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Welcome to Episode 293 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• What if you only had 90 days to win new clients?: Imagine you absolutely had to generate new business, FAST. Let’s explore where you should focus your time, effort and resources.


• 3 HUGE questions to ask about your MSP’s clients: It’s very common to hope that the awesome retention of your key clients just continues, but unless you really give them what they need and want you run the risk of losing them.


• This MSP’s best ideas from his 8 year podcast: My guest is a long-standing MSP owner and eight year podcaster. He’s here to share the very best things he’s learned during that time.


• Paul’s Personal Peer Group: You still hand out business cards, right? You definitely should, and here’s my recommendation of what should be on them.

What if you only had 90 days to win new clients?

Are you ready to take the MSP experiment? How would you do if you had to win a load of new clients within the next 90 days? Yes, just 90 days to find and sign up new managed service clients. The reason isn’t important, it’s a thought experiment, but does the sound of having to do that make your blood run cold? If so, let’s dig into why it’s such an important test and the real world benefits to your MSP.

This is kind of based on a question I was asked on a podcast I appeared on a few months back. I can’t quite remember which one it was right now, but the host asked me if I had to start an MSP from scratch, what would I do? And I think he was waiting for me to suggest which RMM I would use and which PSA and what my tech stack would look like. But the answer I actually gave was that I would figure out all of that stuff only after I’d won some clients.

I’d focus all of my time, effort and energy into creating a pipeline and then shaking that tree until some new business fell out of it.

Yeah, I know I’ve mixed up my analogies there, but you see the point I’m making, right? I’ve never actually owned or run an MSP, but I’ve been a business owner for 20 years and there’s no point getting your operations ready and perfect if there are no clients to put through those operations.

So let’s make that a real life question for you. Not what would you do if you started again with your MSP, but if you absolutely had to generate new business in the next 90 days, what would you do? Don’t get too hung up on the why’s about this. Just imagine you’ve lost a big client or your personal circumstances dictate that you just need more cash. The reason is not relevant. What’s more important is to talk about what you would actually do.

A quick aside, if that was a real situation for you and you desperately needed more cash in the next month or so, that cash is going to come from your existing clients. There’s always more revenue and certainly high levels of profit to be made selling something to your existing clients than winning new clients. But for the purpose of this piece here, what would you do to win new clients in just 90 days? Well, let me break this down into a series of suggestions.

The first of those would be actually the way that you think and the way that you act. One of the reasons that many MSPs really struggle with marketing and winning new clients is because they simply don’t take it seriously. If you’re only spending 20 or 30 minutes a day or even a week on marketing, how can you expect to get momentum on that? How can you expect to get traction? There are MSPs that have full-time departments of people who are generating leads, warming up those leads and turning them into clients. And I appreciate these are probably bigger businesses than yours, but they’re properly resourcing what is a critical function of growing a business. So if you need new clients in the next 90 days, you have to throw yourself into that task. That means a minimum of 90 minutes every single day working on your marketing, and that really is the minimum. Depending on how urgently you needed new clients, you’d spend more and more and more time.

I’ve always thought in the back of my head that if my business was in real trouble and I needed to generate new revenue urgently, I reckon I could free four to five hours a day, just things I could just drop in my day and it might create a bit of chaos and I’d be calling in all sorts of favours from colleagues and perhaps even parents to help ferry my child around to afterschool clubs and stuff. But if it came to it, I could arrange that within like 48 hours, and that means that very quickly I’d have four to five hours a day of extra time to invest into new marketing to win new clients for my business. And in this kind of emergency situation, the 90 day thing, you’d have to be willing to do the same thing, even if that creates some short-term pain. Because it is only short term and it will ease quickly once the new clients start coming in.

Time is a necessary resource. And also cash. You need a bit of that as well. It always shocks me how little some MSPs spend on marketing, how little they invest when there are some amazing marketing resources out there. And obviously I’ve got to give a shameless and blatant plug for my own service here, the MSP Marketing Edge, which is for as little as £149 or $199 per month, and we only work with one MSP per area, but I’ll just leave that one there.

So, you need a mindset of total urgency that’s vital and you need to resource it properly. Those are kind of a couple of the basics. And two other of the basics that you need is to make sure that your website and your LinkedIn are as good as they can possibly be, without spending tons of time on them. When someone’s thinking about talking to you, they will check out your website. They’ll have a look at your LinkedIn as well, both your personal profile and your business profile. And it really doesn’t take that much effort to get both of these assets to be as good as they can be. The basic rule is to make them reflect who you are as a person and the benefits of working with you. People will choose you or not choose you based on their ability to relate to you and how you can make them feel.

If your website is cold and it’s all about tech and stock images and looks the same as all the other MSP websites, then you’re going to get the same results as all the other MSPs, which is a poor pipeline of prospects. Never be afraid to stand out, to be a little bit different, although not by using a gimmick. Be human, be real and talk to people in their language. At this point, let me mention the three step lead generation system that I’ve been recommending for years and years in which my MSP Marketing Edge is built upon. We help MSPs to implement it. It’s six words, super simple but incredibly powerful. Step one, build audiences. Step two, grow relationships with those audiences. And step three, convert relationships. Now, I’ve got videos on YouTube and podcast episodes dedicated to this system, but if you’ve only got 90 days, we want to do the super speedy version of it.

Let me give you now a version that takes more time and more resources, it’s more intensive if you like, but it should give you results faster. So it’s not something you’d build for the long-term, it’s the emergency version. You start by auditing what you already have. Very rarely in an established business are you really starting with any marketing from scratch. More likely you are already sitting on a bunch of assets that you are not leveraging enough. So what data do you have of prospects in the business that you’re not using? Do you have a draw full of business cards of people you’ve met at events over the last 10 years that you never really followed up on? Do you have inquiries on your Outlook of all the people you spoke to years ago and you have no idea what’s happening with them today?

These are all marketing assets that you can leverage because you can email all of these people, you can phone them, you can add them on LinkedIn. And yeah, some of them are dead, but some of them are also no longer the one man bands or one person bands they were 10 years ago. Now they’ve got 25 staff and they’re dissatisfied with their incumbent MSP, but you have no idea until you reach out to them. So look at emails, notes from calls, find old notepads, read everything from back in the day, Any old interaction from anything up to 10, even 15 years ago. It could be a relationship you could renew in the next 90 days. That’s step one, which is to build audiences.

Now, step two, grow relationships. And the first thing there is to invest some of that time that you’ve created each day into spending time on LinkedIn. The key to marketing your MSP is to get the right message in front of the right person at the right time. So every day on LinkedIn, I suggest you focus on the four Cs: connect, contact, content and comment. That means connecting to new people, sending them a message to contact them when you are connected, putting content on LinkedIn every day. In fact, one piece of content every 24 hours works best right now for the algorithm. And then finally commenting on other people’s posts.

And it’s this commenting which encourages people to connection request you. So it’s not just a flood of one-way requests from you to other people, it’s two-way traffic. LinkedIn is an amazing place for MSPs to go farming for new clients, but it isn’t a fast place. It’s