Thank you to David Duffett, Speaker and Trainer at Let The Geek Speak, for joining me to talk about how to improve your communications with non-technical people (ie prospects), and help you get more deals over the line.

David is a Geek that has been publicly Speaking and teaching for more than 20 years, from London to Los Angeles, Berlin to Beirut, Kingston to Kuala Lumpur, Mumbai to Melbourne, and many other places too! He loves communications technology and was the longest serving Worldwide Community Director for the Asterisk® project – the ‘Daddy’ of all Open Source communications projects.

David has always been grateful to the Geeks that build the various technologies he speaks about, and he wants to give back – by helping Geeks to Speak, Nerds to be Heard and Techies to Teach!

He is achieving this by inspiring Geeks to speak by giving speeches at conferences and Sales Kickoffs, and equipping them to do it through teaching his Geek Speaker System – 7 Power Presenting Protocols …for Nerds

Connect with David on LinkedIn:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidduffett/

NB this transcription has been generated by an AI tool and provided as-is.

So in this first bit of the show, I wanted to. Sorry, hang on a second. I’ve just got a notification on my.

Yeah, okay. Actually, sorry, another one’s just come in. Hang on 2 seconds. Don’t go anywhere.

Okay? Right. Sorry. What was I saying? Oh, yes. So this first bit. Oh, hang on. Sorry, another notification. Hang on a second. Yeah, you get the idea, right? Frustrating, isn’t it? Notifications constantly grabbing your attention. Maybe your other half has said something to you or children. Children are the ultimate weapon against notifications because certainly when they’re younger, they will say to you, come on, daddy, put your phone down. Play with me as they get older. Of course, they don’t do that. Why? Because they’ve got their own notifications coming up on their own phones, and so we lose them to that. I truly believe that notifications are the bane of our life. They are the number one killer of productivity. And actually, I kind of fib to you just then because I don’t have many notifications on my phone at all. I sometimes allow WhatsApp notifications if I’m in the middle of a conversation with someone, and I want to see that. Otherwise, I will go into WhatsApp when I am ready to go into WhatsApp. And there are very few other apps that are allowed to send notifications to my phone. I’ll tell you how many apps can send notifications to me on my computer.

Zero. I don’t allow any notifications at all because when I’m sitting down to do some work, I want to do that work right. I don’t want my mind being distracted. Life is distracting enough as it is, especially if we work from home. You’ve got the postman, you’ve got the washing machine. Children come home from school, all of that kind of stuff. So you got enough distractions. You don’t need teams going ping, ping, ping or whatever noise teams make. I don’t personally use teams. I can’t stand it. But you don’t need those notifications. I’ve sat with MSPs and we’ve had one on one consulting conversations that they have paid a four figure sum for. And we’ve sat there with them online with their computer and their PSA and teams and slack and whatever else they’re using is just constantly ping, ping, ping, ping, ping. And they’re sitting there. They’ve paid me thousands for my advice, and I’ve got my full attention on them. And they’re constantly looking away at their screen so that they can see a notification from one of their first line texts about a new user or whatever it is. Something that just isn’t important compared to looking at their marketing strategy, the future of their business. Kind of crazy, isn’t it? People say that one of your greatest assets is time, and I kind of agree with that. But I think these days, especially in 2024, a greater asset than time is your attention. And our attention is so difficult to keep our attention on something. Our phones are the worst things we can possibly have. In fact, wouldn’t you agree that your phone is the best thing that you own and the worst thing that you own? It’s great for full communication and knowing where you are and being able to do. I mean, you can do everything on your phone, but it’s the apps and the lack of attention that you pay to your real life that is just horrendous. Let me give you a challenge. What if you turned off more of your notifications? What if you killed them completely on your laptop, knowing that if it really was that important, a member of your team will pick up the phone and they will call you? That’s a notification. That’s okay, isn’t it? The phone interrupting you? We’ve had that for what, 60, 70 years in business? That’s all right. And it’s certainly a lot less disruptive than all those pings coming up on your laptop. So what if you switched off all those notifications? What if you killed all of them on your computer? So the only notification you had was your phone or maybe your family texting you or whatsapping you or something like that? What if you decided to go and look at your PSA three or four times a day? So rather than it interrupting your work and destroying your attention span, you’re choosing to do a piece of work, working on your business, or doing a client project, or whatever you’re doing, and then you have 20 minutes to look at your PSA and get up to speed, and then you go and do a piece of work. And then you check your PSA and then you check your messages. If it’s really that urgent, someone will phone you for all the rest of it. It’s a distraction. Switch it off. Attention is your most precious commodity.

Here’s this week’s clever idea.

