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Welcome to Episode 315 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• Don’t miss out: Hot new MSP sales book: If sales is one of the biggest headaches within your MSP, then heads up, you need good advice and a solid plan… and I’ve got just the solution.


• The worst advice for MSPs: MSP growth strategies should vary dependant on context. Do you know which plan is right for you? Let’s find out…


• How an MSP built £8m of recurring revenue: Let me introduce you to an MSP owner who built his business from nothing to £8m annual recurring revenue. He reveals the marketing that’s worked the best for him and what he would do today if he was growing an MSP from stratch.


• The Marketing Minute: Don’t miss this simple trust building tip that’ll win you more clients.

Don’t miss out: Hot new MSP sales book

If sales is one of the biggest headaches within your MSP, then heads up, you need good advice and a solid plan. And of course, there’s a lot of noise out there with a lot of conflicting advice on how to improve your MSP’s sales.

Let me introduce you to a true expert who has some of the best sales advice out there. How do you plug his knowledge into your MSP? Well, he’s written a brand new book, let me tell you about it, and the difference it’ll make to your MSP sales.

Most MSPs I meet really don’t love selling. But here’s the thing, if you can’t sell your services confidently, you are always going to be a step behind.

Now, a couple of months ago, I was lucky enough to be at ScaleCon ‘25 in New Orleans, which by the way is a fantastic city. Slightly dangerous, but it is a really, really fun city. And the event was packed with about 400 smart MSPs. So we had loads of great conversations. There were so many ideas, I got loads of ideas and I know the MSPs there got loads of ideas about marketing and growing your business. And while I was there, I bumped into a whole bunch of people that I know, some based in the UK and a lot of the people I know in the channel are in the US or Canada or other countries.

So I bumped into someone I’ve only met in real life once before, but I know him really well. He’s been on my podcast a number of times. His name is Brian Gillette. And he handed me a copy of his brand new book. I did actually wonder at the time if I was one of the first people on the planet outside of his team to get hold of this book. So it’s called, and it’s got a swear word in the title and I’m not going to say the swear word but bravo to Brian for being the first person I think in the MSP space to put a swear word in the title of his book, but it’s called How to Sell a Sh*tload of Managed Services (without selling your soul).

I’ve got the book here, let’s have a quick flick through. I mean, this is absolutely packed with information and advice. And Brian is an absolute true genius at MSP sales. He really understands that it’s an emotional thing more than it’s a cognitive thing. He really understands how you can connect with and engage with and influence the ordinary business owners and managers that you are sitting down and having sales meetings with. So let me just flick through, have a look at some of the different things here. Here we go, so this is a good one, this is about pains and outcomes. So for example, if someone says to you, this is their pain – Our files didn’t sync, we almost submitted the wrong one to the IRS (in the UK of course that would be HMRC) – then the outcome, because in this section of the book he’s talking about turning pains into outcomes, he says – Well look, we monitor your backups and we monitor your syncs daily so there are no surprises. So essentially we will automate that problem away.

Here’s another pain – A single broken device slows down the entire team – and he suggests you turn that into an outcome, which is – Well, we fix stuff fast or we swap it out in the same day. And that’s just off one page. There’s 170 odd pages here of absolute gold dust because it talks not just about the theory and how you should be influencing people and the process you should be following, but it gets right down into a whole ton of really practical stuff. So go and get this book. It’s called, again, editing the title, How to Sell a Sh*tload of Managed Services (without selling your soul) by Brian Gillette. You can get it on Amazon. And I really do think you should get this. You should get this if you are doing the selling in your business, and you should definitely get it if you’ve got other people doing the selling in the business, because let’s be honest, we know that MSPs don’t get enough practice selling.

If you’re only doing one proper sales meeting every month or every other month, where do you get to do that practice and where do you get to improve and constantly tweak and change and make your sales process better? You don’t. So something like this, a book like this that helps you to sharpen your skills, even just a tiny bit, making the axe sharper as it goes, that’s very much worth it. Please do go and get that book. And honestly, even if you just take a few ideas from it, I reckon you’ll sell more, close faster, and feel way more confident the next time you’re sitting across from a prospect.

The worst advice for MSPs

There might be 40,000 MSPs in the world, but yours is unique because it’s run by you and it does things in the way that you want them to be done. Every MSP is like this in the same way that all humans are unique. We’re all broadly the same, but each of us is very different in our ways. So if you assume that this is the case, you must agree with me that when it comes to building your MSP’s growth strategy context is everything.

Every week I have discussions with MSP owners around the world and often the conversation naturally moves on to which growth strategy they should use to grow their business. And while I have dozens of different growth strategies tucked away in my head, my job when giving advice is to figure out which is the right strategy for each of the business owners I’m speaking to.

The growth strategy advice that I’d give to an MSP owner is dramatically affected by the context of their business. 

Well, let’s imagine there are two MSP owners, let’s call them MSP owner A and MSP owner B. So MSP owner A is 45 years old and he’s happy to do another 10, 15, maybe even 20 years in the business. He’s making good money, he’s enjoying the work, and he just can’t see himself leaving that business anytime soon. Plus he’s got young children and he wants to spend time with them, but also keep his really expensive car on the drive. He wants the nice house, he wants the regular expensive vacations or holidays with his family. So that is the context of him and his situation and his business. Now, MSP owner B is in a wholly different situation. So this guy is late fifties, so a lot older than the first guy he’s done his 25 years, he’s got one eye on the door and he’s ready to exit that business in two to three years time.

So these two businesses could have exactly the same revenue, they could have the same staffing levels, they could even have the same resource levels, they could be the same businesses next to each other in the same street, in the same town. And yet I’d advise completely different strategies for each of those. So for MSP owner A, that’s the younger guy who wants to stay in the business, there should be some aggressive growth strategies in place, which means going after new clients because of course that business owner has got 10 to 20 years to capitalise on those new clients and take all of their MRR over the years ahead. And it can cost you thousands to acquire a new client. It’s probably a lot higher than you think it is. So that’s the right thing to do if you want to spend years more in the business and collect that money from getting the ROI (return on investment) from actually winning that new client.

And side note here, if you want to figure out the cost of acquiring a new client for your business, take every single penny that you’ve spent on marketing in the last three years, including all of your time, every single hour of your time that you’ve put in, then divide it by the number of new clients you’ve won. And it’s almost guaranteed to be a four, sometimes even a five figure sum.

Side note over, back to MSP owner B. So this is the older guy now he’s planning to get out of the next two to three years. So he’s only got a shorter period of time to recoup his investment in new clients. So in a business like that, I’d