the magic happen. If you own the business and you are currently doing that as well as the marketing and the sales and looking after the team and account management and finance and admin, that’s so tiring. What a liberating role to have a service desk manager whose entire working existence is focused on the clients and managing resources.

For some people, that’s their dream job. But let me challenge you on exactly who should be doing that job. You see, I’ve always believed and in fact operated this way, that it’s better to hire people who have a great mindset and then train them with the skills that they need to do a specific job. Back when I was working in radio in the early noughties, I had two radio presenters working for me who were either end of this scale. So Kev was naturally talented, but he had a terrible mindset and he was lazy, whereas Tom was less naturally talented, but worked very, very hard to make up for it. Now, guess which of those two was a pleasure to work with and went on to have a very successful career. And guess which one was such a pain in the backside that I took immense pleasure in firing him one day. He’s still in radio, but only just hanging on compared to the other guy.

So if you go with that, mindset first then upskill them, let me ask you a question. Should you necessarily hire a technician to be your service desk manager or should you hire a normal person and then just teach them a few technical skills that they need? Because what are the other skills that the service desk manager needs, right? Well, they need to be great communicators. They need to have the ability to plan and manage resources. They’ve got to be flexible and able to respond to problems quickly. And of course they have to be good with people and to help a team to work efficiently. That means building trust, it means keeping a team motivated, and I’m sure there are other requirements that I haven’t yet thought about.

Here’s the thing. There are people out there who have the mindset to thrive under those exact circumstances. Maybe right now they’re in other sectors, they’re not necessarily even working in technology. But really what technology skills does a service manager need? Does the service manager actually need to know how to configure a server? Do they really need to know how to talk to the third line technician who’s going to do it? Or can a normal person who has spent a career somewhere else keeping clients happy and managing resources, could they do the same for your MSP? What do you think about this? Is hiring a normal person instead of a tech to be your service desk manager, is that an interesting idea to you, or do you think I’ve completely lost the plot?

How your MSP can break into a new vertical

There’s a certain type of MSP where everything’s easier.

It’s easier to make more money, find new clients, and do the marketing that’s going to find you those clients and get all of that money into your business.

In fact, you may have heard that it’s the MSP’s targeting verticals that are enjoying this easy life, but how exactly do they do it?

Let’s find out how your MSP can break into a new vertical and why it’s going to make everything so much easier.

There are many benefits of marketing to a vertical. You can do it alongside your general business if you want to.

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 that I recommend in the order that you should do them.

Number one, build a website just for that vertical. The easy thing is just to put a page on your existing site, but don’t do that. If you’re going to do this and go for a vertical, really go for it properly. And that means a second website. Put together a proper four to five page website because the goal is to appear to be a true specialist to your target prospects. And a proper website is a basic MSP marketing fundamental. Also, the process of you going through creating that new website, it kind of imprints inside you at your very core that this is a big direction you’re going in and you’re going to take the whole marketing journey so much more seriously.

Number two, set up a vertical specific LinkedIn or Facebook or Instagram, depending which platform most decision makers in that vertical use. So for example, in hospitality and retail you would use Instagram, for B2B you would use LinkedIn, but again, have a separate one to your regular one. You can have your general LinkedIn, that’s just for your general business. And then you can have a vertical specific LinkedIn that’s just for your vertical business. And it means that in your vertical business, you are only connecting to people who are in that vertical. It allows your marketing to be targeted on LinkedIn very, very easily.

Number three, start posting regular content so you have a presence. Make sure to edit your content slightly to put the name of the vertical into the headline or the paragraph, like the intro paragraph. Sometimes making content seem relevant to a vertical is as simple as just mentioning that vertical. So you might say, Here’s how technology can improve productivity for accountants (CPAs). But also look at how they refer to themselves and their businesses. So to take CPAs as an example, they don’t have a business, they have a “practice”.

Number four, start networking within that vertical and meeting as many decision makers as you can. Look for relevant vertical business shows or other events that you can attend because nothing but nothing beats pressing the flesh when you’re just getting started in a new vertical, or in fact, in any new market. You’ll have a marketing revelation at every event, I promise you.

Number five, build your email list. It’s so easy to get started with a vertical, you can just buy targeted data or scrape targeted data or just go onto Google, type in the vertical you want to reach and the geographic area where they are and there’s everyone that you want to possibly reach.

Number six, get your marketing machine w