Welcome to Episode 299 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

You must get so frustrated at how long it takes to generate leads and new clients for your MSP. And you’re not on your own there, lots of other MSPs feel the same. But imagine if there was a quick and amazing fix for this frustratingly long drawn out problem. Well, there is, and even better news, while this painful long wait for new clients will be driving your competitors insane, you can train yourself to think differently.

I think one of the things that MSPs find the hardest when they really start taking their marketing seriously is just how long it takes to win a new client. Because you read stuff on the internet, don’t you, about people who set up a funnel or they have a special offer or they do this new shiny tactic and there’s always a promise that you launch something at 9 in the morning and you have your first sale by 9:30, but that’s not really how it works for managed services.

Managed services are a double-edged sword in that you both benefit from and you are punished by them. Let me explain what I mean by that. On one side of the sword, it takes a very long time to win a new client, but on the other side of the sword, they pay you money every month in monthly recurring revenue and they stay for years and years and years. And it’s that lifetime value, the revenue that the client contributes to your business over the decade they stay with you, that is what you’ve got to stay focused on with your marketing.

So if you are measuring your marketing by doing a little piece of activity today, like sending an email or posting a blog post or putting something on LinkedIn and you expect that is going to generate a hot lead who turns into a client tomorrow, it just doesn’t work that way. You haven’t got the right marketing mindset and that’s always going to lead to you being frustrated with your marketing.

The right marketing mindset is about having a great strategy and implementing that day to day, but sticking with it until you are sick to death of it.

Because at the point that you are sick to death of it, that means it’s actually just starting to cut through to the people you’re talking to. So you keep doing it and keep doing it and keep doing it, and it really does work like that.

The strategy that I always recommend to MSPs is super simple. Three steps, six words: build audiences, grow relationships, convert relationships. Which means finding people to listen to you, for most MSPs that’s LinkedIn and your email list in your CRM. Then growing a relationship with them using content marketing, like sending out emails and posting on social media. And that final stage, converting relationships is about picking up the phone, finding out who’s ready to have a conversation about switching MSPs.

Now, those six words there, that’s a very solid marketing strategy. I use it for my own marketing, have done for nearly 20 years. And my business, the MSP Marketing Edge, helps more than 700 MSPs to implement exactly that strategy, but it does take time. It’s not a quick win. I’m going to be honest, there are no quick wins in marketing an MSP. Of course there are short term tactics which come up, they work for a little piece of time and then they go away, they stop working. But trust me, you want to ignore those and focus in on a long term strategy that’s always there working in the background to find the people at the exact moment that they are ready to leave their incumbent. Maybe they’ve been with their incumbent for seven to 10 years, something has unsettled them, and you want to be in front of them and build a relationship with them. So at the point that they are ready to make a new commitment to someone else (you) for years and years and years, then you’ve got to be there at that right moment.

I like to think of this like boiling water. And I don’t mean in a kettle or one of those cool quick tap things. Have you seen those? You just push a button and you get instant boiling water, we actually have one of those in our kitchen, they’re quite cool. They’re super expensive, but they are cool. No, I mean boiling water, the old fashioned way. You get a pan, you fill it with cold water, you put it on the stove and you start the temperature low and of course the water barely moves. So you turn the temperature up a bit and the water starts to just stir a little bit and as you keep turning the temperature up and up and up, the water starts to get more active. It starts to get hotter and hotter and hotter. It starts to move more and move more. And the difference between water that’s actually boiling and not boiling, the difference is one degree. You can turn the stove up by one degree and take very, very hot, but not yet boiling water and turn it into boiling water. One degree.

That’s a useful analogy for marketing your MSP. You keep putting, I was going to say pressure, but it’s kind of influence. You keep putting influence on your leads and your prospects with all of the marketing activity you’re doing, all of the content you’re putting out. And it’s one little thing that makes the difference, that one degree that turns them from being a prospect into a client. The problem is just like boiling water, you can’t jump straight to that one little thing. You can’t jump straight from the one degree that turns hot water into boiling water. You have to have done all of the work building up to it beforehand. And that’s exactly the same with marketing. You can’t just jump to that trigger that makes them become a client. Because actually it’s different triggers anyway, different people respond to different things. You’ve got to put all of the work in and keep doing that work so you reach that one degree that takes them from hot water to boiling water. Does that make sense? I do love a good analogy. I hope I’ve explained that one really well to you.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that marketing your MSP, it is difficult. It is long-term, but it will pay off for you very, very well with clients that pay you monthly for like 10 years. There are hundreds of industries around the world that are so jealous of you for that recurring revenue, for that retention. All you have to do is win more of those clients and you do that by building audiences, growing relationships and converting relationships and making sure you’ve got the right marketing mindset so that you market every single day to get that extra degree that really makes the difference.

