Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast

What’s the difference between MSPs that are standing still right now and those that are rocketing ahead? It’s a special episode today because there’s only three months left of 2026, and I’ve actually got one of my colleagues as a special guest. He’s spent 10 years talking to MSPs about how to grow their business, and he’s going to share all of his brain with you right now.

Welcome to Episode 359 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge.

Featured guest: Ben Smith has been part of the MSP Marketing Edge journey from Day 1, he helps MSPs build simple, repeatable marketing systems that compound over time, generating consistent leads instead of chasing the latest trend.

Having spent over 15 years consulting with business owners he brings practical, real-world experience rather than marketing theory.

Away from work, you’ll usually find him outdoors with his family or working on his latest renovation project.

Hello, my name’s Ben Smith. I work with Paul at the MSP Marketing Edge.

And how has it taken so long to get you on the podcast? We’ve been doing this podcast, what, seven years or something like that?

Good question.

I know, it is a good question. And you and I have actually worked together a very long time, way longer than actually the MSP Marketing Edge has been around. We’ll explore that in a second. But it’s good to have you here today, Ben, because you talk to MSPs all day, every day, and you hear the good, the bad, sometimes you hear the ugly because your job of course is to help people with their growth, with their marketing. And that means you’ve got quite a unique insight into what’s happening with MSPs around the world right now. So do you want to just start by telling us a little bit about you and your background and how we came to work together and what exactly you do for us here in the MSP Marketing Edge?

Absolutely. So we’ve worked together for is it 15 years now, Paul?

Yeah, scary, isn’t it? You had hair when we started. You didn’t really. For those watching on YouTube, Ben has no hair whatsoever.

This is a personal choice. People often say when they find out we’ve worked together that long that I’m either good at what I do or that I’ve got some secret information on you. So they don’t know that it’s both at this stage.

Thank you.

But yeah, we worked together in the previous business working with healthcare sector and opticians, veterinary practices and dentists. And then of course we’ve been working together with the MSP Marketing Edge where you do the podcast and all the fun, crazy stuff. And I speak with MSP owners all over the world and find out what they’re looking to do with their business and if we can help them.

Exactly that. In fact, if anything, I have the fun and you do the hard work.

I enjoy it just as much. So it’s all good.

I’m sure you do. Well, I know you do for a fact. And actually you are talking to our existing members as well as new members who are looking to join us because you do all the one-to-one consultations with our members, you do all of our onboarding. So essentially Ben is pretty much the only member of our team who loves being on a Zoom call all day long. I don’t like being on Zooms, I prefer doing stuff like this. And actually it was just you and me if we go back 10 years to when we first started this business. And so you and I have been here right from the beginning.

And that actually leads onto my first question, which is what have you seen change since 2016 to 2026 in terms of how MSPs grow their business? So I don’t mean from a tech point of view because we’ve all seen cyber security get bigger, AI came out of what almost felt like nowhere two, three years ago. But in terms of what MSPs talk to you about and what’s important to them, what’s changed in the last decade?

Yeah, good question. I think there’s not been as much change as people are probably expecting to hear. I think the stories that people tell me are quite similar in terms of when MSPs are starting out, they grow to a certain point and then something happens. So that’s been the same pretty much throughout the 10 years that we’ve worked with MSPs.

Yeah. And that story, is it the common story of, “I loved what I did working for someone else, but I wanted to do it for me, so I started up.” And then it’s three, four years of frustration and cash going up and down and trying to find the right staff and trying to find the right clients. You must hear that story all the time.

Yes, exactly that. People can see an opportunity to do something better, something different, so they go off and they do that themselves. And depending on when we speak to them and whether they’re still growing and looking to do that more or whether they’ve hit some kind of ceiling, whether it’s a real ceiling or when they’ve placed on themselves is typically when they would engage in a conversation to find out what else they should and could be doing with their marketing.

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. So you obviously talk to MSPs that are literally on day one, where the owner is the MSP. And I know you also talk to the three, four million revenue where there’s an established team and senior leadership team. Is there would you say a sweet spot at which life seems to be easiest? Is it perhaps when it’s just you and two or three staff or is it when you’ve worked yourself out of the business but it hasn’t grown so big that it’s a monster or is that a really difficult question to answer?

It is a difficult one because I think a lot of it will depend on the mentality of the business owner. Whether they’ve got themselves out of one job that they wanted to get out of for so many years and they’ve replaced that with another job, effectively it’s just they’re the boss this time, or whether they’ve got big plans to push it much further than just being comfortable and they want to actually build something that’s going to be bigger than them that they can step back and watch from afar.

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. Now we’ve done this special episode today to get you on the podcast because we’ve failed to do that in the last seven years, but also because this is coming out the last Tuesday of September in 2026. And that means somehow there’s only three months left this year, October, November, December, that’s 2026 done. As you get older, every year just seems to go faster and faster.

What I thought would be interesting is to look from your perspective as someone who spent 10 years talking to MSPs at every stage, what do you see makes the difference between those who are doing well and those who are feeling stuck? And let me define my version of doing well. My version of doing well is that you are achieving what you want to achieve. So I don’t define doing well as big car, big house, kids at an expensive school. I mean, we all want those things, but often those aren’t the things that drive us. So for me doing well is you’re living the life you want to live, doing the things you want to do with the people you want to, and you’ve got enough time and money to do that. So what do you see as the big factors that affect people that are doing well versus those that are feeling stuck?

Yeah. Okay. So if we look at the people who are stuck right now, typically the business owner is probably the bottleneck, that everything’s going through them. They’re slowing everything down, they’re not looking to grow much bigger than what they’ve currently got to, or they just physically can’t find the time or whatever the next lever is that they need to pull. I think a lot of the time those businesses are relying on referrals. It’s purely a reactive approach. And referrals are great, they’re obviously doing a good job that their clients are happy, their clients want their friends to be happy and they refer people in, but the long-term game is those referrals at some point will dry up. And if they don’t have a plan, of course, then that’s going to be an issue down the line.

Yeah. And in your experience, and I’m going to come back to bottlenecks in a second, but in your experience, that over-reliance on referrals, is that something way too many people have and they don’t realise the referrals have dried up until it’s like, “oh, it’s been six months since we had a client?”

Yes, a lot of people do that. And we talked about the typical cycle that people go through is they will win new business, they’ll find something that works and because they keep those clients for so long and they tend to bring in new business when they’re happy. That’s just what people do, if they’re happy they’re going to stay with you and they’re going to probably refer to you. But the challenge is then that businesses rely on that. The MSP gets so used to getting new business through referral that they don’t spend any time or enough time on building something outside of that to build long-term.

That makes perfect sense. So in a second, we’re going to talk about what you would build and we’ll move into what successful MSPs are doing, but let’s go back to the bottleneck. When you talk about the owner being the bottleneck, what are the symptoms that you see of that?

If the MSP owner were to go away for several weeks with no phone, no contact to the office, nothing at all, would any new business would arrive in the door?

And if that’s the case, then all the sales are coming through the business owner, which is a bit of a concern initially, particularly as you’re looking to grow that business longer term, if all of the sales come through one person, that becomes the main breaking point of the business.

That makes perfect sense. And what other areas of the business does it affect? No, let me ask this question a different way. If the owner is a bottleneck in their sales, do you normally expect to see that they are a bottleneck in operations, in senior tech decisions, in every aspect of the business really?

I think quite often that could be the case and the owner wants to still be involved in everything. And again, that can come from a mindset as to where they’ve come from and how they’ve slowly grown the business. Another time it can just be if we’re talking about marketing and growing their business, sales is the main point that we tend to cover, of course, in that kind of conversation.

And actually I guess in your experience, most MSPs that have a conversation with you are operationally in a good place. So they might not be 100% perfect, but it tends to be the thing that MSPs get right first, isn’t it? And then they start thinking about growth. Would you recommend for someone, let’s say, that was earlier in their journey, would you recommend that they did both of those things at once? Should they focus on the operations first, then the marketing, or should those two things be done at the same time, do you think?

In an ideal world, you’d do everything at the same time, of course. But realistically for an MSP to be growing, you need to be doing something well initially because you’ve got enough clients to look after the people already in the door and that will give you some stable base. But I think the biggest challenge people have is relying on that as a long-term strategy. And as you mentioned before, people often don’t realise that it’s a problem until six months too late.

Yeah, there’s always a huge lag in marketing, more so for MSPs I think than any other business because of how slow the sales cycle is. Okay, before we get on to habits and systems and behaviours of successful MSPs, tell us a few more things that you see, again, based on 10 years of conversations, things that perhaps people say to you or the conversations they start and immediately your brain says, “Oh, I know what that’s going to mean, or I know what consequence that’s going to bring.”

I think another problem that people struggle with is having a clear point of difference in a busy marketplace. They will believe that they’re different because they’ve, again, broken out from maybe a previous employee to create their new MSP, and years down the line they feel that they’re offering something that they saw as an opportunity, but in reality their marketing doesn’t translate that point of difference. It will be that we’re the 24/7 reliable local support that everyone else is talking about. And the challenge of that, of course, is your prospects don’t know that you created this business purely to fill the gap that you found. They just see what you are showing them, which is we’re the same as everybody else.

You and I have often said, haven’t we, that people who are technicians, almost the last business they should start is an MSP. In fact, you and I experienced this, and it’s funny when we were talking about bottlenecks, you think how many years I was the bottleneck to growth in this business, and this was my second business. My last business, I’d worked myself out, I wasn’t there day-to-day. And then when you and I started this, I then became the bottleneck for a number of years until I had that “duh”, which I think was only at Covid time when I realised, oh, hang on a second, we need a bigger team here. I’m doing too much work. This is crazy.

So yeah, in a way, most MSPs should not start an MSP, they should go and buy an architect’s firm or an engineering firm or something like that. Obviously, that’s not quite how it works, but you and I do see a difference when we work with, and there’s probably a small handful of people we work with where the owner of the MSP is not an MSP. And I’m thinking there’s a couple of names in mind, and I know that you’ll be thinking exactly the same names. And it’s interesting that they have different problems. Their problems are more to do with delivery than they are to do with marketing and sales. They understand how to differentiate the business and how to position it, but for them often it’s actually getting the tech work and trusting these senior tech people because they don’t necessarily speak the same language. So I guess actually it’s just different problems in different situations.

Right, let’s look at the positive stuff. So the MSPs you talk to who jump on a call and things are going well, and it could be we’ve been working with them for a number of years, it could be that things are going well and they want them to be even better. Tell me some of the trends, some of the traits that you see of common things that MSPs that are doing well, what do they do? How do they behave?

Yeah, so again, some of these things of course are going to be the opposite to what we’ve just talked about. So having a sales function, and sometimes that is an entire salesperson or at least a defined role that is responsible for bringing new business in or certainly nurturing those leads to a point that, of course, the business owner may still be involved in the final sale and getting that deal over the line, but having somebody dedicated to sales. So it doesn’t become a reactive referral-based system. It’s somebody dedicated to having a clear plan that’s systemised to bring in prospects.

And what’s the fear about bringing that person in the first time? Is the fear that I’m going to be spending all this money and it’s going to be taking such a long time for me to get the return, or are there other fears as well?

Again, this will depend on the cycle that people are in. I think if they’re still in a honeymoon period, no matter how long that lasts for, that referrals are just coming in, there’s almost not a need, they don’t feel like there’s a need today. But of course the MSPs that do well and keep doing well are the ones who address that before it becomes urgent. Again, if they’ve got the right mindset and they’re looking at that long term, if the last three clients you brought into your MSP were referral, referral, referral, you’ve got a bigger problem than you might realise.

What other things do you see from successful MSPs?

Opposite to what we talked about a minute ago, but we’re looking that they have a clear ICP, an ideal client profile. They’ve got a good point of difference in the marketplace. It’s very clear if you ask somebody to look at their website versus a competitor that you can see what one does versus another. Again, this all helps the prospects who don’t know you yet and don’t know how great a job you can do, make an easy choice initially when they’re looking at who can fix the problem I’ve got today.

Yeah, you’ve mentioned mindset and attitude a lot. Do you think it’s more about mindset and attitude than people realise?

I think it definitely is. A lot of the topics you cover on the podcast here is exactly that, making sure that you’re not just getting comfortable with good enough. And it’s saying, what else is this business for? As you said right at the beginning, is it giving me the lifestyle that I want rather than just a better lifestyle than I had in the previous job? If I just created a different job, but now I’m the owner. It’s making sure you’re pushing to what’s possible, not just what is better than last time.

Yeah, you and I over the years have swapped quite a lot of stories and books and things that we find quite interesting. I’m thinking David Goggins in particular. So for the MSPs who are listening to this or watching this on YouTube, if you’ve never heard of David Goggins, go and get his books. I can’t quite remember what they’re called, can you? I know he’s written two or three.

Can’t Hurt Me is one of them.

Can’t Hurt Me. That was his first book actually, wasn’t it? So David Goggins is not a normal human being. He’s the only person who’s ever done marine training and Navy SEAL training and completed both of them. If it was fiction, if it was Jack Reacher, you’d be like, “Oh, this isn’t real”, but because it is real and his story’s out there and he’s done loads of content out there, he’s quite an extraordinary guy. But a lot of his stuff he talks about is anybody can be a Navy SEAL if you’ve got the strength of mind. It’s not about what you are doing with your body, it’s about your mind’s control over your body and pushing yourself to limits. I find it quite fun to listen to extreme stories like that because it makes you realise that what we are doing in business is actually quite easy in that context.

And again, you see this with other MSPs talking to businesses that are slightly bigger than them and they realise that there’s more here, “I could do so much more. I’ve just got comfortable at a certain level and I now realise there could be a lot more going on.” We have obviously our Facebook group for our members and people sharing what they’re doing and it almost lights a bulb in other people as to here’s what’s possible in my business if I push past that initial comfort.

Yeah, exactly that. And it’s funny actually, there’s always someone who’s doing better than you if you work in that way. Who did we have on the podcast a few weeks ago, someone who did $143 million exit from his MSP. So it’s like, oh okay, that’s raised the bar there. Now we’ve got to get a 200 million exit and then you start working up from there, but there’s always someone that can inspire you and that’s achieved more, which also shows you if that person can do it, then absolutely you can do it as well, which is really cool. Right, I’m going to grab my Audible app. I’m going to re-download Can’t Hurt Me because as we’ve talked about this, I thought it’s about four or five years since I’ve listened to that and I really want to listen to that again.

Ben, you’re going to finish us off here on the podcast. As we said, this is three months till the end of 2026. So let’s imagine I’m an MSP. I’ve jumped on a call with you and I say to you, “Right Ben, we are doing okay, but we are only doing okay. So the referrals have dried up. We don’t really do a lot of marketing. We don’t have a sales pipeline. We desperately need more money because I need to hire another technician, but I don’t have the cash to hire that technician.” What kind of questions would you ask me or what kind of recommendations would you make to me?

Okay, this is a good one. Without being able to dive in directly to the questions of course, but we’d explore who you’re trying to get in front of, first of all. So who makes a good prospect for you and work backwards that way. So if you’ve got an idea of your ideal clients, then we can build a plan as to what sort of marketing is going to work to get in front of those sort of people. The other thing we’d look at, of course, is what your current marketing is saying about you. And from what you’ve said, and this is quite typical when I speak to MSP owners, is they’re not doing much yet, and often that means they’ve grown organically over the years and now something has to change. Either they feel there’s more out there or worst case, they’ve lost a big client and they desperately need to try and regain that revenue.

First of all, look at your marketing plan, make sure you’ve got a clear systemised plan that doesn’t rely on discipline and motivation for it to happen. It’s just got a system that turns up week in, week out, no matter what you’re doing. You’ve got a clear ICP, as we mentioned, that you’re going after the right set of prospects, and then you can start working with fun things like monthly recurring revenue and that you are building that into your plan. So again, it’s not relying on hope that you happen to sell something because when asked for it, you’ve got a plan of quarterly business reviews and you’ll sit down talking to people about that, and ultimately that’s going to be the initial things that we look at to move that forward.

Amazing advice. Thank you so much, Ben. So for those people listening or watching this right now, what is the best way to get in touch with you?

Well, just like we did there, Paul, we could have a call in real life or we could ask you those real questions and find out about your MSP. You are able to find that at mspmarketingedge.com/ben. And whether you’re a member of the MSP Marketing Edge or you’re not, we can have that conversation and find out what you’re doing with your MSP and what we’d recommend you do to push into that next level of growth.

A simple automated email sequence is one of the highest return marketing assets that your MSP can build… here’s how to get started. Also this week, how to get your whole team involved in marketing, and how to arrange a party for 3,000 MSPs.

Welcome to Episode 358 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge.

Most MSPs never use this, which even though it’s an oldie, is still completely valid in 2026. It’s an automated email sequence which warms up a prospect who has joined your CRM. And the beauty of it is that you set it up once and then you forget about it and it’s going to work for you for years and years to come. There are still far too many MSPs who connect with someone on LinkedIn or hand over a business card at a networking event or someone comes and downloads something from their website and that’s it. That person kind of disappears, maybe the MSP remembers them maybe they don’t, and actually they’re never contacted again.

Today, I want to fix that because a simple automated email sequence is one of the highest return marketing assets that your MSP can build. And as I say, once it’s set up, you don’t really have to do anything. Let’s talk about the one email sequence every MSP should have running. So we should start with looking at how people end up on your list in the first place and how if you don’t have a list, you should have a list.

Most MSPs underestimate the opportunity that having an email list presents.

So of course, LinkedIn connections are a massive source of leads because when you connect with a business owner or manager on LinkedIn, then not only do you have a connection on that platform, but you have the ability to then go and harvest other information about them. I’m a big fan of taking your connections on LinkedIn, finding their email address. There’s a number of different ways you can do that… you can either get it off LinkedIn or you can use a plugin like Lusher or something like that, or you can just go and Google it. There are only about seven or eight types of email address, paul@, paul.green@, pgreen@, p.green@, you get the idea, you go and brute force Google search those in speech marks and you will find that email address eventually.

So all those LinkedIn connections, you can go and find their email address and not enough MSPs are gathering email addresses and adding them into a CRM. Are you using a CRM? Do you have a basic one set up? Please go and do that quickly, it’s easy. Use MailerLite or MailChimp or if you’re in The Tech Tribe, you’ve already got one, it’s Growably, which is free as part of you’re the Tech Tribe membership. Go HighLevel is another popular one. Another one is ActiveCampaign. The ultimate one is HubSpot, but you will be paying them in kidneys every month. HubSpot’s really, really expensive. But the point is you can’t rely just on LinkedIn or gathering business cards. You’ve got to have a CRM where you are gathering people’s email addresses and you’ve got permission to email them.

By the way, if you do take all of those email addresses or just business cards or any emails you gather from anywhere, as long as you’re not doing this on mass and not just buying a bunch of data and shoving it in (that’s bad) but if you’re trickling in people you’ve met on LinkedIn or in real life, then what you do is you send them an email as soon as you put their email address in. You tell them what you’ve done, you say, “Hey, we just connected on LinkedIn, I hope you don’t mind but I found your email address and I’ve put it into my database. I’m going to send you one email a week about growing your business with technology. If you really don’t want that, there’s an unsubscribe button at the bottom.” And like 8 out of 10 people will not unsubscribe, but you’ve now cleaned that email address.

I realise the world’s anti-spam laws will not agree with me on this, but in theory you now have permission to email them. You’ve got to remember all of those anti-spam laws are not aimed at you and me, they’re aimed at the people that are spamming a million people a day, right? If you’re adding three or four people a week to your CRM, it’s not a bad thing, it really isn’t. That is not legal advice, by the way. So other places where you could find email addresses, we’ve mention LinkedIn, we’ve mentioned networking events, so people you’ve physically met. Event attendees, if you run a webinar or even just attend a local business event, whether you’ve got a stall or not, everyone who shows up could be a legitimate prospect that you could add to your list. Then you’ve got website inquiries. Anyone that’s ever filled in a form or got in touch via your website or a live chat or something like that.

In fact, you could go back, look in your Outlook and find everyone who’s ever emailed into you or ever filled in a form on your website, all of that data could go onto your CRM. Then you’ve got referrals from existing clients, anyone whose name gets mentioned in conversation but isn’t ready to talk yet. There’s lots of ways and places where you can get names. The point is every single one of these people who has had any form of contact with you, these are not cold people. These are your potential future clients, but only if you proactively market to them. And that’s what your email sequence does. So the first step is getting their email address, shoving them into a CRM, and then sending that email where you tell them what you’ve done and you are essentially asking them permission to stay in touch with them.

Now, even if you do that, in my experience, most MSPs do that and then do nothing else with those people. So here’s where you set up the thing that we’re talking about here in this bit. You set up an email sequence that goes out to them and it’s completely automated. And I’m going to tell you what exactly it is, what to put in it and how to set it up and keep it going for ages. So what this sequence is trying to do, well, let me tell you what this sequence is not trying to do – it’s not trying to sell. This is not an automated sequence of “buy, buy, buy, please come and buy from me”, because if you do buy, buy, buy, they’re just going to say “bye-bye”. We can’t do that. Managed services is a very long sales process. It takes a long time and people only buy when they’re ready to buy. So there’s no point bombarding them with emails asking them to buy from you because they’re not going to do that.

Instead, the goal is to build trust and you build that trust over a period of time. So the morning that that prospect wakes up and they are finally ready, willing, and able to consider switching IT support companies, your name is already in their head. In their heart they feel like they know you in some way, just because they’ve been connected to you on LinkedIn, maybe seen some of your LinkedIn stuff, maybe met you in real life, but importantly, they’ve opened a number of emails from you across the months or the years. So you’ve got to think about where people are when they very first land on your list in your CRM. Maybe some of them are actively looking for a new MSP. That’s going to be a very small number, most of them are not. They may be thinking of switching next year or they’ve just connected with another local business owner. So they might be vaguely interested, but they’re nowhere near ready to have a conversation.

So your automated email sequence needs to serve all of these people. For the ready ones, there should be a very easy, clear path for them to book a call with you, a discovery call. But for all of the rest of them, the ones who aren’t yet ready, your automated email sequence is going to build the relationship with them and keep you top of mind until they are ready to talk. I guess what I’m saying here is you’ve got to play a long game and the MSPs who play the long game consistently are the ones who very rarely have an empty pipeline.

What’s a good structure? How often should you send out an automated email? I believe one email a week for around about 8 weeks is perfect. And one email a week is the perfect cadence. It’s frequent enough to stay present and it’s not so frequent that people feel bombarded by you. 8 weeks, it’s roughly two months, it’s enough time to establish who you are, what you stand for, why you’re worth talking to, all of that, but without overstaying your welcome before they’ve decided whether they even want to stay on your email list or not. Now you can do less and of course you can do longer. I have friends who have 104 week email sequences, which is crazy, right? They send an email a week for two years, but they’re more in the kind of the internet marketing thing. I think for an MSP, 8 to 12 weeks is more than enough.

But what do you do then after that sequence ends? Well, it’s very simple. The prospect moves into your regular weekly broadcast list. And if you don’t have this, this is something that you should start doing. Every week you send out a new edutainment email. And this is a mix of education and entertainment. So you’re teaching them about tech in a way which is actually quite entertaining. And of course they don’t care about tech itself, they care about what tech can do for them. You talk about business growth and enhancing their business and growing their business with technology underpinning that. And most often the right way to do this is you just load a new email every week. This is what we do for our MSP Marketing Edge members. We give them an email every week. We actually give it to them once a month, but we give them an email that they can send every week to their prospects.

The idea is you do an automated sequence so everyone who joins your list gets the first 8 emails, the same 8 emails in a row. And that way you make sure you cover off all the things you want them to know about… we’ll talk about that in a second. But after that, when your sequence has ended, you drop them into your broadcast bucket and it’s just the email that you load every week. And that’s where you can talk about timely stuff and things that are happening and all of that kind of stuff. But the idea is that you continue building the relationship indefinitely, but you’re either doing it through a structured sequence that you’ve set up once or you’re doing it through that weekly broadcast bucket.

Now, the tone throughout all of your emails should be conversational, personal, useful. Think of it that you are writing to one person, even though potentially thousands of people may see this email over time. But I was taught this back in my radio days. I was a radio presenter from the mid ’90s to the mid ‘00s, and I was taught that when you’re sat in a studio talking into a microphone, you don’t think about the hundred thousand people who are listening, you think about one person. You picture that person in your mind and you just talk one-on-one. It’s what I’m doing now. I’m talking to you. Apparently lots of other people are listening to this podcast or watching it on YouTube, but I’m only talking right now to you, one person. So the less your emails feel like marketing and the more it feels like one person is writing to another person, the more effective they’re going to be.

What do you put in this email sequence? Well, there’s a number of things that you can do, but remember what we’re trying to do, we’re trying to build trust, we’re trying to build a relationship. So in your first email, you might do a warm human welcome. Well, let’s assume you’ve done that one that’s essentially asked permission for adding them to the list in the first place. The next email might be just about you, just a welcome of who you are, what you do, why you’re started an MSP. And it’s not a pitch. Don’t pitch slap them, just tell them your story, give them a shortened version of your story. Because if they’re a business owner like you, then they’re going to connect with your story because business owners love hearing other business owners’ stories. If you’re connecting with an IT director because you’re selling co-managed IT, an IT director is always interested in other IT people’s stories. You see how you can hit both of those things. You want to make them feel like they’ve met a real person and not subscribe to a newsletter.

Then the next email could be something genuinely useful. It might be a timeless piece of advice or an insight or a common mistake that you see businesses make with their IT, something that actually makes them think that’s helpful, and that should be something ideally that’s based on your experience. The next email might be a piece of social proof. So you might have a case study. In fact, we were talking in last week’s podcast about building a great case study. It could be a specific example of a problem that one of your clients have and how you solved it and what changed as a result. And remember to keep this human and specific and tell a really good story, take them on a journey.

And then the next email might address a common fear or frustration that your ideal prospect has. I mean, it could be cyber attacks, could be data loss, could be where the IT slows the business down rather than helping them get stuff done. Show them that you understand their world without making it a sales pitch. Side note, if you are building a vertical specific audience as well as a general audience, you might have two email sequences. And that email I was just talking about, in fact, actually the last couple of emails I was talking about, the case study and then that fear that you were just talking about, those should be specific to their vertical. So the smart thing to do is to have two sequences within your CRM, one that general business owners come into, and then you’ve got a vertical specific one where all of the examples are specific to that vertical. The content otherwise can be exactly the same in both of those sequences.

Right, side note over, back to the main structure, and we’re talking about the next email, and here you might share something slightly personal. So it might be a behind the scenes look at how you work. You could do a video of you and your team. You could introduce the team. You could just do a piece to camera and send them an embedded video about what you believe about IT support that other MSPs don’t. And this is almost like a likability email. It shows that you’re human and it shows the real people behind the business because that’s what people care about the most. Another email is another useful piece of content. You might send them out a checklist or a guide or a question that’s worth them asking their current IT provider… something practical they can actually use.

And then another email, what are we on now? We’re on probably about email 6, 7, 8, something like that. It might be a piece of forward looking insight. You might talk about what’s changing in IT. You might talk about what’s happening in cyber security right now, but don’t look at it from the channel point of view or from your point of view, look at it from their point of view. And this is about positioning you as a tech authority and someone worth listening to on an ongoing basis. And then the final email should be a gentle low pressure invitation, maybe saying to them, “If you’re at the point where you’re thinking about whether or not your current IT setup is really working for your business, then I’d love to have a quick conversation with you. There’s no pressure, there’s no pitch. Let’s just have a 15-minute call to see if there’s anything useful that we can explore together”, with a simple link to book.

You could just put that call to action just in that final email. There’s a couple of different ways of doing it. Me, I like a call to action in every single email. So that last email is just the call to action, but all of the other emails you’d perhaps just have a link at the bottom saying, “PS, if you ever want to talk about your business’s technology, here’s my live calendar.” And that link goes through to your page and a page on your website with your live calendar, simple as that, right? So there’s about 7, 8, 9 emails, something like that, that you could set up as your sequence. As I say, you set it up once, you do it once and you go and forget about it. I would advise every six months, you just go back and re-read those emails. That’s what I do. We have a 12 step email sequence. So if you get the wall planner, that in the next couple of minutes I’m going to offer to you, you go into my standard sequence. In fact, this will be a good way for you to see what I do in my sequence. I set those up a couple of years ago, but I have a recurring task that pops up every six months for me to just go and read them. And there’s always some tiny little thing that I can improve or something that’s gone out of date. So I highly recommend you do that on a regular basis.

I recommended earlier that after the email sequence has ended, you drop them into your weekly email list, your broadcast bucket, and these emails should be edutainment emails, so educational and entertaining at the same time, and you send one out every week to everyone on your list. It should be the same kind of content as the sequence. So it should be useful, human, there should be personal stories behind it, relevant industry insights, bits of social proof. And as I said, this is what we provide to our MSP Marketing Edge members for them to send out every week. In fact, we have a B2B version and a co-managed version as well. But the idea is that this is what keeps you in people’s minds in their awareness and in their consideration. So the day they wake up, they’re ready to buy, you are kind of there in their head and in their heart.

And just to set your expectations, it could take two or three years of them opening that before they’re ever ready to get in touch. And it might be that it’s not the email that’s the trigger, but the email is doing all of the hard work of building the relationship with them. And then it might be that someone from your office phones them and they say, “Do you know what? It’s really weird that you called because we’ve been meaning to call you guys. I’ve been thinking of talking to you for a while because we’re thinking of switching our IT provider,” which is really cool, right? Just to set your expectations, you’re not going to get everyone opening every email. In fact, if you get 20% of people opening an email, that’s really good. A 20% open rate is good. And also another reason you should send them weekly is you can assume that the average person is only going to open one in four of your emails. So if you email them every week, they will see one of your emails once a month. If you email them once a month, they’re only going to see an email from you two or three times a year, which is just not enough.

