Learn how to collect social proof obsessively and build it into your marketing to attract new clients. Also this week, why every MSP needs a dispatcher, and how to get vendors to pay for your marketing.

Welcome to Episode 334 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge.

The one marketing habit every MSP should obsess over

If there’s one marketing habit that I wish every MSP would build into their regular rhythm, it’s this. Collect social proof. And not casually, I mean obsessively because nothing builds trust faster than a client telling the world that they’re genuinely happy with you. You can talk about your service all day long, but the moment someone else says, “These people are amazing,” the whole dynamic changes. So let’s talk about why social proof works, the three types that every MSP should be collecting and how to do it in a way that never ever feels awkward or forced.

To understand why social proof is so powerful, you need to look at a bit of basic human psychology. Back when humans were still figuring out fire and trying not to get eaten by dinosaurs, survival depended on sticking with the group. If the herd ran, you ran. And that instinct is still baked very deep within our brains and our gut reactions. Even though we like to think of ourselves as rational, independent, modern decision makers…

People are still heavily influenced at an emotional level by what other people are doing. That’s why testimonials, reviews and case studies work so well.

They quietly say, “Hey, people just like you trust a business like this and that feels safe.” So as I said, there are three types of social proof that every MSP should be collecting, and the first is reviews.

Reviews are the most powerful form of social proof because they live on third party platforms that you don’t control. So places like Google. They’re public, they’re credible, and that makes them so much harder to fake. And that’s also why if you have to prioritise, I’d always prioritise reviews over collecting testimonials. A simple and very effective tactic is to ask a client to leave you a Google review and then reuse that review in your own marketing. So you get it on the third party platform, but you use it in your own website. So you could screenshot it and include it in proposals or as I say, your site or social posts or even better than screenshotting it. Get your website designer or any designer to recreate the review so that it looks consistent across different screen sizes while keeping the exact wording that you’d see on Google Reviews.

And there are, just out of interest, three great moments when you should ask for a review. During the first 90 days of working together, when everything still feels fresh and positive, just after you’ve completed a big project successfully or right after you’ve saved them from something serious. The only real rule for this is don’t ask for reviews if you’re in the middle of any kind of difficult conversation with your client, which sounds obvious, but you’d be surprised how many people forget or they don’t realise that there’s a bit of conflict going off at the same time, we’ve sent them an email asking for a Google review. So that’s reviews.

The second type of social proof is testimonials. And testimonials are like a review except you have control over them. That’s what makes them different. So they come directly to you. And that might be as a quote or a video clip or an email that you’ve asked permission to reuse. And because you control them, they’re easy to polish and deploy across all of your marketing. And yes, they do work, but they don’t carry the same weight as a public review because everyone knows that you could have edited them. That said, one strong video testimonial, especially from a well-known local business or a business that’s well known in your vertical, that can be absolute gold.

And then the third and final type of social proof is case studies. So if reviews are the match, case studies are the bonfire. A simple case study is simply a story that wraps social proof into a narrative and our brains love stories because they feel more real, they’re more believable and more memorable. The structure that makes case studies work is simple. First, you demonstrate relevance by showing that this client looks just like your ideal prospect. Then you describe the problem from the client’s point of view and not a technical one at all. Then you poke the pain a little by explaining what that problem costs them or how it felt. You introduce the solution by explaining what you did. Again, don’t drown it in tech. And then finally, you show the happy ending by demonstrating how the client was able to move forward successfully because of your help. And you can see why video works brilliantly here. Even a quick Teams recording can be enough, although it would be better to hire a proper videographer to film your client in real life. 20 to 30 minutes of footage gives you tons of videos that you can use across multiple platforms.

And once you’ve got that, you can repurpose it into written content, LinkedIn clips, and website copy. One good case study can fuel your marketing for years, because of course, most ordinary business owners and managers are only looking for an MSP once every five years or so. So they’re simply not seeing your case study more than once. And if you were to collect a new case study every couple of months, you can see why I say this should be a habit because you genuinely cannot have too much social proof.

So here’s a simple challenge for you this week. Go and get one new piece of social proof, just one. Ask one client for a review or record a 60-second testimonial over Teams, or even write up your first proper case study using that structure. You’ve already done the hard work of delighting your clients. Now, let those clients help you prove it and attract even more of the right ones.

Why every MSP needs a dispatcher

At some point, every MSP reaches a stage where the biggest challenge is no longer technology. It’s actually customer experience. Tickets are getting logged, work’s getting done, but clients and the users working for the clients, they don’t always feel heard or acknowledged, or there’s a risk that they don’t feel looked after.

And that’s usually the moment that an MSP realises they don’t just have a service desk problem. They actually have a customer service gap. And that’s why I believe every MSP needs to hire a dispatcher. And yes, a dispatcher brings operational benefits and we’ll talk about those in a second but the real magic of this role, I believe, is what it does for the client experience.

A dispatcher’s primary job is not fixing issues. It’s making sure that every single person who reaches out feels seen, heard, and acknowledged.

They want to feel that someone’s taken responsibility that they’re not just shouting into the void. Imagine that you’re one of your clients or one

of the people that work for your clients, and you submit a ticket and it’s a kind of annoying problem. It’s not a major problem, but it’s something you’d really hope to get fixed in a few hours or so because it’s just annoying you. And in most MSPs, you submit that request and you might get an auto response, but then you might not hear anything for a few hours, or you might get a bit of a message back, but it’s just like a random update. It doesn’t really tell you anything.

Whereas when you’ve got a dispatcher in that exact same scenario, every single ticket that gets submitted, the dispatcher phones that person. They literally pick up the phone and they call them and they acknowledge the problem, they perhaps ask a couple of follow-up questions if necessary, and they empathise with the user. They’ll say to them, they could use these exact words, “This is a really annoying problem, isn’t it? So what I’m going to do, I’m going to get one of our senior technicians onto this straightaway and I hope to have an update for you in the next hour or so.” And what the dispatcher has actually just done is they’ve bought your technicians some time to really look into that problem while also keeping the customer happy. This is great, right?

From a customer’s point of view, that matters far more than whether or not the ticket is resolved in five minutes or 55 minutes. When users know that there’s a calm, organised, pleasant human being at the other end who understands what’s going on, their anxiety just drops immediately. And you know, reassurance is a massive part of good IT support, isn’t it? You must have learned that so many times over your career. So let’s take a moment to just make sure that you and I understand exactly what I mean by a dispatcher.

A dispatcher is the person who sits between the clients and the technicians, and their job is to make sure that every user feels heard and nothing ever gets lost, while ensuring that the technicians always know exactly what to work on next. So from an internal point of view, a dispatcher typically works alongside the service desk manager, and they’re not replacing that role at all. They’re very much supporting it. They help to route tickets efficiently, making sure the right work goes to the right technician and that priorities are set properly instead of emotionally.

Now that alone massively improves flow and maximises technician time, because instead of technicians constantly checking queues and answering phones and responding to interruptions or trying to decide what do I work on next, what’s the priority. They can just focus on actually resolving things. And here’s the important commercial point. A dispatcher u