How much do you understand about what’s happening in your prospect’s heads and hearts? And I mean really happening. When they’re thinking of switching MSP, what are all the questions that are running through their heads? What are all the opportunities they’re hoping to benefit from? What are all the fears that are holding them back? Right now I’ve got a very clever framework for you to use to understand exactly what’s happening in almost anyone’s mind, especially a prospect. It’s a superpower that you can develop which will help you close more clients for your business.

I want to talk about how you can get a better understanding of your prospect’s pain points with five why’s. No, not Five Guys, the rather excellent burger chain, I mean five why’s. It’s a problem solving method developed by the founder of Toyota quite some time ago, about a hundred years ago or so, and I believe that you can use it in your MSP sales.

The idea is that you keep asking versions of why until you get to the real core of someone’s problem or desire.

So here’s an example. It’s a bit of a sort of a two-way conversation between you and a prospect. Prospect says, We need better internet. And you say, Why is that then? And the prospect says, Because our connection is really bad. And you say, Well, why is it really bad? And the prospect says, I don’t know, you tell me. My staff complain all the time that their computers are slow. And you respond with, Well, why do you think that is? And the prospect says, Well, they tell me they can’t get their work done fast enough and I am fed up with their complaints. And you say, It sounds like an obvious question, but why are you fed up with their complaints? And the prospect pauses for a second and then says, I just want them to get on with their work. I want them to stop hassling me with questions and complaints all the time. And you say, It sounds like you have a lot of frustration there. Why is solving that so important to you? And the prospect says, Because I’m trying to build a business here, my staff are holding me back. And you say, So your staff are holding you back because their technology is holding them back. Would you agree with that?

That’s pretty badly acted by me, and in fact it sounds like bad dialogue from a cheap novel, but you get the idea in your own words, as part of a natural conversation. Can you see the power of that? Can you see that that’s a very powerful tool asking why again and again and again, asking why about each of their answers to understand what they really want and why it’s so important to them. And all of that done in one short conversation. In fact, in that conversation, you’ve moved the prospect from, I just need this solution to actually uncovering their real desire. I want you to remove any technology blocks so I can grow my business.

Understanding what’s really motivating them deep in their heart helps you to close the sale and better serve the client once they’re working with you, right? Do you get that? Well, here’s a question. Do you already use the five why’s in your sales?

Featured guests:

Shanté Micah is a PR and brand marketing expert who specialises in helping businesses and thought leaders build visibility, credibility, and sustainable clout through powerful media positioning. Her approach focuses on earned media—media that not only gets you noticed but establishes lasting authority in your field. Shanté is also the author of PR Power Play: Leveraging Media to Market Yourself, Build Your Brand, and Generate Revenue, where she shares the insider strategies that have driven successful campaigns and built trusted brands across various industries. Shanté has a deep understanding of how to create PR strategies that don’t just generate buzz but foster long-term success.

Josh Moody is an award-winning marketer, AI enthusiast, and the strategic mind behind some of today’s most innovative marketing technologies. Blending deep marketing expertise with cutting-edge tech, Josh pioneers powerful marketing systems that drive consistent growth and measurable results.  As the founder of Veratusk, he optimises entire marketing funnels with AI-driven systems. At Good News, Josh merges marketing mastery with technological innovation, revolutionising PR and human-first media outreach.

We all hate wasting our time on anything that doesn’t deliver results. So if you are really keen on finding new managed service clients in 2025, how do you avoid wasting your precious time on outdated marketing activities? In this new world of AI some tactics don’t work anymore and some are way more important than they’ve ever been. I have two special guests today who both believe that PR, public relations, still has a very important place in your MSP’s marketing toolbox. Are they right? Are they wrong? The answer just might surprise you.

Hi, I am Shanté Micah, and I am one half. I’m the co-founder of Good News.

Hi, and I’m Josh. I’m the other half of Good News and handle all of the tech and back end.

And do you know what? This is the first time I think in five plus years of the podcast that we’ve actually had two guests at the same time. So you guys are already doing a first. Thank you so much for coming onto the show. I’m so excited to have you on because we’re going to talk about PR, which in itself is a bit dull. And I say that as an ex journalist who’s also an ex PR guy, PR being public relations. You two are PR people, but we’re not really interested in getting in the media and getting journalists to talk about you. What we’re going to talk about today is using PR as a way of building authority, of getting audiences in your market to trust you, to believe you, to understand you, all of those kinds of things. And I’m a big fan of using PR and using it to influence the kind of people that ultimately as an MSP you want to go on to do business with. So let’s first of all just delve a little bit back into your background Shanté, just tell us a little bit about you and how you got into this world, how you got going with this business, and how did you meet Josh as your business partner?