Most of your competitors have no email sequence at all, which means they’re letting warm prospects slip away every single day because there’s no follow-up happening. The email sequence does the automatic follow-up for you. So you should build the sequence once, switch it on, and then do your weekly broadcast email. This is one of the highest leverage things you can do for your marketing today. It runs while you’re asleep. It builds relationships while you’re doing tech work. And when a prospect is eventually ready to talk, you are going to be the MSP they already feel like they know.

Let me ask you an interesting question. If you asked every member of your team what their job is, they’d probably describe their role, right? They’d be the technician who answers the phone and fixes things or the third line tech who does the really difficult problems that just baffle other people, or they’d be the account manager who looks after the clients or the admin person who keeps things running. And what about marketing? I mean, maybe you’ve got a marketing person or maybe marketing is your job as the owner or the manager of the MSP.

Well, today, right now, I want to make the case that that mindset is potentially costing you growth and that actually getting your whole team involved in marketing doesn’t really mean asking your engineers to post on LinkedIn, but it does have a massive benefit as the whole of the business is thinking, “How do we win clients? How do we keep those clients? And how do we get them to buy more?” So I’m talking here about a mindset shift.

I believe that marketing is a whole business activity because everyone in your business wants to earn more money.

No one ever said no to a pay rise. And also everyone in your business wants to work for a successful growing company. Everyone wants job security. They want all of the perks that come from a healthy business. But the reality is that those things don’t happen without marketing and sales. And yet in most MSPs, marketing is seen as the owner’s problem and no one else’s concern. And that’s a disconnect and that’s worth addressing directly with your team and not in a heavy-handed way, but in a very straightforward way. Because the connection between the business growing and everyone’s quality of life improving, well, we know that those two things are there… you want more money, the business has got to grow first, right?

So if you can make that connection visible to your team, I believe that’s the first step in building a culture where everyone is involved in marketing and growth within the business. And as I say, this isn’t about turning technicians into writers or salespeople. You don’t want to ask introverts to post videos on LinkedIn because they won’t, they’ll complain about it for a few months and then they’ll leave. Instead, it’s about helping everyone to understand that they have a role to play in growing the business. They have a role to play in marketing, even if that role is small and passive.

Let’s start with awareness. And the simplest thing that you can do is update your team on what’s happening on a weekly basis with your marketing and sales, of course. I do this every week in my own business. We don’t do a team call, we don’t do those very often actually, probably because there’s so many of us now, but we do a written update or I do a written update every week in our project management tool. What happens is a colleague of mine, Sarah, she does all the hard work, thank you, Sarah. She goes and looks at all of our numbers, so how many new members we’ve won, what’s happening on our social channels, all of that stuff. And we have a whole bunch of numbers we track every week.

Sarah pulls those together, puts them into Claude, she turns them into a pretty report and she posts that. And then underneath I sort of update on our marketing initiatives. So what we’re running right now, what we’re testing, what’s working, what isn’t working, because trust me, there’s always something that isn’t working. In fact, if you don’t have marketing right now that isn’t working, it means that you’re not trying enough new marketing stuff. By the way, that report takes me 10 minutes to write because I have the same conversation with my SLT, my senior leadership team, and then off the back of that meeting, I just quickly type up some notes from it and share it with the whole team. And what this does is it creates a shared awareness, right? My whole team, and most of them aren’t involved in our own marketing, but my whole team knows what the business is trying to do commercially.

And every week they see that we are running all of these projects and trying these new initiatives. And what happens is then they start to see their own work through the lens of what’s most important to me as the owner and the leader of the business. So I talk all the time about growth projects and marketing and they start to notice things that are relevant to them in what they do. And this is the passive involvement, right? There’s nothing for them to actually do. I hope that they read the report or the guide. It’s not really a report, it’s just an update. I hope they read that and I believe that most of them do. And the idea is that it will just help them understand what we are doing as a business every single week.

Now, there is something that your team can do which you yourself might not be able to do so well, and that’s gather intelligence because your technicians and your account managers are in contact with your clients every single day, which means they’re hearing things that you never hear. They could potentially notice patterns that you wouldn’t see because you are a little bit further removed from the day-to-day tech, which in itself is not a bad thing because your job is to lead the business, but you do sometimes miss out on what’s happening at the edge of the business. So if there are two or three clients asking about the same thing, that is a marketing signal, right? If there’s a common frustration that keeps coming up, potentially that’s a content idea for your marketing. Or if there’s a compliance question that multiple clients are confused, then potentially that’s a webinar topic that you could put on.

The problem usually is that if your account manager or if your tech notices this, there’s no mechanism for them to submit that intelligence to you so it reaches whoever’s doing the marketing, whether that’s you or a marketing person. It gets lost in the noise of just day-to-day operations. So you’ve got to make it easy for your team to pass this on. And a simple channel in Teams, for example, a Teams thread or a section in your weekly huddle where anyone can just drop a note saying, “Do you know what? I noticed that three clients this week have asked about AI governance, I though that might be useful to mention.” That’s all you’ve got to do. I mean, the easy one there is the Teams channel, isn’t it? Where at any point, someone can just go and drop in what clients are asking about, and not in a way of saying, “Help me with this,” but in a, “I’ve noticed this.” In fact, maybe you’d even call it that, “I’ve noticed this.” And it’s really important they understand you’re not going to turn around and say to them, “That’s great.

Hey, could you do me a video about that? Or could you post on LinkedIn about that?” If they think you’re going to do that, they’re never going to give you ideas, but they should understand that all you’re asking them to do is to tell someone when they notice something, and most people will do that willingly.

Now, something else you could ask them to do is to help you spot opportunities to create reviews and testimonials. In fact, this is probably the single most impactful marketing activity that your tech team could do for you, and it fits completely naturally into what they’re already doing every day. So if you think when a technician closes a ticket or resolves a problem or has been on site and the client is happy, which is what happens like 9.9 times out of 10, right? That is the perfect moment to ask for a review because the client is at, if you like, peak satisfaction. There’s goodwill right there. But of course, most technicians won’t naturally do this, mainly because they haven’t been asked to and also because they don’t know how to. They might be slightly uncomfortable with it, but we can fix all of these things.

Give them a simple line they can say and get them to rehearse it. Something like, “Well, we’re really glad that we got that sorted out for you. Can I ask a favour, please? We’d really appreciate it. If you’ve got a couple of minutes to just leave us a Google review, it makes a huge difference to us.” And then they follow up with a direct link, either sent by a text or an email immediately afterwards. One of my MSP Marketing Edge members took this so seriously, he incentivised his technicians to do it. So he’s based here in the UK and he said to each technician, “I’ll give you £10 for every review you generate. And if a technician’s name is mentioned in the review, I’ll give that individual £10 pounds as well.”

So £10 in the group pot for every review that they generate, which makes them work together as a team. And if your name is mentioned, which encourages you to say, “could you mention my name in it”, then you get another £10 as well. Do you see how powerful that would be? And in fact, they collected over a hundred testimonials in just a couple of months. That is a marketing asset worth thousands and thousands, and it was built almost entirely by the technical team doing something that took them 30 seconds and everyone benefited. The client feels good leaving a Google review, you can grow your business faster with more Google reviews, and of course, your technicians get a bonus just for getting praise. That’s beautiful because everyone wants to see praise from the clients, and that praise is published in public.

Now, if you have a weekly huddle where you literally get together with your team, whether that’s in real life or whether it’s on Teams, that can be used as a marketing moment as well. Just use a few minutes of it to talk about marketing and sales. I do a written update because I don’t like group calls, I don’t like calls at all really if I’m honest, but if you like calls, do yours in that call. Record it, transcribe it, get an AI summary, and put that in Teams or wherever you do updates for people as well. Tell them what leads are in the pipeline, what marketing is running right now, what experiments you’re trying, what opportunities you’ve got that the team might be able to help with. And this keeps marketing visible and they see that it’s a priority for you every single day of the week and not something that’s a bit woo-woo and is happening invisibly in the background.

And it takes some time, but over time this will shift the culture and your people will start realising that marketing is a big part of what you are doing as a business. So you can see that I believe that marketing is not a department. In fact, if you are large enough to have marketing people, your marketing people should be working with all of your team on this. The worst thing any business can do is compartmentalise marketing into a tiny little job that someone is doing. In a small MSP, in fact, even a medium and large MSP, marketing is for the whole business. It’s a mindset thing. And the owner who builds that mindset into their team, even if it’s just in small passive ways, has a genuine competitive advantage over the MSP that’s trying to do it all by themselves.

You can start this this week. Tell your team what you’re working on commercially, ask them to let you know what they’re hearing from clients and script that review request for your technicians. Those three things alone could make a huge difference to your MSP’s marketing.

If you’re an MSP Marketing Edge member, did you know that at any point you can jump on a one-to-one call with a member of my team? In fact, we’re unique in the MSP marketing world for offering this at our price point, but it is a critical part of what we do because we know that marketing is hard. Sometimes it’s baffling for you. It’s completely the opposite of the tech world that you are comfortable with. And sometimes that means that you just need to sit down with someone just to go through things and figure out what needs to happen in what order. I mean, we have all of that. We’ve got every marketing task broken down step by step in our portal, but I understand that sometimes you just need one human talking to another human for 10 – 15 minutes just to get it really clear in your head exactly what you are doing. So go and book your one-to-one call. Go into the portal, go into support in the navigation, and inside there is the link to book a call.

And by the way, it is genuinely unlimited. You can have as many one-to-one calls as you need. There’s no cost at all. It’s completely included in your membership. And we deliberately put a whole bunch of my team’s time aside every week to talk directly to members. Now, if you’re not yet a member, there are two different memberships. We’ve got a B2B one, that’s for you to win more business owners as clients. And then we’ve got a co-managed one and that’s for you to win IT directors as clients. Each of those is only available to one MSP per area. So check if yours is available at mspmarketingedge.com/membership.

Featured guest: Christian Jaeger, MSP GLOBAL and CloudFest CEO, is passionate about technology and people who use and create it. As a friend and fan of the Cloud, Hosting, and MSP worlds, his sense of adventure and industry knowledge help him guide the MSP GLOBAL and CloudFest team as they create events that are as fun for attendees and partners as they are valuable to business goals.

Tell me this, have you ever been to a massive MSP event and looked around at how well organised it is and thought, I wonder what happens behind the scenes? How do you get thousands of MSPs to come to a single event? Well, my special guest today can answer exactly that because in four weeks time, he’s bringing 3,000 MSPs to his event in Barcelona.

Hi, I’m Christian Jaeger and I’m the CEO of MSP Global.

And I’m so excited to finally get you on the podcast, Christian. We are four weeks out from MSP Global 2026. I was there last year. I’m going to be there speaking again this year. And you are the man that makes it all happen. And today you’re going to pull back the curtain and tell us a little bit about what it’s like to organise such a big event. Now let’s set some context because obviously a lot of people listening are in the US or Canada and may not have gone to MSP Global, which of course is in Barcelona again this year. Give us an idea of the scale of the show, just how big this show is.

Yeah, thank you very much. And I see you are getting nervous already. So am I, I mean four weeks out, but we have a good team preparing. We are expecting around 3000 MSP representatives coming from pretty much all over the place. Last year we work on 65 different nations and there’s no sign why it should be less this time. We rent out a theme park near Barcelona in Spain. So in October it’s actually quite a good time to go there. And it’s a nice combination of getting to know what is actually happening in talks, but also meeting, I think we have around a little bit over 100 different vendors showing their recent products, but also we make sure that you guys have a good time doing so because I mean ultimately we are in a theme park and we make use of it.

Exactly. Yes, and you really do. I love theme parks, I’m an absolute adrenaline junkie for theme parks and my experience last year was, it’s a great combination of fun and working on your business. And what I want to dive into is the logistics of how you do this because I’m conscious that you guys do two big shows a year. And when do you start organising? So MSP Global last year was the same kind of dates wasn’t it, sort of back end of October. When do you start organising the next event?

Yeah, so I would say for an event of this scale, you need at least nine months to prepare it properly from an organisational point of view. Sales wise, you need even more. So the guys are now already selling the vision for 2027. So that’s even starting earlier, but you need nine months. I’m saying that with all the confidence because in 2022, which was basically the last year within Covid and we were launching our sister event, CloudFest at Arupa Park and we only got green light from the authorities to run it six weeks out. So we were of course in the backhand organising it, but we were a little bit shy, but I would say we had maybe three months, eight weeks, something like that. And you could notice it also, quite frankly, in the way we had to pull things together. So it is also possible, super crazy extreme, but to do it properly and think everything through, think about the content, the strategy, workflows, whom to invite, whom to speak, how to party, then I would say nine months is the very least.

That’s crazy to have done that within six weeks. I’m sure you don’t ever want that to happen ever again. But there’s so many things that you have to think about. And if I think last year, I flew into Barcelona, there was a shuttle bus, because the theme park’s an hour away from the airport. And then obviously there’s your team then greeting people. You’ve then got all of that accommodation. You’ve got, as you say, the theme park and there’s always a number of events happening in the theme park as well, which is fun. And then you’ve got, is it about 15, 20 different rooms that you are putting events on and different talks? You’ve got entire calendars, you have about 40 different speakers coming in. How many people at your end actually organise all of this?

You would be surprised. We are around 22 people that work on both of the conferences. Not all of them are full-time, some of them are part-time. But I’m saying that knowing that we also have a very strong team that is sitting behind us. For instance, the AV technical guys, we are working with them for 15, 20 years already. We are almost like an event tribe, like a big family pulling things off and that they also have their own ideas, how to improve the event, how they know what we are expecting from a show. So it’s very much needed.

We do events differently, we try to think about the entire customer journey. And that means the moment you disembark your aircraft.

I mean, I cannot have a host waiting for you at the gate, but as soon as I’m legally allowed to, there should be somebody waiting and guiding you towards the bus. And it’s not only a shuttle bus, it’s almost a transit system because we also had, I think 35 side events running in parallel that could be anything from a small dinner of maybe 20 people to a side gathering of 200 people. So it’s a lot to think through and luckily enough we have strong partners we are doing that with and an even better team who’s thinking about all the things that I constantly forget.

Yes, yes, absolutely. Because of course as the leader, even with a relatively small team, I mean 22 is a small team for the size of that event and to do it twice a year is crazy. As the CEO then, I guess you get there a few days or a week earlier, what’s your favourite part of the whole process and what’s your least favourite part?

Well, the most favourite one is actually the day prior to opening because by then hopefully we should be in a position like, okay, this is how we envisioned it and this is how it now looks. And when you have this feeling like, yeah, we’re ready now the only thing missing is the attendees. That’s a highly rewarding feeling. And then also the tension, usually my brother in crime, Soeren, who is our chief evangelist and curating all the agenda and the speakers, we usually open our events in the morning of the first day and right before going on stage and seeing people outside waiting. And I keep on saying we are really trying to build a community. So I am nervous when I get on stage. The guys sitting in the audience are nervous that it’s finally starting and there’s a little bit like almost a magic in the air, which I always find crazy and highly rewarding.

What I really hate though is the Thursday or Friday, depending on which event we are talking about, the next morning when we are deconstructing everything, you may have a little hangover from the party of the night before, but still you have quite a lot to do. So getting through that Friday or Thursday evening, that’s actually quite tough to be honest.

Yeah, I can imagine. I bet you have a short holiday straight after as well. That would be very much needed. Let’s talk about server throwing. So for those people who’ve not seen this, it’s really something to behold. Where did this idea even come from? Tell us what it is and tell us where the idea came from.

Yeah. So actually it was the Greeks that invented it. Discus is the old Greek word for server. No, of course it’s not. The Dutch started throwing servers in front of a data centre I think it was around 15 years ago, and they made a little side sport out of it. And we worked together at CloudFest, our other event with the Dutch Hosting Association. And one day I attended one of the events and they did the Serverwerpen, which is the Dutch word for server throwing. And I was so fascinated. It’s like human force against bare metal, such a stupid, beautiful sport. Just take that thing and throw it as far as you can. And we thought, okay, this is a niche sport here in the Netherlands, but it actually needs to become Olympic. It’s our biggest ambition.

We have now formed or in the process of forming a proper association, which is running now. This year we have five different tours around the world. And then the world championship being in March in Germany and in Spain during MSP Global at the end of October, we do the Spanish qualifier. So we expect around 40-ish female and male throwers. And basically, I think the record has been broken in Spain last year. It was around 14 metres. That should be something around 32-ish feet or so. So quite far. So yeah, we are really excited about it. And people come there in disguise. They have uniforms representing their country. It’s a little bit like maybe the Darts Ally Pally is probably the closest that comes to it.

Of course, there’s a few drinks involved and some sunshine. And the reason why we do it is we really want to make sure to take people out of their usual job routine. And most of the people I talk to, including myself, are rather introverted and it’s hard to start a conversation at a trade show because you have something to eat, you run around, maybe you have a drink and it’s really hard to get to know people. But sports is something that uniquely or unifies the people. It doesn’t really matter what your position is, you just like to see servers flying around. And this is why we do these kind of things because we want to facilitate ultimately networking as stupid as it sounds.

I love it. I kind of stumbled across it last year and I’m like, “What’s going on here?” And then that was an hour of my life gone just watching server throwing.

Yeah. I mean that’s my whole ambition. I want to become the president of that association and get it as big as FIFA. And the only main difference between FIFA and us would be that we officially take bribes. So let’s see where it takes us.

Okay, we heard that here first then, I love that. Christian, thank you so much for your time. I appreciate just four weeks out, you must have so much on your plate every day. So it’s October 21st and 22nd in Barcelona, mspglobal.com. I’m going to be there, as I say, I’m doing a talk, I’ve got it written down here, “How MSPs can use AI to build a content engine that earns trust before someone picks up the phone.” That’s my talk. And I’m also hosting one of the captain’s tables for you on escaping the commodity travel. And I’m just going to be there for two days. I know so many people that are going this year and I’m going to try and meet up with them and I’m sure there’ll be a little bit of beer and maybe some server throwing as well. Obviously tickets are completely free for MSPs. So tell us how to get the free ticket.

The idea is that if you’re on MSP, the attendance, including lunch, etc. it’s all included in that price and you can use the code PAULGREEN, if you enter that the ticket gets discounted to zero and you can attend for free. Of course if you are an MSP and you really want to mingle with a European or even international crowd and learn from other MSPs, from other sectors or form partnerships, that’s the place to go. And yeah, we would be pleased to host you. So in order to redeem your voucher, just go to mspglobal.com, click on the register now button and enter PAULGREEN as a code.

Case studies are the single most powerful piece of marketing in an MSP’s toolbelt, here’s how to get started. Also this week, is it ever a good idea to rebrand your MSP? And, you can’t grow your MSP until you’ve got solid leadership (even if it’s just you and a tech).

Welcome to Episode 357 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge.

If a prospect said to you right now, “Go on, send me a case study about your MSP,” what would you send them? Do you have just a simple paragraph on your website that’s actually a testimonial wrapped up as a case study that’s just a client logo and a quote saying, “Great service would recommend?” That’s not a case study.

A case study is a proper story that takes a prospect on a journey. When they’re reading it or watching it they’re feeling and thinking, “That’s exactly my situation. This is the IT support company that I should be talking to and hiring.” Well, today I want to show you how to write that second kind, because done properly, a case study is one of the most powerful sales tools your MSP will ever have.

Let’s start by looking at why most MSP case studies are useless. And most MSPs either don’t have case studies at all, or if they do have something it’s so vague and generic it could have been written by anyone about anyone. If yours looks something like this, “We helped a local business to improve their IT infrastructure and reduce downtime”, well, that tells the prospect nothing at all. And the problem you’ve got there is you’ve written that case study from your own perspective. It’s about what you did technically rather than looking at everything from the client’s perspective. And the client cares about the problem they had, how it felt when the solution came in, and what changed, what got better, what the results were.

A case study is not a description of services, and it’s not a boast of how clever you are technically. A good case study tells a story.

Stories only work when they make the person who’s reading it, or watching it if it’s a video, it only works if it makes them feel something. You think about every book that you’ve ever loved, every movie that you left the cinema thinking, “Oh, that was just amazing.” None of those started with a list of features of things they were going to do in the film. They started with a character that you could relate to, and that character was in a situation that you recognised and they’ve got a problem that made you feel something.

The best stories move us emotionally. And do you know what? Case studies work exactly the same way, which is kind of weird when you think about it because it’s only marketing. But when you’re talking to ordinary business owners and managers, even when you’re talking to IT directors for co-managed IT, you’re looking to move them emotionally. The MSP who can emotionally move the prospect is dramatically more likely to win that prospect.

Let’s first of all address a big problem that a lot of MSPs throw up to me, and that is the issue of confidentiality. “But Paul, what if I lay out all of the details about my client and bad actors out there can use those details to attack our client, to pretend to be us?” I get this, I understand it, and I think this is a unique thing within managed services within the channel. It is a real fear, but it is your fear and not your client’s fear. The most common reason that MSPs don’t have proper case studies is that they’re too worried about naming clients publicly and giving details that will be out there. The reality is that that worry almost always belongs to you and not the client. And most happy clients are not just doing case studies with you, they are doing them with lots of other suppliers as well. Most clients are genuinely proud to be associated with someone they trust, that’s you. And of course they’ll say yes if you ask them properly.

Your fear that naming the client reveals something about their security setup and makes them a target, it is kind of unfounded. I understand where it comes from and I know that sometimes these details are leveraged, but a case study doesn’t really reveal anything about your security architecture or your tech stack or anything about the details of what they are using. It just tells a business story. And if you look on their website, the kind of details that they’re revealing in a case study, they’re already putting all of that on their website, on their LinkedIn, in their other socials? A lot of businesses are already revealing a lot about themselves because actually people like to do business with people. They don’t like to do business with people that they don’t know who they are. So more and more these days, businesses and the people behind the businesses are putting themselves out there.

Anonymous case studies have almost zero value. If you are talking about a professional services firm and not naming them and saying who it is and what the business is and what they do, then that tells the prospect nothing that they can relate to. The power of a case study comes from specificity and recognition. It’s a prospect seeing a named business and a human at that business and they can relate to them. They can think that’s a business like mine, that’s another business owner or business manager like me. So please don’t be too scared of the security risk. Just obviously be very aware of what details you’re putting in there.

How do you get started with your case study? Well, you just go to your three happiest clients. You could do it today, you could do it this week. You say, “Hey, we’re just improving our marketing right now and we would love to write up the story of how we’ve helped your business and just share it on our website and in our marketing.” This is the question to ask, “How would you feel about that?” Don’t ask them directly, “Would you like to do this?” Because that’s a yes or a no. Just ask them, “How would you feel about that?” And if it is a “No way”, then you haven’t directly asked them. You haven’t got the embarrassment for them and for you of them saying no. Whereas someone that’s happy will absolutely go, “Yeah, I’d be really up for that.” And the reality is that most people, like 9 out of 10, when you ask them this, because of the relationship you’ve got with them, they’re going to say yes. If a client genuinely can’t be named for contractual reasons or whatever reasons, then focus your energy on the clients who can be named. Please don’t dilute your case studies with anonymous versions because as I said earlier, they just don’t work.

Let’s talk about the storytelling. And I’ve been talking a lot about feelings and emotions, and that’s really what we want in our storytelling because like with a movie or a book, we want to take the person who’s reading it or watching it, we want to take them on a journey. When you do a testimonial or a review, that’s a form of social proof as well, but it’s a short form opinion about the service that you have given to the client. So they tell a prospect what someone thinks, whereas a case study tells them what someone experienced and what someone feels. It’s all about the feelings and it’s a completely different and far more powerful version of social proof. And really the only stories that work are the ones that make us feel something, that move us, that take us on a journey. A prospect reading your case study needs to feel the same frustration that your client had with the problem. They need to feel the relief of you coming in with a solution. They need to feel the satisfaction of the outcome and it’s very much in that order. It’s got to be frustration, relief, and satisfaction. So if your case study doesn’t create that emotional response, it’s not really going to have any kind of power.

Now let’s get into the nuts and bolts of it, here’s a five part structure for your case study:

1) Context. Who is this client?

Don’t just give their name and their business and what they do, but paint a picture about them. How many staff have they got? What kind of worries and problems do they have day to day? Who’s running this business? What kind of business owner are they? The more context you give about your client without giving anything sensitive away, the more that the reader can connect to them. Context is everything. Relevance is everything. And you want the person watching the video or reading the story to feel like it is someone like them.

Now, this is really easy in verticals of course, because of course, if it’s a lawyer watching a case study about another lawyer, that’s really obvious that this is someone like me, but you can do that with just general business owners. Most business owners can relate to other business owners. If we see someone like us, then we recognise this is relevant to us. And if it’s relevant, we are open to being emotionally moved by it.

2) Talk about the problem.

What was going wrong before they started working with you? And be specific about this. What was the actual situation? But remember not to talk about it from a tech point of view. It’s from the client’s point of view. So it might be that they had slow response times from their previous MSP. It could be there was a breach scare, maybe a failed backup. Maybe their previous MSP just didn’t care or they’d got so big that this client was too small for them. The more specific you are about the problem, the more a prospect with the same problem will recognise, “Yes, I’ve got that same problem.”

3) Poke the pain.

And this is the most underused section, yet it’s really important emotionally. So don’t just describe the problem, I had a cut on my arm. Describe what it felt like. Poke that pain, poke the cut on the arm, describe the pain. Was the business owner laying awake at night worrying? Were the staff constantly complaining? Was the leader losing confidence in their MSP? Was there perhaps a specific moment where they though, “You know what? Something has got to change here.” This is where you poke the pain. And the more you poke, the more you make the emotional connection with the prospect who is reading or watching it. And the more they think, “That’s me,” the more they feel like you are the answer to their problems.

4) The solution. What did you actually do?

Do not deep dive into technical detail at this point. You’re writing for a business owner, even if you’re writing these case studies for IT directors, this is not the place to delve into technical stuff. Do not talk about solutions and tech stack and what you used. None of that matters. Focus on the experience, what you came in and did, what was the structured solution? How did you communicate? How did you demonstrate leadership? How was it calm? How did you prevent there from being any nasty surprises? How did that transition happen? What did you do that their previous MSP never did? That’s the kind of stuff that we’re talking about. So think overview of solutions, not the technical stuff of solutions.

5) The outcome. For that client, what is life like now?

And again, keep this human rather than technical. So don’t talk about uptime being improved by 23% because what does that really mean? But talk about how the owner or the leader never stays awake at night worrying about backups or security or anything like that. What if the team stopped complaining? What if now they all have an extra 90 minutes of work a day because everything has been sped up? Specific numbers are great if you have them, but emotional outcomes are much more powerful than specific numbers. People glaze over when they hear numbers, but when they see an owner, a person just like them sitting, looking at a camera saying, “Do you know what? Our business is growing at a rapid pace now and now the technology helps us to do that, it doesn’t stand in our way.” That’s what you want someone to say. That is the beautiful payoff of your case study. Go for that.

So let’s talk about formats. I’ve mentioned a couple of times about someone reading it or watching it. I would advise that you start all of your case studies as videos. Go hire a local videographer, that’s a hard word to say, videographer who can create these case studies for you. And ideally you want someone that used to be a journalist or has that kind of journalism training because the good journalism skills, and I’m an ex-journalist, I was a journalist for 10 years on the radio many, many years ago, but it’s given me a skillset to do things like the interviews we do in this podcast because I understand how to get to the crux of what someone else has got to say and then present that story to you who’s listening to this or watching it on YouTube.

Go find a local videographer who can interview your clients for you and pull out that story. And don’t be scared of giving them this podcast and saying, “What this guy said, that’s what we want. We want this five-step format, we want emotions, we want to take them on a journey.” And believe me, that is beautiful. Most videographers will be so excited about doing that because they want to tell stories as well. So start with a video and then once you’ve done that video, keep all of that raw footage, make sure all of that raw footage belongs to you, make sure they get lots of B-roll. B-roll is like cutaway footage, so you might have footage of someone’s hands or them at the side or something like that. Make sure all of that owns to you, but get your videographer to cut a case study probably around a couple of minutes, something like that. But all of that footage can be used for clips on social media or just to refresh that case study in the future.

Once you’ve done a case study video once, I mean, you can use that for five to seven years. You can just keep using it, you can keep refreshing it. But although don’t forget that the average prospect is going to see that once and once only. So even if in five years time, a prospect that saw it today, they see it again. It’s not like a movie they’ve sat and watched 50 times. I don’t remember the movies I watched a few years ago. Do you? I’ve got a vague idea, but I don’t remember the details. So you can do that once. And then once you’ve done that, you can then get a writer that you can find on Fiverr or Upwork or even just get AI to do it for you, get a transcript and turn that into a written case study. So it’s the same story, but you present it differently when you write up a case study.

That written case study goes on your website, actually also goes alongside the video on your website. You put that written case study in your proposals, you might even get it printed and send it out to people. You send it to prospects before sales meetings. You might send it as part of an impact box, but you put the videos in front of them, you put the written case studies in front of them. You can use both formats and give both formats to people as part of the sales process. Some people want to watch a video, some people want to read it, so give both of them. And if you can get three of these and you’ve got three case studies of different kinds of business owners on your website, that would be beautiful. A prospect watching three clients tell their story in their own words with genuine emotion is impossible to resist.

So a great case study is not just another piece of marketing material. It’s one of the most important marketing materials that you could ever put together. It’s a story about a real person whose situation a prospect recognises, whose problem they feel, and whose outcome they want for themselves. Get two or three of these case studies absolutely right, and they will do more selling for you than any brochure, any LinkedIn post, or any email you could ever send.

Let’s talk briefly about one of the most tempting, but also one of the most potentially expensive mistakes that an MSP owner can make, and that is rebranding. I don’t just mean refreshing your logo and the colours on your website. I mean actually changing your name, your logo, your whole identity. On the surface, it feels like a really smart thing to do, it feels like a fresh start, like a chance to fix all of the perceived problems that you think have been holding you back in the past. But in my experience, it almost never works that way. Sometimes it does, but most often it really doesn’t.

