The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge

Welcome to Episode 306 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• Your MSP should AVOID these AI tools: If you want to be more productive, do better marketing and ultimately grow your MSP, there are AI tools you’ll definitely want to avoid. Instead, here are five AI tools that you should be using right now.


• Why your MSP doesn’t stand out (and how to fix that): There are thousands of MSPs to choose from, so why would people choose you? Let me share a couple of good ideas with you and see if I can give you some inspiration.


• All successful MSPs have this in common: The easiest way to grow your MSP is to ask someone who’s already done it. My special guest has been growing MSPs for 20 years and has some ideas waiting for you to use.


• Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Find out what “relevance increases results” actually means and how can it help with your MSP’s marketing.

Your MSP should AVOID these AI tools

It’s one thing being overwhelmed by your business and not having enough time to find new clients for your MSP, but it’s another thing being overwhelmed with the choices of AI tools that are supposed to save you time and reduce overwhelm in the first place. Have you found the options and variations of AI tools so completely bamboozling? Well, if so, you’re not on your own.

If you want to be more productive, do better marketing and ultimately grow your MSP, here are five AI tools that you should be using right now. And let’s be honest, there is a lot of noise about AI and a lot of it is hype. I follow a lot of AI newsletters very carefully to keep up to date with what’s happening, which of course is a never ending and somewhat overwhelming task in itself. Now while there is a lot of talk of people trying to do amazing things, often when you dive into the amazing things that all of these new tools should be able to do, they just don’t work that way. Well, they kind of work that way, but they’re never really good enough for you to rely on them. But saying that…

There are some very real and very useful tools that MSPs are already using to save time, create better marketing, and just get more done.

So let me give you a shortlist of what I think are the best AI tools you should know about right now:

Let’s start with the most obvious one, ChatGPT or Copilot or Perplexity or whatever your preferred tool is. And yeah, I know it’s obvious but hear me out because the trick with getting the best output from your general AI tool is giving it good input. So let’s look at content creation for example. The worst thing you could do is just say, Hey, ChatGPT, write me a blog post about backups because it’s just going to generate boring AI slop that isn’t going to bring any benefit to your MSP. So a better way to use it is to shape content that you’re already getting from trusted content providers and get the AI tool to customise it to your specific audience.

Let me give you an example. We create tons of content for our MSP Marketing Edge members and increasingly a number of them are using AI tools to tailor that content to their specific audience. So for example, some have created custom GPTs, which are then trained on their ICP, sorry to use two acronyms in a row there, but as you might already know, an ICP is an ideal client profile. So they’ve essentially taught the AI exactly what their ideal client looks like and then they put our content into that custom GPT and the AI tweaks and adjusts the content so it’s completely relevant to the ideal client. And you do this because relevance increases results. Can you see the power of doing that? You’re taking very well-written content that’s been put together by humans and then you are optimising it for the very specific audience that you want to reach.

The other big thing that I found recently with ChatGPT especially is that just giving it a prompt and expecting it to do a great job is rarely the answer. Instead, you’ve kind of got to challenge it to do something, give it a mission, perhaps get it to interview you, make it a two-way street. If you use ChatGPT like an assistant that you’re having a discussion with rather than a contractor you’re just giving a very short brief to and expecting it to get on, that’s where you get the best results – two way conversations.

My suggestion number two is OpusClip. If you’re making any video content, even just filming yourself giving tech tips, then this tool is magic. You upload one long video and OpusClip automatically chops it into short clips with captions, jump cuts and highlights. It’s perfect for LinkedIn or YouTube shorts and I’ve seen a few MSPs use this to turn a 5 – 10 minute video into a whole month of content.

Suggestion number three is Descript. And this is a game changer for editing audio and video because instead of fiddling around with timelines, you edit the transcript like a Word document and then Descript cuts the video to match. And you can remove filler words automatically. It even has a voice cloning feature, so if you say something wrong and you want to fix it without re-recording, it just kind of makes up your voice for you. Very clever.

Number four, Firefly.ai or Fathom or one of the other AI meeting assistants. And as you probably know, they jump on your Zoom or Teams calls, they take notes and then they summarise the key action points. And MSPs are using them for client meetings, initial discovery calls, and even internal strategy sessions because you get searchable transcripts. So if someone says, Can we talk about cyber insurance again next quarter? it’s right there and some of them will pull out those action points as well.

What’s funny these days is when you join a Zoom or Teams call with lots of people, you get almost as many note takers as you do actual humans joining the call. But like I was saying earlier about ChatGPT, just using something to automatically record and transcribe and summarise every meeting, there’s little real value to you because when do you ever read back those summaries? You don’t because you were in the meeting. But they can be great if you take those summaries and you use them as an aide memoir in the future. Anything that stops you having to go back and ask someone, What was it we were talking about? just saves everyone time, which is great.

I find it quite useful to take summaries and put them into another AI like ChatGPT and ask it to pull out the actions that you should have been doing or to summarise something that you might’ve missed. I know it’s kind of weird to use two AIs together, but sometimes one AI will spot something the other AI hasn’t.

And then suggestion number five, let me tell you about a productivity tool I’ve been using that has completely changed the way I work. It’s called Wispr Flow. Now this is a dictation tool, but you use the same tool across all of your devices and it learns about you and how you talk and what you like and what your preferences are over time. Now, I was kind of dubious when I started their free two week trial. I use dictation on my Mac and on my iPhone all the time, and that’s been a big part of how I work for a couple of years. So why did I need another dictation tool? But actually Wispr Flow is very smart.

It adapts to the platform that it’s being used in. So for example, it’ll be a lot less formal in a WhatsApp or an SMS conversation than it would in an email or if you’re writing a LinkedIn post. It also handles all of the formatting and the presentation of the content for you. The real power of Wispr flow is you just talk to it naturally rather than the stilted conversation that you have with normal dictation tools. So when I’m just dictating something on my iPhone, I’m saying something like, And I will get back to you open bracket when I can close bracket full stop smiley emoji. And it’s not a natural flow.

When I’m using Wispr Flow, I can just say, So I’ll get back to you when I’m ready and if there’s anything else that I can help with, will you just let me know? Thanks Paul. And it automatically arranges it into sentences and leaves gaps and puts emojis in and all of that kind of stuff because it’s learned I like emojis in my texts. I mean even just something like leaving a pause as I’m thinking about something, it acknowledges that that’s the end of a paragraph and it starts a new paragraph. Or it can sometimes go back if I change my mind about something. So if I say, Can you get back to me about the cheese? Oh sorry, the cheese and the beef and the ham. Then all I see in the text is Can you get back to me about the cheese and the beef and the ham? Whereas most other tools that you use like this, you end up seeing cheese, cheese, beef, and ham. Does that make sense?

It will also pick up the way that you spell certain words and you can program certain things in. So if I go in and edit some texts that it’s just dictated for me, which is transcribed for me, then if I’ve changed the spelling, it will automatically add that to the dictionary and use that spelling again in the future. And I can tell it things right from the get go. For example, I have a colleague called Ami, but she spells it with an I on the end, not a Y on the end. And I say the word Ami quite a lot as I’m dictating messages to her. So I only had to tell it once that it’s Ami with an I and now it gets it right ev