The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge

Welcome to Episode 310 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• MSPs: This simple upsell generates new MRR AND boosts retention: This is something that almost every single client wants but rarely gets from their MSP… a 24/7 at-home support package. And it’s such a simple upsell.


• MSPs who do this win new clients faster: If you want to sell your services you have to move people from being someone you talk to mostly on LinkedIn, YouTube, and email, to being someone you talk to on the phone.


• MSPs: Use marketing AI like Iron Man, not Terminator: Many MSPs actually do damage to the marketing messages they’re putting out because the AI doesn’t really understand what their end goal is. My guest today is an AI marketing expert and he’s going to tell you how to get it right.


• The Marketing Minute: Don’t miss this quick and easy LinkedIn messaging tip.

MSPs: This simple upsell generates new MRR AND boosts retention

Could this be the most valuable upsell any MSP could deploy? It’s something that almost every single client wants but rarely gets from their MSP. And it not only generates new monthly recurring revenue for you but also has a huge and positive effect on retention. Let me tell you what this upsell is and an easy way you can roll it out in the next seven days.

The upsell I’m talking about is an at-home support package. Now think about how most of your clients work these days. They might have an office, they might be completely remote, and of course you are already looking after their office tech, their business tech. But the reality is, as we know, people just work from anywhere these days and they also work at any times – in the evenings, on weekends, sometimes even when they’re on a vacation, on holiday.

And here’s the problem, when they’re working from home out of hours and something goes wrong with their IT, they don’t have anyone to turn to, not unless they wait till Monday morning or something when you and your team are back and we all know that that must be deeply frustrating for them. We also know that you don’t want to do support in the evenings and the weekends for work-life balance. So this is a source of friction for both parties.

You should be doing everything to remove friction between you and your client. This is where your at-home support package comes in… and it’s such a simple upsell.

You could do a setup project perhaps by bundling a couple of things together. You could maybe have a laptop doc, a wireless keyboard, maybe do a WIFI survey for their home and install some boosters, something like that, maybe even a check in on their home security. But the real winner and the monthly recurring revenue is a 24/7 help desk. And the secret sauce to this is that you don’t have to provide that 24/7 help desk yourself. You can outsource it. There are plenty of white label providers out there who will handle those calls in the evening and at weekends for you, often under your brand. So your clients still feel like they’re talking to your MSP.

You might choose to be very clear with your clients that it is an outsourced help desk, but they have access to all of your systems and you train them and you’re constantly working with them and updating them. Because no human expects another human to provide genuine 24 hour service from their local office. I think you’re almost being a bit disingenuous with your clients if you’re not honest with them about how you do this. But if you didn’t want to use a white label provider, you could always team up with an MSP on the other side of the planet, so you can handle each other’s out of hours calls.

However you do this, the important thing is to focus on the impact to your client. Imagine being able to say to them, You know when you’re sat doing some work at like nine on a Sunday evening because you want to get ahead for the week, but there’s something wrong with your IT. And normally you’d have to wait until Monday morning to contact us, and that means you’ve lost productive time. But business no longer works like that anymore, so with this at home support package, you can get help whenever and wherever you’re working. I mean, that’s a very, very compelling pitch, isn’t it? It makes sense for your clients and it creates ongoing monthly recurring revenue for you. So everyone wins. And the best part is you don’t even need every single client to buy it. If just a fraction of your clients take up this package, it becomes a lovely new stream of profit with very little extra effort.

So here’s my suggestion… put together a simple offering, brand it properly, and make it available to all of your clients. Talk about it at every strategic technology review and in all of your marketing. In fact, this could even become a front end USP, a unique selling proposition for you. If you are the only MSP in your area who offers genuine 24/7 support, that’s a fantastic differentiator. In fact, it’s a reason right at the beginning of the relationship that someone would pick you in the first place. So position this as peace of mind because that’s what it really is.

Is this possibly the perfect upsell? Is this something that’s genuinely valuable for your clients, easy for you to deliver because you’re outsourcing it and something that builds monthly recurring revenue for your MSP?

MSPs who do this win new clients faster

There’s no way I could make this any simpler. MSPs who use this marketing strategy win new clients faster. So why isn’t everyone using it because it’s not new, it’s not sexy, and I’ll be honest, it’s not fun to do. It’s something that has to be done to speed up new client acquisition. But look, let’s give you the business case for it to see if it’s something that you want to implement. Let me tell you what it is, why it works, and how the best MSPs implement it.

I love marketing. I mean I literally love it. Marketing has not only paid my mortgage over the years, it paid off a mortgage back in 2016 by letting me build up a business and sell it. It allowed me to acquire rental properties. It allowed me to try my hand at property developing, which actually was a disaster, but we won’t get into that. It’s also allowed me to get involved in a few other people’s business ventures. And I say this not to boast at all because my success is modest by most standards. In fact, I consider my work-life balance and my solid relationship with my 15-year-old child, Sam, I consider that to be my greater marker of personal success than what I’ve actually achieved in terms of bank accounts and businesses and all of that kind of stuff. I’m just trying to show you the sheer life-changing power of marketing.

I want to inspire you to take marketing more seriously in your MSP. When you get marketing right, it allows you to find people who could one day buy your services.

It gets those people to choose to start a conversation with you, join one of your audiences and be educated and entertained by you with your content marketing. But there does come a point where if you want to sell them your services, you have to move them from being someone you talk to mostly on LinkedIn, YouTube, and email, to being someone you talk to offline. And the single most powerful tool to do that is the phone.

In that business that I sold in 2016, which was a healthcare marketing business, we had 12,000 leads, which back then we emailed twice a week, so that’s 24,000 emails a week going out. And we used a CRM to track every single open and every single click from every single person on that list. I then had a team of three telesales people sitting looking at that list, using their brains and figuring out who we haven’t spoken to for a few months and then they just called those people. I mean that was all they did five days a week. And that was how we generated £1 million, which is about $1.3 million a year of revenue in that business. And we did that every year because we could see who the leads were, who was active, and by phoning them, we could find out who was ready to buy. Good marketing puts the right message in front of the right person at the right time and using the phone accelerated that process.

Of course, yes, the phone is inefficient and it’s difficult. More often than not, we couldn’t get hold of the person we were calling… gatekeepers could be very, very effective. But when we did get hold of them, we attempted to have a relationship building conversation. At least once a day or once every other day we would have a very high quality conversation with a lead and we were able to book a sales appointment with them, turning them from a lead into a prospect. Now, if I owned an MSP like yours, I would do exactly the same thing today, yes, even in 2025.

I would build audiences of people who were willing to listen to me. And these audiences will be the decision makers and influences in the businesses I wanted to work with. And then I would educate and entertain those people using good marketing content, building up a light relationship with them and building up my business’s profile as well. But ultimately what would make me money would be having a telephone person looking at all of the marketing activity, picking up the phone and making outbound phone calls to these people.

This is the three step lead generation system my MSP Marketin