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Welcome to Episode 279 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• MSPs: Set up your phone person for success: Phoning leads and prospects to find out if they’re almost ready to switch from their incumbent MSP is the golden nugget opportunity. Here’s how to get the most from your phone person.


• How the Compound Effect helps MSPs do better marketing: If you want to have great marketing that delivers one new client a month, then you need to make some sacrifices and have LOTS of discipline.


• Why MSPs must build a personal brand on LinkedIn: My special guest explains how to build a personal brand on LinkedIn. He can help you to get over your fears and show you why your leads and prospects will see you and your MSP differently.


• Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Do you capture success stories from clients that your MSP has really helped? Find out the best format for doing so in this episode.

MSPs: Set up your phone person for success

This is the hardest role to recruit for in your MSP, but when you get it right, it can lead to an explosion in sales. Now you thought it was hard finding a decent level three technician or a service desk manager. Well, no, this role is even harder. And even though thousands of people can do it, you wouldn’t want to hire the vast majority of them.

Let me tell you what this role is, why it’s so important in your MSP and how to find the perfect person for you, someone who’s going to help you win new clients and grow your profit.

Now, this might be controversial to some, but I believe that every MSP should have an in-house person making outbound phone calls. Phoning leads and prospects and trying to find the golden nugget opportunity. That’s when an ordinary business owner or manager is kind of almost ready to switch from their incumbent MSP, and it’s the best time to start talking to someone.

Having a phone person, well, they can find them purely through doing the hard work and that’s doing something that you personally would never want to do, which is of course, picking up the phone repeatedly day after day after day, just calling these people. And these aren’t sales calls, by the way, this is not some kind of Wolf of Wall Street boiler room.

These are relationship building calls, to find out who is nearly ready, willing, and able to have a conversation about switching MSPs.

And then book in a 15 minute video discovery call with whoever does the selling in your business, which of course might be you or you might have a salesperson. And then you or the salesperson does the heavy lifting of booking the actual face-to-face sales appointment and of course closing the client. I know that you can do that. If I can get you in front of the right people, you can do that, right? Well, this is one of the best ways to get those 15 minute zooms. As I said, it’s an in-house person role rather than using a telemarketing agency. And there are some telemarketing agencies out there, some great ones out there, but there are also many rotten ones. And I always like to take a long-term view with any kind of marketing infrastructure that you’re putting in place. So honestly, I do believe you’ll be better off hiring someone to work within your MSP doing this. They may actually be based at home, but they’re just doing it for you. They’re not doing it for anyone else.

A back to work mom is great for this. You are looking for someone who has had a career break but who was previously in a professional role and yet they have no desire to return back to that lifestyle for whatever reason. Now, ideally, she doesn’t have any kind of professional selling or calling background, otherwise she might bring lots of bad habits to the party, but she does love being on the phone. So what is a bad job for you and me, and a distress activity, is fun for her. Just calling people all day long.

Actually you’re only looking for her to do two to three hours a day, two to three days a week. That kind of flexible part-time work is perfect for many back to work parents working around the school day. So anyway, let’s assume that you are committed to that role. I’ve hired and fired lots and lots of telephone people and I advise all of the members of my MSP Marketing Edge service to go out and get one. And I’ve noticed that there are three critical success factors in any phone person.

The first is that they need marketing support. If you just give them a list of people to call and say – just call these people, see who’s ready to switch – well, that’s a horrible job for anybody because it’s just cold calling and there’s not a human on the planet who really likes cold calling, let’s be honest. Would you want to just cold call people all day long? Me neither. I’d rather do anything, I’d rather lose a finger than do cold calling. So a better option is warm calling, and this is where you set up a marketing system to build audiences, grow relationships with those audiences, and then the final stage of what you’re trying to do here, which is to convert relationships. You’re looking to convert them from being a lead to being a prospect to being a client.

We’re talking here about the three step lead generation system that I often talk about in my YouTube videos and on the Podcast because it is so very powerful. If your phone person is calling people who are connected to you on LinkedIn, who get educational emails from you, who may already have seen 10 or 20 pieces of your content over the last year or so, well guess what? That’s not a cold call, that’s a warm call. And that’s going to be a dramatically easier conversation. That makes total sense, right?

The second critical success factor is to use a CRM properly. So firstly, make sure you have an actual CRM and you’re not just trying to use your PSA for this. A PSA is not a marketing tool, it’s an operational tool. So go get a proper CRM, and the low cost no cost one include MailChimp, MailerLite, and of course Growably, which is free with a Tech Tribe membership.

Now, the thing that’s critical is using that CRM properly. You must set it up so it’s easy for your phone person to know who to call, see what relationship building activities have already happened with them in the past, and then for them to be able to leave simple notes that can be referenced by somebody else in the future. You always kind of need to assume that your phone person today will be a different phone person in the future. They might change. So any notes from calls today must make perfect sense when a different person is accessing them in a year’s time. And a side note on this, some MSPs actually attach the VoIP recordings to the CRM record. Personally, I think that’s a little bit of overkill, but I can see the benefit of doing that if you can automate it.

Okay, our final critical success factor is that you must keep your phone person motivated. Now, this is a hard job and even somebody who likes making outbound phone calls will have days where they just can’t be bothered because there is a lot of rejection. There’s a lot of work to do to get that rejection. And there’s an even greater deal of work to do to get the desired results. So some easy ways to keep your phone person motivated is to remember one of the reasons that any back to work parent goes to work, is to have adult company. Now, I’m a sole parent myself, and my child now is 14, but when she was younger, she was like eight or something, there were days where I was desperate to speak to other adults and do adult things, not just do drawings and have tea parties with dollies, although I do miss that now I have to say. So keep your phone person motivated by keeping her involved in what’s happening in your business.

Maybe she joins the big group teams call that you do every Monday, even though that’s actually quite an operational one, it helps her to feel that she’s part of something, part of the team, that what she does matters. She can see the results of her work as new clients come on board and start to be discussed by your technicians. Maybe if on Fridays, if you do a team lunch, you get her involved in that. Either she comes into the office to take part in it or you send a pizza to her home so everyone is having pizza in the office or at home at the same time and jumps on a Teams call, which is a social. And definitely of course, get her involved in social events.

There’s one more thing that I recommend that you do, and it does require a little more of your time, but the payoff from this is massive, and that’s where you coach your salesperson. You jump on a call together and the first thing you do is you play back a recording of one of their calls, something that you kind of listen to together. Pick one where they have actually got through to someone, just look for the longer calls, you want one where they’ve had a conversation with someone, not just where they’ve been rejected from the gatekeeper. And then you can talk about three things in that call. You can talk about what went well and your phone person can do the same, they can say what they thought went well. And then you can talk about what didn’t go so well, and again your phone person does the same, what they thought didn’t go so well. And then finally, you talk about one thing that they should do differently next time. So what goes well or what went well, what didn’t go so well, what should you do differently next time? And it’s only one thing that they