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Welcome to Episode 252 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• Get the right message in front of the right person at the right time: To attract new clients you need consistent, well-timed marketing to ensure they choose your MSP when they’re ready to switch.


• Do you employ any Sales Prevention Officers?: That’s anyone who avoids suggesting beneficial services to clients so they don’t appear salesy, but they’re unintentionally hurting your business by missing opportunities to improve client satisfaction and increase revenue.


• The common service mistakes that can damage client retention: My guest this week, Michelle Coombs, highlights the common service mistakes that can damage long-term client retention and how to stop them from happening in your MSP.


• Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Alec, who has an MSP in Nashville, would like to hire a virtual assistant to take on his admin tasks but doesn’t know how to hire one that he can trust.

Get the right message in front of the right person at the right time

There’s a reason that getting new clients for your MSP takes so long. It’s because of what’s happening to the ordinary business are owners and managers that you are trying to reach. And when you understand what’s going on in their heads and their hearts, you can figure out why they’re so slow switching from one MSP to another. Let’s talk about the importance of getting the right message in front of the right person at the right time.

Now, one of the most critical marketing skills that you can develop is the ability to look at your MSP and what you sell from the point of view of the people that you are trying to sell it to or put another way. If you can get in their heads and their hearts, you can better understand what’s driving them to make a decision. Or maybe more importantly, what’s holding them back from making a decision. The best phrase that I ever heard to describe this is…

To influence what John Smith buys, you must see through John Smith’s eyes.

When you really look at why a business owner or manager switches from one MSP to another, you suddenly get a startling insight into why switching MSPs is a distress activity for most people. You see, they don’t really understand technology at all. In fact, compared to you, they are literally the other end of the scale. You have such in-depth technology and abilities and that makes you an incredibly talented technology person, but the client you’re selling to, well, they’re more like me. I’m not a tech I never have been. That by the way means it’s easy for me to represent the ordinary people that you sell to. And sure, I understand a bit about technology and I love it. And actually I probably know a lot more about technology these days because of course I’ve been working with MSPs for eight years, but I can’t set up a server, I can’t configure a cloud service and I bet you a rather large amount of money that I’d be the guy that would get the setting wrong and I would take down the entire business. So please, no one ever give me the settings of anything important, I beg you.

Anyway, because they don’t understand technology, but they do know it’s incredibly important. They are less willing to muck about with it. So something major has to change at their incumbent MSP for them to want to switch to someone new. And we do see this, don’t we. We see small businesses being sold and kind of merged into super MSPs and maybe customer service goes down and maybe prices go up and the dissatisfaction creeps in very, very slowly for the clients. But there does inevitably come a day where the client wakes up and thinks, I’m not happy with my MSP anymore, and it’s time to change. Or they feel that they have outgrown their MSP or there’s just change.  Change in their business or your business is often what drives people to pick a new MSP.

So, your marketing challenge then, is to consistently get the right message in front of the right people at the right time. And that should be your core marketing driver. It’s why I’m always recommending both in this podcast here on YouTube and across everything I do, both for my MSP marketing edge members and just all MSPs out there. I recommend that you have a very easy but powerful three-step lead generation strategy. You build multiple audiences of people to listen to you. You grow your relationship with them using content marketing, and then you convert the relationship normally by sending out marketing campaigns and getting people on the phone and just chatting to them about their business.

Now you chose to start a business in the most wonderful sector in the world, but it is cursed by very, very slow sales because someone will stay with an MSP that they’re unhappy with for a number of years until that day comes when it’s time to switch. That day when they’re ready to switch, that day is perfect for you to get your marketing message in front of them. Now, based on what I’ve just said here, this is why your MSP needs a marketing machine, not just a set of random marketing activities that happen now and again when someone remembers, but a machine where marketing happens on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. And that’s the only way that you can truly drive new business into your MSP in a systematic way.

Do you employ any Sales Prevention Officers?

If I was a client of your MSP and I was on the phone with one of your technicians telling them about a common frustration that I’m having, it’s actually something they could help with, but it would involve me spending money – I’d have to upgrade something or buy some new software or something – in that situation, would they suggest that solution to me or would they not? Because like many technicians, they don’t ever want to be seen as doing any kind of sales. They don’t want to be seen as a salesperson despite the fact that selling me this software or this service would make my life better.

Would that happen in your MSP? I’m asking this because I’m wondering if in your business you employ any sales prevention officers, let’s find out.

An extraordinary event happened to me a few years back and it was before I upgraded to an EV, to a Tesla. So my car was low on diesel and I popped into my local petrol station on the way home. Now the woman behind the counter was acting in the most peculiar way. “You’re the last customer”, she practically spat at me and she was actually pointing at me with her finger. And then, “I need to shut the forecourt and stop selling petrol”. “Well, what’s going on?” I ask because perhaps there’d been a big fuel spillage or an accident of some kind. And I couldn’t believe her answer.

“I’ve run out of till rolls,” she replied. It was such a bizarre answer that I didn’t understand at first. So I said, “Sorry, you’re shutting the whole petrol station because you’ve run out of till rolls?” It’s the little receipt thing that comes out of the till. “It’s the law,” she screamed at me; something to do with having to give a receipt to someone when you sell them something. Some bizarre UK law.

But by this time there were other drivers standing at the pumps. They’ve got the nozzle in their car, they’re waiting for her to press the button to authorise the fuel. And she’s tapping at the window, waving at them, pulling a finger across the neck like in a classic dead motion. I tried to help her out and said to her, “Look, even if the law says you can’t sell fuel without a receipt, you could always do handwritten receipts for those who want them because most people probably aren’t bothered.” That’s what I suggested. “They just want fuel.” I said to her. But she was having none of it. And once I paid, she went outside to cone off the entrance to the petrol station. I mean, the whole thing was completely shut down. It was a nightmare. This woman was the most successful Sales Prevention Officer that I’d ever met, and I have met quite a few as you probably have as well. She took a small detail of her job quite literally, and rather than work flexibly around it, decided it would just be easier to shut the whole business down for a few hours. Can you imagine how incandescent with rage her boss would’ve been when he found out?

Now, I bumped into another sales prevention officer a few weeks ago. I was taking a long walk around one of the lovely lakes near where I live in Milton Keynes here in the UK. And it’s a habit of mine to pick up a takeaway coffee from a pub on the lake. It’s always busy with a flurry of walkers doing the same thing on a Sunday morning. This week though, as soon as I walked through the doors, a bored looking girl shouted, “No coffee, we ain’t got no takeaway cups.” and then looked down at her Instagram again, I kid you not this is exactly what happened. Her attitude and that welcome pretty much shut down the alternative of staying in for a coffee or maybe even having breakfast as a treat. And I’m sure by this point she was sick of having to tell walkers there were no coffee cups. To her, this was hassle whereas you and I would see this as an opportunity. So here’s a scary question for you, how do the sales prevention officers act in your MSP?

What makes Sales Prevention Officers terrifying is they think they’re doing the right thing. It’s rarely malicious. It’s just having the wrong thinking and the wrong behaviour.

Here are some ways it may be happening in your business. Maybe when a first line te