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Welcome to Episode 256 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• Warning! This friction kills MSPs’ sales: When you have someone making contact with you, your job is to make sure you’ve removed every single piece of friction from the sales process.


• Can your MSP’s technicians close this many tickets?: I interviewed the awesome Jason Kemsley from Uptime Solutions, an outsourced help desk, who gave us the stats to assess what good performance looks like for all three levels of technician.


• How MSPs manage the conflict of business and parenting: My guest, David Ask, tells you how to live a great life, while still achieving everything you want with your business.


• Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Chris from San Francisco wants advice on a good meeting structure to grow his MSP.

Warning! This friction kills MSPs’ sales

As an MSP, you’re hardly inundated with calls from people who want to buy from you. Well, that’s my experience of the MSPs that I work with, certainly. So when you do have someone making contact with you, your job is to make sure you’ve removed every single piece of friction from the sales process. Let me tell you about my experience of the exact opposite of this, where I was desperate to buy something and the friction in doing so was so great, it drove me into the arms of a competitor.

So I’m not going to name the company that I was trying to buy from as that’s not really fair on a podcast and YouTube video like this, just know that it’s not an MSP and it’s not a company in the channel, but it is a supplier of marketing services based in the US. I’ve been doing some research recently into a new marketing initiative that we are doing to promote the MSP Marketing Edge and this service was the perfect solution.

I’d managed to answer all of my questions online, on their website, which is actually the first piece of friction that you and I need to talk about. If an ordinary business owner or manager goes onto your website, will you answer as many of their questions as you can? I’ll be honest, for most MSPs, the answer to this is sadly no.

Most MSPs don’t have the basics in place, such as explaining what you do, how you do it, what makes you different from the other IT companies they’re looking at. And most importantly, you probably don’t have an indicative idea of pricing on your website.

Now, I know that this is a very emotive subject because the price depends upon how long the string is. But when it comes to websites, I very much follow the advice of Marcus Sheridan. In his book, They Ask, You Answer, which definitively says you should put prices on your website because it’s one of the most basic things that people are looking at.

Anyway, I digress. So I answered all of my own questions on this potential supplier’s website and I was ready to buy, and that was where I ran into real trouble because it really wasn’t obvious how to buy from them. There was a call to action button, so the thing that they wanted me to do, and that took me through to a page, which did actually talk about their pricing and their packaging or their packages, but you couldn’t actually select one of the packages and go through with the purchase, which was really weird.

So I thought perhaps the website was having some kind of blip. I refreshed it, I left it for 24 hours and I came back the next day, but nothing had changed. It was exactly the same. Here’s the thing, sometimes what seems obvious to us, what seems obvious that we want them to do, is not obvious to every other human on the planet.

So I clicked on the live chat button, but it was out of hours with the time zone that they were based in, and there was no option for me to leave a message on live chat for them to reply to. So I looked up their email address and I sent them an email and 48 hours later, and yes, this was during the week, this wasn’t the weekend. 48 hours later, I still hadn’t heard anything, which was nuts. It was kind of like they didn’t want the business. So I sent another email chasing my original email, and this time I did get a reply about three hours later and you won’t believe what the reply was. They asked me to book a video call with them, a zoom with them. They sent through a live calendar and said that the only way to buy from them was to actually have a meeting.

Now, I completely understand the need to qualify buyers and check that they’re the right kind of buyers for you, but we are not talking about something like managed services here where you may only take on one or maybe two new clients a month at the most, so you want to pre-qualify them and then make sure they’re right for you. This was a service that should be taking on two to three new clients a day and then to add insult to injury. They had no availability in their live calendar for the next two weeks.

Anyway, let me cut to the end of this story. I did eventually manage to book a call for the following week after I’d gone back to them and we’d done a bit of back and forthing over availability, and then I’ve realised, oh, I’ve got another week. I’ve got to sit for a week. And I started to get a bit annoyed about the lack of progress because the lack of progress in buying from this supplier was holding back the whole marketing initiative and it’s a marketing initiative that I’m driving and I try to make myself accountable to my own team for anything that I’m working on, which I think as the boss you have to do. It’s much better for productivity when you’re accountable to someone, even if that’s your own team.

I didn’t want to have to tell my team that I’d failed again and this project was going to have to be pushed back another couple of weeks. So I just started Googling and I actually just typed in alternatives to this service and guess what happened? 30 minutes later, I’d done some research, I’d found a competitor that looked similar, not as perfect a match as the one I was going to buy from, but I got my questions answered. I looked at the price, I pressed the button, I entered my card details, and I was a client.

Do you know what’s really weird… no one from the original supplier that I picked, no one followed me up when I cancelled the live meeting. And remember, we’ve had email conversations, I’ve asked them to free up some availability, and then I cancelled that meeting without giving them a reason why, and they never asked why. This is crazy.

Now, I appreciate that this is perhaps an outlier example, but the amount of friction that was there in that buying experience was nuts. And it’s a great reminder to you to figure out if there’s any friction in your buying experience. For example, can someone book a 15 minute meeting with you in the next 24 hours? Is your live calendar on the website? Do you answer all possible questions or maybe even have a live chat that’s manned 24 hours a day because you use an outsourced service? As we asked earlier, do you have prices on your website? Here’s a good one. If I phoned your MSP today, would the person who answered the phone be able to answer my sales questions immediately? Would I find myself frustrated by being passed around on the phone or being told that someone, you I guess, is going to call me back at some point?

Let me make this as clear as I can for you, so you put urgency and priority on this. Any friction in sales will put off new clients and they will go and look elsewhere. It’s a priority for you as the owner or manager of the MSP to make sure the process of vetting you and picking you is as easy for prospects as it can possibly be.

Can your MSP’s technicians close this many tickets?

One of the hardest things about running your own MSP is that it’s too easy to feel your operating in a silo, in a little bubble cut-off from everyone else. The hell of staff, marketing, finances and everything else that we have to deal with single handedly is what can make us business owners feel really lonely. And this is weird, but it’s also perfectly normal. And actually MSPs have some of the greatest support communities I’ve ever seen, such as the tech tribe and my MSP Marketing Facebook group.

The good news is you are not alone, which means virtually every challenge that you have to deal with, there’s someone out there with guidance.

Now, let’s take your technicians. Have you ever wondered how efficient are they? Last year I interviewed the awesome Jason Kemsley from Uptime Solutions, an outsourced help desk. At that point, they had 37 help desk staff handling 3000 tickets a month on behalf of 180 MSPs, which sounds like a big headache to me, and I’m sure those numbers are much, much larger today. But it does mean that Jason and his team are able to assess what good performance looks like for all three levels of technician.

They also know what extra ticket load every extra user brings to them. And because they’re growing so fast, they need this information, it’s critical to help them recruit ahead of demand. So here are the stats that Jason told me, and you can compare them to your technicians:

First line technicians should be able to handle between 10 and 14 tickets a day, and if they’re not achieving this, it probably means that they’re not bought into your MSP’s culture, or their base knowledge just isn’t there.

Second line technicians should be able to handle eight to 12 tickets a day. Now this includes escalations