If you want more hot leads for your MSP, put a price estimator on your website. Marcus Sheridan is here to tell you why this works. Also this week, change your life (and MSP) with this daily habit, and why email is the #1 MSP marketing tool.

Welcome to Episode 324 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge.

Why is this so controversial for MSPs?

If you want more hot leads for your MSP, put a price estimator on your website. For some reason, this is one of the most controversial things in the channel, with many MSPs saying it’s impossible to give an idea of pricing before you’ve spoken to a prospect. And yet, prospects don’t want to talk to you in order to get a price. What to do? Well, I’ve got marketing expert and bestselling author, Marcus Sheridan, here right now to give you what I believe is the definitive word on this.

I like to think of myself as a bit of a marketing sponge. I read almost every single business and marketing book that I can get my hands on, actually, I listen to them more these days, but I’m also constantly reviewing different ideas and different ways of doing things to keep my mental model of the best way to market your MSP fully up to date. And there was something that I added to this model years back when I read a book called They Ask You Answer by Marcus Sheridan. Have you read this?

One of the big ideas in the book is the idea of transparent pricing. Marcus in that book talked extensively about radical price transparency, which means that you talk very openly about your price. You explain what drives the cost up and down, you discuss cheap versus expensive options, and you compare yourself to alternatives.

You’re just trying to help people who want to buy from you, who want to switch MSPs, you’re trying to help them to understand value.

And then Marcus released a book called Endless Customers last year, which was a reinvention of They Ask You Answer and kind of updated for the AI age. And he took the idea of radical price transparency and took it even further by suggesting that you put a price estimator onto your website. What’s a price estimator? It’s a tool for someone to get a rough idea of how much it costs to be a client of your MSP.

This to me was so obvious that I actually negotiated a partnership with Marcus Sheridan and his business partner, Steve Auchettl, and we launched MSP Price Guide at the backend of last year. It’s an AI-driven price estimator tool that you can put onto your website and we’ve done all the hard work for you. So we’ve built templates, we’ve added in all the standard managed services, all of that kind of stuff. So you can just start your 30 day free trial and get an estimator onto your website within 10, 20 minutes or so. You can see that at msppriceguide.com.

Anyway, I asked Marcus to pull together something to show you why all of this is so critical and so applicable to MSPs. Take it away, Marcus.

Hello MSP community, Marcus Sheridan here. Let’s have an honest conversation about whether or not you should be considering a pricing estimator for your website. First thing that we have to understand is that 75% of all buyers today say they would prefer to have what’s known as a seller-free sales experience. In other words, we don’t hate salespeople as buyers, we just don’t want to talk to them until we are good and ready. And that was a B2B study by Gartner, by the way. And I think you would agree with that. We don’t want to talk to sales until we’re confident, comfortable, and we feel like we’re not going to make a mistake. The answer to that is give the buyer more control through what is known as self-service.

Self-service are interactive tools mainly on your website that allow a visitor to take an action or get an answer that previously they would have had to have done by speaking with a human. Now, what’s so great about this is it drives a tremendous amount of trust and it also drives a tremendous amount of conversions. We know that the number one question the business has when they’re looking at potentially hiring an MSP, they are saying to themselves, All right, I need to outsource this. We can’t do it anymore in- house. Let’s find a provider for this. Whatever it is, first question, you know what it is – Roughly, how much is this going to cost? Or as they would ask you if you talk to them on the phone – Could you give me a sense as to what we’re looking at here?

This is the fundamental question that everyone has when they start the buyer journey, and it is the gateway to the buyer’s journey. If they can’t get any type of answer for this, oftentimes they’ll stop at that point, but if they do get an answer, they can continue and they’ll vet you further. They’ll stay on your website longer, and then eventually they’ll watch maybe some of those videos and finally fill out that form that says, Hey, I would like to talk to a salesperson. This is how you behave, this is how I behave, and the reality is your customers are no different. So we have to address the gateway question to making a purchase, which is roughly how much does it cost. You will increase on average a 300% lift in conversions on your website if you as an MSP have a pricing estimator on your homepage that says the phrase Get instant estimate, keyword is instant. Get instant estimate.

What you have to understand is what you’re not doing here is you’re not actually giving a quote. There’s a difference between an estimate and a quote. The quote comes after they speak to you and then you give them the quote. I can tell you right now that over 90% of the industry, as you well know, doesn’t address pricing on their website. Many of them sadly have a pricing tab in their navigation bar. And then when you go to that tab, there’s a form that the person can fill out essentially saying call for quote. It’s like someone has walked into the bar, which is your website. They sat down next to you and you immediately said, Would you like to go home with me? I mean, that’s not how it works. That’s not what you should say in that moment. There has to be a process by which you earn their trust and they say, You know what, I think this is the type of company that I would potentially like to do business with.

When someone adds an estimator to their website, they don’t take it off. Did you know the average SaaS product, software as a service, has a churn rate of 30 – 50%. What we have seen with this tool, we have a churn rate of 0.7%. Why is that? Because lo and behold, when someone puts a pricing estimator on their website, they get way more leads and your quality of sales conversations go up. So there isn’t shock at all, there isn’t big surprise when you’re having these conversations. So not only are you having more sales conversations, but they’re better sales conversations, which means you close more deals.

But there’s another benefit to this because long term you’re planting a lot more seeds. So because you’re going to get 300 – 500% more leads, you’re going to build your database. And as you build your database, you can remarket those leads. And as you remarket those leads, even if they’re not ready today, as they continue to experience pain, which we all know because of where technology is going, people are going to experience more and more pain in the future and they’re going to need to outsource these services where they’re going to be thinking about you because you’re going to be front of mind.

And that’s the idea and that’s the circle of life and that’s the power of business. That’s the power too of MSP Price Guide. It is my hope that you say, You know what, just because the industry isn’t doing this, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t. In fact, because they’re not doing it, maybe we should be doing it. That’s my challenge to you. Run in the opposite direction. Give the buyer what the buyer wants. Follow the golden rule. Put a pricing estimator on your website and use it often. Watch what happens with your leads. Test it. Test it. You will immediately see the impact that it has. Obviously, it’s contingent on the traffic that you get, but again, you’re going to see 300 – 500% on average increase in leads. Hopefully that was helpful to you. If you have any questions, reach out, and give the price guide a try today.

Change your life (and MSP) with this daily habit

What if there was a daily habit, which if you adopted it, would change your MSP forever?

It would allow you to do everything you need to do to win new clients, get those clients to buy more from you and get those clients to spend more.

And of course, in changing your business in this way, you change your life.

You could potentially spend more time with the people you love doing the things you enjoy and less time doing work you don’t enjoy. You fancy that?

One of the best business habits I’ve ever adopted is working on my business for 90 minutes every weekday. And I’ve been doing this for about 20 years now.

And I’d say in fact, it’s one of my secret weapons because no matter what happens in my workday, so long as I’ve completed my 90 minutes working on the business, I can guarantee I’ll get things done. Now, when I tell MSPs about this, I’m often hit with a series of common questions. So let me answer them for you right now. The first is…

Why do you do this, Paul? Well, because like you, I’m a busy