So let me briefly tell you why, in my opinion, it’s rarely ever a good idea to rebrand your MSP. Let’s talk about, first of all, what is and what isn’t a rebrand. So to me, a rebrand is a full overhaul of your entire identity, it’s almost like a regeneration. So the old name and the old identity dies. If you’ve ever watched Doctor Who, which is a really cool sci-fi show here in the UK, there’s a regeneration. That’s where one actor who plays Doctor Who turns into another actor, and that’s how they’ve kept the show going for like 60 years, although it’s kind of dead now, but let’s not talk about that. But that’s what they do every now and again, and it’s what you do when you rebrand. Your old identity explodes in a burst of flame and you become a brand new identity. You’ve got a new name, a new logo, a new website, a new visual language. Everything is new.

Now, this is a massive undertaking. Refreshing your logo and your website is a big enough deal, but when you start changing the name, I mean, it’s huge. It costs so much money, it takes up so much time, it’s almost a distraction. Let’s come back to that thought, the idea that it’s a distraction, because a marketing refresh is often a very good idea. Update your website, update your messaging, get a cleaner logo. It’s a lot of work, but it’s a good idea because you’re not substantially changing the name and the feeling of your business. It’s still you, it’s still got the same name, it’s got the same history. That’s something that you can and should do at some point. Every business hits a point where it needs to get professional with its identity and its branding. That’s an evolution, right?

A complete and total new brand is a revolution, not an evolution, and it carries a huge amount of risk.

When MSP owners say to me they’re thinking of rebranding, we’re going to change our name, what often they actually just need is a marketing refresh. And as I say, those two things are completely different. I learned about the dangers of rebranding and completely refreshing everything back when I worked in radio. I said to you earlier on that I used to be a journalist and I spent 10 years working in radio. I watched this pattern play out repeatedly. So you would get a struggling radio station. This is back in the mid ’90s up to the mid noughties, and you’d have this music station and just no one listened to them, right? And they would decide that the problem was their name. So they would spend this massive fortune on a rebrand. They’d get a new name, new logo, new jingles. The jingles are things like, “It’s Paul Green in the morning,” that kind of thing. I’m never going to sing again. Anyway, they do a new absolutely everything. They would spend a fortune and they would launch with this enormous fanfare.

In fact, the very first radio station that I worked at in 1996 in the town of Northampton in the middle of the United Kingdom, it did this not once, but it did it twice. It relaunched with a brand new name, a brand new identity. And do you know what? For about three years, the listeners kept calling it by the old name, which was really frustrating for all of us that worked there. So eventually they went back to the old name and they didn’t do that because the old name was better, but that was because they couldn’t persuade people. They’d listened to the first name for 10 years. And then when this new name came along, people just kept calling it by the first name. So eventually they realised they’d just got to go back to the old name, which is kind of bizarre. The two names were close, but it was a very weird thing because people just didn’t pick up the new name, even though they were hearing it every three minutes on the radio.

And the lesson that I took from that as a very young person at the very start of my career was that people’s mental associations with a brand name don’t change just because you change the name, right? The name of your business, if you’re MSP, is just a container. It’s just like a wrapper. But what’s in the container is your reputation, the experience that people have with you, the feelings that people associate with you. Those are the things that matter. Just like we were talking about with case studies, it’s all about people’s feelings. No one picks your MSP because you’ve got a sexy logo. They just don’t do that, but they pick you because of how they feel about you. And normally that’s about how they feel about the people that they’re talking to more than the logo of the business.

And yet rebranding feels attractive to us. When your business isn’t growing the way you want it to, it’s very natural to look around and look for big targets and think, “Do you know what? I’m going to make a big, big gesture here. I’m going to do something huge. I’m going to rebrand the whole business.” And it’s very easy to sit and look at your website and your logo and your brand and think, “Well, that’s our visible thing, that’s our tangible, visible thing out there.” If I change that and I spend a ton of money on that and we come up with a better name and a better logo and a cleaner look, then prospects are going to take us more seriously and the phone’s going to start ringing and we’re going to grow the business.

But I’m going to be honest with you, this is not always, but almost always wrong. And I believe it’s a distraction. That big six to nine month rebranding project is a distraction and it gets in the way of you doing things that actually do get prospects to call you. Prospects are not not calling you right now because of the name of the business. Like I was saying, it’s because you’re not doing enough outbound marketing or you don’t have big enough audiences or for whatever reason, they’re just not connecting with the humans behind the business. It’s good marketing that makes prospects call. You can have a really bad name for your MSP, and I’ve seen lots of MSPs with really bad names, but I’ve also seen a lot of MSPs with bad names who’ve got a substantial recurring revenue business, and that’s because of the good marketing they’ve done.

Having a new name with the same marketing approach pretty much produces the same results as before, but you’ve lost six to nine months and you’ve lost a ton of cash that you’ve paid to some design agency somewhere. The uncomfortable truth is we all think that our business name is far more important than real prospects and leads ever do. A prospect does not choose an MSP because of the name they choose based on trust and reputation and the people and whether or not you seem to understand their world. So unless your name is genuinely causing you a problem, and we will come onto that in a second, it’s almost certainly not the issue that you think it is.

Now, let’s talk about a situation that I’ve come across a few times, and this is often where the owner is desperate to change the name of the business because it is named after themselves or after something personal, but from 15 years ago. It’s called Dave’s IT Solutions or something that kind of made sense at the time, but now it’s doing a couple of million a year. It almost feels a little bit cringeworthy. And over time, as the business has grown and become more professional, the owner has almost developed a sense of embarrassment about the name. It doesn’t feel premium enough and it doesn’t feel like the business that they’ve become. But here’s the thing, as I said, the prospects don’t feel that embarrassment. It’s only you, if this is you in this situation, it’s only you feeling this embarrassment. Most prospects don’t think about the name.

Even if it is called something like Dave’s IT Solutions, which sounds like a guy in a van, if actually they can see that you’ve got an office and you’ve got 20 staff, that kind of immediately dissipates that. And in a way, they can actually see what the journey was. They can see that it was you in a van 15 years ago and now you’ve got 20 staff and as one business owner to another, that’s a pretty impressive story, right? That becomes part of the story that you communicate. And they’re not really thinking, “Is it just you in a van or is it 20 staff?” They’re thinking “This business, these people, can they help me? Can they solve my problem?” So when you’ve got that kind of embarrassment of the name, or maybe you called it after your ex-wife or your ex-husband or something like that, honestly, just forget about it. It’s an internal feeling, it’s not a marketing problem. And spending 50 grand to rebrand because of an old name that makes you feel a bit embarrassed, essentially to spending 50 grand to resolve an internal feeling, that is not a good return on investment.

The only exception to this is if the name is genuinely embarrassing in a way that would make someone wince. So if it sounds unprofessional or juvenile or something that 20 years ago was okay, but maybe it’s a word that the latest generation of teenagers has adopted and it now means something different. I’m not going to give an example because obviously I’m like 51, I don’t know what the generation today is saying, but you get the idea. If it’s a word that no longer means the same thing or it is embarrassing or something like that, of course, then you’ve got to change it, but that very rarely happens. That’s a very, very high bar and most names don’t come anywhere near that bar.

So let’s look finally at when rebranding is actually the right thing to do. And it is like a one in a hundred situation, but those situations do exist. And the clearest case for this is when your business has fundamentally changed direction. It might even be that you started as something else and you’re no longer in that market, you’re now an MSP. In fact, there is an example of this near me. I live in Milton Keynes in the UK and we are near a town called Bedford. And there’s a company there called Bedford Battery. They’ve been going like a hundred years. And in the old days, all they did was they supplied batteries for cars. They brought batteries around to garages and they gave you batteries for the cars to the mechanics. And now they are a motor factors company, so that means they carry all the parts. So you take your car to a mechanic, the mechanic needs a splonge. I don’t know anything about engines. He needs a splonge. He calls Bedford Battery and they bring out the splonge. So they don’t just do batteries, they do everything.

And actually their strap line, their company name is Bedford Batteries. We don’t just do batteries. Now you could argue that they should have changed their name years ago. Here’s the thing though, they’ve been around for a hundred years. They’ve got a hundred years of reputation. That mechanic’s dad’s dad’s dad was buying from Bedford Batteries. And I’m not a mechanic, but I’ve seen the vans around and I’m now telling you MSPs all over the world about Bedford Battery, right? That’s kind of crazy, but if they change their name to something generic and motor factory, it wouldn’t stand out as much as Bedford Battery do, right? So even when you no longer do what you set up as doing and the old business name sounds a bit weird, it doesn’t really matter. You might’ve built your reputation as a service specialist and it’s all in the cloud now, and you might have the word server in your MSP’s name, and you might think that everyone in the area thinks that, “Oh, they only do on-prem infrastructure”, but actually that’s very unlikely that they think that because ordinary people don’t think that way. But I do get it if you’re in that situation.

So definitely change it if it’s something rude or it’s changed. You can think about changing it if it doesn’t really reflect what you’re doing. But the general rule of thumb is if business is all right, if you’re doing well, and it’s not like people are saying to you, “Oh no, we didn’t want to talk to you because we thought you only did this,” it’s probably not worth the rebrand. The other trigger that changes the name or that makes it legitimate to change the name is when there’s some kind of merger and acquisition. So two businesses combining under one roof, and often they need a new identity. If it’s like an equal merger, it’s sometimes easier to have a new identity that represents both businesses, although sometimes the right answer is just to take the stronger brand and wrap the other company up into the stronger brand.

Again, you can overthink these kind of things. You really can. You haven’t got to worry about it. There is also, I guess, a case for geographic expansion. If you are like the Bedford Battery example, but Bedford and Milton Keynes are two towns like 10 miles apart, 15 miles apart, and Bedford Battery is all over here. They’re all over Milton Keynes, and that doesn’t hold them back. It’s not like anyone would think these days, “I’m not going to hire them because they’re 15 miles down the road.” So can you see how even with all of these kind of could be genuine examples, I’m thinking it’s not worth it. It’s not worth the five figure investment for the rebrand.

The case as far as I see it, the case for rebranding is almost never as strong as you think it is. So here’s what you should do instead if you’re unhappy with how your brand feels. In most instances where you’re unhappy, the case is to just go and invest in your marketing and get a rebrand done and that will make you feel better. So get your logo redesigned if you must, get your website redesigned that’s certainly worth spending money, work with a marketing agency to get stronger positioning, get a very clear USP, that’s a unique selling proposition, make sure your messaging is as compelling as it can be. These are the things that change how prospects perceive you and they work whether your name is Apex Technology Solutions or Dave’s IT.

So to summarise, I believe your name is almost certainly not the problem. It’s your marketing that is the problem. Before you spend a penny on rebranding, spend that money on better messaging, a better website, and more consistent marketing. And once you’ve got that right, you might feel that the name you’ve currently got will be perfectly adequate, because a great brand isn’t built in a designer’s studio. It’s built in the mind and the heart of every client and prospect who’s ever had a good experience with you.

If you’re an MSP Marketing Edge member, I want to make sure you know about something that a lot of members tell me is one of their favourite parts of the membership. Now, we only started it earlier this year, but already it’s become huge. It’s called Tactical Tuesdays. And every week on a Tuesday, we run a live session on a specific marketing topic. So we’ve done things like how an outbound caller can turn your leads into meetings. We’ve talked about building relationships on LinkedIn in 20 minutes a day. We’ve talked about the best lead magnet working right now in 2026. And also how to put 80% of your attention on something called your dream 100 prospects, like your hottest prospects. Also, how to break into a vertical as your marketing secret weapon.

Each session runs for a maximum of an hour, and it’s very focused on that subject matter, but it’s also very practical. The idea is it’s a discussion, not a presentation. So I go live from my studio here in the UK and we have a whole bunch of our members and sure, I’ve got some content to talk about stuff, but it becomes a discussion, which is really cool. And it’s about practical actions. The idea is it’s things that you can act on straight away, not just have to think about. So if you can’t make it live, every one is recorded and all of the recordings are right now inside the portal waiting for you. Go into the portal and go to the navigation, look for Tactical Tuesdays, you can see the details of the next live call and watch all of the recordings.

Now, if you’re not yet a member of the MSP Marketing Edge, we have two different memberships. We’ve got a B2B one, which is for winning more business owners as clients, and then we’ve got a co-managed one for winning IT directors. And each one is only open to one MSP per area. So check if yours is available at mspmarketingedge.com/membership.

Featured guest: Chris Farr is a technology executive, author, and leadership voice in the managed services space. With more than 20 years of IT experience and over a decade in leadership, he brings a practical, trenches-built perspective on operations, accountability, communication, and performance under pressure.

He is the author of Built In The Trenches, a book focused on real-world leadership, responsibility, discipline, and the lessons learned when decisions carry consequences.

If I was to ask you to rank the leadership skills within your MSP, on a scale of 1 to 10, what score would you give yourself? Or maybe your answer to that would be, “But Paul, I’ve only got one tech. I don’t need leadership skills.” But actually my special guest today would disagree with you on that. He believes you can’t grow your MSP until you’ve got solid leadership in place and you need that even if you only have a tiny number of staff.

I’m Chris Farr. I’m the vice president of operations at Invision Technologies and also the author of Built in the Trenches.

And it’s so cool having you here on the podcast, Chris. Thank you so much for joining us because of course you are there in the trenches yourself. You’re running an MSP. You were just telling me you’ve got three locations, so I’m sure there’s a lot of staff there that you are looking after. And any of us that start our own business or whether we’re running a business, we find ourselves in a position of leadership. We don’t really realise that when we start the business, but every business needs leadership because if there is of course a vacuum of leadership, someone else will come and fill that and not necessarily give the leadership that you want within your own business. So you’re there, as you say, in your own book, in the trenches doing it. That’s what I want to explore with you today, Chris. So tell us a little bit more about the MSP. So you’re vice president of operations, you’ve got three locations. How many humans are you looking after right now?

As far as technicians, we’re sitting around roughly 25 technicians as far as the flagship product, the managed service side of the house. And total, we’re sitting at about 65 employees total. We do different types of things other than just the MSP. We’ve got cabling, security systems, access control, etc. But as far as the technical side, around 25 currently across the three locations.

So there’s more than enough people there for there to be potentially a big headache every single day?

Oh yeah, every day.

And that’s something you learn, isn’t it, the more staff that you get. So I know you’ve been doing this for some time and that’s a business that’s in growth and that’s a lot of mouths to feed, a lot of heads to look after. What have you found to be the biggest challenges in looking after that many people and guiding them and leading them towards doing all the things the business needs to do to continue growing and doing its job properly?

Well, the biggest hurdle that you see, especially as you’re growing, is trying to get that company culture pushed across multiple locations and across multiple teams within the business. Just keep that common goal and to keep everything going and keep everybody on the same page. And finding the right way to communicate what that end goal is. Just because something’s decided at the leadership table in one location, trying to make sure that you get the right direct reports that are pushing that down to everybody that is even further into the trenches that’s out there physically doing the work that the clients need done for us. So the biggest thing was just trying to get that mission, get everyone on the same mission across multiple locations. It was much easier when it was just one location, when it was just a handful of people. It was easy just to kind of look across the hall or just walk into the bullpit or whatever the case is and get that message going.

But when you look around and go, okay, we’ve got a whole other location that isn’t necessarily in the mix of the headquarters where the decisions are being made. And so that was the biggest thing is trying to figure out how to do that. And every company’s different too. What would work for us may not necessarily work for another company. So you got to kind of figure out how the people that you’re working with need to be communicated with. What’s the best way to get that message? And so trying to get everybody’s quirk, so to speak, the way they need to be communicated with and pushing that across the page, that’s the biggest part of it. But at the end of the day, it’s also fun too. As you’re going and growing, you’re growing as a leader just as the company’s growing. So the bigger the company’s going, you’re learning more day to day also. So it’s a fun ride.

Yeah, I’m sure it is. And can I ask those other locations away from head office, were they through acquisition?

Yeah, both of those were through acquisition. And then of course, once the acquisition was done and we got that book of business, then of course the organic growth came behind that as well.

Yeah. But because they were through acquisition, you’ve actually got two problems there, haven’t you? You’ve got the fact that they’re not across the hall. You can’t just wander down and have a chat with them, but also when you’ve acquired something, you’ve acquired a completely different culture built by different people with different values, different mindsets, different goals. So tell us some of the practical things that you and your leadership team have done, because you’ve obviously got an efficient ship running there. So what are the actual things that you’ve done? Maybe perhaps tell us some things that you’ve tried that didn’t work and some things that you tried, which you would do again if you were in the same scenario again.

Well, especially going back to the acquisition side of it, some of the things that we would not do is that day one, the day one that you cut over and you’re now operating as this business, to not try to upset the apple cart as much as you really want to. When you really want to go in and that day one, you’re operating identically to the home office or the other offices that you’ve got. But what we learned through the very first one doing that way back when, was that you got to baby step that because not only are you dealing with different personalities and the employees that you’ve inherited, those clients are, they’re used to being treated and handled in possibly a different way than the way that you’re handling your clients. And even though you’re delivering 100% customer service, you’re over the top, there may be one or two things that they’ve come to experience that they like. And so you have to incorporate what they’re accustomed to into the way you’re doing business.

So spending time and seek first to understand from the employees and how they handle the interactions with their clients rather than just ripping the bandaid off and saying, “Well, this is how we do it. Here’s our procedures. This is how we’re going to follow it.” And so the way we’ve kind of moved through that going forward with other ones is kind of day one, you’ve already leading up to that, of course, you’ve gotten to know the people that you’re going to be working with, but that once you physically cut it over and they’re on your system and everything is running through all of your tools, it’s best to spend at least a week or so transitioning through that and just learning how they do. And again, incorporating what they’ve got that’s good into your business because they were successful for a reason. There’s a reason that you purchased them. So there’s obviously some good that you can take away from that.

So if you could take the good that they’re doing, incorporate it maybe into what you’re already doing and then through the course of that kind of pump down the company culture and the way we expect things to be done into that. So that way it’s more or less a two-way conversation, a two-way road. But the biggest part, like I was saying, just learning what they’re doing as a business operationally and it just makes things a lot more seamless because you go in with all of your processes, all of your procedures, and you know they’re tried and true. You know they work for you and they’ve worked for you for many years, but you just got to baby step that and just, like I said, seek first to understand.

Yeah. So I guess what you’re actually doing here, if I was to take a step back, is you’re building trust. So you’re suddenly working with a whole bunch of people that you never interviewed, that you never selected for the job. You bought the business that they work in, but now you’ve got to work with those people. So would it be correct to paraphrase is you’re just going through a process of building trust with them and trust with the clients that they look after, which just makes everyone’s lives easier going forward.

Right, exactly. The trust is the biggest part of it because they’re coming into an unknown too. When you’re purchasing a company like that, they’ve gotten to know you a little bit through the acquisition process possibly, depending on how that process went down. But yeah, they’re having to build trust too because they’re used to certain boundaries and certain things within the company that they’re currently working for. And then at the flip of a switch after midnight one night, they’re now working for a whole new company. And so there’s a lot of trust building on both sides. They’ve got to prove themselves too, to show that they can deliver at the level that they need to deliver at, but you also need to show them that you’ve got their back. You’re going to help them through this transition. And if you set that up and you get off on the right foot, then it’s a great relationship. And then that business or that particular location can then go and grow from there with a little bit of guidance.

Yeah, I love that. Now let’s bring this away from multiple locations back to a single location. So the vast majority of people who listen to this or watch this on YouTube are owner operators of their own MSP. And typically they’re growing or they’re looking for growth. And sometimes say there’s one or two staff, sometimes there’s 10, 20, 30 staff. In your experience, at what point do you start to hit a leadership problem or a point where the business is growing so much that you as the owner or as the owner operator are struggling to be the leader? Is it the point where you get past 10 people or where you’ve got people under you hiring people so you’re not involved in that kind of hiring process or is it something else?

I think the 10 people scenario is a good starter, but it really depends on the type of clients that you’re handling as well. It depends on the type of vertical that you’re in or the type of business that you’re doing the services for. Some are going to be more needy than others. And so that’s really, it kind of moves that sliding scale with, is it 10 people that you hit that limit? Is it five people? Is it 20 people? It really depends on a case by case basis, but I think as that owner operator is finding himself more working in the business as they’re growing and just bringing more business in and not working so much on the business, I think that’s when the transition really needs to take place.

That’s when you really need somebody who, not necessarily a COO at that time, but at least somebody as a lead, a team lead that can kind of be that liaison between the engineers that are out there doing the work and the owner operator. That way the owner operator is able to help kind of scale the business and keep their hands on the steering wheel of the business and make sure that it’s moving in the right direction rather than just being stagnant and just stale and kind of just treading water where they may be being successful in what they’re doing, but…

If they’re really wanting to grow, they have to step out of that mindset of working in the business and move more towards on the business.

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. And as you’re saying that, I’m thinking about the MSPs I know that over a number of years have grown quite considerably and in almost every single case, in fact, as I’m thinking of them, every single one I can think of, at some point there was an intentional decision that I can’t be the leader and the level three tech and the HR person and the guy/gal that cleans the toilets. And it is very much an intentional thing. And I think sometimes as business owners, we feel almost a little guilt that we’re stepping away. Here’s a client we’ve looked after for 10 years, they still call you on your cell on Sunday nights because their home printer’s not working, even though you’re so far away from that and that there is a certain level of guilt on that. And also guilt of feeling like you’re abandoning your staff in some respects. But actually those businesses grow and they become different and more robust and more mature businesses that are able to do different things, which is really interesting to watch. Obviously that’s not what everyone wants, but that’s what many people are definitely working towards. Chris, let’s talk about your book. So this was how you first came to my attention. You wrote a book which I think came out in April, which is called Built in the Trenches. So what’s the book about? I know it’s aimed at MSPs and it’s about leadership and a whole bunch of other things, but what’s the book about and what was it that inspired you to write it?

Well, the reason it came to be, I was constantly just writing down different things that had came to me over the years and people that I have learned from and different mentors just throughout my career. And what got me to put it in the book was we got to a size a while back where we had to put a middle management level in. We had to put those team leads in to kind of limit the direct reports that were reporting all the way to the top. But when we did that, we took the cream of the crop that were the engineers and they were the ones that were kind of quasi closet leading, so to speak, people on the team anyway. So it made sense to promote them into a leadership position and give them a little bit of authority. And they’re great technicians at the end of the day and they’re great people that can lead people and point people in the right direction, but that’s only one aspect of being a leader and being in management.

There’s things such as having tough conversations. There’s things you may have to say something to somebody and it’s not going to be what they want to hear, but they need to hear it anyway. And it kind of puts people in a bad position if they’re not properly trained on how to do that because they go from one day being peers with these individuals and then the next day these individuals are reporting to them. And so we got to looking around and there really wasn’t much training material that kind of fit the MSP world for the ones that were kind of up and coming into that. And so I said, well I’ve already got some of these things written down, just for my own purposes, just as I would think of them, just kind of put them on paper. And I said, it would be good if these were in a book and I wish that I had some of these little tidbits of knowledge at the time that I was originally getting promoted up to be a supervisor years ago. And so that’s where the book came to be.

I kind of did it with the mindset of the people that we had promoted up into those ranks. And then I said, well it may make sense just to kind put it out there on the market, see if anybody else could use it because if you take away one thing from it, it’s valuable. There’s plenty of books that I’ve read and it’s a thick book, but there’s two or three things in there that you take away, kind of stick with you. So that’s where it came from. I know there’s a ton of leadership books out there, but I said, Why not? I’ve been through the ranks, I’ve been in the trenches, I’ve been pretty much in multiple aspects of the IT industry, so why not try to put it in a book and see if it benefits somebody and hope that it does. And so it’s been great around here and it’s doing pretty well.

I’m glad I finally did it. It’s one of those things that I never thought I would do as far as writing a book, but it’s one thing you can check off the list. And when you do something that you normally wouldn’t do, it makes you a little bit stronger in different aspects too. So it makes you think in different ways. So it was a great process.

Yeah. In fact, one of my early mentors told me that the most robust way to learn something is to know you’ve got to teach it. And actually you’ve kind of done a version of that in order to solidify for you what you know, and I guess almost may have been a voyage of discovery for you of what you didn’t know, putting it into a book where you have to explore it and simplify it and make sure you’re communicating it clearly, it kind of helps you get your head clear on that. So fascinating. Chris, thank you so much for coming onto the show. So let’s just finish off. Tell us where can we get the book? Is it the usual channels, Amazon, or is it somewhere else? And for those people who’ve been listening to you or watching you on YouTube and think, “This is a guy I want to follow,” what’s the best way to get in touch with you? Which again, I’m guessing is just LinkedIn.

Yeah, LinkedIn is the best place to get in touch with me. There’s a lot of good content out there, so I mean, hit me up there. And the book, yeah, it’s available on Amazon where just about everything’s available. So yeah, that’s where to buy it.

A discovery call is the thing that turns a warm lead into a booked sales meeting – here’s a 6 part format for getting the most from them. Also this week, how to market your MSP during a quiet spell, and the secret to being recommended more by AI.

Welcome to Episode 356 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge.

The discovery call is the most underloved, most misunderstood part of the entire sales process for MSPs. Most owners treat it as an opportunity to tell the prospect about their services, but that’s not what it’s really for.

Done properly, a discovery call is the thing that turns a warm lead into booked sales meetings.

And right now I want to give you the exact format for running one that actually works, including the differences between a B2B call and a co-managed IT one. And I’ve broken this down into six easy parts to make it easy for you to understand, follow along, and of course implement.

Part 1: The mindset shift.

When we’re talking about a discovery call, we mean normally a video call and it’s normally the first quality contact with a new prospect. And the goal of the video call, the discovery call is not actually to sell anything. It’s actually to do two things. Number one is to qualify the prospect as someone that you really want to work with, someone that’s worth pursuing. And then secondly is to make them feel as though, “Ooh, this is interesting. These are the guys we should pursue.” So you know that you want to work with them and they are intrigued… they feel heard, they feel as though you could be the right people for them.

And the way that you do that is by zipping your mouth because the prospects should be talking like 80% of the time. You ask questions, but then you shut up and you listen really, really carefully and you just occasionally reflect back what you’ve heard, what they have said. Because the best sales don’t come from talking at someone the best or having the best pitch. They come from actually the best listening. So most MSP owners, they get on a discovery call and start talking about their services and their accreditations and their qualifications and their tech stack. And do you know that the prospect doesn’t really care about any of that stuff.

At the very beginning of the process, which is what this is, they just want to know if you can understand their world and if you can listen to them. And feeling heard is one of the most powerful psychological forces in all of human connection. When someone feels like you genuinely get them and get their situation and you understand their hopes and their fears and their wants and their needs, then you’re going to form some trust. In fact, they’re going to know you, they’re going to like you and they’re going to trust you. And when those three things are in place, they’re much more likely to give you a wad of cash and commit to you for a three-year contract. Beautiful, right?

Part 2: The ask – how long should you request for a discovery call?

This is where B2B and co-managed IT are slightly different. So in B2B, I believe you should ask the business owner for just 15 minutes on a discovery call. Why? Because it sounds like a tiny, tiny commitment. Most people are going to say yes to 15 minutes, whereas actually if you ask them for 30, that feels like a bigger chunk and certainly you don’t ask for an hour. So 15 minutes is absolutely perfect. Now in co-managed IT, you do ask for 30 minutes and that’s because IT directors, even though they’re super busy, super overstretched, they also have more complex situations to explain. And 15 minutes isn’t enough to have a peer-to-peer conversation about the real frustrations in their life. Because with business owners, it’s them as a normal person talking to you as an IT expert, whereas of course with an IT director with co-managed IT, it is a peer-to-peer conversation.

However, in both these cases, you block out an extra 15 to 20 minutes in your own diary after the call. You know how you go into Calendly or Microsoft Bookings or whatever you use and there’s a buffer, you can have it automatically protect some time after the call. Always do that because good discovery calls almost always run longer than the time that you asked for, and especially when the prospect is really engaged and you don’t want to be midway through a great conversation and you hit your limit, your 15 minutes and you have something else booked. I mean, they might, that’s the downside of that. But 9 times out of 10, that call will go on much longer than you asked for. But mentally, they’re only going to commit to 15 minutes as a business owner, 30 minutes as a co-managed IT director.

Part 3: The structure of a great discovery call.

I believe you should ask just three questions and then close. And by close, I mean you ask them for the next thing. So you should do a very brief warm introduction, 30 seconds no more. We’re talking literally your name, what you do in a sentence, if you like your elevator pitch. Maybe if you’re clear on your ICP (ideal client profile) and your USP (unique selling proposition), so that’s who you want to work with and why they would work with you, if you’re clear on those two things, you will have a one sentence elevator pitch so use that. And then give them a reminder of why you’re doing this call, what’s the purpose of this call. All of this should be done in literally like 30 to 60 seconds. You should rehearse this so you can talk off the top of your head in just 30 to 60 seconds without boring them and without taking the first five minutes of the call talking about yourself, because it’s not about you. So do that and then hand over to them immediately. And then I would ask them just three questions or variations of these three questions.

And the first question is this, “Tell me about your business.” And this of course is their favourite question, it’s their favourite subject. Everyone wants to talk about themselves and especially as a business owner, we want to talk about our business because it’s our baby. So let them talk. Listen out for useful information that you can use. You should listen for size, sector, how they use technology day to day, what their kind of vibe is right now. Are they frustrated? Are they frustrated with their business? Are they frustrated with their technology? Are they frustrated with their staff? Are they growing? Are they stressed? Are they coasting? Are they ambitious? Are they just looking to save money? What is the vibe from them? And you should take notes either on paper or use one of those little devices like a Plaud or a Pocket or something like that, because there’s nothing ruder than typing along and they can see you looking down and typing away while someone’s talking. So it’s much better for you to write some notes on a paper or just use that Plaud, that Pocket, whatever you use so you have a copy of what they’re saying, but you don’t really want them to see that the meeting’s being recorded.

