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Welcome to Episode 312 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• Why being the cheapest MSP is a bad strategy: If your marketing strategy is to be the cheapest MSP around, what you’re actually doing is setting yourself up to attract the worst clients, who create the most noise and generate the least amount of profit.


• The #1 all time secret of epic MSP marketing: The marketing winners aren’t smarter and don’t necessarily work harder than everyone else. They just get more of the right stuff implemented really fast.


• DANGER: Most MSPs have confused messaging: My special guest is an expert at making messaging simple. Your eyes are about to be opened as to how confused messaging is killing your MSP marketing efforts dead.


• The Marketing Minute: Don’t miss this simple email signature marketing idea that can make a big impact.

Why being the cheapest MSP is a bad strategy

If your marketing strategy is to be the cheapest MSP around, then you’re setting yourself up for a world of pain. Lots of MSPs do this because when you’re not very good at marketing, which most MSPs aren’t, it just seems like the easiest thing to do… offer a good service, deliver it at a good price. But what you’re actually doing is setting yourself up to attract the worst clients, who create the most noise and generate the least amount of profit.

If you don’t today, have the confidence to put up your prices, to be the most expensive MSP in your marketplace, let me tell you why you owe it to your existing clients, your future clients, yourself and your family to do this.

On the surface, being the cheapest MSP feels like a good idea because everyone likes a bargain, but being the cheapest is not a winning strategy.

It attracts completely the wrong kind of clients. The ones who are constantly haggling, they’re always looking for shortcuts and they just don’t value what you do for them. In fact, they’ll leave the moment that someone else comes along who’s a pound or a dollar cheaper than you. And that is not really a foundation that you can build a profitable stable MSP on.

So instead, you kind of want to be at the other end of the scale, the most expensive MSP in town. Now, I know that you might maybe have tensed up when I said that and you might be thinking, Me, the most expensive, no way. I don’t want to be that. I don’t want to do that. But listen, just hear me out on this. The MSPs who charge the most are often the ones who are seen as the safest choice. It kind of seems crazy, doesn’t it? But actually, higher prices signal higher value. They signal better service, they signal more stability, more reliability, and guess what? The best clients, the ones who are really serious about their businesses and protecting their businesses and growing them with a proper partner, they want that reassurance. They don’t just want to spend money on a service and spend as little as they can. They want the best quality because they want a genuine partnership from someone that offers a very high quality of service.

So how do you do this? Well, there are two main approaches that you can take overt and covert. So overt is where you’re very upfront about being premium. In fact, you build your whole brand around expertise, trust, and high standards. You’re never apologising for your price, in fact, you’re proud of it. But then the opposite is covert because this is a little bit more subtle. And in this with being covert, you don’t shout about being the most expensive from the rooftops. Instead, you just focus on value.

One very smart way to do this is to use a three-tier pricing, like a good, better, best pricing where your good price, kind of like your entry level price is a very, very keen price. And when they’re comparing you to the other MSPs and you and I know they’re comparing apples to oranges, but when they’re doing that, they can see that you are a very good value price, but ultimately the package that you most want to sell than actually most people will want to buy because it’s the best value, there’s all of the stuff in there, it becomes your better package or your best package. And of course the price for that is a lot higher. So you’re the most expensive without essentially advertising that you are the most expensive.

But what if you’re thinking, Paul, this is all very good, but I just don’t feel comfortable charging more. Well, maybe that’s something called imposter syndrome talking. And we all get that, it’s the little voice in the back of our head that says, You’re not good enough. And sometimes it’s there and it’s loud and we listen to it and we let it dictate us, and we think, well, if we put our prices up, people are going to see that we are in an imposter that we are not worth the money that we want to charge.

But let me tell you something, you are worth that money. You really are. If you’ve been running your MSP for a few years, if you are good at keeping your clients safe, you’re good at not just the reactive stuff, but you’re good at the proactive stuff, you protect them. Sometimes you protect them from themselves and you help them to grow their businesses. If you do all of this and you’ve been doing it for a few years, you are already delivering huge value. You are not just fixing stuff here, you are so far past break/fix. You are safeguarding people’s businesses, you are safeguarding their livelihoods, you’re safeguarding jobs, you’re safeguarding whatever it is that they do for their clients. You are instrumental in this. And if you get it wrong, which you don’t most of the time, but if you get it wrong, it has lots of implications, but you don’t do this. You are a massive part of their success.

So instead of asking yourself, Can I justify charging more? Why don’t you try asking yourself, What do I need to do so that my clients see the value in what we do and are happy to pay more for it? It’s a tiny little shift in thinking, but it can change everything. So here’s my big takeaway for today. Don’t ever play the cheapest game. You’ll always, always lose in some way, either by attracting the wrong clients or just having to deal with the noise and the hassle and the lack of profits that they generate. Instead, play the value game. Position yourself as the MSP worth paying more for. And even if you don’t feel ready to be the most expensive in your marketplace, at least make sure you are never the cheapest.

The #1 all time secret of epic MSP marketing

Would you like me to tell you the greatest secret I’ve ever learned about marketing an MSP? It’s the secret every MSP has been begging me to reveal, and you’ll be surprised to hear that it hasn’t changed over the last decade. What I’m going to say is exactly the same today as I would’ve said to you back when I got into the channel in 2016, and you won’t believe how simple it is, but also what kind of dramatic positive impact it can have on your marketing. So let me reveal the number one all time secret of epic MSP marketing.

A member of my team recently paid me the highest possible compliment. Several months back I took over driving our MSP Marketing Edge development roadmap, mostly out of frustration at how long it was taking to just get things done. And my colleague said to me, it’s a lot more chaotic with you pushing things, but we’re getting so much more done, which is amazing. So obviously I gave him an immediate pay rise. No, I didn’t.

I do pride myself as an epic implementer because everything I’ve achieved in the 20 years now that I’ve been running my own businesses has been accomplished purely by getting things done. So I’m not the smartest guy in the room and I’m never going to be. This is an average brain that I’m carrying here, and I’m certainly not the most driven person. I’ll be honest, I’m comfortable and I prioritise being a present parent and a present partner above driving a sick Lamborghini.  But I’m also the most impatient person you will ever meet, I just hide it really well. And I have a hundred marketing ideas a day, and I want to implement as many of them as I possibly can as quickly as possible. Because this is the only way to find out which ideas work and which suck.

Being able to rapidly implement marketing is a key skill to develop in your MSP. And the good news is that doesn’t mean that you have to do it all personally.

In fact, it’s better that you don’t try to do it all yourself. I can get more implemented by inspiring, guiding and driving my team than I can by trying to do everything myself. Being able to step back and take in the overall picture is valuable and almost impossible to do when you’ve personally worked for hours and hours and hours on something.

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