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Welcome to Episode 313 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• Why people don’t believe your MSP’s reviews: People trust what other people say about you more than what you say about yourself. But if all your reviews sound the same they lose their power.


• Why your technicians won’t sell (even to help the client): One of the most frustrating things for MSPs is when your technicians won’t recommend a service you offer when talking to clients, for fear of appearing salesy. Here’s what to do…


• How ordinary business owners feel about AI: Let’s talk about AI attitudes of the people that MSPs want to reach. My special guest today is an expert in AI and he’s going to tell you how ordinary business owners and managers feel about it.


• The Marketing Minute: Don’t miss these tips to maximise your hard work in generating new leads.

Why people don’t believe your MSP’s reviews

People are so skeptical these days and when they’re looking at your MSP’s reviews, if they see certain words and phrases they might not believe the reviews are true. I know this sounds crazy because it’s not like you’re selling a product on Amazon and paying for fake reviews, but the reality is not all social proof is equal. You’ve got to make sure that people say the right things about your MSP. Let’s explore how to do that, how to collect social proof that always works, and the best way to guide people on what to say without your reviews ever seeming fake.

Social proof is one of the most powerful tools in your marketing toolkit. People trust what other people say about you more than what you say about yourself. But here’s the catch, if your reviews all sound the same, they lose their power. Think about it, how many times have you seen a review that says great service or would recommend or very professional, and that’s all it says? I mean, there’s nothing wrong with those comments, but when every review looks like that, they stop feeling real.

“Samey” kills sales and it’s the same as social proof, because these sound like copy and paste praise and prospects just ignore them.

That’s what I mean by cliches in social proof. It’s those generic lines that don’t give your potential future clients any real reason to trust you. So what works better? Detailed, story-driven reviews. And I’m going to give you an example. Instead of great IT support five stars, you want something more like, Our server went down late on a Friday afternoon. We thought the whole weekend would be lost, but within 30 minutes the IT team had us back online and they even followed up on Monday morning to make sure everything was stable. That level of care is why we’ll never use anyone else. Do you see the difference between those two reviews?

The second review tells a story. It shows the problem, it shows what you did to save your client and the end result, and that’s what makes it believable and therefore powerful. So how do you actually get this kind of social proof? Well, the trick is to guide your clients. Don’t just say to them, please, can you leave us a review. Instead ask them specific questions and I’m going to give you a few examples that you can use:

Number 1: What was going on in your business before you came to us?

Number 2: What made you decide to reach out to us instead of someone else?

Number 3: Can you tell me about a specific problem that we’ve solved for you?

Number 4: How did that make a difference to your business? How did it make a difference to your stress levels?

Number 5: What’s the biggest benefit you’ve seen since working with us?

Number 6: If a friend asked you why they should work with us, what would you say?

Now, those prompts which you might use in real life, if you are videoing them or interviewing them, or you might just send across to them on email and ask them to answer those questions, they give you reviews that are rich in detail and importantly in emotion. It’s exactly what new prospects want to read. Oh, and one more tip for you, mix up your formats. Written testimonials are great, but video reviews are even stronger because people can see and hear the genuine emotion. A 30 second video clip of a client saying how you saved their bacon is worth 10 generic five star reviews.

So avoid the cliches, go deeper and get your clients to tell their stories. That’s the kind of social proof that stands out and convinces prospects that you are the right MSP for them.

Why your technicians won’t sell (even to help the client)

I know that this is one of the most frustrating things for MSPs. When your technician is talking to a client on the phone and the answer to all of that client’s problems is a specific service that you already sell, but the technician won’t even mention it, let alone tell them the details of it and the benefits of it. Why does this happen? Is it that your technicians don’t care? Are they scared? Could you incentivise them to sell? Well, maybe, but I believe the actual answer here is to look at things not from your point of view, but to look at things from the client’s point of view and especially from the technician’s point of view, here’s how to do that.

So here’s a question which comes up now and again when I’m talking to MSPs, how do we get our technicians to sell? Because they’ve got all of the selling opportunities right there in front of them. They’re sitting there every day speaking to people on the phone and dealing with tickets. And often they’re fixing problems that could be dealt with more proactively if the client bought a higher level of service or a different flavour of an existing solution.

Yet as we know, many technicians just don’t want to sell. I know there’s always the odd one who’s very good at selling and just gets on with it, but how do you motivate the majority who hate selling? How do you motivate them to actually sell? Well, I believe that we coming at this from the wrong point of view. As the owners of the business, we all want more monthly recurring revenue, right? Because this is the lifeblood of any MSP business, and so that becomes the thing that we’re focused on generating when dealing with existing clients.

But from the technician’s point of view, they’re not really interested in helping you to grow your monthly recurring revenue. Many of your staff look at you and the clothes you wear and the car you drive and the house you live in, and they already believe that you rich enough. I know that sounds crazy, but that might be how some of your staff really do think because all they see is the rewards. They don’t see the years of risk, the hard work and all of the sleepless nights. They don’t see the amount of business related debt that you carry and the personal guarantees that you might be burdened with. And they don’t even see that for every pound or dollar that comes into the business, only a small proportion of that actually reaches your pocket.

So you need to stop looking at this from your point of view and instead try to reposition it from one of two other different points of view. The first being your client’s point of view. Most technicians most of the time want to do a good job for clients. Would you agree? They want to stop them from having problems, they want to fix their issues. They want their clients to be happy and to say, thanks so much for that, you did a great job. Because we are driven as people to seek that kind of feedback. If your technician can recommend something to a client that makes their life easier, then they’re much more likely to do this, especially when they can start to understand that unlike consumers, business decision makers don’t have to make all decisions based on cost alone.

You owe it to your technicians to do some kind of weekly training with them. Perhaps just get them together as a group for Pizza Tuesdays to teach them about a specific service that you’re offering and what symptoms to look out for. In fact, if you did this every single Tuesday for the next year, that alone would help your technicians to sell more, because they’ll learn how to spot more symptoms of more problems, and they’ll learn how to understand that there is a solution ready for those problems.

Position it from the Tech’s point of view and answer their question – “what’s in this for me?” Whether we like it or not, people operate in a selfish manner.

It may not seem that way on the outside, but in the inside they’re asking themselves at some kind of level, what’s in this for me? why should I do that for you? So perhaps the right thing to do is to offer your technicians a little slice of the pie, if they can contribute to the business in a way that helps the clients. The client gets help, the business gets extra revenue and they get a top up to their Xbox fund, everyone wins. You could put in place a very simple scheme such as they get 10% of anything that they sell. If it’s a one-off project, they get 10% of the revenue. If it’s a monthly recurring revenue thing, then they get 10% of the first year’s value. And of course, they only get this cash when you’ve received the cash, so there’s no risk to you.

Perhaps the most robust way to do this is a combination of the two – weekly awareness training for your technicians, with a si