Oh, yes. I love this story. So I’ve been in the PR space, but it’s been called brand marketing, it’s been called brand awareness and I’ve gone in and out of companies, but PR is what I got my masters in 20 years ago. And I stepped into a role that was for global communications. That role sent me to Israel where I was an expat, opening up multiple markets. I came back stateside and that was when the emergence of social media was happening. So I was asked to figure that out for a multibillion dollar company at the time, which was interesting.

I ended up meeting Josh about 11 years ago. And it was at a digital marketing agency and we were both running enterprise accounts and these were for big companies like ESPN, Time Warner Cable, Dell, Adobe, Citrix, forgetting a lot of them. But Josh was running his team, I was running my team and we never actually worked on the same team but we’d find just these sidebar conversations where we would just be talking about things that were important to us. And that’s where we both realised that we have a lot of the same values when it comes to how we manage teams, how we create systems that can then align people from the client side to the people that you have on your team. And we were at the same agency for five years. Then I went my separate way. Josh has moved all around, but we kept in touch. And about four years ago, I reached out to him and I said, Hey, I just had this big change in my career, let’s catch up. And from that we ended up catching up and then becoming accountability partners on separate projects.

And then one fortuitous day, Josh was like, would you ever want to do something together? And the idea for Good News came straight after, and it was from a lot of people in my circle that were asking me for big PR strategies because they had no idea how PR worked. It had this mystique to it, and I thought, I think I could do something with that. My frameworks of 20 years, I’ll put it into a book and then we’ll put it into a system. And then with Josh’s background, we turned it into what Good News is, which is engineered omnipresence. We’re able to engineer this for people and then demystify it so that people in fields like MSP can actually use it, where before it felt like elusive and separate like a future them problem. So that’s the summary.

That’s a great summary. Thank you for that. And I agree with you that PR is a bit mysterious. Well, in the past it was very mysterious. And when I was a journalist back in the mid nineties, up till 2005, which is when I started my first business, I remember I hated being contacted by PR companies. But the reason that business owners like MSPs hired PR companies was because they didn’t know how to get on the radio, get in the local paper, get in the local TV. And I think what has changed dramatically in the 25, 30 years since. First of all, the media no longer control the distribution anymore. The internet has put the distribution into anyone’s hands. But I think what has gone alongside that and why companies like yours still exist and still thrive is because the amount of noise has gone up, probably by X thousand percent. Josh, in 2025 is it really worth the owner of a small business like an MSP that might have 3, 4, 5 staff, is it really worth them trying to get media coverage? Trying to influence what’s said about them on social media? Is that what modern PR is all about?

That’s a phenomenal question. So I come from the digital marketing world. Shanté and I have very different perspectives on this. So I’m biased towards digital marketing, I come from SEO and content marketing. And so this question hits in a very good way because now transferring over and really doubling down on PR, I think it shows really where I’m putting my bets. PR is the play to invest in right now. And I’ll explain why that is. In the past, you could show up via SEO, you could show up via your content marketing social and you could generate noise, you could generate top end noise, and that was great for a small MSP startup or whatever type of business. However, that doesn’t necessarily translate into trust and credibility. And that’s really what we’re seeing in today’s day and age. And that’s further compounded with AI. Everybody’s losing trust and getting a little more skeptical.

Having trust, whether you are a massive MSP or you’re a smaller startup, is absolutely the currency you need to leverage for growing your brand.

And there’s a lot of other factors that go into this, and we will get into I’m sure in a minute, but that PR is by far and away the biggest bang for your buck. Dollar in dollar out, you’re going to get a hundred times more with PR nowadays than you would have with SEO or any of these other channels, that’s exactly what we’re seeing.

Yeah, I love that. And you’re right, in a second, we are going to come to some practical stuff that MSPs can do to improve their, I’m going to use a term that you used Shanté, which is omnipresence. I absolutely love that. Being everywhere all at the same time or the perception of being everywhere. Shanté, in terms of how PR has changed, nevermind all those big shifts over decades, the last two and a half years since ChatGPT went mainstream, as Josh was just saying anybody can churn out hundreds of pieces of content, that’s been a massive game changer in itself, but the core fundamentals of marketing have not changed, which is that we will only buy from people that we trust, that we like, that we know that we have a relationship with that we perceive as an authority. So how has your work changed and the work that you recommend MSPs and other business owners do? How has that changed in the last couple of years?

