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Welcome to Episode 261 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• Stop clients calling you personally for first line support: You can’t grow your business while you’re delivering first line support. Find out how you can free yourself from these burdens whilst retaining great relationships with your clients.


• Why victory loves preparation: Planning small actions regularly will make the biggest difference to your business.


• How introverts can communicate more confidently – and feel better about it: Learn how to tap into your passion using this confidence formula, whatever your “vertness”.


• Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Greg from South Carolina wants to know what the Parthenon principle of marketing is and how to apply it to his MSP.

Stop clients calling you personally for first line support

When you are the person who started the MSP, one of the hardest transitions for you is to get away from delivering first line support to that very first set of clients that you won in your first few years. But it’s something that you absolutely have to do or otherwise you get trapped in doing technical work forever.

Now, don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with technical work, but you can’t grow your business while you’re doing password resets and setting up new users, right? This problem happens to most MSP owners and the reason it’s so hard is because you used to look after these clients yourself, you personally. So they feel that they have some kind of special bond with you. And even when you’ve employed first line technicians whose very job it is to sit there and help your clients, they will still email you directly or call your mobile directly rather than speak to the help desk.

Now, this steals your time when you should be working on the business, but also reduces your ability to sell more to them during a strategic review.

You can’t be the technology strategist and first line support at the same time. Clients’ minds will only let you sit in one of those boxes.

There are a number of different ways to tackle this problem without annoying your clients, and you’ll probably put a couple of the things I’m about to talk about together into a blended solution. In fact, here are nine things that I recommend.

The first is to set clear expectations. Now, this is really easy with new clients, but hard with longer standing clients. So just remember you have to educate them, constantly. What’s top of mind for you is item 1,058 in their mind’s list of priorities.

Number two, make it easy. Put stickers with the help desk number on every single device. Put them on their hands so they can’t help but see them.

Number three, have a standard operating procedure to roll out each time a client contacts you directly. Make a plan in advance so you don’t have the emotional trauma of wondering, how am I going to deal with this?

Number four, play dumb. Tell them you don’t know how to fix that as you focus on strategy these days, but you’ll ask someone on the help desk to call them immediately.

Number five, change your voicemail to say that you’re not working today and for any support, please call the help desk on this number. You can then let client calls go to voicemail forever. Perhaps just follow up with them the first couple of times it happens or when their issue is being resolved just so that they know you are there, but you are not the one doing the work.

Number six, set up an email auto reply exactly at the same principle as the voicemail.

Number seven, this is a cheeky one, fake being your own virtual assistant. When someone emails you or sends you a text, send back a standard reply saying that you are actually your VA and that you are off today and here’s how to get support with the number for the help desk.

Number eight, get a second mobile number so you keep your old number that clients have been calling for years, but let it automatically forward all of the calls to the help desk. Then you get a second private number that’s just for friends, family, and your team.

And number nine, now this one will hurt, but it is worth it. Make your clients wait if they contact you directly after hours, do not take the call, do not reply to the email. You’ll only encourage more bad behaviour. And over-servicing clients can be just as bad for a working relationship as under-servicing them as it sets unrealistic expectations. So make them wait and explain in a warm way how using the proper channels will get them faster support.

Why victory loves preparation

Victory loves preparation. It’s a phrase I’ve been living by for years and years, and it was only when preparing this episode that I looked up where it had come from. I thought perhaps it was from one of the hundreds of business books that I’ve read over the years, or maybe from one of the inspirational business leaders that I follow on social media. Well, how embarrassing. It turns out to be a Latin phrase written on the side of a baddies gun in a Jason Statham film that I’ve never seen.

Hey ho, it’s still a good phrase to live by because it means making sure your help desk is ready to pick up the phone five minutes before the lines open. It means never going on a sales call without having done at least 30 minutes of basic research on the company that you are visiting. It means systemising the things that have to happen in your MSP every day and having a plan when someone’s off sick. It means always having someone in the office trained and ready to speak to incoming new client inquiries because these days, speed beats size. It means locking in a trusted partner to help you with your basic prospect marketing, assuming that that’s not a core skill of your business so that you are moving prospects closer to becoming clients every single day.

Now, this is one of the reasons why I recommend that your management team meets first thing every Monday morning or as soon as it’s practical, every single week. Even if the management team is just you and a colleague and actually together, you make up two thirds of the business, you still meet every week because that meeting is about the small actions that have to be taken in order to get the better lives that you and your management team desire by being prepared.

Growing your business isn’t going to happen without preparation, and it’s not going to happen just by doing the stuff that the business does every day.

Fixing technology, strategic planning, that’s what the business does, but those activities don’t grow the business. So your weekly management meeting time, that’s all about what the business is trying to achieve right now and what must happen in the next week to move you closer to that goal. And you do it weekly to ensure you get into a rhythm, something that’s planned weekly is more likely to actually happen than something that’s a bit more ad hoc.

And actually, here’s a simple agenda for your management meeting. You start with a recap of your goals, your three year goal and this year’s goal, and then you move on to progress on the actions agreed last week. And then you talk about what’s moving you away from the goal and what can we do to kill that. And then what do we need to do this week to move closer to our goal. And then you agree, actions, who’s responsible, and the deadline for each action.

Let me give you a final quote to finish on. Now, this one’s from Bill Gates, not Jason Statham. And Bill says – Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in 10 years. You could do the same with days or weeks or months. The way to guarantee that long-term achievement comes only through taking small actions every single day. And your weekly management meeting is where you plan those small actions that will make the biggest difference and make sure that they happen.

How introverts can communicate more confidently – and feel better about it

Featured guest: Dallas Amsden has honed the skills of communication for 30+ years. As a classically trained singer and actor – and even as a stand-up comedian who has performed at venues such as the Hollywood Improv and the world-famous Comedy Store – Dallas now leverages those skills he learned on stages all over the world to help business professionals use the “soft skills” of communication to more deeply connect with prospects, customers, and their teams. He has worked to create messaging with 100s of organisations, including Fortune 500 companies.

Dallas is on a mission to teach business owners, business professionals, and entrepreneurs – especially Introvert Entrepreneurs – to develop the skills necessary to become the most effective, most powerful – and even most successful – communicators in any room they enter. He is the co-founder of the Communicate2Succeed Academy, and the host of two upcoming podcasts, “The Future You Leadership Podcast” and “The Dallas Daily Show.” To learn more about Dallas, go to <a href="https://emea01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.dallasamsden.com%2F&data=05%7C02%7C%7C62061da9d74541c9d69a08dcd35cb2a5%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C638617642340625098%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C0%7C%7C%7C&sdata=