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Welcome to Episode 299 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• Marketing an MSP is like boiling water: Marketing your MSP is difficult. It requires a long-term strategy, not a series of one-off activities. But it will pay off for you very well with clients that stay with you for years and years.


• MSPs: Get a better understanding of your prospects’ pain points: You can get a better understanding of your prospects by using the five why’s framework. It’s a problem solving method developed by the founder of Toyota and I believe that you can use it in your MSP sales.


• How MSPs build trust, authority and credibility in the AI age: In this new world of AI some marketing tactics don’t work anymore and some are way more important than they’ve ever been. My guests reveal how you can use PR to your advantage in this new landscape.


• Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Do you struggle with content creation? I have a brainstorm of really great ideas for you to try.

Marketing an MSP is like boiling water

You must get so frustrated at how long it takes to generate leads and new clients for your MSP. And you’re not on your own there, lots of other MSPs feel the same. But imagine if there was a quick and amazing fix for this frustratingly long drawn out problem. Well, there is, and even better news, while this painful long wait for new clients will be driving your competitors insane, you can train yourself to think differently.

I think one of the things that MSPs find the hardest when they really start taking their marketing seriously is just how long it takes to win a new client. Because you read stuff on the internet, don’t you, about people who set up a funnel or they have a special offer or they do this new shiny tactic and there’s always a promise that you launch something at 9 in the morning and you have your first sale by 9:30 , but that’s not really how it works for managed services.

Managed services are a double-edged sword in that you both benefit from and you are punished by them. Let me explain what I mean by that. On one side of the sword, it takes a very long time to win a new client, but on the other side of the sword, they pay you money every month in monthly recurring revenue and they stay for years and years and years. And it’s that lifetime value, the revenue that the client contributes to your business over the decade they stay with you, that is what you’ve got to stay focused on with your marketing.

So if you are measuring your marketing by doing a little piece of activity today, like sending an email or posting a blog post or putting something on LinkedIn and you expect that is going to generate a hot lead who turns into a client tomorrow, it just doesn’t work that way. You haven’t got the right marketing mindset and that’s always going to lead to you being frustrated with your marketing.

The right marketing mindset is about having a great strategy and implementing that day to day, but sticking with it until you are sick to death of it.

Because at the point that you are sick to death of it, that means it’s actually just starting to cut through to the people you’re talking to. So you keep doing it and keep doing it and keep doing it, and it really does work like that.

The strategy that I always recommend to MSPs is super simple. Three steps, six words: build audiences, grow relationships, convert relationships. Which means finding people to listen to you, for most MSPs that’s LinkedIn and your email list in your CRM. Then growing a relationship with them using content marketing, like sending out emails and posting on social media. And that final stage, converting relationships is about picking up the phone, finding out who’s ready to have a conversation about switching MSPs.

Now, those six words there, that’s a very solid marketing strategy. I use it for my own marketing, have done for nearly 20 years. And my business, the MSP Marketing Edge, helps more than 700 MSPs to implement exactly that strategy, but it does take time. It’s not a quick win. I’m going to be honest, there are no quick wins in marketing an MSP. Of course there are short term tactics which come up, they work for a little piece of time and then they go away, they stop working. But trust me, you want to ignore those and focus in on a long term strategy that’s always there working in the background to find the people at the exact moment that they are ready to leave their incumbent. Maybe they’ve been with their incumbent for seven to 10 years, something has unsettled them, and you want to be in front of them and build a relationship with them. So at the point that they are ready to make a new commitment to someone else (you) for years and years and years, then you’ve got to be there at that right moment.

I like to think of this like boiling water. And I don’t mean in a kettle or one of those cool quick tap things. Have you seen those? You just push a button and you get instant boiling water, we actually have one of those in our kitchen, they’re quite cool. They’re super expensive, but they are cool. No, I mean boiling water, the old fashioned way. You get a pan, you fill it with cold water, you put it on the stove and you start the temperature low and of course the water barely moves. So you turn the temperature up a bit and the water starts to just stir a little bit and as you keep turning the temperature up and up and up, the water starts to get more active. It starts to get hotter and hotter and hotter. It starts to move more and move more. And the difference between water that’s actually boiling and not boiling, the difference is one degree. You can turn the stove up by one degree and take very, very hot, but not yet boiling water and turn it into boiling water. One degree.

That’s a useful analogy for marketing your MSP. You keep putting, I was going to say pressure, but it’s kind of influence. You keep putting influence on your leads and your prospects with all of the marketing activity you’re doing, all of the content you’re putting out. And it’s one little thing that makes the difference, that one degree that turns them from being a prospect into a client. The problem is just like boiling water, you can’t jump straight to that one little thing. You can’t jump straight from the one degree that turns hot water into boiling water. You have to have done all of the work building up to it beforehand. And that’s exactly the same with marketing. You can’t just jump to that trigger that makes them become a client. Because actually it’s different triggers anyway, different people respond to different things. You’ve got to put all of the work in and keep doing that work so you reach that one degree that takes them from hot water to boiling water. Does that make sense? I do love a good analogy. I hope I’ve explained that one really well to you.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that marketing your MSP, it is difficult. It is long-term, but it will pay off for you very, very well with clients that pay you monthly for like 10 years. There are hundreds of industries around the world that are so jealous of you for that recurring revenue, for that retention. All you have to do is win more of those clients and you do that by building audiences, growing relationships and converting relationships and making sure you’ve got the right marketing mindset so that you market every single day to get that extra degree that really makes the difference.

MSPs: Get a better understanding of your prospects’ pain points

How much do you understand about what’s happening in your prospect’s heads and hearts? And I mean really happening. When they’re thinking of switching MSP, what are all the questions that are running through their heads? What are all the opportunities they’re hoping to benefit from? What are all the fears that are holding them back? Right now I’ve got a very clever framework for you to use to understand exactly what’s happening in almost anyone’s mind, especially a prospect. It’s a superpower that you can develop which will help you close more clients for your business.

I want to talk about how you can get a better understanding of your prospect’s pain points with five why’s. No, not Five Guys, the rather excellent burger chain, I mean five why’s. It’s a problem solving method developed by the founder of Toyota quite some time ago, about a hundred years ago or so, and I believe that you can use it in your MSP sales.

The idea is that you keep asking versions of why until you get to the real core of someone’s problem or desire.

So here’s an example. It’s a bit of a sort of a two-way conversation between you and a prospect. Prospect says, We need better internet. And you say, Why is that then? And the prospect says, Because our connection is really bad. And you say, Well, why is it really bad? And the prospect says, I don’t know, you tell me. My staff complain all the time that their computers are slow. And you respond with, Well, why do you think that is? And the prospect says, Well, they tell me they can’t get their work done fast enough and I am fed up with their complaints. And you say, It sounds like an obvious question, but why are you fed up with their complaints? And the prospect pauses for a second and then says, I just want t