People do not buy features, they buy benefits… many MSP’s know this but very few actually live it in their marketing, here’s how to change that. Also this week, is your MSP’s expertise hiding in plain sight? And how much is your MSP really worth?

Welcome to Episode 328 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge.

The most common MSP marketing mistake

There’s a basic marketing mistake that the vast majority of MSPs make. In fact, once you know what it is, you’re going to see it everywhere. It’s going to drive you crazy, you’ll see it on your website, on your LinkedIn, on your other marketing channels. But the good news is I can help you to spot it and fix it in the next five minutes.

We are diving into one of the most fundamental principles in all of marketing. People do not buy features, they buy benefits. Now, every MSP has heard this, but very few actually live it in their marketing. And the reason this matters so much is because features and benefits land completely differently in our brains.

A feature is normally processed logically, it engages the analytical part of the mind that loves detail but really doesn’t like to make decisions. Whereas a benefit is processed emotionally and hits the part of our heart and also the brain that drives action, that imagines outcomes, that feels relief, confidence and safety. And here’s the uncomfortable truth…

All buying decisions made by ordinary business owners and managers start emotionally. People only use logic afterwards to justify what they already wanted.

So features live in the logical world. Benefits live in the emotional world. When you talk about features, you are speaking to the wrong part of the brain… you’re speaking to the part of the brain that doesn’t buy. But when you talk about benefits, you’re speaking directly to the part of the brain that says yes. And this is why when MSPs proudly list their features – 24/7 monitoring, remote support, patching, ticket automation, all of that stuff – prospects kind of nod politely, but they’re kind of glazing over and they feel nothing. It’s like listing ingredients instead of actually showing the finished meal, it’s like describing the different parts of the engine rather than describing the feeling of driving the car.

So benefits create pictures in people’s minds and they let the prospect imagine what life will be like when they’re working with you. And you do know that imagination is one of the strongest decision-making tools that humans possess, right? Let’s make this real. When you say “24/7 monitoring”, that’s just a mechanism, it doesn’t actually mean anything to a normal business owner. But if you say to them, Hey, we spot problems early which means fewer business disruptions, then suddenly that becomes something tangible that they can feel.

They can imagine a calmer working day, systems just running and fewer surprises, and that is a benefit. When you say “remote support”, again, that’s just a mechanism. But if you say, Hey, we can fix issues really quickly without downtime and you don’t even need to wait for us to arrive, that becomes a benefit because that sends a message of speed and convenience and continuity. When you say “regular patching and updates”, they’re yawning because you’re naming a process. But if you say, Hey, look, so your security stays strong with zero effort from your team, you guys don’t have to do anything, that’s a benefit and it speaks of safety and ease and peace of mind.

So features describe what something is, whereas benefits describe what something does. That’s the big difference between the two. Features force the prospect to translate what you’ve said in their brain into some kind of emotional meaning, whereas benefits you’ve already done the translation for them. Awesome, right? And that makes all the difference because prospects are not thinking, Oh yes, how does patching work? They don’t think that at all. They’re thinking, Oh, what does this mean? Am I going to get hacked? Are my staff going to be able to just work? Is this going to be a smart financial decision? Will this decision make me look good or will it make me look stupid? Will things just run smoothly? That’s all the stuff they’re thinking, but with benefits, we’re speaking to their emotional outcomes, the things that matter to them.

So here’s the psychological shortcut for this. Features require effort, benefits create clarity. Features are cold, benefits are warm. Features are about you, benefits are about them, and as we know, we are more influenced by what something means to us than by what we think about it. So to help you do this automatically, here’s a simple formula that I want you to burn into your brain. In fact, you can have it tattooed on your hand. Please don’t do that…don’t write in if you do that. Whenever you hear yourself say a feature, just add the words, which means that, So I call this the “which means that” formula obviously, and it forces your brain to move from mechanism to meaning.

• Remote support, which means that issues get fixed quickly without downtime.


• Patching and updates, which means that your security stays tight without your team having to do anything.


• Backups and disaster recovery, which means that even if the worst happens, your business keeps running. MFA, which means that stolen passwords no longer equal compromised accounts.


• Proactive maintenance, which means that things stop breaking all the time and your staff stop moaning about IT.

This beautifully simple phrase, which means that, it turns every feature in your MSP into a compelling benefit that actually influences buying decisions. And the more you practice it, the more natural it becomes.

Is your MSP’s expertise hiding in plain sight?

Are you seen as the true expert by your MSP’s leads and prospects? Or do you secretly worry that from the outside you look just like every other IT company in your town? The thing about perceived expertise is that it isn’t random and it isn’t about who’s the best engineer. It’s something you can build deliberately with a few simple habits. Right now, I’m going to give you a whole stack of practical ways to dramatically increase the authority you project every time someone encounters your business.

Let’s talk about perceived expertise, because in marketing, it is absolutely everything. Prospects very rarely choose the most technically competent MSP. They choose the MSP that feels safest. The one who sounds like they know what they’re talking about, who shows up consistently with ideas and insights and clarity.

Expertise in the mind of the buyer is 90% perception and only 10% reality, and that’s wonderful news for you because it means that you can turn the dial up as much as you want.

Now in a Facebook post that I shared recently in my MSP marketing Facebook group, I shared seven ways that MSPs can grow their perceived expertise, and I want to expand on each of these and then stack a load more on top.

The first was publishing a weekly blog or video and then emailing that to your email list. Weekly is key for this, by the way, because it creates a reliable rhythm. Your prospects start to kind of expect to hear from you, and they build a habit around hearing from you. And the more often you show up with helpful insights, the more they’ll file you mentally under trustworthy expert who knows my world.

Next is posting daily on LinkedIn and doing a weekly LinkedIn newsletter. This isn’t about chasing likes, it’s about being present. When your name pops up in someone’s feed, often every day, maybe in a non-salesy helpful way, you just become familiar to them and familiarity is a huge psychological lever. People trust what becomes familiar.

Third, speak at local business events. Even tiny local events give you a huge authority boost because when you stand on a stage or even just at the front of a room with a microphone or even no microphone, you are instantly perceived as the person who knows what they’re talking about. In fact, this is borrowed authority from the room itself.

Fourth is writing an IT services buyer’s guide. Books, guides, frameworks, white papers… call them what you like, these things elevate you into the position of educator and advisor. And people love buying from someone who literally wrote the guide on how to choose an MSP because it feels safer to do that.

Fifth publishing case studies. Now, these aren’t optional. Case studies are the most important form of social proof. They tell stories, they let prospects imagine themselves getting the same outcomes, so that makes you real.

Sixth, create checklists and create cheat sheets. These tiny assets are incredibly powerful because they signal that you have systems, structure and repeatability.

And seventh, build a knowledge hub on your website. A single destination full of blogs, videos, guides, reports, checklists, FAQs, all of the stuff that we’ve just been talking about. And when prospects land on that page, they instantly think, wow, these people really know their stuff. And no, they’re not going to read it all and they don’t have to read it all, it’s the impact and the perceived expertise that’s most important from a knowledge base like that or a knowledge hub.

Now, let’s expand on this list because perceived expertise is a momentum game