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Welcome to Episode 303 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• How to market your MSP to accountants: Accountants are a perfect fit for MSPs. Learn how to speak their language to win over their hearts and minds to give your MSP the competitive edge.


• 4 huge marketing problems that damage your MSP: These marketing problems do massive amounts of damage to MSPs, and yet they’re so easy to overcome when you understand them. Are these damaging your business? Here’s what to do.


• MSP insider’s lessons from 18 years of marketing: If you want to grow your MSP by attracting new clients, the chances are you’re making some fundamental marketing mistakes. My guest today shares his 18 years experience working at an MSP and reveals what really moved the needle.


• Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Do you sometimes find that your team makes the same mistakes over and over again? Well, this is actually your problem, not theirs, and here’s the process to eliminate the problem.

How to market your MSP to accountants

Dream client alert. For many MSPs that target verticals or niches, they find accountants (CPAs) to be a very attractive sector. Are you targeting accountants? If not, you really need to hear this, and if you already are, then this is going to make things so much easier. Let’s deep dive into why accountants switch MSPs, what they’d want from you and how to grab their attention.

Accountants are a perfect fit for MSPs. They have a business that’s dependent upon technology. They’ve got compliance and regulations, and they’re often very stable businesses with lots of recurring revenue. So imagine this, you are sitting across the table from a busy accountant and they’ve literally got piles of tax returns and spreadsheets and calls with their clients all lined up. What’s the one thing that you know that they don’t want? More hassle. And understanding that is the first step in marketing your MSP to accountants.

Get inside their head and their heart and really understand what drives them and what would drive them to pick your MSP instead of someone else.

Accountants live in a world of rules, a world of deadlines, a world of compliance, and a world of absolute attention to detail. They value accuracy, speed, and security above almost anything else. So if you want them to even consider working with your MSP, your messaging has got to show that you understand their world. Talk about what matters to them, not technology. Instead show them how you help them keep their client data safe, how you help them to meet deadlines without system crashes, and how you help them eliminate the panic of last minute tech issues during tax season.

I mean you can literally paint them a picture, you can say, imagine your team working flat out in January (or whenever your local tax season is) and instead of the WIFI dropping in and out or your software slowing down or freezing, everything just works because in the background we’re monitoring everything, we’re fixing problems before you’re even aware of them, so you can focus on your clients and tax returns and getting things done while we are focusing on your technology.

Now that’s the kind of language that really gets into someone’s heart as well as their head. And then you start to think about how to influence them and get them to influence each other because accountants really do talk to each other. In fact, most people in any sector talk to other people in that sector. They ask for recommendations, they trust people who seem to understand their industry. So build up case studies specifically about accounting firms that you are helping or you’ve helped in the past. And use their words, words like, “Since moving to we’ve cut downtime by 40% during tax season.” Those kind of stories carry huge weight.

And here’s another angle, incentives. Accountants aren’t looking for freebies or gimmicks. They’re looking for partners who make them look good to their clients. So be that partner, show them how you’re going to help them impress their own clients. Maybe you could run a quick cyber security review for their top customers, but perhaps branded under their firm’s name. Or give them priority support during key filing periods. Little things like that really stand out.

Look at things like priority response during peak times, regular health checks before busy seasons, before the crazy time they have to file all the tax returns. Look at giving them a personal account manager who knows their deadlines, understands their industry, who they can pick the phone up to at any point. When you market to accountants, remember this, you are not selling IT support or technology. You’re really selling peace of mind, especially during their most stressful moments. You’re selling confidence that you know their world. That’s what they’re going to buy from you, not technology services.

So the next time you’re thinking about how to grow your MSP, don’t just target businesses in general. Pick a niche like accountants, learn what keeps them up at night, learn what they worry about, learn what they want and what they need, and show them that you got the answer. Show their heads and show their hearts. That’s how you build trust, loyalty, and a queue of accountants who wouldn’t dream of going anywhere else?

4 huge marketing problems that damage your MSP

If you’re not winning enough new clients, this could be one of the reasons why.

There are four huge marketing problems that do massive amounts of damage to MSPs, and yet they’re so easy to overcome when you understand them.

Let’s look at what these problems are, how to spot if they’re damaging your business and how you can obliterate them forever.

Selling managed services is hard and slow. There are four big problems that cause this, all of which are out of your control.

Problem one, is that decision makers don’t know what they don’t know. Ordinary business owners and managers know next to nothing about technology. In fact, they don’t even know what they don’t know about technology. They can’t explain what the cloud is in a sentence that makes sense and they don’t understand how dangerous ransomware is. And this explains why you can’t talk to them about technology in the same way that you talk to another technologist, they just glaze over. And if they do that, you’ve lost the sale. No one buys something they don’t understand.

Which leads us onto problem two, prospects make buying decisions with their hearts and not with their brains. Their brain prefers to make decisions based on facts, and that’s a big problem for the ordinary decision makers because to them all MSPs look the same. Their websites might have different words and pictures, but the themes are the same and the messages are very similar. Many MSPs copy the marketing of other MSPs and consequently end up in the soup of looking samey. Faced with this, the brain says, well, they all look the same, I can’t make this decision. And the brain delegates the decision down to the heart.

That leads to problem number three, inertia loyalty rules. This is the thing that keeps us with our CPA/ accountant years after we decide that they’re not right for us. And it’s what persuades an ordinary person to stay with their incumbent MSP long after they’re ready to move on. Why? Because better the devil you know, it feels safer to stay with someone I know but dislike than it is to move to you. These decision makers might not understand technology, but they do understand that if it goes wrong, they’ll be in big trouble. And people are more motivated to avoid pain than they are to pursue gain.

Problem four, people only buy when they’re ready to buy. There are so many things you can sell that you can persuade people to buy today rather than tomorrow. But managed services is not one of those for all the reasons we just discussed. For many decision makers, switching MSPs is a distress activity. They’ll keep putting it off until it becomes urgent, and it’s only on the day that they wake up ready to act that they’ll start paying attention to your marketing.

There is good news though. You can overcome these problems by asking yourself three magic questions and I have some suggested answers for you as well.

Magic question number one: How can you know when the time is right? There are a couple of ways to know. First, people leave clues by their behaviour. So for example, we give the members of my MSP Marketing Edge a comprehensive IT Services Buyers Guide, which is updated every year, in fact, we’ve just released the 2026 version. And it’s about how to pick an MSP. But the reality is that no one in their right mind would want to read this unless they were thinking of switching MSPs. So the very nature of someone requesting an IT Services Buyer’s Guide is a signal of intent. And you can also use tools, HubSpot to track how much of your marketing someone consumes. An increase in activity can be a signal of intent. Or a better way, you can just ask them. Get an outbound phone caller for your MSP and call people all the time. And these are relationship building calls by the way, not sales calls. Make sure your caller asks people when their current contract is up. Some won’t kno