I don’t know about you, but I hate it when I’m on a sales call with a vendor and they’re recording that call because it makes me just sort of hold myself back a little bit, I don’t know why, maybe it’s just me. I almost feel like I don’t want them to use what I say against me in the future. Whereas of course, if someone’s just recording it using a separate device that’s listening to the conversation, that’s fine. And that’s not being underhanded, you just don’t want to put them off and you don’t want them to see you typing. When they’re talking, don’t interrupt. Let them talk. Listen with your ears. Let them do all of the talking. If they want to keep talking and answering that question for 30 minutes, fine, that’s their choice to do that. And the chances are that if they are a talker and they talk and talk and talk, and I say this as a talker myself, the more they talk, the more comfortable they’re going to feel with you. That’s great. So that’s question one.

This is question two, “What’s prompted you to look at a new IT provider right now?” And obviously you should put that in your own words, but this is your most important question. The answer tells you everything about how serious they are and what they actually need. So are they frustrated with slow response times? Are they worried about their security? Perhaps they’ve read something or a friend has had a security incident. Has there been a specific incident within their business that’s kind of shaken them up a bit? Or are they just renewing a contract and they’re just shopping around? If the answer is vague, you can follow it up with exploratory questions like, “How long has that been going on and what kind of impact has that had on the business?”

These kind of follow-ups really find the emotional stakes for you, which is where the real buying motivation lives. Now, if someone gives you a short answer and goes quiet, don’t rush to fill that silence. You can actually let their quietness and the pause do the work. So if you ask someone an open question and they kind of say blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and then they go quiet and sometimes they’ll look over to one side. They’re thinking, right? Some people are thinkers. They’ll talk, they’ll think a bit, and then they’ll talk again. Me, I’m a rapid instant question answerer. I’ll fill 30 minutes thinking as I go along. In fact, my girlfriend said the difference between me and her is she thinks to talk and I talk to think, which I thought was really insightful of her. Obviously she thought a lot before she said that, but some people, they think don’t get in the way, don’t interrupt their thinking time. Let them think, let them give you more because they will give you a higher quality answer if you give them that space.

And then question three, and again, put this in your own words. “What would amazing IT support look like for you?” And some prospects will have very specific answers to this because they have thought it through in advance, whereas others will just say things like, “Well, I just want stuff to work. I don’t want any more complaints from my staff. I want us to grow without having to think about it.” All of those kind of things. And it doesn’t matter which of those or any other type of answer they give you, all of those answers are valuable. The specific answers you get tell you exactly what you must address in your proposal, but the vague answers tell you that this person is still going through the process of thinking about it and they haven’t nailed down yet what they want, which means you have an opportunity to shape that vision with them. Now, this question also plants a seed. It gets them imagining a better version of the situation that they are currently in, and they can imagine that where you are part of that solution. We want them to be thinking about you as the answer, don’t we?

Part 4: The co-managed version.

So those were for a B2B discovery call. For co-managed, question one is very similar, but you want to understand their internal IT team. So how many people, how it’s structured, how long they’ve been there, all of that kind of stuff. So ask them to tell you about their setup, their team. You’re more interested in the humans and the reporting structure and stuff like that than you are the tech stack at this stage.

Question two is what’s prompted you to look at external IT support alongside your internal team? So you want them to talk about strain signals. You want them to talk about capacity pressure or a specific incident, or maybe there’s a security requirement that they can’t meet. Or maybe there’s been a board conversation that’s made them think, “Do you know what? Our team hasn’t grown and yet the business is four times the size. They won’t let us hire extra people. We need some external help.” So you’re kind of exploring the strain. Strain is what sells co-managed IT.

And then question three becomes what would the ideal relationship between your internal team and an external partner look like? And again, this is crucial because it tells you whether or not they understand what co-managed is, whether or not they are open to the kind of arrangement where an external team like yours works with an internal team like theirs. And throughout a co-managed call, you want the IT director talking about their frustrations more than anything else because they rarely get to vent to a peer, someone who actually understands their world. So you can be that person.

Part 5: Go for the close.

And that is booking the next thing, the thing you want off the back of the discovery call. And I believe that next thing is proper sales meetings. So I genuinely believe that discovery calls are never, ever, ever the place to pitch or quote or run through your services in detail. They are a bonding call. It’s about opening up the prospect so that they connect to you and think, “I really hope these guys can be the people that we can work with.” So when that discovery call is naturally winding down coming to the end, you should say something like this. “Do you know what? This has been really, really useful. Thank you so much. And based on what you’ve told me, I think there’s definitely something worth exploring properly here. I’d love to set up a proper meeting where I can come and meet you and your senior team, see your setup and talk through what working together might look like. Would that be worth your time?” So you put that in your own words, but notice what you didn’t do there. You didn’t pitch, you didn’t quote, you didn’t talk prices, you didn’t run through your service tiers because all of that you do after the sales meeting at the appropriate stage. But if they say yes to an in real life meeting and like 9.4 people out of 10 will say yes, then you say that’s great and you send them a calendar invitation with a link for them to add that to their calendar. So that sales meeting is locked in, you send them a calendar invitation straight away and that’s locked into their calendar for you to go and visit them.

But here’s the thing, before that sales meeting, do send something else to them and send them something physical in the mail. I would send them a printed letter thanking them for a great video call and just confirming when you are coming to them and if there’s any prep that they need. For example, you might say, can you make sure that there’s a meeting room where we can talk privately, for example. You may also, if you have them, send them printed case studies, ideally from clients in a similar sector to them or of a similar size. Or if you don’t have those, just send a general case study. Better than a printed case study is a video case study which might be on your website or YouTube. In fact, you could send both. You could send a printed case study and then you could put on it, see a video version of this at your website.com/case study, something like that. And that physical piece of mail arriving before the meeting does something that no email ever can. It’s going to make you stand out, it’s going to make you memorable, it’s going to show that you are different than every other MSP that they are speaking to right now. And throughout this whole sales process, anything that you can do to stand out is really, really good.

Part 6: Talk less.

This is the one habit that changes everything. And I’ve mentioned it already, but it’s really important. And for someone like me, it’s really hard, but even I have learned this during a sales process. The thing is, talk less. Throughout this whole sales process, every time you feel the urge to explain something about your business, instead ask a question. The discovery call and even the sales call itself, the in real life sales call is not about you shining out. It’s about them feeling understood and heard. This is really important in the sales meeting. So the discovery call is not a mini sales presentation. It’s a conversation where your only job is to ask really good questions, but only a short number of them, listen properly and make the prospect feel like you genuinely understand their world. If you get that right in that first 15 minutes or 30 minutes, however long your meeting is, then the actual real life sales meeting and the chances of them becoming a client are almost guaranteed.

Every MSP hits a quiet spell at some point. The pipeline looks thin, the phone just isn’t ringing, and you get that slightly sick feeling inside that something’s not quite right. All business owners go through this, especially MSPs. And today I want to talk about what to do when that happens because the way you respond in those moments says everything about the kind of business that you’re working so hard to build and it’s going to determine how quickly you come out the other side.

So let’s talk about the mindset piece first. If you expect me to just give you a list of things that you can do, a bunch of ideas, I mean I can do that, but I don’t think that’s really going to help you. Because a quiet spell for your MSP is almost always a lagging indicator of work that hasn’t happened in the past, rather than an indicator of where you are right now.

The pipeline problem you have in your MSP today is a result of marketing that you didn’t do months ago.

And getting your head around that is really important because it stops you from making panicky short-term decisions that could actually make things worse. The worst thing that you can do in a quiet spell is panic. Panic leads to dramatic, expensive, ineffective things, actions that actually damage your positioning and your confidence. For example, when you panic and you’re like, “Oh, I haven’t got a pipeline. What do I do?” You might drop your prices, but you should never drop your prices ever, ever, ever, just to win work, right? You should never blast an email out to a cold email list because this never really works. You should never chase prospects in a way that signals that you’re desperate because believe me, prospects can smell desperation and it repels them. It pushes them away. The right response depends almost entirely on one question. Have you been doing consistent marketing for months and months or have you not?

If you have been doing consistent marketing and you hit a dip, well, it happens. It happens to me, it happens to everyone. Dips happen when you’re doing everything right because marketing is not a tap that you turn on and leads flow immediately. It is in some sectors, but it’s not for MSPs. Marketing is more like a garden, you plant seeds, you water, you talk to your plants and you wait for them to come up and give you a crop of new business. The answer if you are having a dip and you’re doing consistent marketing is not to change what you’re doing. Keep working on the garden. In fact, double down, speak more to the plants, give them more sunshine, give them more water, double down on what you know has worked. And it’s crazy how often I talk to MSPs who are using a specific marketing strategy or tactic and it has worked really well for them and then they’ve stopped using it and they never use it again.

The whole point of marketing is you have to run a series of experiments to find out what works for your specific business in your specific market. Does that make sense? So look at your existing database of prospects and leads. Who have you had good engagement with in the last six to 12 months, who’s gone quiet? These are the people who already know you, who’ve already shown interest. They’re the closest thing you’ve got right now to a warm lead. And this is one of those rare situations where just picking up the phone is actually completely the right answer. So not cold calling them, but warm calling your hottest prospects. Ring the people who’ve engaged with your content, who’ve replied to an email, who maybe downloaded something or attended a webinar in the past. Call them. It’s a brief personal low pressure connection call. “Hey, I was just thinking about you. I wanted to check in, see how things are going.” That’s it.

Similarly, direct mail to your warm prospect list or a personal direct message on LinkedIn to connections who’ve been engaging with your content or a slightly more personal version of your regular email. All of these are the right things to do if you’re doing consistent marketing and you’re just unfortunately having a dip right now. And then don’t overlook your existing clients. Pick up the phone, not to sell anything, just to check in with them. How’s business going? Is there anything that we could be doing for you right now? And at the end of the call, say something like, “Do you know one thing that really helps us grow is word of mouth. So if you ever meet another business owner who you think might be switching IT support, I’d really appreciate it if you just pass my name onto them. Would you be happy to do that?” And most happy clients will say yes immediately. They just need to be asked. Some of them will go and do that because it’s weird, they’ll be at a barbecue next weekend and they’ll get chatting to a new business owning friend who starts talking about their IT support.

So all of those things I just mentioned there, those aren’t long-term strategies. They don’t really scale, but they are legitimate emergency responses when you need to generate some momentum right now from your consistent marketing if you’re having that dip. And they work because they’re personal rather than broad. Does that make sense? It’s just taking the work you’ve already been doing and just doing a bit of extra work to those people you’ve been consistently marketing to. So that’s the easy part. The harder part is if you haven’t been doing consistent marketing. So if you kind of dip in and out of marketing, you’ve got an empty pipeline, as in there’s no real leads or prospects in your pipeline, there’s no database as such, you don’t have an email list, you haven’t built up your LinkedIn connections, you don’t have a bunch of engaged prospects, you don’t have a good audience that knows you and likes you and trusts you, then the quiet spell that you’re having is of course not bad luck. You haven’t done the work. And that’s not an attack or a criticism, it’s just an observation because a lot of MSPs are in this position. And what you’re suffering from is the natural consequence of not having in place a marketing system.

The only real answer in this situation is you’ve got to build a marketing system. I’m sorry, but there are no short term golden bullets that are just going to win you clients. The only way you can do that is start throwing money at Google Ads and hoping that you get a lot of people who’ve got broken technology clicking on the ad and calling you. But even then it’s going to cost you thousands just to get those calls coming in because that’s the case with Google Ads right now. Google Ads really good, getting you in front of someone who’s got an immediate urgent problem right now, but it might not be the right kind of work. It might be break fix work. It might not be the right kind of client and you are going to be paying thousands for that. So if the real answer is to build a marketing system, I know that the temptation in a panic is to look for a shortcut, a quick fix, a golden bullet, but I genuinely believe that those shortcuts just kind of put you back.

Unfortunately, the buying cycle in managed services is very, very long and very slow. No one wakes up on a Monday thinking, “Right, I’m going to switch IT provider” and switch on a Friday. That’s very, very rare. So the right mindset here is to accept there is no quick fix, there are no emergency actions, but what you have to do is you have to throw yourself into marketing as thoroughly as you can and do as much good solid marketing to build a marketing system for your MSP. And that means you’ll never be in this position again. Like I was talking about earlier, if you’re doing a lot of marketing stuff and you have a dip, you can start shaking the tree a bit more and working your audiences a bit more, but you have to get that marketing system in place first.

The marketing system that I recommend, which I’ve been recommending for 10 years to MSPs across the globe, and all of my MSP Marketing Edge services are based around this. It’s a 3 step strategy, six words, super simple, it’s this – build audiences, grow relationships, convert relationships. So build audiences is where you build up people to listen to you. So the two audiences most MSPs do is your LinkedIn connections and your email lists. Then you grow relationships, that’s about putting content in front of those people. So content on LinkedIn every day, not just posts, but a variety of content and you send out an email once a week. Those are the two basics that you do. There is a lot more that you can do. And then the third step of that strategy is convert relationships. That’s the shaking of the tree. That’s about phoning people who are in your audiences and just asking them where they’re at, getting intel from them, finding out who they’re with, when their contract is up, how comfortable they are right now with their IT support. And if you want more on that system that you want to build, if you go onto my website, mspmarketingedge.com/3step, there’s a video there, it’s about eight minutes long, and I talk you through that 3 step strategy in more detail.

I do believe that you have to have a long-term approach to your marketing. The MSPs I see that really struggle with their marketing are picking it up and putting it down. Pick it up, put it down. They do a campaign for a couple of weeks and then they stop and they don’t do something for three or four months. And that marketing does not work in managed services. In fact, it creates the illusion of activity, but it’s not actually generating results for you. So that reinforces the false belief that marketing doesn’t work for MSPs. The big picture is, marketing does work for MSPs. The MSPs who rarely have quiet spells are not lucky. They’re the ones who market consistently, even during the busy periods when they didn’t feel like they had the time to do the marketing. They keep it going 365 days of the year. And the irony of marketing your MSP is that the best time to do it is when you’re busy and don’t think that you need it. The worst time to start marketing is when you’re quiet and you’re desperate and you desperately need new revenue. So a full pipeline is not the reason to ease off your marketing. In fact, it’s proof that your marketing is working and it’s a signal to keep going.

So if you take one thing from what I was just talking about here, let it be this, your future sales pipeline is being built or not built right now by the marketing that you are doing or not doing right now. So the quiet spell you might be feeling today is basically an echo of things you did or didn’t do months and months ago. And future you is going to be very grateful to now you if you put in place that marketing system now and you start working on your pipeline and growing your pipeline today so that future you benefits from that. Sure, quiet spells are uncomfortable, but they also show you exactly what your marketing has or hasn’t been doing. I know you’re desperate for new revenue, but I promise you if you don’t panic, but make a decision about what kind of business you want to build and what you’re prepared to do to get there, the answer is always the same. Consistent long-term marketing. Start today, keep going, and I promise you long-term, the quieter spells will get shorter and they’ll get further apart every year.

Featured guest: Jimi Gibson is the author of UNINVISIBLE: Invisible Owners Create Invisible Companies and VP of Brand Communication at Thrive Internet Marketing Agency. A former professional magician with 25+ years on stage (including the MGM Grand and his own theater in Myrtle Beach), he now helps business owners become the recognisable, magnetic face of their brand.

He created the Business Visibility Index, a proprietary study of 400 companies measuring how owners show up in AI search. His work has appeared in Forbes and Entrepreneur, and he speaks regularly on TEDx and keynote stages.

If your MSP is looking for a vertical that ticks almost every box, then financial services might be the one… here’s why. Also this week, the “trust transfer” trick of borrowing credibility from people prospects already trust, and my guest built an MSP to $143m exit and understands why MSP founders get stuck.

Welcome to Episode 355 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge.

If you’re looking for a vertical that ticks almost every box – recurring revenue, long-term loyalty, genuine willingness to pay for good IT, and a compliance pressure that never goes away – then financial services might be the one.

Right now, I want to do a deep dive into winning wealth managers, independent financial advisors, mortgage brokers, and insurance brokers as clients for your MSP, because this is a sector that is genuinely crying out for MSPs who understand their world. Let me show you how to become one of them.

Let’s break this down into six easy parts…

Well it’s pretty simple really, it’s very stable, very profitable, long-term businesses. These kind of financial services clients don’t tend to disappear overnight, and they also have a very high dependency on technology. You think about it, everything they do involves data, communications and client records. So they are genuinely willing to pay for high quality IT because for them, the cost of getting it wrong is huge, just huge. It isn’t just that the technology is needed by them, it is absolutely mission critical. That ticks a big box for us.

But also, and this is huge as well, compliance pressure. For these people, we have no idea what the compliance pressure must be like for them because they have to operate under an increasingly complex and burdensome set of rules. There’s always new rules coming in. It’s very rare that someone comes in and says, “Let’s have fewer rules for financial services.” That just doesn’t happen. So the norm for them is all this compliance. And of course, a lot of the technology is there to make sure that they stay compliant. I’ve been digging around for some stats and I found that 96% of financial firms now allocate more than 5% of their total spending budget to IT and cyber security, and that’s going up. They take technology really, really seriously. And that means that once you’re in, you’re in. Because as we know, for an ordinary B2B company, switching an IT provider is highly disruptive for them. And for a regulated company, that’s just too much risk. You’ve got to be really bad to lose a financial services client or someone that’s related to that. So retention is very, very high in this sector.

On top of this, and this just keeps getting better and better, these people talk to each other. The IFAs, the mortgage brokers, the insurance brokers, they tend to operate in very tight networks, either because they’re all part of the same actual selling network or buying network or something like that, or just because they tend to hang out with each other. They meet each other at training and compliance sessions and stuff like that. So they are talking about the suppliers that they use. Once you are in with one and you do a good job, the good news is you’re likely to pick up other clients as well.

For these people that we want to reach, it’s almost always that the decision maker is the owner or the senior partner. And of course, there are influencers as well. In most B2B buying decisions, you’ve got a decision maker and an influencer. So you might have the CEO is the actual decision maker, but the operations manager might be an influencer. The operations manager will pretty much tell them who to pick, but the final decision comes down to the CEO. So you’ve got to appeal to both of those people.

For the decision maker, their primary fear is not an IT failure in the technical sense, it’s not that their laptops are down or their cloud access is gone for a few hours, they’re more interested and more fearful of what IT failure means for their regulatory standing. Because in financial services, if there’s a data breach or a compliance failure, this doesn’t just cost them lost time and a bit of money, it can actually cost them the whole business. They can lose their license or whatever their qualification is, their ability to do business, which is potentially the end of their career. And the business that they’ve spent decades building can be destroyed by that. So that’s a completely different level of stakes, isn’t it?

If you think about working with a manufacturer or a printer or a veterinarian or a CPA, and if they lose access for three or four hours and lose a bit of data, that’s really annoying. And obviously it’s damaging to the business, but most of the times it couldn’t kill the business. Whereas for a financial services business, it could genuinely be the end for them. So this is really important to bear in mind because the financial services buyer is not evaluating you on your technical capability. They are evaluating you not with their brain, they’re evaluating you with their heart on how much they trust you with something that could end their professional life if it goes wrong. This is a massive thing to understand. The currency here in winning financial services clients is trust. And the currency of trust is bigger for this sector than almost any other sector you can work with.

They’re also very, very aware of third party risk because regulators across the world now are explicitly holding financial firms responsible for the security provided by you, by their IT providers. So if your MSP has a breach which cascades into their business, and I know we’re entering the nightmare territory here, but if that happens, then often they carry the regulatory consequence of that. And that’s the weight that they’re bringing into every interaction, every conversation with you. And of course you need to address this upfront. So if they’re scared that a breach that you have could affect them, that’s part of the sales conversation. You talk about all of the safety protocols that you’ve put in place. In fact, that’s a conversation you wouldn’t have with an ordinary business owner, but you would have with the owner of a financial services firm.

I’m not going to go into territory specific stuff. We have listeners and viewers to this podcast in almost every major English-speaking country around the world. So we’re not going to talk about territory-specific laws because we’d be here for four hours and we’d all die of boredom. But every financial services firm, regardless of which country they’re in, they operate under regulatory frameworks that require them to demonstrate that their technology is secure, that it’s auditable, and it’s highly resilient. And of course this is, as I say, it’s getting tighter and tighter. There’s more laws coming in, not fewer laws. There’s more documentation, more evidence, they’ve got shorter and shorter breach notification windows. So this is massive.

In fact, financial services experienced a 65% ransomware hit rate in the latest stats that I could find, which are from two years ago, 2024. And that 65% was the highest level ever recorded. And the financial services decision makers, they know about this, they read about it. I would say they have a higher level of awareness than the average business owner that you speak to. And the average data breach cost in financial services is now over five and a half million dollars, which is second only to healthcare. Again, caveat, it’s a stat I found online. There are lots of different stats online. It’s always very difficult to actually find the evidence for these stats. But if we go with that and we just say that these people have really big consequences, they’ve got really big awareness, all of this makes them very different when you are actually selling to them.

Let me give you one other really important stat for your marketing. 42% of financial services decision makers say that staying current with all of the evolving complex compliance requirements is actually their biggest challenge. And 36% of them, so a third say that they don’t have the internal expertise to keep pace. Let’s go back and look at that again. So coming up to half of them saying that staying current with compliance is a huge challenge, and a third of them say they don’t have the internal expertise to keep pace. Well, that’s an opportunity, isn’t it? That’s an opportunity for you to keep pace of what’s happening in their marketplace, particularly how technology can help them stay up to date with compliance. That’s huge, and it’s a gap. And whenever we see a gap between what’s required and what your client can actually manage internally and that there’s a gap in between the two, that’s an opportunity for your MSP to make money.

Well, because they’re a little bit different and they’re more aware, going in with the usual message of, “We give you proactive IT support”, that’s going to mean nothing to them at all. And they still don’t want to see a list of your certifications or your qualifications or your accreditations because they don’t know what those mean and they don’t care. But what they need, both in the noggin and in the heart, is they need to hear that you understand the environment that they operate in. So what they need to hear and understand both in the noggin and also in the heart is that you understand the regulatory environment that they are operating in.

You do need to know what regulations affect them and particularly the ones that affect their compliance needs in technology. They’re going to need to hear that you have experience with firms like theirs, which is great if you’re already working with one, but if you’re not, at the very least, you need to be able to quote their own regulations back to them. That’s really important because they need to hear that you can help them to demonstrate compliance and not just implement security. In fact, effectively, when you’re working with a financial services firm, it’s a greater burden for you. There’s all of the usual cyber security stuff, and then there’s meeting their regulations. But the payoff for that is that you get very good, well-paying clients who spend a lot and they’ll stick with you forever and ever and ever.

And by the way, that word demonstrate is really, really important because many financial firms have reasonable security in place, but perhaps they don’t have the audit trail. And increasingly their auditors want written policies and risk assessments and access reviews and incident response test records and all of that kind of stuff. So a big part of what you’re going to be doing with them is not just the security and the compliance, it’s also the documentation. So actually in doing that, again, you’re ticking a box. You’re solving a different and actually more valuable problem than just if you like, keeping the IT lights on for them.

Well, our old friend LinkedIn is your primary tool here. The owner of a small independent financial advisor or insurance brokerage is almost 100% definitely on LinkedIn, either proactively using it themselves to win clients or passively just keeping in touch with their clients and just being there because almost everyone in business is on LinkedIn these days. So you should build audiences of them on LinkedIn. It doesn’t matter if they only look at it once a month, it’s still a place that you can reach them. And then of course you should publish content on a regular basis, ideally at least once every single day. One piece of content every 24 hours works well in LinkedIn.

Would you have a separate LinkedIn just for financial services? I think you would if you were going for it as a mega sector. If it was going to be a huge vertical for you, it’d be worth having a second LinkedIn. If not, then you would just build up your audience of financial people alongside your general business owner audience. But obviously the downside of doing that is it’s very hard to put the right content in front of them. When you’ve got a specific audience of financial services people, you can put content in front of them that really talks to them, that seems relevant to them.

The kind of stuff I mean is plain English explanations of what regulations are changing and what it means for their business. And you can go and get those from their sort of blogs and news websites and interpret them using your AI friend and then write about those on LinkedIn and how that affects what they’re doing with technology. You could write specific stories about independent financial advisors that have had close calls with breaches or audits or anything like that. And again, you can just take case studies that are out there and rewrite them to be relevant to your marketplace. You’ve got to help them understand that gap between where they are and where they need to be.

Now, I would advise not leading with technology. So often when you’re talking to ordinary business owners and you’re creating content for them, you lead with how they can use technology to grow their business and have less hassle and stress. But with these financial people, I suggest that you lead with compliance. Compliance risk and client trust, because that’s their world. 99% of their head, apart from how do they sell more stuff, is compliance risk and client trust. That is huge for them. So something else that works very well in this sector is the referral network. I was saying earlier that IFAs talk to other IFAs. They often talk to other related people like CPAs or accountants, they’ll work alongside IFAs. IFA’s insurance brokers will work with each other as well because they’re dealing with the same clients, but they don’t sell the same things. So if you can get in with some insurance brokers, they may introduce you with financial people and vice versa.

There are also places like local financial services networking events, you’ve got professional association meetings. All of these things are worth attending if you can go in as an outsider. And often they’ll have people in to do talks or maybe even sell stands or something like that. They’re always looking for ways to subsidise these meetings. You might be able to sponsor the event, which basically means you pay a few hundred pounds or dollars and you are paying for their lunch or their snacks or their canapés, but it gives you an opportunity to go. And don’t just put a banner up and not talk to anyone, the whole point of that and the beauty of that is talking to the humans that are there because that’s where buyers gather. Their guard is down, they’re relaxed, they’re talking to their peers and actually being able to have a good conversation with someone like you who can talk about regulations and compliance, that’s absolutely massive.

Some other things you could do, you could also consider creating a one-page guide specifically for financial services firms. It could be just something simple like five questions that your financial services firm should be asking its IT provider. And again, have a compliance emphasis on that. And you could use that on LinkedIn as a content piece, you could send it out on direct mail, you could even use it as an email outreach tool to just send it to people on email or in direct mail and just say, “If you’re ready to switch IT providers to someone that understands your world and the compliance burdens you have to live with, then we are ready to have a conversation.”

Based on everything we’ve just been talking about, you might be surprised to hear I suggest you start by talking about compliance and not their technology. So ask them what their last audit looked like, what their regulator expects of them, what their data security rules are, whether they’ve documented all of their things, their incident response process and all of the other things. And most of the small financial services firm have, well, some of them have done it properly, but many of them haven’t. They’ve done a lot of it, but they haven’t done all of it. And what you want is you want them to sweat. As you are asking them about all of these things, which they know they’ve got to do, they’ve either got to do now or they’ve got to do very soon because the rules and regulations are changing, you want them to feel that kind of back sweat.

And we’re not manipulating people here, we’re trying to make them realise that they have a problem and you have the answer. That’s great sales, that’s the gap we’ve just been talking about. And you’re not going to get them having that back sweat by talking about servers and software and the cloud. They don’t care about that stuff. You’ve got to talk about their professional risk, and their professional risk sits in compliance and regulations and the trust they have with their clients. And if you start the conversation that way, the conversation moving to technology and IT support, what you do becomes the solution to their problems rather than the sales pitch. And that is a very beautiful way to talk to a decision maker.

So look, financial services is one of those verticals where the compliance pressure does most of the selling for you so long as you’re speaking the right language and saying the right words. Stop talking about your technology. Start talking about regulatory risk, how they need to keep and maintain their client trust and what happens if something goes wrong. And if you get that right, you’ll find that financial services people are some of the most loyal, profitable, and the most referral active clients that you’ll ever have.

One of the most underused concepts in marketing is something we call trust transfer. And the idea is very simple. Instead of spending months or years building trust with a cold prospect from scratch, you borrow credibility from someone they already trust. Today, I want to walk you through all the different ways you can do this because some of them are so much easier than you think, and almost nobody in the channel is doing them consistently.

Let’s start by talking about why trust transfer matters. As I said, building trust from scratch with a cold prospect, it takes so much work, right? It’s months and months of consistent content, repeated touch points, and having a high level of patience. But if someone a prospect already trusts, says, “Hey, you should really talk to these people,” then that journey just compresses dramatically because the prospect arrives warmed up. They’re not evaluating you as a stranger, they’re meeting someone who comes recommended by a person whose judgement they already respect. I mean, if you think about the most obvious trust transfer, which is a referral, when someone contacts you and says, “My friend is your client and they suggested I talk to you,” that’s your client to lose. And what I mean is that you are at the top of their buying list, and the only reason you won’t win that client is if you screw up the sales process in some way. But that is the ultimate trust transfer. It’s the ultimate one because they’re coming in ready to buy. But there are other trust transfers as well, and every trust transfer mechanism works on the same principle. You are attaching your credibility to someone else’s existing credibility. So let me give you some other ways of doing it.

The first is building on referrals and it’s actually having referral partners. So as I say, they’re the most powerful form of trust transfer, the most durable when they’ve done well. And you can’t just rely on referrals from your existing clients because that’s a finite pot, but you can build a series of referral partners. So the key is to find other businesses whose clients are the same as yours, but whose services don’t compete with you, and where there’s a natural reciprocal flow. So for example, marketing agencies, web design agencies. They are always asked by clients to sort out their email hosting because they’re hosting their website, but they’re not hosting their email. And do you know what? Web agencies hate doing email, but you don’t mind doing email hosting and sorting out the email first, but you probably don’t host websites or you certainly don’t design websites. So can you see the crossover there? If a client of theirs says to them, “Hey, can you help sort out our email? It’s a mess.” They can refer that to you. And when one of your clients says, “You guys do computer stuff, could you build us a new website?” and you don’t want to do that, you can refer that to the web agency. So that’s a nice two-way flow.

That works with marketing agencies, you can do that with business coaches as well, you can sometimes do that with business brokers, people who are buying or selling businesses. You can do it with shared office spaces, you could maybe do it with serviced office providers because their tenants need IT support. Commercial insurance brokers, especially if you’re in that sector like we were talking about earlier, because they’re already talking to their clients about risk. You could maybe do it with CPAs/accountants as well, although it kind of depends on the attitude of the CPA. But the golden rule with this is that you approach every potential referral partner from their perspective and never from your perspective. What do they get from this? If you put a partnership together, how does it make their life or their service easier? And the relationship has to work for both sides or it will not last.

