The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge

Welcome to a very SPECIAL edition of the show, Episode 260, celebrating 5 years of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green.

This episode’s been released five years to the day since we launched the podcast on the 5th of November, 2019. It’s a birthday! Amazing. Well back then, producer James and I figured it would run for a few months when we launched the first episode.

“Hello, this is Paul Green and welcome to the first ever MSP marketing podcast. Now, my aim every single week is to give you some motivation, some ideas, some clever stuff that you can take that other MSPs are doing around the world and you can bring it into your business and really make a difference to your business quite quickly and quite dramatically.”

Five years on, I’ve talked to some of the guests who’ve appeared over the years and asked them a big question – What’s the best idea you have to help MSPs make more money? We’ve split their answers into four different sections, starting of course with Marketing and Sales.

Hi guys, it’s Jamie Warner here, CEO of eNerds and Invarosoft. And here’s my tip for how your MSP can make more money. Well, the good news is I’ve got two tips and as an MSP owner, this is coming from experience. I’m actually in the saddle selling at the moment. So my first tip is that you must learn how to increase your percentage success rate of converting new customers. Your only goal is to essentially convince that new client opportunity that your MSP is going to be a step up from where they went before. That is why clients look to change. They don’t look to change for technical reasons. They only look to change for a step up in the service experience. So that’s your job, to figure out what are the things that you can say in your IT services presentation that will demonstrate that your service methodology is a step up from where they’ve gone before.

Now, obviously in the Invarosoft world, we use our customer experience technology to demonstrate to that customer how visually they’re going to get a step up in their service experience. And interestingly, we also use our QBR or our roadmap, TBR, whatever you want to call it. We use the methodology and the software that we use to do that and we demonstrate that to the customer as well, so they can see how our methodology and how our roadmapping and our gap analysis and our reporting is going to be a step up, and we show them examples of that when we are presenting our services. So that’s tip number one and that’s going to help you sign up more clients and grow your MSP.

The other thing that doesn’t get spoken about, so tip number two, is that you absolutely have to treat your clients as a pipeline of opportunity from a QBR perspective. So every client essentially has a huge amount of things that you need to help them improve. It might be new switches, routers, firewalls, a project to go to the cloud with Office 365, whatever it happens to be. Put all your clients in a list, down the left hand side of an Excel spreadsheet, look at how much you think you could possibly sell them. Workstations and desktops tends to be a big part of that. And then look at the enormous pipeline you’ve got. Now, these are things that clients actually need. These are not things that they don’t need, and so the best MSPs that grow faster, there’s this concept of sales compression. It’s understanding you have a pipeline as it relates to the QBR side of things, going out and actually having a conversation with the customer to get them to make decisions.

Which is what we do, the buying psychology of good, better, best when we present those recommendations to get buyers to make decisions faster. And if you can squeeze your pipeline down into a shorter period of time, lo and behold, you sell more faster and you grow faster. And let me tell you, as someone that speaks to a lot of MSPs, it’s the ones that are more sales efficient and the ones that with my first point are focusing on how they can convert those customers that grow faster. And in the last year, eNerds grew a million dollars in revenue and we signed up $70,000 in new MRR support, so just support in that last year alone, so it works. I wish you well. Good luck.

Hey, this is Nate Freedman from Tech Pro Marketing and I was the guest on episode 84. My tip for making your MSP more profitable is to have a live chat agent on your website. In my own study, 20% of leads prefer to engage through chat rather than a form or call, and 100% prefer speaking to a real person. Plus websites with live chat have been shown to have a 35% higher conversion rate compared to those without. So by offering a live chat option, you’re not just meeting expectations of your customers, but you’re actively increasing engagement and lead conversion rates by providing immediate personalised responses.

Hey there, this is Adrian Savage from EmailSmart. I was the guest in episode 99. My idea is to make sure you keep in regular contact by email with your customers and prospects, ideally at least once a week using a reputable email marketing platform. Send them a quick tip that will help them, something they can do quickly and easily. And in the same email, always mention one of your services along with a call to action, because if you don’t keep at the front of their mind, they won’t come back to you.

Bonus tip, make sure you regularly remove the people who haven’t engaged recently from your email list. Remove the people who haven’t opened anything in the last three months, and ideally the people who haven’t clicked anything in the last six months. Otherwise, you’ll be hurting your email reputation and your emails might not get through.

Hey, this is Megan Killion from MKC Agency and I was a guest on episode 238. My tip is to regularly ask your clients for referrals. In particular, I highly recommend getting a CSAT system in place that’s going to automatically ask your clients when you finish a ticket, if you did a good job. Then have your service delivery manager review those and see who’s doing well and pass it over to sales account management, or whoever’s going to be in charge of reaching out to clients to get referrals, that they should be touched in with and asked for referrals.

Then use your outreach to those clients, and be super specific -say something like, “Hey, it’s Megan from MKC, I know that you love when Tammy helps you guys out with your scheduling. She’s been so great and helpful for you and I know that we’ve delivered you about $1.5 million in new revenue this year. I’m just wondering, do you have any MSP friends that could benefit from a million and a half dollars in revenue in the pipeline?”. That’s it. Just ask for the referral and get out there and kick some butt.

I am loving these and this next bunch of ideas is all about looking after your clients.

What’s up everybody, Justin Escar from the Virtua Consulting Group. You may have heard me on episode 75, 100, 181, there may be another one who knows. Congratulations to Paul Green for celebrating five years of the Paul Green MSP Marketing podcast. Big shout outs to you, Paul and your entire team. Can’t wait to see what you do over the next five years.

Now, what’s my hot tip for MSPs to make more money? It’s not getting new customers, it’s about selling to your existing ones. The things that are really important today. So as we end 2024 and get into 2025, I’m talking about three things – security, identity and compliance. Sell not just the licences, but the services to your existing customers to make them more secure, help them with their identity and get them more compliant. I guarantee you, you’ll have a leg up on your competition if you take advantage of those things. Want to start small? Look at email security. There are great tools out there right now beyond spam protection that will help you and help your customers be more secure. So take advantage of what’s out there now. Look at your existing customer base. It’s not always about the new shiny, it’s about what you have now and how you can maximise your profit from it. Again, I’m Justin Escar from Virtua Consulting. Can’t wait to see you all soon.

Hi, this is Tony Capewell from Your Cloud Works and MSP Dark Web and I was the guest on episode 125 of Paul Green’s podcast almost three years ago. First of all, congratulations on five years of providing outstanding advice to the MSP world. It’s been an incredible resource.

My idea is the cost of acquiring a new customer is far higher than the cost of keeping an existing one happy. It’s easy to get caught up chasing new clients, but in reality, focusing on your long-term customers brings more consistent, sustainable profit. We do follow our structured regular marketing plan, but we’ve made it a priority to nurture our existing relationships, ensuring our clients are satisfied and feel valued. Our regular client check-ins and proactive support also allows us to upsell cyber security services with ease. So yes, continue with a structured marketing plan, but focus on client retention and you’ll save money while increasing loyalty and lifetime value.

Hey, this is Richard Tubb, The IT Business Growth Expert, and I was a guest back in episode 21. Now my idea is to do client floor walks. This is where you or one of your engineers visits your client site, not to fix an issue or close a ticket, but just to pop by to see how your client is doing.