I would say that AI has been this great equaliser when it comes to any type of content you can create. But like with anything, it’s garbage in, garbage out. With PR, you can certainly generate a lot of pitches, and I see this happening where journalists are already bombarded and there’s been massive shifts in the media landscape. Traditional media conglomerates laying off a lot of writers, and yet the writers that remain are still required to hit a beat and a body of work with the same cadence, if not more so their work has tripled. So they’re still required to get those stories. They need your pitches, but what they need are pitches that are pithy and powerful and personal. So they need to be relevant. So just plugging into an AI framework for a PR pitch, it’s not going to get you anywhere.

We don’t need perfection when it comes to PR pitches, but we need precision. I know that a lot of journalists, including yourself as a host of a show, you get dozens if not hundreds of pitches per day, and most of them are going to be off the mark because they’re not considering relevance. They’re not considering the audience before themselves. They’re not considering how a journalist is a caretaker for their audience. So the shifts that we’re seeing is that, it’s still a numbers game because to hit timing, you do need to be pitching regularly, but you need to be pitching with more precision so that research on the front end is even more important. Knowing what their audience is talking about, knowing the relevant cultural conversations, knowing what they care about, all of that should be demonstrated in your pitch. And your pitch should still be under 200 words. You really have no reason on that initial pitch to go bigger. And every journalist, they’ll see the difference. It is a remarkable difference when you get a pitch that is like, oh, they got it, and you suddenly become this source to a journalist who’s already burdened beyond. So I would say that the things that have changed is precision. You just need a system to create that precision. And then the reps.

Okay, well let’s come onto that system in a second. You mentioned me getting pitches, I only get about 20 to 25 a week, which is not unbearable. But I was saying just before recording, yours stood out, as you would hope a PR company’s would stand out but because you’d actually done the research, you’d actually looked into me, you’d clearly spent time on it and not just got an AI to transcribe an episode and pull out a, oh, I listened to this and this was my insight, because the insight, never real insight. So you can see through that a mile off. So if I’m doing that, then journalists who are getting hundreds of pitches a day are definitely seeing that.

Let’s bring this back to making this real to the MSP owner. So the average MSP who’s listening to this or watching this on YouTube is the business owner, they’ve got somewhere between 3, 5, 10 staff, eager to grow, their marketing is a bit of a distress activity, it’s something they know they have to do, but they don’t necessarily enjoy it because it’s the complete opposite of tech work. And as we’ve already established, PR is very good for building trust, building authority, all the things you want as big picture items from your marketing. So Josh, let’s throw this at you, and Shanté feel free to jump in. What’s a good system for an MSP owner to go about actually getting that kind of third party mentions that gives them great authority, greater credibility?

Absolutely. So I’m going to start small scale because what we’ve found is when MSPs are starting to get into this, like you said, it’s not their body of work, doing PR, getting those pitches out the door. So I’m going to start small and give you really practical steps here. The first thing that we would recommend almost always is podcasts. Getting on podcasts, because podcasts are, there’s so many different valuable tangible assets that you get from being on podcasts, but you also get a lot of psychological benefit from being on podcasts. So let me break it down. The first thing that I would recommend an MSP to do or someone on their team, I would have them go to iTunes or Spotify and I would say start looking through different podcasts and aggregate a list of 10 to 20 podcasts that you would love to be on, that you have a message, you want to share your message of your brand.

I’m not talking about stats. I know once we get into the MSP world, people love stats and the figures, uptime, all of the things that we nerd out on. But instead look and see what stories you can tell such as how you rescued a client from a ransomware attack or something like that. Something that’s pithy and really tangible. So you’ll have your list of 10 to 20 podcasts that you want to be on, sort them by how much visibility you think they have. You don’t need to get really scientific with this in the beginning. Just try to sort them out into, this is a phase one meaning this is an emerging smaller podcast, phase two kind of more middle of the road they still have some momentum, versus phase three this is going to be the big top end podcast to have a massive amount of exposure.

And then what you’re going to do is you’re going to break down your story. So come up with maybe five different angles in that story. Take a client case study, how you rescued that client from ransomware and break it out into five different angles. Break it out and then overlay those two, your list of the podcast that you want to reach out to and then those stories. And then this is where the rubber meets the road. When you’re writing that pitch, try to synthesise a pitch that is under 200 words. It has to be really short, really pithy, and really it has to be value to the host, but more importantly, value to their audience. And this is where people start to go wrong when they’re leveraging AI tools too heavily, is they come out with these pitches that are more self-serving or serving to the host and not to the audience. And really the core value here is we’re creating value for the audience. You satiate that, you fulfill the request of the host, and you win. And then the last step here is find their email, there are a handful of free tools out there you can use. hunter.io is a great one where you can plug in their domain, the domain of the podcast, find someone to reach out to and send that pitch. And the reason I say start small is what’s going to happen is you’re going to start sending these pitches out the door and you’re going to start to get, going to get a lot of misses, but you’re going to get some hits. Those hits are going to teach you about how to tell your own story. And that’s going to be one of the big differentiators.