And one final thought on this, it is more of a personal relationship than a formal arrangement, right? You’re not signing a contract to send clients to each other. You’re building a friendship with someone who happens to have the right kind of people. And when I say friendship, you might literally become friends. If you’ve got two or three referral partners in your network, you’ve got a web agency, you’ve got a CPA, you’ve got an insurance broker, you might actually meet up, you might have your own little group that meets once a quarter just to talk, have a beer, just swap stories because you’re all business owners together. And guess what? You will send each other more referrals as well because you’re all dealing with the same kind of clients, but you’re not in competition with each other.

Another mechanism, and that is guest appearances on other people’s content, such as podcasts. So every podcast has a built-in audience that already trusts the host. I’ve been doing this since November 2019. We have a pretty loyal audience, I know because we get lots of feedback, but we also know that we’re growing this podcast over time, so that’s new people coming in all the time. And we’re reaching MSPs literally all over the world. So when a host of any podcast, especially if it’s been going a year or more, when they invite you on as a guest, some of that trust transfers to you instantly. “Oh, we’ve got a guest coming up later. We’ve got a fantastic guest today”. We are constantly being pitched to, I must get four or five guest pitches a day that arrive on email, and that’s because guests see the longevity of our podcast, they see the growth in it, and they see that if they come on this podcast it’s trust transfer from me to them. That makes sense, right?

You want a bit of that in your market. You want to be endorsed by association by the podcast that you are on. So the right podcast to target are not podcasts like mine, they’re not IT podcasts, they are business podcasts listened to by the kind of business owners that you want to reach. Now, you may have some of these happening in your local area. And when I say podcasts, that could be YouTube videos as well. YouTube is pretty much podcasting these days. In fact, a lot of podcast consumption happens on YouTube. So there might be someone in your area who’s making regular YouTube videos about business in the local area, or they might be doing something podcast specific. Some areas are bigger for this than others, but it doesn’t have to be your local area. It could be, let’s say you’re trying to reach the financial services people we were talking about earlier, and it could be that there are podcasts for them. And that might be one that’s in their specific wider area, or it could just be a sector specific, a vertical specific one. So you could go and get yourself on those sector specific podcasts.

There might be just general ones about entrepreneurship or growth podcasts. And do you know what? Pitching yourself as a guest is a lot easier than people think because as much as I’m at a stage now where I can be very picky with my guests because I get a lot of people pitching me, that’s not the case in the early days. The first two or three years of this podcast, we often got to the point where we’d run out of guests and I was really shaking my tree on LinkedIn to try and find interesting guests. And if you can put together a number of really interesting subjects like how to protect your business from cyber threats without needing to understand IT or a whole series of other things, and if you’re going into a vertical specific podcast, talking to them about things that are genuinely of interest to that vertical, you will find that all it takes is a series of emails for one of those podcasts to say, “Yes, we’d love to get you on.” And you only need one good podcast appearance, that can reach a lot of ideal prospects, but it also makes it easier for you to then get on other podcasts. Sometimes podcast hosts don’t want to be the first person to book a new guest. But actually, I mean, I evaluate guests by what they’ve got to say, but some podcasts will, if you’ve been on three or four other podcasts, then they definitely want to talk to you.

Next mechanism is being quoted or featured in your local media or in trade publications. Now, when a journalist talks about you or quotes you, again, they’re implicitly endorsing you as an expert worth listening to. So we’re talking here about the local business press or just the local general press, radio, regional newspapers, trade magazines of your chosen vertical. Even though the old-fashioned media has tiny audiences these days, they still carry massive credibility with their readership. In fact, it’s kind of ironic, those kind of blogs and podcasts, they might have a greater reach, but they have lower levels of credibility. Something that’s not professional. I mean, this is me in my home studio, right? Just talking to you. We have a pretty good reach on this, but we probably have a lower credibility than CRN Magazine, of which there’s one in the UK, there’s one in the US, and they obviously have a good website as well, each of those. And that’s because that’s a professional publication with professional journalists working for them, and it’s been going for years and years and years. So I’m sure it has a bigger audience than me, but you get the idea that has a higher level of credibility, and that will be happening in your marketplace and in your verticals as well. So use that credibility.

And again, getting quoted by journalists and being featured in stories is so much easier than people assume. I was a journalist for the first 13 years of my career, from the age of 19 to about 31. And I know that journalists, even from back then in the ’90s and ’00s, it was no different then than how it is today. Journalists are always looking for expert sources, especially technology and cyber security stories. So you could just do something simple like set up a Google alert for cyber security or technology stories in your local area, or you could get an AI briefing to happen every morning, just giving you an opportunity to reach out to journalists with a brief and offer useful comment when there’s something in the news. That’s the easiest way to start a relationship with a journalist. Something security related is in the news, they’re clearly going to write about it, but they need a different spin, you could be that different spin. And just like appearing on one podcast leads to other podcasts, being quoted once tends to lead to being quoted again. Journalists return to sources that they trust again and again.

Another mechanism is speaking at events. When you’re standing on a stage, even if it’s a very small stage in front of like 10 people, that instantly gives you authority. And the event organiser has already vouched for you by giving you the platform. Do you see kind of the similarities here? When the podcast host puts you on as a guest or the journalist talks about you or the event organiser puts you on stage, they are transferring trust and putting you literally up on a pedestal and saying that you are worth listening to. So this is huge. And there’s so many events that you can speak at. It’s not just big shows, right? You can go to local business networking events. Chamber of commerce will run meetings. Industry associations will run meetings for your chosen vertical. You’ve got BNI, which is all over the world, or there are other similar networking groups. And your topic doesn’t have to be complicated. “Five things every business owner should know about protecting their data from AI”, something like that. That works brilliantly for a non-technical audience, which is obviously what you’re trying to reach. And even just a 10-minute slot at a local networking breakfast that puts you in a fundamentally different place and category to every other MSP who just turns up and hands out business cards and do stuff like that. Speakers are considered to be experts, so go be a speaker.

Another mechanism, you can co-create content alongside trusted voices. So rather than you being interviewed, how about if you interview someone? You could interview a well-known local business figure for your newsletter or LinkedIn. In fact, here’s a really smart thing to do, start your own podcast, aimed at business owners in the local area, and interview all of the top business people in your area. Now, it doesn’t matter whether you have an audience or not. The very fact that you have interviewed the most respected business leaders in your area, and trust me, they are not being asked for interviews as often as you think. The very fact that you are interviewing them, that gives you instant credibility. And here’s the super clever thing to do with that podcast. You then go and interview your ideal prospects. So let’s say there were 10, 20, 30 businesses in your area that you would love to do business with. You contact the CEOs of those businesses and you say, “I’ve got this podcast. It’s about business owners in this area. I would love to get you on as a guest.” And the interview is where you get to know that CEO. And they will then, particularly if you do the interview in your office, and they will say, “So you guys are what, an IT company?” And you start a conversation and they might say to you, “Well, we’re with this company. We’ve been with them for 10 years, but you know what? If I’m honest, I’m not overly happy with how things are going. I don’t really understand what’s in it for me. The service levels have come down, the price seems to have gone up.” I mean, wouldn’t that be just beautiful if you could have a CEO of an ideal client telling you that when they’re sitting in your office? That’s going to start a great conversation, right?

So other things you could do, you could ask respected CPAs or accountants or lawyers or business brokers or financial services. You could ask them to come onto your podcast or just contribute a guest piece to your email list or to your website or to your LinkedIn. And it needs to be about a topic that obviously their clients and your clients both care about. But essentially you can leverage all of these other people in your area to create content for you. And in doing so, they trust transfer over to you because when their name appears alongside yours, well, they’re going to promote that to their audience and their credibility with their audience kind of rubs over to you. And this also gives you a natural reason to share the content both to their audience and to your audience, so you’re doubling your reach in one move. It’s a really smart thing to do.

Another mechanism for you, awards and accreditations. So if you think about your industry awards, your business awards, best employer lists, all of that kind of stuff, they all represent a third party, often a trusted third party saying publicly that you are worth paying attention to. And most MSPs never enter awards outside of the channel. I’m not talking about channel awards, although channel awards have a value, but I’m talking about awards in your marketplace. And most MSPs never enter them because they assume they’re not going to win or it’s not worth the effort. But even being shortlisted gives you a kind of a credible third party stamp on your name. So do have a look at the local business awards in your area. Have a look at who’s entering what. Often there’s not as many entries as you think, and the bar to getting shortlisted is lower than you’d think.

Sometimes these are revenue generating exercises more than anything. So do be aware that if you enter something that has an awards night, that’s how the business makes the money. That’s how either the magazine or the newspaper or whatever makes money. If you enter, you’ll probably be shortlisted and you’ll be expected to buy a table at 500 pounds or dollars or whatsoever. That’s just the price of business. And actually you get to have a black tie night, it’s a bit of fun, and you might win an award the second or third time that you enter. And if you do win something, display it everywhere. Your website, your LinkedIn, your proposals, your email signature, anywhere and everywhere for a year or two after you win an award, you shout about that award. And ideally, you’d win an award somewhere every year because it just builds up. And you can say, imagine saying award winning for seven years in a row. And it doesn’t matter that they’re different awards. It’s a trust thing. It tells prospects that you are safe.

And then another mechanism is client testimonials and case studies. These are actually a great trust transfer because this is trust transfer from your existing clients to your prospects. So a prospect reading a detailed case study from a business that works with you already and that sounds just like them, they’re not listening to you in this instance, they’re listening to a peer, a peer who already trusts you and is saying to this person, “Trust these people.” The more specific the testimonial, the more powerful the trust transfer. If you’ve got a named client in a specific sector or vertical and they’re describing a specific problem that you solved, that is worth more than 10 generic five-star reviews. And obviously video testimonials take this even further because the prospect can see and hear a real person and not just read words on the page.

So the principle that ties all of this together, cold outreach asks a prospect to trust you based on nothing but your own word about yourself. Whereas trust transfer asks them to trust you based on someone else’s word, someone they already trust. And every one of those mechanisms I’ve just been talking about costs you less than paid advertising and builds more durable relationships. So the question isn’t which one to use, it’s which one you’re going to start with this week. Because you don’t have to earn trust entirely from scratch with every single prospect. There are people in your marketplace who already have the trust you’re trying to build, and they’re very often very willing to share it if you approach the relationship the right way. Pick one of those mechanisms I was just talking about and go and do something about it this week. That’s all it takes to start.

If you’re an MSP Marketing Edge member, I want to ask you a direct question. When did you last actually look at your own website through a prospect’s eyes? So not as someone who knows what you do and why you’re good at it, but as a stressed business owner who’s landed on your homepage for the first time and has two, three or four seconds of patience before they click away. If your honest answer to this is, “Yeah, it was some time ago, Paul,” or, “No, I’ve never done this,” then there’s something in your MSP Marketing Edge portal right now that’s worth an hour of your time. It’s our standout MSP website framework, and it walks you through every element of your website and tells you exactly what’s working, what’s missing, and what’s sending prospects elsewhere before they ever get in touch. So go into the portal right now and you’ll find that in the training section.

And if you’re not yet a member, there are two memberships. We’ve got a B2B membership for winning more business owners as clients, and then we’ve got a co-managed membership for winning IT directors. For each of these memberships, it’s only available to one MSP per area. Check if yours is available at mspmarketingedge.com/membership.

Featured guest: Dave Sagraves is a proven MSP growth strategist, entrepreneur, and advisor with 20+ years of experience helping IT service providers build scalable, predictable revenue engines. He is the Co-Founder & CEO of MSP Growth OS, a consulting and advisory firm dedicated to helping MSP owners create repeatable sales systems that reduce reliance on founder-led selling and accelerate enterprise value creation. 

Assuming you’re the founder of your MSP, do you sometimes feel stuck with your business? And by that I mean that you are really ready for growth. I mean, you want the new clients and you want to grow your monthly recurring revenue, but for some reason it’s not happening. Either it’s not happening at all or it’s not happening at the pace at which you need it to. Well, my special guest today understands exactly why founders get stuck, and he’s definitely someone that you should listen to because he built his MSP to a $143 million exit.

I’m Dave Sagraves. I currently serve as CEO and founder of the MSP Growth OS here out of Nashville, Tennessee.

And so excited to have you on the show, Dave. You and I were introduced by one of your co-founders of MSP Growth OS, Robert Gillette, who’s been on the show a couple of times, and I loved hanging out with Robert at ScaleCon last year in New Orleans and Vegas the year before, hoping to do so in San Diego with him this year. And every time we speak, he’s like, “You’ve got to get Dave on the show. You’ve got to get Dave on the show. You’ve got to get Dave on the show.” So Robert, stop asking. We’ve done it, Dave’s here on the show. And I know you have so much to talk to us about today, about how MSP founders move the business on from it being just them and a bunch of people helping them. And you and I both know, because we both work with MSPs in different capacities who hit that ceiling, that wall, and they don’t quite know where to go. And I know you won’t have all the answers today, but I know you’re going to give us some of the areas that we should be looking at. So just for some context, Dave, before we jump into that, tell us what’s your story? Because you achieved something pretty remarkable with your MSP.

Well, first, thank you, Paul. It’s great to be in the studio with you and get to know you better. So I worked at an MSP where I was a salesperson that started in a sales role. I wasn’t on the cap table, I wasn’t an owner, and that business grew pretty rapidly. That owner invited me to buy into that business. That business ended up scaling to 20 million in three cities in Tennessee. I would say we were a lot of lucky and a little good. I think we were really great at hiring really talented people. And then we had just fanatical discipline. And so that got us a great result in the scale.

In 2015, we sold 77% of that business to a private equity-backed regional play. And they took our sales engine and we rolled that into some states around the Gulf of Mexico, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, and expanded that footprint. And so when that business exited, they exited for 143 million, sold to a privately held strategic play. And so I’ve gotten to see MSPs from the very beginning days of being a seller to the ranks of sales management, building out a team, and then scaling that across the region. And again, I would look at, I think we had better people than most, and that’s largely the recipe for success, as well as discipline and focus over time.

Yeah, I mean, that’s an incredible story, and I bet it was a wild journey. I bet you have some amazing stories to tell from it. When the private equity sold that business, and obviously you had a stake, so I would imagine you did quite well out of that, was it a celebration moment or was it almost one of those, what’s the word I’m looking for, where you’ve achieved something enormous that most people will never achieve, but it’s almost like a normal day at the office. Does that make sense?

Paul, it was very surreal. On one day, a wire transfer changed the trajectory of my life financially. I met most of the goals I had set for my life over a simple transaction, and yet nothing really changed. And so I’ve heard often that financial resources just amplify the character of an individual. So if you’re a difficult individual, it’s just going to amplify that. If there’s humility and consistency and discipline, it’s going to amplify those things. So it was a bit of a almost false positive, if I could say, in that it was a great event, and yet we just continued grinding through the day-to-day life. We were raising young kids at the time, and so it gave some great margin in my life in terms of decision-making.

Yeah, I love that. And obviously you’ve then decided to dedicate a proportion of your working time to helping other MSPs, perhaps not in exactly the same situation, but to help those owners who’ve created this business, they’ve got it to a certain level and they’ve got stuck. What drove you to do that? Because I guess you could have semi-retired or you could have gone and bought another MSP or you could have bought an architect’s firm or you could have done, I guess, a lot of different things. What was it that drove you to help people in that sector that you’d spent so many years in?

Yeah. Paul, it’s a great question. I took about three years and I really slowed my pace down. And I had a commitment to my kids at the time coaching sports, being involved in their day-to-day life. I’m a firm believer we just don’t get that time back, we get one shot at parenting, and that was a heavy focus for me. As I started consulting, it just started with a friend that called me and said, “Hey, I want to grow my business. Can you help me?” And I said, “I don’t know. I can try. I did it for myself, but I don’t know if I can transfer these skills.” And that began a six-year thesis with that company on can we transfer the skills of a growth operating system into another MSP? I’m happy to report six and a half years later that company doubled. They started at 18 million and they just finished last year at 40 million. And so I think we’ve got a recipe for that. That was incredibly, not only valuable to my friend and client, but very satisfying for me.

And so I got to transfer what I got to live as my dream, which was building a business to scale and getting to exit. And I built that environment for a friend who’s going to get to realise that in whatever form he chooses. So I did that seven times for seven different MSPs and realised, “Hey, I think we’re onto something here.” And that’s when Robert and I got together and we began to architect what we now call the Growth OS. And really we have a mission here at the Growth OS. It’s to give MSP owners the revenue growth they want in their business. It’s very simple. They define it, they outline it. We show them the path and the operating system to do that and help them execute that growth trajectory that they desire. And so as we do that and we see clients winning, Paul, that fills my cup every day. And so that brings meaning and really a deep level of satisfaction in being able to give back and serve the community that I gained so much from.

That’s just wonderful to hear. Now you and I know that 80%, and that’s just a made up figure, but it’s probably a good guess, 80% of MSPs are stuck. They’re very competent what they do. They’ve got sometimes good people, sometimes not good people, but there’s that level of stuck. And almost every MSP I speak to has frustrations that they can’t get the right people or they can’t get the right clients or they just can’t grow. They’re hitting a ceiling, they’re hitting a barrier. They’re not being a great parent, they’re not being a great husband or a great wife or whatever is the case. So you’ve done this a number of times, and I know you’re working with a number of MSPs right now. Why? Why do so many MSPs get stuck?

I would say there is a natural barrier for revenue growth for MSPs between $1.5 million and $8 million.

Where the natural percentage of attrition that would be a mean or average in our industry, begins to clip at the heels of their ability to generate revenue. Largely these MSPs start as a founder-led or principal-led sales model where the owner-operator runs operations, runs finance, runs everything else, and they’re out doing all the sales calls. Largely those owner-operators are focused on marketing-generated leads, which are great and provide so much in that desire to scale. What I find is if you don’t combine a good marketing engine – consistent, repeatable, with results, focused on your target client with a direct sales engine – you’re not going to grow in sales velocity. I often say, Paul, we have to build a manufacturing process for new meetings or new FTAs. A lot of times early on, we can do that through marketing and do it consistently. It becomes difficult as you begin to scale. So if you want six to eight meetings every single week, that’s difficult to do just with marketing alone unless you’re investing substantial dollars into it. And I want to say again, marketing is the thing that gets us all where we need to go. It’s like the foundation, the framework. But then as you mature, you grow into a sales engine or a sales operations company, and that’s a completely different beast. So that’s the first thing I would say.

The second thing, Paul, is there’s a natural inclination of every owner-operator. Think about these owners of these businesses, they largely are technicians. And they think, “Oh, if I hire a salesperson that has strengths that are different than me, they’ll just sell and do everything.” And the reality is they don’t have the training or the environment or the KPIs or the ability to equip that seller to actually be successful. So there’s a diagram that we use all the time, which are that there’s three concentric circles. If you think of a Venn diagram, there’s a sales process, there’s a technical acumen, and there’s an executive presence. The owner of that MSP Paul can do all three of those, in spades, they can do it in their sleep. But when you get a salesperson, all they bring is sales prowess or process. They don’t have a lot of the technical depth and they don’t have the executive presence to carry a conversation like an executive would, which is really just comfort and the ability to ask difficult questions and challenge a buyer that may have wrong thoughts. So as I look at the combination of those, those are some of the hurdles that owners tend to deal with. And what they want is they just want to hit an easy button. They want the silver bullet or the easy bullet. Oh, if I just do this plan, I’ll grow sales. And the reality is you’ve got to fix a couple things.

You’ve got to fix and build a manufacturing process for new meetings that you can count on every week. Now once you’ve got those meetings, Paul, you’ve got to consider how do I make those meetings, ones that I can win at the highest percentage possible? And that’s where a lot of technicians are just not that good at the actual process of building client trust, which is what our clients buy from us when they buy our MSP services. They are saying, “I trust you more than my current solution and the other options I have.” So really what we are as brokers for trust. And as you well know in your marriage or your partnership, you didn’t just overnight have a meeting and sign an agreement to get married. I know mine was a long process of years getting to know my wife, and then we committed and got to know each other, met each other’s families. That’s what an MSP sales process should be like. It’s the cultivation of a deep relationship that’s going to move us towards trust and then broker into a long-term relationship. There’s so many transactional MSPs that just want to get you as a client, but then a year to two years later, maybe three, you’re going to come out the other side because they have inconsistent service. So while we’re building sales, we have to build the operational engine as well to ensure that we can serve and support those clients consistently and repeatably.

Yeah, I love that because we do know that MSPs have great retention because the business owner clients don’t really want to move on to another MSP. But I believe you can’t rely upon that. You have to be very intentional with that retention. And I love the idea of the sales marriage that you’re going into it saying, we want to do 10, 15 years out of this, we’re not interested in just doing a couple of years. So interesting that you talked about the easy button, that a lot of MSPs want to hit the easy button, and that’s human nature I don’t think that’s just an MSP thing, and I’m sure you agree, it’s a human thing. And especially when we’ve done something, if we’ve run a business for 10 years already, and then someone like you comes along and says, “Ah, you need to build this and build this and build this and build that.” And a little piece of your soul dies, doesn’t it? Because you say, “But I’ve already done 10 years on this. Where’s the easy button?” What other frictions do you tend to come up against from MSP owners?

When I think about this easy button concept, it really is an abdication of the role of sales in your business. So every other functional area of the business for a good MSP owner or operator, they understand the tech stack, they understand service delivery, they understand finance, they understand security, they understand HR and hiring people, and they focus different discipline in those areas and they have a well-functioning engine. And then they hire a salesperson and culturally, you’re hiring somebody that doesn’t fit in that culture and you expect them to have raving results. So one of the first things that’s a friction point is an MSP owner has got to realise you have to build a subculture in your MSP that will allow a seller to want to be there and live their life there and hang their hat there for a long time. I often equate salespeople in the MSP field because of the infusion of private equity as they are free agents. They can go to any job they want. If they’re good at what they do, they can go get three to five jobs at any moment. And by the way, they have recruiters knocking on their door almost every day trying to get them to go take another job. And so as the owner of the MSP, I’ve got to build a culture that tells that seller, come work with me. You’ll make good money. You’ll succeed and grow your skillset. Here’s your career path, and you’re going to have a blast while you do it as you’re earning at a high level. And I think that friction is something a lot of owner operators don’t see when they think about expanding their sales footprint.

Yeah, I think that’s a very valid way of looking at it. So let’s just finish off by talking about MSP Growth OS, which by the way, is a fantastic business name, I think everyone immediately understands a growth operating system for MSPs, you can see that instantly. In fact, I remember when Robert told me what you guys were going to call the business, and I went, “Oh, that’s amazing. I wish I’d thought of that.” You build it around a structure. Now, I don’t want you to go into every detail of that structure, but obviously, and you’ve talked about some of those things already, but what are some of the other elements of the structure that you attempt to help the MSPs build out?

The first thing, we start with a learning management system. And so as you think about one of the greatest risks to hiring a salesperson is can you train them and onboard them effectively to our industry? We have very light technical training, and then we have tons of coursework for a salesperson that all they do every day is hunt for new clients. So we’ve created an environment where they can go and continuously learn every day and get sharpened and practice their craft through learning. So that’s the first thing. The second thing, Paul, would be accountability. And so we have to be accountable to setting new meetings every single week. And so we’re going to help the owner do that. We’re going to help the salesperson do that. The next thing that we’re going to do is we’re going to provide a context for them to practice their craft. And so we want sellers, and Robert’s business was the MSP Dojo. The MSP Dojo is now a part of our curriculum where every Wednesday a seller gets to practice role play or role practice to get better at the areas where they might be weak. But really what we’re trying to do is build the confidence in muscle memory that when they get in front of a client that’s a good potential client, that they can win at a higher percentage. So that’s really what our system is built off. So we call it the Growth OS because we are a co-managed solution. You don’t outsource or hit the easy button to the Growth OS. We are partnering with an owner-operator to help them with an operating system for how they can consistently and repeatably and organically grow their recurring revenue.

I love it. So tell us what kind of MSP this is ideally suited for, and that might be in terms of employee numbers or maybe revenue. And what’s the best way to get in touch with you and Robert and all the team at MSP GrowthOS?

So 80% of our clients are in the one million to eight million range. And so the first thing is if attrition is clipping at your heels, if you’re frustrated because you have inconsistency in the number of new meetings you have every week, that’s what we help owner operators solve for. The next thing is where to find us. Very simple, mspgrowthos.com. And if we can serve in any way, we do a call with you just to help you if it’s not a fit for our program. So if there’s any way we can serve the community, we’d love for you to reach out.

For MSP’s, winning back past clients is actually one of the easiest and cheapest opportunities… are you overlooking this? Also this week, the horrendous truth of how MSPs are losing sales opportunities and annoying existing clients on the phone, and the MSP who thinks you should sell Google Workspace, not Microsoft.

Welcome to Episode 354 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge.

I want to talk about a type of prospect that almost no MSP ever follows up with.

The prospect is a client who left you in the past.

Let me make the case right now for why winning back these kind of people is actually one of the easiest, cheapest, and maybe even most overlooked opportunities in your entire marketing.

Winning back a client who left you is up to five times more cost-effective than winning a brand new client.

If you think about it, they already know your name, your reputation, they know roughly what working with you is like, even if you’ve changed in the year since they left. And yet research consistently shows that most B2B businesses do not do this. Almost three quarters of companies have no win-back process at all. They lose a client and that’s the end of the story. So why does this happen? And specifically, why does it happen with MSPs?

I wonder, is it down to pride and discomfort? Because I don’t know about you, but I know for me, it feels a little bit awkward to go back to someone who chose a competitor over you. It’s one thing if you pitch to someone and they choose a competitor in the first place, but if you’ve worked with someone for a couple of years and then they leave you for a competitor, that’s where it almost feels slightly personal, doesn’t it? And it can feel a lot more awkward. It almost feels like you’re admitting weakness or you’re chasing them and you don’t want to be. I guess if you put it in ex-boyfriend/ex-girlfriend terms, you don’t want to be the ex that reaches out because that’s uncomfortable.

But they’re not an ex-boyfriend or an ex-girlfriend, they’re an ex-client, and that discomfort is costing you easy revenue that’s sat there to be collected. Let’s be clear about the kind of clients we’re talking about here… We’re not talking about the ones that have been acquired by another business, that business is gone. We’re not talking about the ones that have gone bust, obviously that business is gone as well. We’re talking about if they have switched from you to another MSP. So let’s talk this through and all the aspects of it.

Let’s deal with timing first, this matters more than you would think. If you reach out too soon, you are the needy ex and of course they’re still in the honeymoon period with their new provider. But if you reach out too late, you’ve completely missed the window where they realise that the grass wasn’t greener on the other side. Because that’s why someone switches, isn’t it? They leave you for another MSP thinking that with the other MSP the grass is going to be greener. And there does come a point where they realise that actually, some of the things are going to be different with that other MSP, but some things will be worse, some things will be better because every MSP operates and delivers in quite a different way.

We did a little bit of research on this and the research broadly supports a timing window somewhere between two to six months after they leave. And my gut feel would be towards the back of that. So if they leave you in January, you should be reaching out in June… April, May, June kind of time. And most attempts to win back a client happen far too early. They happen at the point that someone cancels or the point that the client says they’re not going to sign another contract. That’s the worst point because that’s the point the client is least receptive. And obviously, of course, you should have the conversation about why are you moving? What is it that’s made you not choose another contract with us? Yes, of course that’s a conversation you should have. But if they’ve just cancelled, that’s too soon.

The sweet spot then, for an MSP specifically, is four, five, six months. That’s your kind of target you should go for. And that’s long enough for them to have left you, be happy with their new provider, they’ve been onboarded. And it’s also enough time for any problems to start to surface. But it’s not so long that they have accepted those problems and stopped noticing the gaps. Remember, switching MSPs is a distress purchase for most ordinary businesses. They don’t want to switch MSPs, so if they’re motivated to do so, then there comes a point with their new MSP where they’re going to stop noticing the things that are wrong. But that first four, five, six months is a great time where all of the joy of the switch is gone and now they’re starting to be like, these are the problems with these guys.

The other thing I think you should look out for is trigger moments. So for example, the contract renewal date. If they left you in June, the chances are that their contract renewal date every year or every two years or whatever, is going to be in June. So if nothing happens at that six-month mark, there’s nothing wrong with you reaching out to them a month before their contract renewal every year or every couple of years depending on the contract they’ve signed, and just checking in with them saying, “Just checking to see how everything’s going and if it’s worth us having a conversation?”

There are other triggers like this, like if there’s a high profile cyber attack in the news, or if you are getting really good at that AI consulting that we were talking about last week in the podcast, for example, and you notice that the competitor that they’ve switched to doesn’t seem to be pushing that, you can reach out to them and you can say, “Hey, I hope everything’s going great with your new company. By the way, we are now offering some high level AI consulting, which is all about implementing safe AI across the business that’s got sort of guardrails and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” All of that kind of stuff. So you’re looking for these natural reasons to reach out to them. And you should do it, not just once, but do it at that six-month mark, do it at the 12-month contract renewal mark, reach out if you have a thing that you think you’re doing their competitors aren’t doing, and at the very least, every single time their contract is up.

There’s going to come a point when they’re going to leave those people. And actually, they might have been sitting there thinking, why did we ever leave you? People do that. They go over, they think the grass is greener, and they sit there and they say, “I wish we’d never left the other people.” So actually, when you reach out to them, you are being the bigger person and making it easier for them to say, “We made a mistake. Can we come back?” Because actually their pride could stop them from reaching out to you and saying, “Can we come back?” Because that’s a horrible thing to do, that feels awkward. But if you are the one that’s reached out to them, then you are doing the hard work of taking that loss of pride away from them. Does that make sense?

