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Welcome to Episode 295 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• Ghosted? Send your MSP’s proposals in 3 ways: There are a number of things we can do to minimise proposal ghosting with prospects. Only sending it digitally risks your proposal being lost in digital noise.


• A free cyber security webinar outline any MSP can use:  Webinars are a great way to enhance your reputation and your perceived authority as the local tech expert. Let me give you a free cyber security webinar outline that any MSP can use.


• Why every MSP must niche in some way: My guest and I to talk about niching and about the power of super laser focus on a very specific set of people. Find out exactly what to do and how it works.


• Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Confused about which social media platforms to use to market your MSP? Let me tell you my top 5 in priority order.

Ghosted? Send your MSP’s proposals in 3 ways

This must have happened to your MSP… proposal ghosting. You send a proposal to a hot prospect and crickets. All the conversations, all of the relationship building that you did leading up to this proposal seem to have counted for nothing. So how do we fix this? Why don’t they reply? Why can’t you get hold of them? Are there three simple things that you can do that will improve your hit rate? Absolutely, there are, and let’s get into them right now.

A few years back when I was single, dark days, I was being ghosted all the time. OK, that was on Tinder and Hinge and Bumble and other platforms, but I know that you get ghosted by your prospects now they seem so hot, so ready to join you, and then you send the proposal through and they never get back to you. So you never quite understand what’s happened.

Is the problem that the price isn’t right, that you didn’t display an understanding of their business? Have they changed their mind? Have they gone off to another MSP? Have they signed another contract with their incumbent MSP? Are they actually dead? I mean actually really, are they dead? And you can phone them as much as you want, but there’s no one there to answer the phone. We all have these exact thoughts when we get ghosted by prospects.

The problem is not your prospects… the problem is actually you. You’ve allowed them to take some level of control of the sales process.

You’ve allowed them to ghost you. I believe there’s a number of things that we can do to minimise ghosting, not in dating, but certainly with prospects. Now, let me tell you about two of those things. The first is that I think you should send all of your proposals out in three separate ways, and then the second thing I’m going to tell you about is that you should always have the next appointment in your calendar. That’s coming up in a second. Let’s first of all go into some of the details.

So, how do you send your proposals now? If you’re like most MSPs, you probably just do it digitally. Maybe you use a specific piece of software or you have a proposal tool built into one of the platforms that you’re using and these kind of tools they are cool, especially as they can track who’s opening your proposals, how many times they view it, all of that kind of stuff. Or maybe you just pull a PDF together or even just an email and you just send it off to them by email. Most MSPs do proposals digitally because it’s quick and it’s easy, but anytime something is quick and easy for you to send out, it’s then quick and easy for people to consume it and ignore it.

We all have far too much digital information and that makes it really easy for us to receive something on email, read it, maybe save it to a folder somewhere, or add a label in our email, and then just kind of forget about it. The other issue with sending out proposals digitally is that it’s very hard for you to stand out from the other MSPs. So most times when you’re talking to a prospect, they’re also talking to other MSPs. And even if you know you’ve got the best package, the best price, the best position, you want to be 1000% sure that you always stand out against your competitors.

Let’s do that by sending them the proposal in two other ways. So yes, we send it to them digitally, but we also send them a video. And this should be a video that you record just for them, like a one-to-one video. So get yourself onto a service like Vidyard, Bonjoro or BombBomb where you can record a personalised video to someone really easily through your laptop or your phone. And what I suggest you do in that personalised video is you bring up a screen share of that proposal and then take them through the main sections of it. You’re looking for a 60 second, maybe two minute video max. But think about it from the prospect’s point of view. If you send them a proposal with a video that explains that proposal, they’re much more likely to watch that video  to read the proposal and they’re much more likely to be engaged with it.

The better you can communicate anything, the more likely it is that someone will take action on it, and that’s why I recommend you send your proposal out a third way. And you might think that this one is nuts. I suggest you print off the proposal and you send it to them in the mail. Yes, I’m talking about the proposal that’s already sat on their laptop, and in fact, they may have received it as a PDF and as a video explaining the PDF, and then on top of that, you’re going to send it to them in the mail as well.

Yes, yes, yes. I want you to do this because physical stuff stands out in our digital world. And you want that proposal to sit on their desk for a week, you want it to get passed around between offices, passed around in meetings, you want them to scribble notes on it. And I know they could print off the PDF, but most of them won’t do this. Send it to them physically and maybe even include some chocolate bars, some candy bars, perhaps even a printed case study with some social proof if you want to send them a mug with your MSP’s name printed on it. The point is that by the time you come to put in a proposal to someone you’ve already invested hours and hours of your time and probably a fair chunk of cash as well, just in generating that prospect and getting them into a meeting. Marketing is hard enough as it is, so you want to make sure at the point that someone’s actually asked you to submit a proposal to them, you stack the odds dramatically in your favour.

To summarise, you’re sending out the proposal digitally with a personalised explainer video and you’re sending them a physical copy in the post in the mail, and there’s one final thing that I suggest you do, and this one is actually probably your ultimate weapon against being ghosted. At the previous meeting where you agree you’re going to send them that proposal, make sure you walk away from that meeting with a follow-up meeting date already in the calendar. Because if you walk away from that meeting and there’s no next meeting scheduled, which is what most MSPs do, you are deliberately making your life too hard because that pushes the action taking back onto the prospect.

They then become in control, and I know that you are giving them some space to read your proposal and talk it through with whoever they need to talk it through with and get back to you with questions or a yes or a no or whatever. But they can have that space and you can still have the next meeting booked after they’ve had that space. The follow-up meeting needs to be scheduled in their calendar. In fact, it must be this way. It’s the only way you can keep control of the sales process. So at that meeting where you’ve gone out, you’ve collected the information, you’re going to go away and write the proposal and send it to them. You ask them how long will they need to read it, absorb it, discuss it? Who do they need to speak to? Which meetings do they need to have? What are the other proposals they’re waiting for so that they can compare your proposal to the other peoples? They’re going to do that. So you might as well talk about it. Let’s say they need two weeks to do all of this. So you say to them right there in that room, okay, everyone grab your phones now, grab your calendars. Let’s schedule the follow-up meeting between you and me. And at that meeting you can ask me any outstanding questions and then give me the good news that we’ll be working together. And if you say that line with a bit of a cheeky smile, that can make quite a difference as well.

Now, these are some really, really easy changes to make. If you could find 30-60 minutes today to implement those changes, even if that only won you one new extra client over the next 12 months, surely that’s going to be the most productive hour of today, right? 

A free cyber security webinar outline any MSP can use

Would you love to do a cyber security webinar to promote your MSP but you have big concerns? Maybe you’re worried there are too many other MSPs doing webinars or what exactly would you say? I mean, you know your cyber security stuff, right? But maybe you’re not convinced that you could communicate this well to an audience. Well, good news. I’m here to help, and let me tell you why prospects are actually very keen to attend any webinar that you put on. And let me give you a free cyber security webinar outline that any MSP can use.

Yes, the world does need more webinars. It might seem to you like every ve