Coming from the MSP world, you might think you know how to tell your story, but really you’re going to get real world feedback by who responds to you. Oh, that’s the way that you’re going to tell your story. And then you iterate on that. Your next 10 pitches are going to be kind of changes of that same pitch. And then you’re going to continue down the line. And what we’ve seen is once people land their first podcast, they get on the shows, they’re on fire, they are so stoked, they want to tell that story a hundred more times, and then they get the assets back when it goes live. And they can share it on social media. They didn’t even have to edit it, and now they’re really on fire. And so there’s kind of this addictive nature to it as well. And that’s why I say start small. You’ll start to feel the energy and the momentum and you’re going to want to go all in. So that’s where I would say to start kind of any MSP start on that small scale and then ramp up from there.

Yeah, I love that. Thank you. And Shanté, it’s our final question, unfortunately, because you guys are so good, we’ve already been talking for getting on for about 13, 14 minutes. So let’s take those podcasts as the first step. And I agree that’s a great place to get going and build up your enthusiasm, see if actually you like being interviewed. Shanté, where would you take it from there and just give us two or three bullet points where you would expect an MSP to go from there.

Yeah, I mean, most of you will be compelled to go for top national, but what I have learned in my 20 years of experience is industry and trade is probably going to be where you have your buyers and your most interested parties. It’s more niche, but it’s going to do a lot for you. And then I would say digital, digital publications, you could canvas an entire space of digital publications. You could be a contributing author to digital publications. Start leveraging those for local, if local would be meaningful to you, it’s not necessarily meaningful to everyone. And then with all that, you use all of that for leverage for top national, a top national journalist, if you’re showing up in trade, the validation that you’re a good resource, some of that work’s already been done for them.

Yeah, I love that. That’s a great checklist. Thank you very much. You guys need to come back on the show, right? I need to get you back on. We only allow a guest on once a year, so 2026 or 2027, I’d love to get you guys back on. In fact, it’d be really interesting to have you back on in two years to see how that AI, that huge leap forward. I mean, who knows what’s going to be happening in two years time, right? But let’s finish up for now and you can arm wrestle, I know you are in geographically separate locations, but you can arm wrestle about who’s going to tell us about Good News. What do you do and how do you help MSPs?

Yeah, I’ll take this one. So Good News. We create visibility systems. So we’re not a PR firm, but we help people engineer that omnipresence that you would get from a PR agency. You own the contacts and we do all that research. We turn it into a visibility system for you, and then we mobilise that so that it’s turnkey. So you are the one sending the pitches, but we create those pitches for you and we support you for a year under every single project. But to get started with us, I would say go to our website, it’s higoodnews.com. Hi, as in hello. And we have a banner there where you could get a podcast sampler list. So if you opt into that, takes you through about a two minute intake and we will tell you a handful of podcasts that you would be perfect for. And then we can start talking about next steps.

Mitch, an MSP owner in West London, has a question after reading the book Endless Customers. His question is: Do you have any content suggestions?

That is a book that we’ve been talking about on the podcast over the last few months since it came out. And it is a book I highly recommend as well. Every MSP should read Endless Customers. It’s been written by a guy called Marcus Sheridan who originally wrote a book called They Ask You Answer, and that was about answering the questions that prospects have before you ever really start talking to them one-on-one. Endless Customers is the version 3.0 of They Ask You Answer, and it’s a complete reinvention of his marketing strategy for the AI age. Now, trust me, it’s a book that you should read, absorb, and implement, and creating great content is still at the heart of his marketing strategy. So what I’ve got here, a very quick brainstorm for you of some really great Endless Customers content ideas that you can use. And I’m going to hit you with these at speed, so if you just want a written list of them, you can get a transcript of this [email protected].

Here we go. And by the way, I’m going to talk about Teams a lot. You can take Teams and replace that with any other piece of software. In fact, a smart thing to do will be to take all of these ideas, take a version for Teams, take a version for Outlook, take a version for all common software that all businesses use:

I’m sure you’ve got your own ideas. I’d love to hear those. If you want to send them over to me, get my thoughts on them or even submit your own question, email me.