Let me drop an idea on you that you might consider to be utterly insane. Because this podcast has been published on the 5 March 2024. And the idea that I have is that you should send Christmas cards and Christmas gifts to your prospects, like now. Not wait till November, December. But do it now. Why would I suggest something as crazy as that? There’s a very good reason for it. Whatever you see, or whenever you see a whole bunch of people doing something at the same time, you should do the complete opposite. And that goes against what we feel is right. I know when you’re not very good at marketing, and perhaps you’re just starting out, your inclination is to look at what everyone else is doing with their marketing and just copy that. Right. It’s why things like cybersecurity week exist. And you can look at things like Valentine’s Day and Thanksgiving and Christmas and say, ah, other MSPs do these marketing activities around those dates. So I should. I want to do what everyone else is doing. However, if you really want to stand out and have huge made up word coming up, standout ability, then you can’t do stuff at the same time that everyone is doing something. Take cybersecurity week, or in fact, any kind of tech promotion. If everyone, I’ll put that in speech marks. If a lot of people are doing a chunk of activity around a week like cybersecurity week, there’s no point you bothering because you just become part of the noise. You want to do your own cybersecurity week, like six months later, do it sometime that they’re not. If a lot of MSPs do a piece of activity around Thanksgiving, let’s say Black Friday sales, I’m not a big fan of Black Friday sales for MSPs. I think it’s completely the wrong positioning. But let’s say you see MSPs do Black Friday deals and you think, oh, I should do a no, no, no. Just because everyone is jumping on it doesn’t mean that you should do it for. Amazon is a great example of this. Amazon does. I mean, I’m sure they do Black Friday, but they have created their own event, which is Prime Day, which is what, about a month and a half before Black Friday, something like that. And actually, Prime Day has become prime week, hasn’t it? Or prime two or three days. So Amazon there is proving that rather than just do what everyone else is doing and they still take part in Black Friday, they’ve created their own thing. Back to why I think you should send a Christmas card to your prospects now. Think about a prospect. Think about a hot lead, someone that you really want to talk to this year because you think they may choose you and leave their incumbent MSP. Imagine if you sent them a Christmas card this week or next week, and the Christmas card said, dear Dave, whoever, I wanted to become the first person to wish you a happy Christmas 2024. Tell me, have I succeeded? Question mark from Paul or whoever. And imagine if you just sent that card, or maybe you’d put your email address on the bottom or way for them to feed back. So let’s just recap from the point of view of the prospect. They’re sat at their desk, incomes, the posts. No one gets much posts these days. There’s a few things and there’s a card in it. And we all know when we get a card and you think, oh, what’s this? And particularly if you’ve handwritten the envelope, by the way. So if you print it out, it will have less impact than a handwritten, a card that turns up with handwritten and a real stamp on it, not some kind of franked mail. So they look at this and they go, what’s this?

I was really hoping to catch your attention or something. I’m never very good at making these things up on the I can write this stuff better than I can speak it, but you get the idea, right? You can reply to their email and you can ultimately lead it into, how’s everything going with your technology? Hey, the last time we spoke, you were talking about switching contracts in July. Is that still something that you’re looking at or. You told me how unhappy you were with your incumbent. Are you still thinking of leaving them in the summer? What’s the best date for you and me to have a chat? Can you see how that would get some engagement going? So that’s easy for the ones who reply. What about the ones who don’t reply? You send off the card and nothing. That was the kind of the tumbleweed sound effect. You get the idea. Yeah, it’s from old spaghetti westerns. Anyway, you get nothing. Well, I still think you can pick up the phone and just give those people a call and that might be you or it might be someone phoning on their behalf. But literally just pick up the call, pick up the call, pick up the phone, give them a call and just say, hey. Hi, Dave, my name’s Paul from so and so. It tell me this is a bit weird and a bit random, but I sent you a Christmas card because I wanted to be the first person to send you a Christmas card in 2024. Did I succeed? What a great engagement. In fact, what a great way to even get past the gatekeeper. Hi, can I speak to Dave, please? Yes, he’s calling.

Never mind emailing me. Another great resource to get direct input from me into your marketing is my free Facebook group. We’ve got around about, I think it’s about 3000 members in there. They’re all MSPs because it is a vendor free zone and you can join completely free. And I’m there every single day talking about growing your MSP. So grab your phone right now, fire up the Facebook app, type in MSP marketing at the top, and then just make sure you go to groups you don’t want to. Like my page pages are so 2021 we’re going for the 2024 group. So MSP marketing, go for groups and then you just have to apply to join. A couple of basic questions to check you are really an MSP and not a vendor trying to sneak in. And I look forward to speaking to you in the MSP marketing Facebook group.

Are you a technical person yourself, David?

Let me put it this way. Why can’t ordinary people understand technical conversations?

Let me ask you, Paul, if you’ve got a brand new trendy coffee machine for home, are you the kind of person that’s going to rip it all out of the packaging, plug it in and get going with it? Or are you the kind of person that would carefully take out the manual and then sit in your comfortable chair and spend time reading the manual before you ever plugged it in?

I’d then go after the manual when I figured out I couldn’t operate the coffee machine.

And actually that third one is what we call reflector. That’s when you reflect on the fact that you haven’t been able to get it to do everything you want it to do, and then you’re prepared to take a little bit of input from the manual. Imagine if you’re an action orientated person like you, and you’re going to talk to a customer about what your MSP does and you think, oh, well, I love getting stuck into stuff. So actually I’ll put the mouse in the hand of the customer and let them drive a demo. But imagine if the person that you’re presenting to or the people that you’re presenting to are the manual reading type, that would prefer to take a bit of input. And so the preferences protocol is all about understanding your audience, taking a little walk in their shoes, and doing things the way that they would like it, rather than way that you would like it.

But if you said, we’ve got a chartered engineer coming in who’s got these seven power presenting protocols, that’s going to help you get more customers over the line when you talk to them, then that’s a different idea. But actually inherently you’ll get the communication skills as part of it, because what people learn in presenting rubs off into many other areas of their lives.