Let’s talk about how you actually do this. So your tone has to be completely free of any, “Why did you switch?”, “I told you so.” You have to get rid of all of that. I know it hurts. It hurts me when a client leaves me, I’ve been in business for 20 years and every single client leaving has been a stab right into my heart. I’m sure it’s exactly the same for you. And your clients are a lot bigger than my clients. So I know that financially it affects you a lot more, but also I’m sure that the knife is going deeper into your heart. And we carry that, don’t we, as business owners? It’s because the business is our baby. We do take all the good things and the bad things very emotionally. It’s a very hard thing to get away from. But you have to get rid of all of that. So especially even if you know they’ve switched to a new provider that you know is just not as good as you. So if you know they’ve moved from a very comfortable experience to something that’s not going to be quite so good, obviously you never say that to them. You don’t go in and imply it, you don’t be smug about it. You have to go in removing all of the emotions from it and just go in as a friendly person that they used to work with.

And then I think you should make the outreach personal and not just personalised. So don’t just send them an email or send them a standard letter in the post. Why not send them a note from you, like a one-on-one note? You could actually hand write something. Or maybe the 2026 way is to do a personalised video for them using something like Vidyard or BombBomb or Bonjoro or one of the other platforms like that. And you might just say, “Hey, I just wanted to check in, see how it’s going. It’s been six months since we last worked together, so I was just curious how everything is. I’m hoping to hear back that everything’s wonderful with your new provider because I want the best for you. But if that’s not the case, I’m happy to have a conversation with you. We’d always love to have you back.” Something as simple as that, but something personal from you as the owner of the business. I think you should lead with curiosity rather than a pitch. Some specific words you could say could be something like, “Do you know, it’s been a while since we worked together. It’s been six months, so I just wanted to check in, see how things are going for you.” But as I say, don’t pitch. You can open the door and can say “If ever you wanted to come back, I’m happy to have that conversation.” And that’s that thing that takes their pride out of it.

Now, if they do respond and there is a door that’s open there, don’t rush straight in for a sales pitch, because remember they already know what it’s like to work with you. So I would just lead in with questions. “How’s the new setup working for you?” If they’re saying that something’s not quite right, then say specifically, “Can you tell me what wasn’t working?”, which is good competitor info as well as them telling you what they’re not happy about. “What’s changed since we last spoke? What are some of the areas that you feel have gone down that you want to bring back up? What are some of the areas that you feel were better than we delivered that we can improve for you?” So essentially you’re saying to them, “Come back to us… You’ll get all the things you used to enjoy and we’re going to match the things that that other company was good at.” Let them tell you what’s actually going on because most often they will volunteer the problem themselves.

And then if they do come back to you, be very wary of using financial incentives or financial penalties. I have heard of MSPs who when a client returns to them, they jack the price up. And I can see why you do that. And sometimes it’s because that was a long-standing client and the price was too low and they left anyway. If you do that, do it for the right reason, do it to equalise the prices. Don’t use it as a penalty, as a punishment for them, but also don’t use a financial incentive to bring them back. Trust me, if they have opened the door and they are willing to talk to you about coming back to your MSP, that’s the motivation. If they’re willing to go through a switch again, they feel like they made a mistake and they want to come back to you. They don’t need a financial incentive to do that. Giving someone a discount in this instance would just give away your margin. Don’t do that.

And then finally, don’t give up after one message. As I say, it does take a series of messages to talk to people. So at that six-month point, you might send them a video, you might send them an email follow-up, you might make a phone call follow up to them. I know it’s awkward, but trust me, at some point you’re going to talk to someone and they’re going to say, “I’m so glad you called. Thank you very much.” We’re all busy these days. We don’t have time to watch the videos and the emails and answer the phone all the time. But if you are gently persistent, I sound like an AI when I say that, don’t I? That’s a human thing though, be gently persistent and just gently keep in touch with them till you have a conversation and you’ll know where they are. Sending one video or one email and nothing more these days is just a waste of time, if that makes sense.

Now, all of that there, what I’ve just talked about, that should be built into a standard operating procedure. I know you don’t lose clients very often, but when you do lose a client, even if it’s just once every other year, go to your system, set a date in your reminder system, whatever you use to reach out to them six months later and build it into how you run the business in the same way that you build in any other piece of marketing. It all has to be a system because in marketing, it’s only when you’ve got systems that you really get the most out of it.

Every MSP has a handful of clients who’s left over the years, and most of them are sitting in a spreadsheet or somewhere hidden away in the PSA completely forgotten. Today, you could go and find those people. Pick two or three who left for reasons that are completely fixable, and why not just send them a one-to-one video message this week? You might be amazed how many of them have been sitting there wondering if they made the right call in switching to the other guys at all.

I want to talk about something that I think is a big problem across the whole channel, and that is the phone, or specifically how badly so many MSPs handle phone calls.

Sometimes I chat to other vendors and they tell me horror stories about ringing an MSP and they ring and ring and ring and no one ever answers the phone.

So today let’s go through some of the crimes that MSPs commit on the phone because actually if this is you, I know you don’t want the vendor salesperson getting through to you, but what if it was a prospect? What if it was a client trying to get hold of you…?

Let’s start with that most basic crime of all, which is not answering the phone. And a surprising number of MSPs, which are businesses built on providing a reliable support service, it’s surprising how many just don’t pick up the phone. It rings out or it goes to a generic voicemail. Now just think about how mad that is. You are in the business of being reliably available for your clients, so your own phone behaviour must reflect that. And if they can’t reach you on the phone because you’re busy, then it’s saying completely the opposite of “We’ve got your back.” And there is some research on this as well. Around 75% of callers report feeling really frustrated when they can’t reach a real person, especially when they’re already stressed about a problem that they’ve got, which is basically your clients.

So here’s the prospect version of this. If a potential client is ringing you to ask a question or book an appointment and they get no answer, no one answers the phone, that says to them, “You are not open for business.” And they will not call back. Unless they are desperate to work with you, perhaps because they were referred to you, they’re much more likely to move on to the next MSP that’s been recommended to them by their AI tool. They don’t leave voicemails, they don’t try again, they just go elsewhere. And you might never know that you missed out on a hot opportunity.

The second crime is the generic and unhelpful voicemail. “Hi, you’ve reached the office of X, Y, Z IT. Please leave a message.” But if there’s no name, no warmth, no kind of real human being at the end of it, then it tells the caller nothing about that business and whether even they’ll hear back. So don’t have a, “Hi, thanks for calling,” kind of a voice message. Have a real person saying, “Hello, it’s Dave here from X, Y, Z IT. Hey, do you know what, we’re really busy at the moment or we’re supporting all of our clients at the moment. Leave a number, we’re going to call you back within the next 15 minutes.” That’s all right, there’s nothing wrong with a voice message like that.

Crime number three is the call that goes to the wrong person. So a client rings with an urgent issue and ends up speaking to whoever happens to grab the phone who maybe isn’t equipped to help them and fumbles around and puts them on hold or promises a call back that then doesn’t happen. So you’ve got to make sure that existing clients are getting straight through to the help desk. I would say the way to do that is one number for support, another number for everyone else. And I know you can do the whole press one for this, press two for that (we’re going to talk about that in a second) but if you’ve got a number that’s coming into help desk and all of your help desk people are busy, you could then divert that call to a call answering service. So at least another human is talking to your human client and saying, “Oh, hi. Yep, I’m on the help desk team, but I’m not able to help you myself. I’m going to get Dave to give you a call back in five minutes.” Something like that would be a very simple way of doing it.

Crime number four is actually having your senior engineers answer all of the calls. That to me feels like a waste of their time. And you could think it sounds good to the clients and kind of helpful for them on the surface, but actually if your senior staff are constantly being interrupted, picking up the phone and having to talk about a password reset or a new user, then they’re spending too much of their high level time on low level issues. This is why having a dispatcher is such a great thing. It’s something we talked about in a previous podcast. Someone whose job it is just to answer the phone, reassure the clients, and then sort of route that work out to the technicians. In fact, often if you have a dispatcher, you don’t need to hire so many technicians, which is great. It’s easier to hire a dispatcher than it is a new technician.

Crime number five is the triage black hole. A call comes in, it gets logged as a ticket, but the caller doesn’t know what’s going to happen next. They don’t know if it’s urgent or not. They don’t know if it’s a priority, if someone’s going to get back to them. So them calling in and hearing nothing back, that’s almost as damaging as you not answering the call in the first place.

Crime number six is treating every client the same regardless of urgency. So if someone calls up and it’s a password reset or it’s a new user thing or whatever, and that gets the same kind of response time or the same kind of, “Yeah, we’re going to look into it.” As someone who calls up and says, “I’ve got 20 staff here who no one can access the internet. We can’t do our work.” You and I know one of those is an emergency, one of them is not an emergency. And clients really remember how they felt about how you dealt with them during their moments of panic. So you’ve got to be able to say to them, “Right, this is a number one priority for us. We’re going to go and press some buttons, find out what’s happening. We’re going to call you back in the next 15 minutes.” Versus, “Yep, we can get you a new user set up. I’ll be honest, this isn’t a priority for us. It’s a priority for you I know. And oh, so your member of staff has already started yesterday and you didn’t tell us. Not a problem, I’ll send you the form through now, fill that in and we’ll get that done for you in the next hour.” Or whatever is the case.

Crime number seven is when they ring and they have to press 1 for accounts, 2 for support, 3 for sales, 4 if you’re a vendor and I’m going to cut you off, etc etc. What’s that called, is it IVR? People hate that. I know it’s efficient, but if there’s like four, five, six people in your business and they have to stab the buttons to get through to someone, it’s really, really frustrating. There’s a bank here in the UK called First Direct, and I haven’t phoned them for many years, but I have an account with them, I have an account with lots of banks here in the UK. But if I phoned them back in the day, their thing used to be 24/7 banking on the phone, and if you phoned them within three rings, you were through to a human. Even at four in the morning, and I did used to call them at four in the morning when I was a radio presenter and I was ringing up to check something in my account while I was driving into work, it was great. And you never had to go through the beep, beep, beep pressing buttons, all the different options, or even worse when you have to say to them. And that was one of the reasons I stayed with that bank and I loved them because compared to ringing the other banks where it was, “You have 17 options”, it was so frustrating. So if you have one of those IVRs or whatever they’re called, just consider getting rid of it. Having someone, a human who answers the phone and diverts the call to whoever needs is so much better because the human is talking to the human straight away. And I know there’s AI things and there’s automated things and this and that. But the more people put in place AI things, the more I believe actually real humans talking to real humans is absolutely the right thing.

Another crime is after hours, in emergency calls that nothing ever gets acted on. So if something breaks for someone at 8pm on Friday, they can’t reach anyone, they’ve left a voicemail, they’re stranded, they feel uneasy, that’s not a good thing at all. Actually they’re going to be a little bit upset with you even though you finish at five or six on a Friday and you’re back on a Monday morning and you’ve told them that till you’re blue in the face and the voicemail said that, it might be worth looking at what if there is a 24-hour call answering service that either they can just talk and log a ticket with, and then perhaps that text comes through to your engineer or your duty engineer or whatever, or actually look at an outsourced help desk for your downtime. As your MSP gets bigger, you need to consider things like 24/7 support. And most of the time it’s actually just a few hours in the evening when we’re doing a bit of work or a Saturday morning. It’s rarely four in the morning. But once you’ve got that in place, that’s a good value add for your clients. So what does good actually look like? Here are a few principles that I think are worth you taking seriously.

I think every call should be answered every time by a real human.

The data that we’ve looked up on the internet shows that people want a person and not an automated system, especially when they’re stressed, which is your clients or maybe even your prospects. Prospects can get stressed because they don’t want to have to switch from one MSP to another, but they do it. You should have a proper triage process. Someone whose job is to pick up the problem, understand the urgency, ask the right questions and prioritise it. That’s your dispatcher. It shouldn’t be your most senior engineer who’s doing that. You should set clear expectations on every single call. If you can’t fix it immediately, tell them what happens next and roughly when they’re going to hear from you. Get rid of that uncertainty because it’s the uncertainty that creates the frustration, not the actual waiting itself.

Pull together a plan for out of hours emergencies, whether it’s just a third-party answering service, just so a human feels that they’ve been heard or whether it’s a proper IT help desk. And this is the one that connects directly to your marketing, every single phone interaction, whether it’s with a prospect or an existing client, is a marketing moment. It either reinforces the trust you’ve worked so hard to build or it undermines it. And one other thing, make sure every single member of your team knows that if a prospect ever calls in and shows any interest in working with you, that is the highest priority call that could ever come into your business. Make sure they understand the very simple system to get hold of either you or who does the selling and what happens if you or that person are on a vacation, a holiday, so that that person, the prospect, can speak to someone immediately ideally without them ever having to be called back.

Here’s an idea. Go and test your own phone system this week. Ring it from your mobile, experience exactly what happens when your prospects and clients ring up, or maybe do it from someone else’s mobile so they don’t recognise the number. If what you hear embarrasses you even slightly, you’ve got to fix that. In fact, you’ve got to fix it before you spend another penny generating more leads or working on your client retention because right now you might be losing leads or even just annoying customers when they’re phoning you up.

If you’re an MSP Marketing Edge member, don’t forget that you have unlimited access to world-class support. And I know that every vendor says they have great support, but we genuinely do because we know that one of the reasons you join us is because marketing feels very difficult to you and it’s the complete opposite of the tech work that you enjoy. So I have a team of people who are there to answer your text questions. So if you email into us, for example, or use the chat on our website or on our portal, but also they will jump on one-to-one calls with you. And that’s to help with any aspect of your marketing that you’re stuck on, not just implementing the MSP Marketing Edge system. In fact, every week we do loads of calls with our members just to help them get past their problems. So if you want to access that, just go to support in the portal. It’s there at the top of the navigation.

And if you’re not yet a member, we have two memberships available. We have a B2B one if you want to win business owner clients, and we have a co-managed one if you want to win IT director clients. And each of those is only available to one MSP per area. So check if yours is available. Just put your postal code or your zip code in at mspmarketingedge.com/membership.

Featured guest: Dan Taylor is the founder of AppsEDU, an MSP focussed on Google Workspace customers, and also the founder of the ‘Workspace Audit tool,’ which allows customers and MSPs to manage the security of their Google environments. 

We all know that 99.84% of the channel sells Microsoft. Yeah, I made that stat up, but it’s probably not that far off. And yet this MSP believes that you should instead be selling Google Workspace. Get your rotten tomatoes and eggs ready as we put him in the stocks and let him try to convince you himself.

Hi, I’m Dan Taylor. I’m the owner of AppsEDU. We’re an MSP focused mostly on the education vertical. I’m focused on Google. And I also run a system called Workspace Audit.

And thanks so much for joining me on the podcast, Dan, we are going to go into dangerous territory today because one of the things you want to talk about is why MSPs should be selling Google Workspace. And already I can hear thousands of people across the world going *deep intake of breath* at the thought of selling Google Workspace instead of selling Microsoft, but we’re going to explore that today. And I know you do a lot of that within your MSP and we’ll talk about the audit tool that you have as well. But just give us a bit of background about you. So we can hear that you’re British, but you’re not based in the UK. In fact, from what you and I were just saying before we started our interview, you’ve got a very international business by the sound of it.

Yeah, that’s right. I mean, we work with an international school, so they’re obviously international. I’m from the UK, from Yorkshire, but I’ve been in Prague for 20 years, just outside Prague. My team’s in the Philippines, UK, Czech Republic, and Dubai. So really very international and focused on schools.

So do you work with schools in lots of different countries as well?

Exactly, international schools. So you probably know it’s a huge market. I mean, if you say Dubai, for example, there’s almost 300 international schools in Dubai. Bangkok, there’s 200. You can pick a city across Asia and Middle East. It’s a big market.

Yeah, no, it sounds like it. And it’s interesting that your MSP is highly focused on the education sector because the small number of MSPs that I know who are Google shops, essentially they resell and recommend Google Workspace, not all of them but many of them do tend to be more education-focused than business-focused. And that’s one of the things I hear from MSPs when I’ve talked to them is not a criticism, but an observation that, “Ah, Google, that’s not for businesses.” But I guess your message is that’s not actually the case.

It absolutely isn’t. And although we’ve very much, for most of our history, we have been in education, we’re now working with more and more businesses, even up to some enterprise customers, 30,000 user businesses. So it’s really changing. And we can talk a bit about that later about how it’s shifted from education to business.

Well, let’s do that now because we’re not having a technical conversation about Google today. Obviously we’re looking at this from a revenue, from an opportunity and an operations point of view. Let me first of all declare, we use Google. So within the MSP Marketing Edge, we’re a Gmail business. And that was a conscious choice of mine 10 years ago because I don’t like Microsoft products. I don’t tell anyone that. So I’m a big fan. It just works. And I know people laugh at me when I say, “Oh, we use Gmail because it just works.” But guess what? It does just work. And I see what the hell that MSPs have to go through sometimes with Outlook and all of the other associated things. From your point of view, is it simply a case that it’s easier to use and administrate? Or is it a case that it opens up other opportunities or is it something else?

It’s interesting, it’s basically a religious war of Microsoft and Google. I’ve been a member of some MSP forums and just posting a Google question got me hate. I mean, if you promote Google, some people see it kind of as an attack on their existence. I just want to say I’m from the Microsoft world, I was an MCSE. That was my background for many, many years until I discovered Google. But definitely it’s changing a huge amount and I’m really becoming a big business thing. Education-wise just some numbers for you, in the US it’s roughly 80% of schools use Google Workspace and it’s 60% in the UK. So it’s a huge number, but that’s also increasing with business.

And I guess I wonder if Google’s playing a very clever long game. I’ll give you an example of some software from a previous career of mine. So I used to be in radio,  I used to be a radio presenter. And we used to use a piece of software to schedule the music on the radio stations called Selector. And the people who owned Selector, which did dominate the market, they gave the software for free to all of the universities and anywhere there was a student radio station. So all of the students and the next generation of radio people grew up using that software. So then when they came into the workplace, they already knew how to use it. Do you think that’s one of the things that Google’s trying to do with its education program?

Absolutely. I mean, it’s the crack dealer business model. You get people hooked on your product and then you hope they keep using it afterwards. And you see that in the numbers.

Small businesses, so businesses of one to nine people, overwhelmingly use Google Workspace.

Roughly if you talk about the numbers, it’s like 60 / 40 of Google to Microsoft, and that switches when you get to above nine people. But yeah, absolutely, I think that’s Google’s in. And I think the other way they’ve got in after the university is startups, because that’s overwhelmingly Google. Startups, FinTechs, it’s like 95% Google Workspace.

For you as an MSP, as you’re supporting these larger businesses, without getting technical, what are some of the limitations that hold you back with Google or have they ironed those out over the years?

It’s 100% cloud-based, that’s the thing. So if you’re coming from a world where you want to have desktop apps and you want to have that kind of syncing and that experience, I think Google is very hard. I think limitations, you can look at individual apps, most people would say Excel has got more functionality than Google Sheets, Outlook has got more functionality than Gmail. So you could probably say it is a bit more of a basic solution, although it is catching up and there’s a lot of integration. But I think that would be the main criticism would be some of the apps are a bit more basic, but I would say it’s more than compensated by the simplification of the administration and the management of it.

So looking at it from an operations and a profit point of view then, I guess you’re spending less time playing around with settings to achieve the things that people want, but how does that affect you from a revenue point of view? Do people expect to pay less for Google Workspace and is there less margin for you because they’re buying something and everyone has a free Gmail and they see Gmail or Google Sheets as a schools thing?

It’s a really good point and it’s hard for me to answer that because I’ve never supported Microsoft customers, at my Microsoft career I was an employee. But I think, yes, I would say the revenue, anecdotally, the revenue would be lower you’d make per customer per seat in Google compared to Microsoft. But on the plus side, you would be able to take on more customers. I think it would work out net, you would make higher income. And obviously reselling the licenses, you’ll get a similar margin reselling Google licenses that you would get reselling Microsoft licenses.

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. And then the final thing I guess we have to look at is AI. So obviously Copilot is now starting to mature as a product, and one of the reasons you’d integrate that into 365 is because of the guardrails and the ability to do things with Copilot that you can’t do currently with Claude and ChatGPT, etc. In terms of Google’s Gemini, is that as mature a product yet in terms of those business guardrails?

Again, your audience is going to hate me, but I think it’s night and day how much better it is. I mean, if you look at most of the recent benchmarks, Copilot against Gemini, Gemini is streets ahead. Gemini has suffered in the past from not being as well integrated into all the apps, like taking something from a Google Sheet and putting it into Gmail. But with the new updates, literally this month, you can do all that. So it’s definitely, as an AI LLM and the model, it’s much better.

Okay. That’s a very objective thing though, isn’t it? And just by the way, we recorded this in May 2026. I say that because obviously by the time this gets broadcast, the whole world could have changed again with AI. That’s typically what happens.

Another thing to add as well, Paul, is that people often dismiss Google. Let’s talk about, again, some numbers, if you talk about the enterprise market, it’s almost 80% Microsoft and it’s almost just over 20% Google. So they say, okay, that’s only 20%, but that’s 20% of a huge market, billions and billions of pounds and dollars market. And I would say even though the Google MSP market is competitive, it’s less competitive than Microsoft, and it’s definitely less competitive relative to the number of customers out there. So competition per customer is better in the Google sphere than it is in the Microsoft sphere.

Yeah. Interesting. Okay. So if you’re listening to this or watching this on YouTube and you have hate mail, don’t send it to Dan. Don’t send it to me. Just put it on Reddit. I think that’s probably the best place for all the negative comments. Just as long as I don’t get it, that’s fine. I don’t like emails like that. Let’s talk about your SaaS business that you’ve put together. So this is something that directly relates into Google Workspace, isn’t it?

Yeah, exactly. The tool’s called Workspace Audit. And we’ve done a tool which simplifies the management, not just security, but operations of Google Workspace. As I mentioned, Google Workspace is simpler, there’s one admin console, whereas Microsoft, you’ve got multiple systems. You’ve got the admin centre, you’ve got the exchange portal, you’ve got all kinds of things. You’ve got one admin centre, but still there are hundreds of settings in different places. So we’ve made a tool that allows you to go through, identify the high priority issues, fix them in an orderly way, get a security score. And for an MSP one thing that’s very interesting, if you’ve got multiple customers, which you do, you can manage all in one portal. So you can manage all of your Google customers in one portal, track the scores, even manage things like third-party apps, DNS settings, everything in there. So that’s what our SaaS has created. We’ve created it to sell to businesses and schools, but we’re getting more and more interest from MSPs, so that’s great.

Great. And I’m guessing this is one of those tools that you built to fix your own frustrations.

Exactly. We’ve been doing security audits, one thing most MSPs do is security audits. We’ve been doing that for decades, and we built this to simplify that, and it kind of grew, and now it’s our main thing. I’m an MSP operator myself still now, even with this. So we know what’s required.

Dan, thank you so much for your time telling us about that. So just tell us what’s the website address to go and find out about that tool. And also for those MSPs that just want to reach out to you and just have a chat with you, where do we find you? I’m guessing LinkedIn is the best place.

The website is workspaceaudit.com. You can email me [email protected], or [email protected], and search for Dan Taylor on LinkedIn, you’ll find me and it’d be great to connect to anyone.

Let’s discuss how MSPs can talk about AI without sounding like everyone else to win more consulting opportunities. Also this week, the pricing page no MSP dares to build, and what are the hot opportunities in the channel right now?

Welcome to Episode 353 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge.

AI is probably the single biggest consulting opportunity sitting in front of your MSP right now. But of course there’s a problem. Almost every MSP talking about AI sounds exactly the same as all of the other MSPs who are also talking about AI. So today I want to show you why that’s happening and how to fix it. Let’s talk about how to talk about AI without sounding like everyone else.

If we’re honest, most MSPs are not true experts in AI. I know that you’re very capable users and you probably use Copilot or Claude or ChatGPT. I mean, you probably use all of them, right? You’ve probably had to play with all of the major tools available. But when I say that most MSPs are not AI experts, typically you are just a few steps ahead of the average person, depending on the kind of clients that you deal with.

These days, being an AI expert does only mean being a few pages ahead of everyone else because of course it’s changing so quickly.

I do think there is a big difference between being a capable user and being a credible advisor. They’re two completely different things. And the trap is, for most MSPs, if you are just a few pages ahead of your clients and your prospects that you’ve read a little bit more, you’ve watched a little bit more on YouTube, then you have to be careful not to turn that into genuine expertise. But what you have as an opportunity is the ability to talk to them about AI and how they can roll it out and protect themselves and protect their business. That’s something that they don’t know. And that’s something that even if you are only a few pages ahead of them in the book you still have the ability to talk to them about that.

For example, they might be looking at “How can we use Claude? How can we use ChatGPT within the business?” But they don’t know the questions to ask themselves. So they don’t know the concept of shadow AI, that their business’s data is being loaded into everyone’s personal Claude accounts right across the business. And of course that could be happening right now and they have no idea that this is happening. They don’t know that Copilot has those guardrails that you don’t necessarily get with Claude and with ChatGPT and with the others.

It’s almost a case of because they don’t know what they don’t know, and they don’t know what questions to ask, that’s why you can consult with them about their AI. So you’re not consulting with them about AI capabilities as much as the best way to roll it out across their business. And actually, isn’t that what you do already? You are already a consultant about the best ways that they can roll out technology and max technology in their business, and AI is just another strand of that. But when you are communicating that, you’ve got to be careful not to use generic AI messaging. And this is the issue with general MSP messaging anyway.

You’ve got to be careful not to use generic phrases because when ordinary business owners see the same phrases from all MSPs, it makes all MSPs look the same. And samey kills sales. So it’s exactly the same in AI. Here are some specific phrases that you might inadvertently use which make you sound the same. You might say phrases like “AI is transforming business” or “Unlock the power of AI” or “Stay ahead of the AI curve.” Those by the way, are all phrases which came out of an AI tool. And unfortunately they say nothing because all MSPs could easily put those on their websites or on LinkedIn posts. You look at any kind of vendor’s marketing collateral or emails and they’ll have variations of those kind of themes.

Let me go deeper. Let me give you an example of how not to do it. Imagine a LinkedIn post that says something like, “AI is changing everything. Is your business AI ready? Get in touch to find out how AI can transform your business or transform your operation.” So everything I just said there is technically true, but actually it’s meaningless. Nobody looks at a post like that and thinks, “Oh yeah, this MSP really gets it.” And it’s so easy to put out stuff like that because most MSPs are approaching AI in the same way. And in fact, the same way that they approach everything else in their marketing. They’re looking for that kind of broad, safe, slightly vague messaging often generated by AI, hoping that that’s going to appeal to the target audience. I think the fix is actually not to play it safe and be broad and generic, but you have to go right in to the specific problems that your target market has and be as specific as you can. And specificity sells. If samey kills sales, specificity sells. You try saying that when you’ve had two or three beers.

First off, you need to know your target market and their specific problems. So let’s say you dealt with lawyers, for example, and lawyers was your target market. I know I always pick a vertical because it’s easy, we understand what we mean when we’re talking about the vertical of lawyers. And you ask yourself, “That ICP, that ideal client profile of a lawyer, they’ve got 20 staff, they’re a managing partner, they’re chasing ambulances all day long. What are the specific wants and needs and hopes and fears that that person has, that personality has?” And then when I get down to using AI, what’s the specific things that they are hoping AI can do for them? What do they fear about AI? What do they want from it? What do they need from it? Specific beats broad every single time.

For example, you might say instead of “AI can transform your legal business”, you can say, “We worked with a 12 person legal firm who were still manually copying over case details or looking up case details…” or whatever they’re doing, manually logging time and adding it into invoices for clients. “… And we actually saved them on average one hour and 12 minutes per lawyer per day across the entire business, which across the business resulted in a saving of 150 hours a month. So we freed up 150 hours of billable time every month.” One of the things that we know that lawyers care about is billable time. They want to be suing and doing paperwork, whatever they do. They don’t want to be sitting logging admin stuff. So that’s a very specific example that you can use to talk directly to a legal client. “We saved a legal firm of ours 150 hours a month of billable time that they can now invest back into clients using specific AI tools.”

How you do that is less relevant at this stage than catching the attention of your ideal client prospect, the person you most want to work with, with that kind of specific setup. And you can do that for lots of different clients. There’ll be a version for CPAs, for manufacturers. You can do it for general business clients, although it’s harder to do it for general businesses because for example, a manufacturer has different needs and wants and hopes and fears than a lawyer does. So when you start to try to appeal to everyone, that’s where you start generalising and being broad with your message, and that does not work as effectively as being specific does.

I think the other thing that you can do when you’re marketing your skills in AI or what you can do to help people is not just to talk about the opportunities, but to talk about the risk. You go and look at all the conversations about AI right now, and it’s all about the upside, all the good things that you can do. And no one’s talking about shadow AI. They’re not talking about data leakage, they’re not talking about the real risks of personal AI accounts with company data or rolling out AI across the company with company accounts, but without those data guardrails.

You’ve got people using tools like Claude. They’re rolling out Claude and giving all of their team Claude Cowork and actually that’s kind of terrifying because now Claude has the ability to go and do stuff on their laptop. You and I know that there’s a massive risk with that, but they perhaps don’t know that. So being the MSP who talks specifically about AI risk, maybe putting opportunity and risk together and actually having that conversation, that will differentiate you. Go and look at what other MSPs are talking about AI right now and it’s all of the pros and none of the cons. And maybe actually you want to be seen as that cautious, trustworthy advisor rather than just someone else who’s trying to sell the latest shiny new thing.

And then the third thing, and I’m going to relate this back to what I was talking about at the beginning, is don’t try to be an expert on something that you are not an expert on. As I say, most people are just two or three pages ahead in the book of AI. So don’t position yourself as an AI expert, but position yourself as an expert on strategising and applying AI to the kinds of businesses that you work with. It’s much more powerful to talk about practical applications and all of the risks and how you understand those risks and you understand how to roll it out in a way which is safe for the business and safe for you, a safe use of AI.

I see all of this as really good news because you don’t need to understand how large language models actually work. I know you’ve probably got a vague understanding of it, but you don’t need to be an expert on how they actually work. You don’t need to be an expert on the latest thing that came out yesterday because frankly, it’s tiring trying to keep up with that. You don’t need to worry about all of that kind of stuff because your prospects don’t care about that either. They just need someone they can trust. Trust to translate AI into specific outcomes for their specific businesses. That’s all they want, they want the outcomes, they don’t really care how they get there.

So I believe the MSPs who are going to win more AI consulting this year and next year won’t be the ones who know the most about AI. They’ll be the ones who can explain it and make it relevant to the specific businesses that they want to work with.

Let’s talk about the single most important page which is missing from most MSP’s websites. It is the pricing page. And today I’m going to make the case for why you need to go right onto your website and add a pricing page immediately, like today. In fact, I’m also going to give you nine different ways that you can actually do it. Could you be the MSP that dares to build the ultimate pricing page?

I’ve been doing some research on this, and this isn’t just a thing that affects MSPs, it affects all B2B service businesses. In fact, I found a stat claiming that less than 10% of B2B service businesses have any kind of indication of pricing at all on their website. And obviously MSPs are firmly a part of that. So there’s this guy called Marcus Sheridan. I’ve talked about him on the show before, in fact, I’ve interviewed him on the show. Back in the day, he wrote a book called They Ask You Answer, and then he updated that a couple of years ago, it’s now called Endless Customers.

He has spent years and years studying pricing and why B2B businesses don’t talk about pricing. And he has so much data on this. And he says that when he started talking about this, which is probably about 15 years ago, 98% of all companies weren’t talking about the price of what they do online. And now he estimates that to be around about 94%, but that’s a rubbish shift, right? Almost nothing has changed there. Isn’t that kind of crazy? But Marcus makes a very, very simple point. He believes that 70% of any B2B buying decision, including from an MSP, 70% of it is made before the prospect ever talks to the company. That means people are coming to your website and deciding whether or not to inquire to you, and you have no idea that they’re doing this.

If your website says nothing about price, then you’re kind of invisible.

At the exact moment that they’re making a decision, you are kind of invisible to them. They’re entering your website, they’re making a decision not to work with you, and then they’re going away, partly because you don’t have any pricing information on your website. So I actually partnered with Marcus Sheridan on this because I believe it so strongly. And we built something called msppriceguide.com. It’s an AI-powered price estimator, which is specifically for MSPs. Marcus and his team built the tool. We took a version of it and we added in a whole load of MSP resources and tools into it. And I did that because I wanted to give you a practical way to solve this problem, not just be talking about it.

So why do MSPs avoid having more transparency about their pricing and why don’t they put their prices on their website? Well, it’s probably for the same three excuses that Marcus actually hears from every single industry that he’s worked in, and he’s worked in pretty much all of them. The first is that every client is different, so giving a specific price would be misleading. The second one is if I publish pricing, my competitors will see it. And the third one is that prospects will use the price to negotiate me down before we’ve even spoken. But actually, realistically in 2026, none of these hold up. So your competitors already roughly know what your pricing is, or they could find out in five minutes. Do you really think that one of your proposals hasn’t made its way into the hands of a competitor? It’s already happened. And prospects don’t want an exact number, they just want a kind of a rough indication. They want a sense of scale so they know whether or not to bother inquiring to you at all, because you might be roughly in their ballpark or you might be hundreds or thousands of dollars or pounds away from it.

Here’s the psychology that Marcus talks about. He says, imagine…. it’s almost like take yourself out of B2B, but imagine if you needed a new roof on your house and you Google roofing costs and you go onto four or five different roofing websites, but everyone you find, there’s no indication about price at all. So by the fourth or the fifth or the sixth site, you are not at all impressed. In fact, you’re starting to think, “I’m not really doing research here. I’m not getting anywhere. I have no idea how much it’s going to cost to get a new roof.” And that just makes you feel frustrated because you’re starting to feel like these roofing companies are hiding things from you. And that frustration happens every single day in real life when business owners are researching MSPs. They’re thinking exactly the same thoughts. Why don’t they tell me roughly how much it’s going to cost? What are they hiding from me here?

And there’s a newer reason that this matters even more right now. And that newer reason, obviously, is AI. Marcus has done some latest research on how AI search tools, so like Claude and Copilot and Chat and Gemini, when they’re researching specific purchase intents for people, they are starting to penalise websites that don’t address pricing. Let me say that again because that’s important. If someone says to Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, whatever they’re using, “Hey, this is me. You know this about my business. We’re looking for a new IT support company. Can you go and find two or three people we should be talking to, please, and give me a rough idea how much it’s going to cost?” If those AI agents come onto your website and there’s no indication of pricing, that’s a major negative against you because the AI knows that the human wants to know a rough idea of pricing. So if the AI tool can’t extract a rough price range from your price, they’re dramatically less likely to recommend you in their answer.

This is a big problem and it’s a real problem right now. So what does pricing transparency actually look like for an MSP? As promised, here are several different approaches ranging from a very light touch to a full-on full commitment approach. And your job is just to pick whichever one of these feels achievable for you right now, but then please go and implement it.

Number one: The interactive price calculator. This is a tool on your website where the prospect answers a few basic questions about their business, such as number of users, current setup, and they get an instant rough price range. And that’s the thing that we built at mspriceguide.com to deliver that specifically for MSPs. So you could build your own, of course you could, I know you could code your own. If you just want an easy solution that’s already been built and is already AI powered, go to mspriceguide.com. Obviously the price of it is there on the webpage and it’ll show you what you can do and you can get started with that. You can get it into your website in about 20 minutes or so. It’s really easy to get going.

Number two: Just publish your starting prices. You could simply state on your website, you could have a page which says “Managed IT support starts from X per user per month.” And that X is a dollar price or a pound price or whatever currency you’re in. So there’s no commitment to an exact figure. You’re giving them a starting point, it starts from this. Or I guess you could do a range as well, couldn’t you?

Number three: You could do tiered packages. You could have three clearly labeled tiers, let’s say essential, standard, premium with price ranges or starting prices for each of those. And then just a clear explanation of what’s in each one. And they can see that essentials is this price and standard kind of goes up in price and premium goes up in price from that. It’s very easy for people to understand the pricing psychology of a good, better, best approach.

Number four: You could have a pricing factors page. Instead of giving them a number, you could have a page which explains what affects the price, which is number of users, complexity of infrastructure, compliance requirements, level of support needed, etc. And the idea behind that is you educate the prospect without ever having to give them a specific figure.

Number five: Have published case study pricing. Here’s what a 25 person law firm typically pays for our service. Or here’s what a 10 person accountancy, a CPA firm would typically pay us for our service. So you have some real specific, maybe anonymised examples that give them genuine context. Because if you want to work with 25 people law firms, then giving an anonymised case study of a 25 person law firm, obviously that’s going to attract that kind of customer.

Number six: You could do a cost of doing nothing comparison. Rather than just showing your price, you can show them your price compared to the cost of downtime or the cost of a breach or the cost of losing their client’s trust. And actually, if you set those potential costs against the cost of proper IT support, it makes what you do look like an absolute bargain, which I know it is a bargain. It’s just the clients don’t know it’s a bargain. So that’s a reframing thing. You’re reframing price as a relative rather than an absolute.

Number seven: You could have an FAQ style pricing page. So you answer the actual questions that prospects are typing into Google. How much does IT support cost for a small business? Or what is the average price of IT support? And you give them those kind of answers. Again, this is something that comes from Marcus Sheridan. Go and read Endless Customers. It’s an insanely great book. Every MSP should read Endless Customers. And he talks in there about why you need to answer all of their questions before they ever contact your business.

Number eight: You could do a request a custom quote form. You could say, we’ll get it to you within 24 hours. So it’s not a price that’s on the page itself, but it’s an easy kind of low friction way for them to inquire and get a price. And that does work well with a lot of the options we’ve just been talking about there where you give them indications. The one thing to remember is if your competitors have price on the page, whereas for you, they have to fill in a form and wait 24 hours to get a price, well not only does it give you another job to do, but it slows it down and it does kind of introduce a little bit off friction. Although obviously you can give them a much closer price than they would get just from going through a price calculator.

Number nine: Published minimum and maximum range. You could have a simple statement like, our clients typically invest between X and Y per month depending on size and complexity. And again, that gives them a kind of an idea, gives them an anchor. And you know that every client isn’t identical, but they don’t, so you need to sort of spell that out to them.

You don’t need to do all of these, of course. I would just pick one of the things that we were just talking about there. The point of this isn’t perfection, you’re just trying to make it easier for them to look at you and get a specific idea of roughly how much it may cost them. Those people who are visiting your website but are not contacting you, if there’s no pricing information there, then you are losing those people. And I believe that actually that’s now today a competitive disadvantage, both with the human buyers, but also increasingly with the AI tools that they’re using to do research. So pick one of those approaches and please try to get something live today if you can. It doesn’t need to be perfect, but it does just need to be implemented.

If you are an MSP Marketing Edge member, have you yet joined me on one of our Tactical Tuesdays? This is something new we introduced a couple of months back. We meet as a group for a group call every Tuesday, it’s a live call and a maximum of 60 minutes. It’s very much a discussion, not a presentation, I do talk about a specific subject for about 20 minutes or so, but the MSPs, some of them jump in and interrupt me. Or Sarah, my colleague who’s on the live chat during that call, she’ll jump in and interrupt me if there’s a relevant question. So we very much just talk about that specific subject and then that merges into a general discussion where we’ll talk about their specific marketing problems right now. And sometimes that’s implementing the MSP Marketing Edge system or some other marketing question or just business growth in general.

It’s a really, really good call each week, it’s my favourite thing to do every Tuesday. So if you want to join one of these, they’re at the same time every Tuesday. I won’t give you the time now because obviously it’s different in all the many time zones that we’re in. But go into the portal, go to the navigation, it says Tactical Tuesdays in the middle of the navigation, and please do join me next Tuesday.

If you’re not yet a member, we have two memberships available. There is a B2B one if you want to win business owner clients, and there’s a co-managed one if you want to win IT director clients. And each of these are only available to one MSP per area, check if yours is available at mspmarketingedge.com/membership.

Featured guest: Greg Jones is a #1 Amazon Best-Selling Author in Managed Services, IT Growth, and Business Leadership, a multi award-winning MSP growth strategist, and one of the most influential voices shaping the global IT channel.

As Senior Vice President of MSP Enablement for EMEA and North America at Kaseya, Greg leads strategic initiatives that drive the growth, performance, and long-term success of thousands of managed service providers across multiple continents. His remit spans global partner strategy, enablement, community leadership, and ecosystem expansion, positioning him at the centre of one of the world’s largest and most influential MSP ecosystems.

What I personally love most about this podcast is how it allows me to connect with really important people in the channel who have very valid things to say that we can all benefit from. And my special guest today is definitely one of those people. He’s going to tell us about a project he was working on earlier this year that thousands of MSPs have already benefited from. Plus he’s going to tell us what the hot opportunities are in the channel right now.

Hi, I’m Greg Jones, Senior Vice President of MSP Success at Kaseya.

And very much a friend of the show. It’s good to have you back on, Greg, it’s been a couple of years since you were last on. And I think that’s because you’ve done nothing but fly around the world continuously in that two years. You’re a very difficult man to get hold of, but everyone knows you within the channel. It’s an absolute delight to have you back on. Thank you so much. So we’re actually going to talk about a couple of things today. We’re going to talk about a book that you released, it’s a number of months ago now, I know it’s become a bestseller on Amazon, which is amazing. Congratulations.

And I want to use that book then to go into what the state of the channel is right now as it were. And as I say, as you are someone who talks to MSPs literally every single day, I would say you’re right at the cutting edge of what’s happening out there. So it’d be really good just to get your take on how things are right now, what you think could happen the rest of this year, and of course, as we go through into 2027.

Before we do all of that, for the rare number of people who don’t know who you are, do you want to just give us the 30 second potted history of you and what you’re doing right now at Kaseya?

Sure absolutely. First and foremost, thanks for having me on, Paul, always an absolute pleasure. My name’s Greg Jones, I head of the MSP success arm of the business at Kaseya for the EMEA and also North America region. So what does that mean? Well, it means if you imagine everything kind of away from products and services, really about MSP success. So helping MSPs with their business operational maturity, help with the likes of guidance, sales, marketing, consultancy. I head up a lot of the programs like Kaseya’s global partner program around enablement. I also look after programs like MDF, marketing development funds. I’ve been with the business for around about eight years. Before that, I was on the MSP side of the fence. And then before that, I was at local and central governments working on a lot of large scale IT projects around education, building skills for the future. So yeah, potted history spanning back 27 years now, something like that.

Yeah. It’s scary how quickly those years can go, isn’t it? It really is. So you had a video series on LinkedIn and it was very popular. And am I right that you launched this during COVID back in 2020?

Yeah, it was actually earlier than that, so it was 2019 I launched it. I was out with a partner and he said something that was absolutely gold and I just had to get it out there. It just dawned on me. I was going to take a video of it and I was going to post it. And then it got that many clicks, likes, comments, I just thought “This has got legs. It could move into something.” And also as well, I’m out with MSPs all the time and I thought there’s so much good information out there. And as you know, Paul, we’re better together as an MSP community. Advice, guidance, tips and tricks. Why don’t I do it every single week? Call it one minute Wednesday. Bit of a pun there, it’s never one minute long. And really just sharing tips across the industry. Sometimes it’s me, sometimes it’s MSPs, sometimes it’s vendors, sometimes it’s celebrities, if say we’re coming off stage and there’s a keynote speaker and I can grab hold of them and get them for a couple of minutes. So yeah, that’s really where it started and got traction really quick throughout COVID.

Yeah. I think the reason I probably have it in my head as a COVID thing is because that’s actually how you and I met. And you’d had some seriously top names on that recurring program in that series. And I remember looking at it and I can’t remember if you emailed me or I emailed you, but we were brought together. It was possibly by Mark Copeman, I know you know Mark well, as do I, in fact everyone knows Mark Copeman well. And yeah, it was one of those things during COVID. We all lost weight, we all exercised more, and we all watched your LinkedIn series.

So how long ago was it you turned it into the book? It must be getting on for six months ago now. Tell us what made you decide to take that, I guess anything that’s been on LinkedIn in the past just sits there and no one ever revisits it, was that what motivated you to kind of immortalise it into book form?

Yeah, it’s a really interesting question, it was a number of reasons really. One, if I’m honest, one of my mentors was pushing me to do a book for many years. And also a lot of MSPs that I met or meet out and about say, “Hey, I love your one minute Wednesdays. They’re quick, they give actionable tips and tricks. It’s no fluff, it’s not staged, we make errors in there, there’s bumps along the roads and it’s just raw content for actionable things you can take away.” And then a few MSPs said to me, “You should take that and put it into a book. There is a wealth of knowledge there.”

One of the things I didn’t want it to be about was all about me, if that makes sense. There is that much knowledge and literally hundreds and hundreds of tips that we’ve done every single week over the years. It was one, how do I pick the content, how do I pick the speakers? So I kind of picked a narrative and a theme and reverse engineered it. So it’s not I’m leaving anyone out of the book for a reason, but there was just no way we could get that amount of people into the book. I keep getting asked for volume two, but it was painful enough to get volume one out. So I’m not sure about that.

And that’s really where it developed. It launched in February. It was amazing to see how the MSP community got behind it for an incredible charity, Alder Hey Children’s Charity, but it just blew me away. I knew our industry is incredible and powerful, but I had no idea until that launch day, if that makes sense, just how powerful. Within 14 hours it had become bestseller in the UK, best seller in the US. And within a few days we were over 8,000 copies sold within just a few days. It was mind blowing. It was so nice to see.

Yeah, it’s wonderful. And you did a LinkedIn post just a few days before this interview where you said that up until recently, if you typed in “MSP” in Amazon, your book came up at the top. And do you want to just tell us what’s actually beaten you to the top listing?

Yeah. So I’ve been really, really fortunate because of the MSP community, the book is always, whether you search “Greg Jones” or “MSP” on Amazon it come up as number one. And I was explaining this to somebody and telling them and showing them. And lo and behold, I was beaten on number one spot by the words “MSP”. And I looked and it was a tin of paint, which just blew my mind. So a tin of paint has officially pushed me off number one spot, multi-surface paint.

I love it. Of all the showbiz things to push you off the top spot as well, it was a tin of paint. I just love that. Everyone now should just go and do a test search on Amazon just to see. So let’s briefly finish on the book. You mentioned the charity and I think I’m right in saying all the proceeds from the book have gone to this charity. Now we have listeners and viewers on YouTube all around the world. So can you just explain what that charity is and why you picked it, Greg?

Yeah, so all the profits from the book, even the cost to make the book and everything about that, I took on those costs personally. All of the money that comes in from the book arm goes to Alder Hey Children’s Charity. It is the largest children’s charity in EMEA so it’s in many different countries. It’s based in the Northwest of England and it’s just an incredible charity that just blows my mind. So for many years, I’ve been a business ambassador for them sitting on their boards, facilitating business connections and opening doors, really driving sponsorship and money for the charity arm of Alder Hey Children’s Charity.

I first come across them many years ago when I was on the MSP side of the fence. And it was through a connection back in the early days in BNI, Business Networking Institute. And they had an event at the facility at Alder Hey, and they have what they call the bat cave, it’s an innovations cave around technology. So you can go into the bat cave and see the journey of say a little girl, and you can see her whole hospital journey through technology. So a lot of the technology and surgeons that are there are using technology to push the boundaries of what is possible, if that makes sense. So as to make the experience for the child or the individual when they come in less daunting, but also so the surgeons are more prepared. So for instance, the little girl on this particular day that we followed, she had an issue with her aorta going into her heart. And the surgeons were able to provide scanning and mapping, not only use virtual reality, but augmented reality to walk down the aorta and see the issue so that, it wasn’t 100% lifelike, but they had an idea of what they were walking into before the surgeon made an incision, if that makes sense.

And it’s that being pre-armed and pre-warned really. So even down to the fact of printing organs or veins or vessels and devices out so that they can just feel it, hold it, look at it, get a bit of a better understanding. And a lot of the times, some of these leading surgeons are flying in from across the globe for more of the complex treatments. And quite frankly, I remember being extremely moved that day from a business event, seeing the use of technology having the impact of children’s lives. And I don’t have kids myself, but it just blew me away. And yeah, I knew from that day I wanted to get involved somehow and support that business.

Yeah. I love it. Well, it’s a great book, it’s an incredible charity. The Best of One Minute Wednesdays, it’s on Amazon right now, let’s get it back up to that top spot and beat the paint, I know we can do that. Greg, let’s just finish off by having a little look at what’s happening in the channel right now. So let’s timestamp this interview because let’s be honest, you’re talking there about medical technology, if the medical technology is moving at a fast pace, we know that the channel is moving at the fastest pace ever. So we’re recording this literally right at the very, very beginning of June because we do work so many months ahead on the podcast. So as someone who’s very much in touch and you’re looking at the channel, what are you seeing right now? Are you seeing MSPs excited by AI? Are they feeling threatened by AI? Is it all about AI? We all know that cyber security is still as big as it used to be, even if it doesn’t get as much attention as AI because it’s not new and shiny, but it’s still there. What are you seeing right now? What are the trends?

For the first time ever, we’ve seen SMB/SME spend outpace enterprise spend around technology, which is phenomenal.

You think we should all really be celebrating, but there’s a lot of MSPs that are worrying at the moment in terms of the market. There seems to be this race to the bottom. A lot of SMBs/SMEs challenging around price, but also it’s very competitive at the moment in terms of the services that an MSP needs to deliver to really be successful in the future. I guess what I’m trying to say is what got us here in terms of the services will not be what wins and certainly dominates going forward. Lots of new trends coming in, certainly the likes of compliance as a service with the likes of NIST, HIPAA, DORA GDPR, all of those being mandated in a lot of tenders, RFPs and frameworks.

But also we’re seeing different buying patterns from SMBs/SMEs out there. And I truly believe that it’s because we’re starting to see the younger generation certainly move up into management and even C-suite positions now. And they have a very different expectation of technology. They’re digital natives. They expect instant gratification around technology and have an instant requirement for it. So if they need something, it’s not like me and you, Paul, back in the day, you’d have to put a request in or look at a certain software. They simply just go to a website, sign up to a software as a service and expect it. And that has driven a huge amount of change, but also challenges for MSPs being able to deliver such a wide and diverse range of not only tools and technologies, but skill sets within their MSP business.

So a lot of MSPs are starting to look back at outsourcing, which back in the day sometimes was frowned upon. Well, I’m a big fan of outsourcing or offshoring, providing you’ve got frameworks and processes and procedures in place. It can be incredible to be able to pivot, shift, adapt and evolve really. So it’s very, very interesting at the moment. What I would say is we’ve just launched our MSP report recently, and the number one reason that an SMB will leave an MSP is not because of poor service. It’s actually because the MSP does not provide the tools, the technology, or the service of that business needs to be competitive or win in the marketplace. And you’re right, Paul, it goes back to that AI, automation, machine learning. And a lot of it, when I look back to the roots of it, a lot of it is not leading edge technology. So I’m not asking people on this podcast to run out and buy the latest shiny tech.

A lot of the biggest wins at the moment are coming from helping businesses with flawed business processes and technology sits around that, if that makes sense. So I’m very optimistic. The market is still very buoyant out there. MSPs do need to pivot and adapt. And as always, focus on that sales and marketing. Still seeing MSPs struggling with that massively. So my key focus to all MSPs is focus on that top of funnel sales and marketing.

That’s fascinating. And you’re talking about outsourcing, it’s so interesting, I was talking to one of my MSP Marketing Edge members the other day who was moaning about, “Now we’ve got to do AI have we? Once upon a time we just fixed computers, and then we had to manage all the services, and then we had to do all of this, and then we’ve got to keep them safe and now we’ve got to do this.” And I said, “Well, you could look at it as now we’ve got to do that. Or you could reframe it as what a great opportunity that they’re turning to us to do these things.” And of course there are MSPs that take this even further and they’ll build websites for people and they’ll manage their social media and do all of these things because ordinary business owners will look at a website as a computer thing. It’s not, it’s a marketing thing. But if the business owner sees it’s a computer thing and the MSP either has the skill set or is outsourcing it to a trusted partner as one example, then to me that’s a really interesting thing. So maybe a lot of that, Greg, is then about the mindset. And it’s so easy to do this for 20 years and get really ground down by it because everything’s changing all the time?

It is, but as you say, it’s a huge opportunity. If we look at say the compliance as a service, so that market is tapped to be worth 78 billion by 2028. And the adoption of compliance at the moment is outpacing the likes of cyber security. So it’s a huge opportunity, but also as well, it’s a way that you can have deeper and better conversations with your customers. And as you say, possibly if you haven’t got the skillset to bring it in-house or the resources or the funds, because attracting good talent’s hard and also retaining. Sometimes looking at an outsourcing partner to help with those pieces can be absolutely gold. They’re very agile, you can, in some cases, ramp them up or down, but also it allows you to be able to pivot and adapt. And if you don’t do it as an MSP, trust me, it’s going to cost you business and somebody else is going to offer it. No longer can we say we don’t do that piece. We do everything else, but this piece sits over here. They’re not looking for that. They’re looking for someone with the whole 360 approach to their business around technology.

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. Greg, I could talk to you for hours about this because you’re clearly someone who thinks a great deal about where MSPs are going and what’s developing in the channel. Let’s get you back on the show next year. Just for now, for those MSPs that want to follow you or maybe get in touch with you, what’s the best way to do that? I’m guessing it’s through LinkedIn.

If you’d like to connect with me, please connect on LinkedIn. I’m constantly sharing information to help MSPs grow and scale. Jump over to LinkedIn, type in Greg P. Jones. That’s my URL at the end. And I look forward to connecting with you on there.

We’re finishing our three part marketing audit with a focus on revenue protection. There is a gold mine sitting inside your existing client base, let’s find out if you’re maximising that in your MSP.

Welcome to Episode 352 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge.

This is the third and final part of our massive marketing audit that we’ve been doing across three episodes of the podcast. So two episodes ago, that was episode 350, we looked at your foundations: your ideal client profile, your unique selling proposition, your website, and your LinkedIn setup. And then last week in episode 351, we audited your lead generation engine: build audiences, grow relationships, and convert those relationships into meetings and clients. So if you haven’t yet gone through those, it really would be worth you going back through them.

Today’s the same format, a bunch of questions to ask you with yes/no answers. We’re kind of building something up over these three episodes of the podcast, so you can really get to grips with where the opportunities are within your MSP. Don’t think of it as, “I’ve got all this work to do”, think of it as “I now know which areas I need to focus on the most.”

So we’re finishing with an audit on revenue protection. And this is the part that most MSPs actually kind of never really think about systematically, often because they’re so focused on looking after the existing clients and trying to win new clients that they forget that there is actually a gold mine sitting inside your existing client base. In fact, if anything, I would say that there’s more money to be made selling more and improving the retention of your existing clients than there is bringing onboard new clients. And sure, bringing on board new clients is really important, but actually mining the existing client base is equally important, if not faster results and better results.

I’ll tell you something as well, and you may not hear many people say this, but I promise you this is true. If you can get your clients to a stage that they want and they choose to buy more from you, they will be happier and they will stay longer. And that kind of seems highly unlikely. Surely it should be the other way around… the less they spend with us, the lower the bills are, surely the happier they should be. And yes, that’s the case, but the keyword is choice. The more your clients choose to buy from you, the happier they will be.

So we’re going to look at three areas today. We’re going to look at first of all, getting the first purchase over the line, as in getting someone to choose you, to buy from you. We’re then going to look at good account management. And account management isn’t just happiness, it’s about making sure they’re going to stay for years and years and years. So essentially systemising your retention. And then we’re going to look at upselling. And remember, I’m not talking about selling them stuff they don’t need or they don’t want, but I am looking at how can we find the things that will make them happy if they bought those things and then give those things to them. Retention is baked into good upselling.

I’ve got 30 questions for you in total, and it’s the same format as before, just a simple yes or no answer. Grab a bit of paper, grab a pen, grab a laptop if you have to. Unless you’re driving, just keep score as we’re going through this and I’ll tell you what your total means at the end. Let’s do this.

Getting the first purchase over the line.

10 questions here, asking whether or not you’re making it easy enough for a warm prospect to take that very first step with you.

Question 1: Do you offer a low cost or a low risk entry point that lets a prospect try working with you before they have to commit to a full managed service contract?

This is a very big question to start with, and I make no apology for that, but actually 99.9% of MSPs go from nothing to managed service contracts. Now, the fact that 99% of MSPs do this shows that it can be done. It’s completely possible and it happens every day where you take someone from, they’ve never bought anything from you before, to “Hey, sign your first contract.” And that’s what’s normal within the channel. However, from a marketing psychology point of view, that’s a big ask. To ask someone to go from nothing to thousands of dollars or pounds a month, whatever you are charging them, it’s a big jump. And that’s one of the things that slows down the sales cycle for all MSPs because you’re asking them to not only trust you with all of their technology, but to trust you with 30 – 40 thousand pounds or dollars a year. And also you’re asking them to trust you with, it’ll be okay, you’ll have their back even though they don’t know you. It’s that fear of committing to a new MSP, which makes it easier for someone to sign another contract with their existing MSP, even if they don’t like them or they don’t respect them anymore.

So there are a couple of things that you can do just to give someone like a taster. For example you might sell them, and this is a bit of an old hat technique but it’s still valid today, a paid audit. It used to be called the network discovery audit or something like that. But there’s various variations of that, it could be a cyber security one, could be an AI audit, but getting them to just give you a few hundred dollars or pounds so that you can just do some work with them and wow them and blow their minds with how amazing that was. That product is not really a profit line for you, it’s getting the prospect to pay you to build a relationship with you. And you will find it a lot easier and faster to sell them a full managed services contract and probably a longer contract as well. You could probably sell them a three-year contract right off the bat, off the back of doing a piece of work. So a paid audit is a good way of doing that.

Another way of doing it is just some cyber security training or some AI training. I know a few MSPs right now who sell cyber security training either in person or over a video call and they deliver it to the staff, but then critically they do a debrief with the decision maker afterwards. Another version of that is to do some kind of AI consulting. Now you may only be one page ahead of your clients in terms of AI, but it’s changing so fast, you only need to be one page ahead at this stage. So you can consult with them, talk to them about the things they’ve never thought about. For example, the guardrails that Copilot offers versus the danger of using Claude or ChatGPT or whatever it is. So even that kind of consulting, just a few hundred pound or dollar consulting, it builds a bond of trust between you and the prospect. They’re much more likely to go on to sign a longer contract.

Question 2: Is your discovery call or your initial meeting structured around understanding their problems rather than pitching your services?

I think we were talking about this last week. We were saying that the natural first next step for any kind of prospect is to book a 15 minute video call with you. Well, if they’re a business owner and it’s B2B, you’d book 15 minutes. If you’re selling co-managed IT and you’re talking to IT directors, you go for 30 minutes. That’s an appropriate amount of time for each one. 15 minutes works for the business owner because they’re not going to have a technical conversation and they want a low commitment thing, whereas the IT director, again, they don’t want a technical conversation but they want a much more in-depth conversation, one peer talking to another peer.

We call this the discovery call. It’s a 15 or 30 minute call on Zoom. I know you love Teams, but for a lot of people around the world, Teams sucks. So Zoom is something that everybody can use. So do it on Zoom if you can. And it’s basically you getting to know them. And the more you talk, the less likely they are to become a client. You should literally talk, ask two or three open questions about them and their business. And the whole point of that initial discovery call is for you to check that they’re a good fit, that you and they would fit together, you want them as a client and then you propose having a full sales meeting. That’s the point of that. If you’re pitching your services, you’re failing. You don’t do any pitching. The pitching comes right at the end of the sales process. You never really actually pitch. You listen to their problems, their wants, their needs, their hopes, their fears. You listen to all of those things, and then you tell them how what you do gives them what they want, takes away their fears, etc, etc.

Question 3: Do you have a written proposal process that presents their options clearly and in plain English, not in technical jargon?

Again, this comes at the very end of the process. You’ve had your discovery call, you’ve had a proper sales meeting. You go away and you put a proposal in. And that proposal obviously is the same proposal that you’re just adapting for each prospect. But to them, it’s got to feel like it’s a complete reflection of everything they’ve talked to you about. Right down to, you write down the problems they told you about. This is a really smart thing to do. Get yourself a Plaud, or a Pocket, or just use your phone to record the sales conversation.

Stick it into an AI afterwards and ask it what were the main pain points they have? What are the main problems they have? Write those down. Use their words. If they say, “I really worry late at night that my staff are stealing my data.” If they say that, you take those exact words and you put them in, and you say in your sales proposal, “You told me that you worry late at night that your staff are going to steal your data.” And I promise you, using their exact words back in the proposal is not going to make them think, “Hey, that’s weird. Those are my words.” Because they don’t remember the exact words they’ve used, but what it does instead is it makes them feel heard. It makes them feel as though you have heard them, which is absolutely perfect.

Question 4: Does your proposal address the prospect’s specific situation rather than being a generic template with their name dropped in like we were just talking about?

Dropping in their exact words, dropping in their hopes, their fears, their goals, what it is that they’re looking for. You can actually systemise that within a template. It’s a very smart thing to do.

Question 5: Do you schedule a follow-up meeting to get their decision?

Something that lots of MSPs do that actually drives me crazy, (so if you’re doing this, please stop it), is where you’ll go through the sales process, you’ll put in your proposal, and then you kind of leave it with them. And that means that the emphasis is now on you to follow them up. And that’s where you become one of those people that’s calling and calling and sending emails, and it makes you the needy one. You know what I mean… the desperate one. In dating, for example, you wouldn’t do that in dating would you? If you had a date with someone and then you sent them a message and they ghosted you, you might send them another message, but unless you get drunk and you do drunk texting, you don’t keep messaging them because that makes you look needy and desperate. You just accept that they’ve moved on and it’s not going to happen. Fine, next.

And it’s kind of bizarre that in sales, a lot of people, a lot of MSPs put themselves in the position where they’re the needy, desperate one because they’re constantly doing the follow-up. The reality is people make decisions when they’re ready to make decisions. Sometimes they just don’t want to work with you and they just can’t be bothered to tell you. It’s rude, I know, but they do it. Sometimes actually they’re talking to the 15 people in their business that they need to, or they’re having to think about it, or there’s another big project in the way. And all of these things then stop them making a decision.

I believe at the sales meeting, what you should be doing is you should be asking them how long they need to consider this, talk about it, and make a decision. And then you schedule a follow-up meeting. You literally pull out phones, “Everyone pull out your phone right now and schedule this. When’s good? How long do you need? Two weeks? Great.” So two weeks’ time is going to be the 25th and you get them to actually put it into their calendar. And obviously you send a calendar invite as well. But can you see the difference there? The difference between you being the pain that’s following them up versus the scheduled decision meeting where you can answer their final questions and look forward to welcoming you as a client. It’s a completely different approach and it makes such a difference.

Question 6: Do you have social proof or a reference client that you share with prospects who are close to a decision?

Social proof, as you know, is testimonials, reviews, and case studies. A testimonial is something that they’ve given to you. A review is that they’ve given to you on a third-party platform, so it has more credibility because you can’t have edited it. And a case study is a story that you take people on. So you present the problem, the solution, and how it made their business better. You should, as part of your sales process, be sharing case studies. So the ideal kind of case study to share is a video. You literally send them a YouTube video or a video link of you and a client or a client talking about the case study, the experience that they’ve had with your business. And they will watch a five minute case study, I promise you.

What you could then do is have that video repurposed into something printed. Or maybe as part of your proposal, you have that case study within your proposal. They will read a page of text with a couple of photos or even a couple of pages if it feels like it’s relevant to them. And trust me, at the point that they are thinking of buying from you, that kind of stuff is relevant to them because we feel if we can see other people like us have trusted you, then you feel like a much safer proposition.

Question 7: Is your onboarding process documented and described to prospects before they sign so they know exactly what happens next and the unknown doesn’t scare them off?

Remember, particularly when we’re talking about ordinary business owners, they don’t know what they don’t know about technology. So everything is scary to them. And they navigate to the MSP that they can get to know, like, and trust. So knowing you and liking you, that’s very much part of the content that you put out there. And do you remember if you were in last week’s podcast, that middle section of the 3 step system, which was build audiences, grow relationships, convert relationships, that grow relationships part is where the content builds the relationship with them.

But when we’re talking about know, like, and trust, the trust comes from them believing that you are an expert at what you do. And one of the things that marks an expert is that they’re good at explaining difficult things, and they’re good at guiding people and showing them what exactly they need to do. So as part of your sales process, if you have an onboarding checklist and you show them, you could leave it with them it doesn’t really matter whether you actually use this in the business or not, it would be sensible to use it but if you have a 15 or 20 step onboarding process and you say to them, “Well, what happens on day one is we allocate you to one member of our team who’s going to take responsibility for all of your onboarding through the whole of this process. And there’s 15, 20 steps, they’re all documented here. It’s not your job to tick these off, it’s Dave’s job” or whoever it is that’s going to do it. And what that helps them realise is over a two or three week period, you are going to be systematic about onboarding them.

That takes away so much fear because remember, if they’re scared of switching from their current MSP to you, and you say to them, “But actually, we are organised, we are systemized, we do this day in, day out”, it makes them realise that there’s less risk of them moving from them to you. That’s a very good thing. You’re kind of ticking off all the boxes, the boxes in their hearts and the boxes in their brains. There are a number of things that people have to be comfortable with before they will switch. And things like knowing that you know what you are doing, these are important boxes that you need to tick.

Question 8: Do you make it genuinely easy to say yes with simple contracts, clear next steps, and no unnecessary friction?

Sometimes I’m looking at discussions in The Tech Tribe or on the MSP thread on Reddit and various other communities I’m part of. And sometimes people talk about contracts and they get these huge contracts drawn up. And I know I’ve had lawyers on this show and I think it’s important that you get a lawyer to protect you because there’s so many ways it can go wrong for an MSP. But if you put a 30 page contract in front of someone, that is friction. That is so much friction. And I think there’s a balancing act between a contract which protects you and the client, and also a contract which they can read. No one really reads contracts, but they glance over them, and if you’ve got 30 pages that sends a message of “We’re protecting ourselves. You’re taking all the risk here, Mr. Client or Mrs. Client.” So I think you have to make everything as easy as possible and just remove friction.

So things like scheduling the follow-up call, showing them the onboarding list, showing them the contract if they want to see it before, giving them a date where you can onboard them, giving them a named contact who will be responsible for onboarding them, setting a date that you’re going to come to the site and do any onsite work or you’re just going to meet their team. Having all of these things, almost having it as part of a checklist. Again, it just shows them that you have removed all of the friction from the whole of the process.

Question 9: When a prospect does go cold after a proposal, do you have a process for a multi-channel follow-up?

I was saying earlier that you don’t want to be that desperate person, but at the same time you don’t want to give up. So for example, let’s say you set that date to get their questions and let’s say they cancel that just before, which in itself is interesting because if they cancel something, it shows you they are engaged with the process. But let’s say it’s been a couple of weeks, they didn’t rebook. I think you should hit them hard multiple ways from multiple channels in one go. So you might ring them, you should leave a voice note, you should then send them an email follow up to tell them why you’ve rung them. You could message them on LinkedIn. You might even send them something in the mail, like a letter that you write in the mail.

That might feel to you, you might be crossing your arms at this point saying, “ I’m not comfortable with that.” But big picture, if you hit people with the same message via multiple platforms, you’re much more likely to get that message in front of them. And they might listen to your voicemail and go, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, I need to deal with that.” They put the phone down, they forget. And then later on they get their post and there’s a letter and then they’re like, “Oh my goodness, yes, I meant to do that.” And then they’re on LinkedIn later and there’s your direct message and they’re like, “Right, yeah, I’ll just hit reply to this.” So it feels like you’re bombarding them, but you’re not. I promise you they’re not. That’s why multichannel always works as a way of hitting different people.

If you were to send five emails in the same day, that’s stalker territory, right? That’s scary. So you wouldn’t do that. But it is absolutely appropriate to hit them multichannel. And I would do that today and then maybe wait two weeks and do it again. It kind of depends, doesn’t it? It depends on how urgent they said it was during the sales process. I do know that the ultimate email that you can send to someone which will reactivate a prospect who does genuinely want to talk to you is this. You literally send it to them and in the subject line it says, “You’re switching your IT. Have you given up on this project?”

This comes from a book called Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss, it’s an amazing book. He is the former FBI chief hostage negotiator, and he developed a whole load of techniques to stop the hostage takers from killing the hostages. And he’s now applied them to business negotiations. And that one, “Have you given up on this project?” is great. Because if they have, they reply and they say, “Actually, yeah, we have. We’re going to stick with our existing MSP.” Which is frustrating, but they were going to do that anyway, at least it closes it off so you can focus your attention elsewhere. But if they’re not yet, for whatever reason, they’re not yet ready, they reply and they say, “Actually, yes, we do want to do this. I need three more weeks. This has happened all whatsoever.”

Question 10: Could you name right now at least one thing you could offer a hesitant prospect that would reduce their perceived risk of choosing you?

And the easy answer here is a guarantee. This is called risk reversal, where you literally reverse the risk. If they pick you and it doesn’t pan out for whatever reason, it becomes your problem, not their problem. We talked about this in the podcast a few months ago. Here’s a great example, you might give them a six-month easy out, money back guarantee. So if at any point in their first six months they’re not delighted with what you do, you will release them from their contract and you’ll give them their money back.

Now, the money back aspect of that is probably the one that scares MSP the most, but the six-month easy release access, that’s an easy one to do. Because the reality is any new client you had in their first six months, if they were that unhappy with you and your team, you’d release them from the contract anyway, right? You would just do that. In fact, I always say to MSPs, you take the behaviour that you would do automatically and you systemise that and you formalise that. And what I mean by that is if you would let someone out of their contract, you then turn that into a guarantee. It will help you win more clients if that’s part of the marketing.

Account management and retention.

For this bit, we’ve got 11 questions, and I’m asking whether you are proactively building loyalty rather than just hoping that your clients stay. And I know that most MSPs have epic retention, but as years go on, the people that you bonded with and that you onboarded 5, 10, 15 years ago, I think you actually have to start working proactively to keep them because there’s always levels of dissatisfaction which builds in. All businesses have clients who are slightly dissatisfied. What you need is a proactive retention system just to make sure that you uncover any unhappy clients and you proactively work to make them happy again. That’s what we’re going to talk about now.

Question 11: Do you have a structured annual review process where you sit down with every client at least once a year to review their technology, their goals, and their satisfaction?

These are called QBRs, quarterly business reviews. I think quarterly is massive overkill unless they’re obviously a huge business, which for most MSPs watching this or listening to this, you don’t have like 500 user clients. So quarterly is overkill. I prefer to call them technology reviews or something like that, or technology service reviews. And it’s just where you sit down once a year and you talk to your client about their goals, what they’ve achieved in the last year, what they’re looking to achieve in the next couple of years, how their technology helps them to achieve those things, and you just get a general sense of satisfaction out of that.

Sometimes you start those sessions and if they’ve got problems, they will want to talk about those straight away. It’s almost like no matter how you start it, they bring those problems out. So it’s a good idea to go into those sessions having reviewed their recent tickets, reviewed any contact you’ve had. And sometimes as well, your service desk manager or your techs or you might have a gut feel, like a spidey sense that there’s something not quite right. So in that instance, you’d proactively bring that up at the beginning of the session. But those technology reviews should be very much forward-facing, focused on the things they’re going to do and the things you are going to do together.

Question 12: In those reviews, do you come prepared with a written agenda and specific recommendations rather than just winging it and asking how things are going?

Again, this is part of your prep for that. So you might look at a client and might say, “Wow, this year they’ve had 12 support tickets on the same problem. We could fix that problem if they took this service or if they put this bit of kit in.” That’s the kind of thinking you want to go into it. In fact, you want to go into every review, having reviewed their tickets, their recent communications, what they do, what their technology is. So you know going into it, “They really need a hardware refresh. We really should move them from this service to that service. And I would love for them to buy this cyber security service.” It’s kind of you going in, not with a wishlist of things you want them to buy, but you going in prepared and ready to talk to them about the things that are most important to them.

That prep really does matter. You must have heard the phrase, proactive prior preparation prevents poor performance. There are some other words that go in that, but proactive prior preparation prevents poor performance, it really is true. The more prepared you are going in, the less chance that session is going to be a complete washout.

Question 13: Do you proactively communicate with clients about changes, updates, and threats rather than only contacting them when something goes wrong?

So it’s really easy, especially when you’re busy and you’ve got lots and lots of clients and lots of users, to only talk to them when something goes wrong. But actually I believe you should be proactive and you should now and again communicate with them about something. It’s really hard to know when because actually a lot of the cyber security stuff that’s happening in the channel just never really reaches the ordinary business owners. They’re just not aware of it as we are. So you might pick something like CrowdStrike from a couple of years ago, that’s an obvious one because everyone was talking about that. But you might decide the three or four biggest cyber security incidents each year. You just drop them an email. It could just be a mass email out to all of your clients and you say to them, “Hey, just in case you’ve seen this in the news, we’ve checked all of your setups. This isn’t going to affect you. If you have any worries, of course, you know how to contact us.” And you remind them how to contact the help desk.

Or it might be like a holiday is approaching, a public holiday, and you just message them not just with your support hours, but to say, “I know that this week before is going to be a busy week for you because it always is. Just to let you know, we’ve increased our customer service levels or our service desk levels this week before the holiday so we can help you faster if you need that help. But just so you know, we won’t be here on Monday as you won’t.” Something like that, showing that you’re proactively thinking about them, it can be a very sensible thing to do.

Question 14: Do you send a regular newsletter or communication to existing clients that adds value and doesn’t just promote your services?

Now I have to say, I’m not per se a big fan of sending newsletters to clients for the sake of it. I love and highly recommend that you send regular emails to your prospects, but those emails should be one email, one subject. The idea of a newsletter where you pull a whole bunch of things together, it’s a bit like, nah, no one really reads those emails. So prospects send them one email a week, absolutely. And these are the kind of resources that we give to our MSP Marketing Edge members just to make it easy for them. For existing clients, well, we don’t give anything to our MSP Marketing Edge members for our existing clients because actually I think the clients get tired of a weekly email from someone that they’re in a service relationship with.

But what you could do is maybe send them something once a month, once every two months, something like that. I’ll tell you what is good… printed newsletters. We give a printed newsletter to our B2B MSP Marketing Edge members. And that newsletter is kind of a collection of tech stuff, but tech stuff that’s relevant to business owners. So you could print that and you could, we do it monthly, but you could send one of those out every two or three months just to keep your costs under control. If you’ve got 10 staff at a business, you might send them five different copies or send a couple of copies to the operations manager and say, “Could you put this in the lunchroom, please?” You could put on that newsletter a reminder of how to contact us if you’ve got a tech problem.

I guess what I’m saying is don’t bombard them with a weekly email, but do something at least six times a year just to keep you in front of them and definitely reminding them how to reach out to you. You cannot tell your clients enough how to get in touch with you, reminding them. This is why stickers on computers, I know they’re a little old hat, but I think they’re really cool. Literally click this button or ring this number or email this address, whatever it is that you want them to do. But reminding people and constantly reminding them how to get support from you is always a smart thing to do.

Question 15: Do you have a formal process for measuring client satisfaction, whether that’s a survey, a net promoter score, or regular check-in calls?

Some people do, they have the plugin in the PSA, you know the one that has the faces at the end? So when someone’s closed a ticket, it asks them to tap a face whether they’re unhappy or happy. And then if they’re unhappy, it lets you know so you can check in with them. And if they’re happy, it sends them off to a reviews platform, which kind of makes sense. So you could do that. You could do net promoter score, go and Google what that is, I’m not going to explain it now, but it’s a very simple way of figuring out how satisfied your clients are. It’s typically a big business tool, but you can use it. And actually those smiley faces, I believe, link into a net promoter score. You could do regular surveys.

Me, I’m just a big fan of just picking up the phone. Call each client every six months. Literally say to them, “I’m just having a few hours at the end of the day. Your name just popped into my head.” Don’t tell them it’s a system, “It’s six months since we spoke, six months of the day and I’m calling you according to our systemised retention process.”, that sounds awful. Instead, just say to them, “Your name just popped into my head. Jus call in and see how things are going.” And literally just ask open questions. “How’s things going right now? What can we do to help you? If you could wave a magic wand and get any help from us, what would you get?” These kind of questions are absolutely perfect.

Question 16: Do you celebrate client milestones, anniversaries, achievements, or significant moments in their business in a personal and memorable way?

The worst thing you can do with this is send them a Christmas card or send them a card when they’ve hit their 10th anniversary or whatsoever. And the reason that’s the worst thing is because that’s when everyone does it. At the point at which everyone or lots of people are doing something like Christmas, like public holidays, you’re just part of the noise. Even things like birthdays, I’m not a big fan of sending people stuff on their birthdays, but you might send them a, “It’s been six months since we started working together.”

Or you might hear that they’ve got a big new client and you might send them a bouquet of flowers, which is a relatively cheap thing. Who doesn’t like flowers? And just send them a thing saying, “We just heard you got a new client. We knew you guys were amazing, but this is fantastic,” from your IT support team. And you print your name, the business name on the card. Something like that. It does so much more value than sending them a gift at Christmas or something like that. So don’t be part of the noise, find chances to stand out. This is a show of genuine partnership, and

genuine partners slap each other on the back and congratulate each other when they’ve achieved something amazing. You can do this.

Question 17: Do you know who the key stakeholders are at each client?

Not just the main contact, but the people who actually use your service every day. I always say in any business, there’s a decision maker and there’s a number of influencers. So for example, in my business, I’m the owner, I’m the decision maker. But you know what? I very rarely pick our suppliers. We have an operations manager, Ami. She is the secret weapon in this business and she’s more likely to pick a new supplier. I might sign it off, but she influences me. Christelle, who’s my VA, she’s an influencer on me because she’s watching everything I do all day. I mean, not literally watching, but she’s in my email. She sees everything that’s happening in the business. And she sometimes will just say something like, “I’ve noticed that this, this, and this. Why don’t we do this?” And she’ll save us a few hundred pounds or something like that. So she’s an influencer. And actually my team, I just listen to all of my team. And if they say, “You know we buy this. Well, we found this, which is better and cheaper,” then I’m much more likely to switch to it. So it’s exactly the same in terms of keeping a client as well. It’s not just the decision makers. Who are the ones that shout the loudest? It’s often sometimes the things like the operations managers, but it’s also sometimes other influential people within the office.

You’ve got to make sure that you know who these people are and you keep in touch with those people. In fact, I was just saying that you just phone your client now and again. What if you phone the noisy people, the people who clearly influence other people in the office? Because when the contract comes to be renewed, the decision maker is going to, at a staff meeting or something, is going to say, “Oh, by the way, our IT contract’s up. Are you guys happy if we stick with this company again?” And if people kind of look down and they’re like, “Hmm”, then he or she knows there’s a problem and you’re going to lose that client. Whereas actually if the noisy people go, “Oh, we love them. We love them,” then that’s exactly what you want.

Question 18: When a client raises a complaint or expresses frustration, do you have a clear process for resolving it quickly and following up to make sure they’re satisfied?

It’s kind of an obvious one and no one likes complaints. As business owners, we are so emotionally attached to our business. We don’t get many complaints at the MSP Marketing Edge, but when we do, even if it’s a minor thing, it strikes me right in the heart, it’s like someone pushing a big stabby knife into my heart. I hate it because my business is my baby and it’s my identity, it’s my professional and personal identity. So actually we have a system. If someone’s unhappy, Ami, our operations manager, I was mentioning earlier, she has a system to follow to find out what happened, make sure it doesn’t happen again, and fix it obviously, and make sure the client’s satisfied. And you should have exactly the same thing within your MSP. Complaints are not something to be avoided, complaints are very positive feedback on problems you’re having in the business that you don’t know about yet. And actually for every person that complains, there’s two or three that never get around to complaining.

Question 19: Could you identify right now which of your clients are at the highest risk of leaving and do you have a plan to address that?

So all the things we’ve talked about here will give you signals. They’ll tell you who’s at risk, who might leave, who you feel like we need to spend more time with those people. And a lot of the time it is spidey sense, it’s that gut feel. So listen to that gut feel or figure out what the signals are. There are obvious signals like another IT company asking for information, but there are also less obvious signals like ticket volume going down or ticket volume going up. Or just generally, you feel as though when you’re talking to people at this client that they’re viewing what you do negatively. They’re quick to anger, they’re quick to frustration, and yet they weren’t a year ago. That’s something you need to bear in mind.

Question 20: Do your clients feel like they have a genuine relationship with a named person at your MSP or are they logging tickets in a faceless system?

Even if you are just a two, three, four person band, they can still have a named person. That may be you. You don’t need to have an account manager or a service desk manager for them to have a named person, but they do need to have humans that they speak to. And the smart thing is to give them a team. Because if you give them just one person, Dave, and they talk to Dave for three years and then Dave leaves or gets moved up or whatever, that can be a level of frustration where suddenly they’ve got to deal with someone new. Whereas if they’re dealing with a team, it might be like a pod of people and it’s Dave, John and Karen and they’re dealing with those people, then people can come in and leave that team over a period of time and it has less impact because there’s always someone there that they have consistency with.

Question 21: Have you done something in the last three months that genuinely delighted a client, but it was something they weren’t expecting and didn’t pay extra for?

I’ve not really got any examples of this, but it might be that you up someone’s service level or you proactively fix something before they even knew it was broken. I know that’s what you do anyway. But when you have something like this, don’t be afraid to then ask that person for a bit of social proof afterwards. If someone’s been delighted for any reason and they didn’t have to pay anything extra for that delight, then ask them if you can turn that into a video interview. Just say to them, “Hey, could I ask you a few questions about this? Because your experience might help other people choose to work with us in the future.” And never forget that your happiest clients always want other people to join you. They want you to succeed, so don’t be afraid to use that.

Upselling.

In this final section of the whole process, I’ve got nine questions for you, checking whether you are growing the value of the relationships that you’ve already worked so hard to build.

Question 22: Do you have a clear picture of every client’s current spend and what additional services they could benefit from, but they aren’t yet buying?

This information may be in your PSA and maybe depending which PSA you’re using, it’s really easy for you to see this as like a snapshot. But if not, you should put together something called a profit matrix. That’s where you get a grid and you put all the clients down the left-hand side, all the services at the top, and you kind of fill in the dots so you can see that client one is buying service A, B, and C, client two is buying service B and D. You get the idea. And what that shows you at an instant snapshot is who’s buying what and who’s not buying what.

The reason for that instant snapshot is if every time you need that information you have to go through a screen, through a screen, through a screen in your PSA, you end up kind of not bothering. Whereas if you’ve got it, and particularly if it’s a physical thing, a lot of MSPs that I recommend this to do it as a whiteboard that’s literally on the wall. And what that means is that you can just have a quick look up and see, is client number seven buying service D? And if they’re not, and you’re preparing a strategic review or a technology review as we were saying, it allows you to just instantly think, “Ah, that’s something I need to talk to them about.” It’s a hugely powerful tool.

Question 23: Do you have a documented three-year technology roadmap for each client?

So I just mentioned strategic review or technology review, however you call it. One of the benefits of doing those sessions and a way to use them to drive future progress is to pull together a three-year technology roadmap for every client, and you do it together at that session. When you’re asking them about their future goals, the things they want to achieve, you start to document them and you turn it into a three-year plan. For example, let’s say they’re a bricks and mortar business and they’re going to be opening five new locations in the next three years. You know that by the time they open the third or fourth location, then the existing tech infrastructure isn’t going to be able to cope with that. So you can say to them, “Right, you’re going to be opening every four months, at month 19 we need to do an infrastructure improvement so that will allow you to open the next 20 units”, or something like that and you plan it in. So you’re basically planning in work for up to three years ahead. And that’s huge because not only are they a) mentally committed to it, but b) they’ll start to budget towards it and c) that’s your work that you’re going to get. The timescales may change on it, but you’re going to get that work, which is really exciting.

Question 24: Are your annual review meetings used as a natural opportunity to introduce new services rather than just reviewing what’s already in place?

I said to you earlier, you’ve got to make it a forward-facing thing. In fact, if you are using the strategic reviews, the technology reviews, and you’ve got the technology roadmap in place, you’ve already got all the tools you need to start to talk about other services. For example, you could say to them “Today, you guys need to up your cyber security. Already you’re a little bit below the gold standard, so we can either do that now, which is my recommendation, or if you don’t have the chance to do it, I’d like to do a refresh in six months time, so we’ll put it in the roadmap.” And at that you might pull in two or three extra services that you really want to put in place with that.

Question 25: Do you present upsells as solutions to problems the client has already told you they have rather than as products you want to sell them?

I know how it works, you go on a webinar with a new vendor, they’ve got a new shiny thing or whatever, it’s a new service and you’re like, woo-hoo, I’m going to sell this to all of my clients. So you then go into a series of meetings and conversations with something to sell, right? But that’s completely the backwards approach of going into it. Instead, you should be going into something like that by saying, well, what are their fears? What are their worries? What do they want? What are their needs? All of that kind of stuff. And then if you’ve got a service which fulfills a want or fulfills a need or takes away a fear, that’s the reason that you talk to them about it.

Now I appreciate that sometimes there’s going to be a bunch of cyber security services that they don’t know about because they’re not in our world, but what you do is you hook them together into removing a fear. So if for example, they’ve said, “I do worry sometimes that we are not well-protected,” you can say, “Well, look, I believe that right now you’re protected at silver level. I’d like to move you up to gold, but if you want that sleeping better at night, there is a platinum level.” And you just throw different services in. So more services in at the platinum level to give them extra levels of protection. That’s the right approach to use.

Question 26: Are you having proactive conversations with clients about cyber security improvements even with clients who haven’t asked?

I think cyber security is the one thing that sits outside of what we were just talking about. So as new threats come up, and let’s be honest, AI threats have suddenly become a big thing this year. I know it’s always been a thing, but now that the new models are getting better and the criminals are using them,

I’m guessing there are tools around to help you manage these risks, but cyber security is probably the one thing where you need to be more proactive and not just wait for them to tell you about a need or a want or a fear. And I think you know that, but I think the more your clients realise that it’s not you just trying to sell stuff, but the game is changing so rapidly and you are going to do your best to protect them. And that means that now and again, you’re going to have to ask them to invest in something because their level of protection is slipping down and you want to always keep them up at gold standard.

Question 27: Are you tracking which clients are on your most basic package and actively working to move them to a more comprehensive one where it genuinely benefits them?

And again, this is the benefit of using a profit matrix. If you’re just looking up at it and you’re thinking, oh my goodness, all of these clients are still on our most basic package. You can almost put together a strategy. And again, that might be part of a technology roadmap where as a client grows, and I appreciate not all clients grow, but as a client grows or as their needs are changing, you can say to them, “Well, look, today what you are on is okay, but it’s only okay over the next three years. And I think within 12 months, we need to move you onto this package because you’ve grown, you’ve got more demands, you’re doing this, and actually we are not able to service you as well. We need to give you a higher level of service.” And when you put it in those kind of terms and it’s a future plan thing, that’s okay. You’re not dropping it on someone and saying, “We need another $10,000 a month tomorrow,” or whatever is the case.

Question 28: When a new product or service becomes available that would benefit a specific client, do you contact them directly?

Again, the benefit of the profit matrix. Something comes out, you look at it, and you’ve got this shiny new thing. Can you instantly look at the clients on the board and say, “I think these five people would benefit from that,” and then just phone them and say, “Hey, look, I know this wasn’t in our technology roadmap, but there’s this new thing. You know how you were saying you got that problem? You were telling me about that six months ago. There’s this new thing, and I really think we should talk about it.” And at least if it starts a conversation, then that’s a sensible thing to do.

Question 29: Do you measure your average revenue per client and track whether it’s growing over time?

It’s a very smart thing to do. Now you might choose to just cut out licenses and it might just be service revenue, but what’s your average revenue per client? What’s your average revenue per user? In fact, what’s your average revenue per technician? All of these things are figures that you could easily track, and it just helps you to keep a grip over time, whether you’re growing your revenue per client or even revenue per technician. Or every time you bring in a new technician, then the revenue per technician goes down, but it helps to give you baseline figures for you to know whether or not you’re actually growing.

There’s only three ways to grow any business. You get more new clients, you get your clients to buy more from you, and you get them to spend more over time. And you should be constantly adding in new clients, getting existing clients to buy more things, and getting the clients to spend more, getting the existing clients to spend more, which is partly about price increases and partly about them buying more things from you.

Question 30: Could you identify right now the three clients with the most upsell potential and name the specific conversation you should be having with each of them?

So you might organise your clients by As, Bs and Cs. Your A clients, you want more of them, and all of your account management focus should be on those. Bs, they’re important, but actually the job with the B clients is to get them to buy more and upgrade their levels of whatever they’re buying so that you move them up to be an A client. And then your C clients are maybe the ones that you put less amount of time in. They’re not growing or as a business they’re not growing, their account isn’t growing, but they’re bread and butter money. You may also have D clients, which is disaster clients, and the goal is to get rid of any of the D clients. But if you don’t know the three biggest upsell opportunities, it’s worth you maybe even having a day out just to baseline this. You, your service desk manager, or someone who deals with the clients day-to-day as well as you, go out, take the PSA, go through in each of them and maybe grade each of the clients A, B, or C, and who are your A top three, your A1, A1, A1.

Let’s work out your score.

Add up all of your yes answers across all three of those sections. Out of a potential high score of 30, what did you get?

If you’ve scored anywhere between 26 and 30, good news, your revenue layer is working. You and I can give each other a high five. You’re making it easy for prospects to say yes to you. You’re retaining your clients through proactive action and you’re growing the value of your existing relationships. So you have a complete marketing revenue operation, and your only job now is to just keep incrementally improving each area.

If you scored 18 to 25, that’s still a very good score. It means you’re good in places, but you are leaving some money on the table. And some of this is working, but there are some specific gaps costing you your revenue. So go back and look at where you answered no. Those no answers are pointing at either retention or upsell because those are the areas most MSPs typically under-invest in, and fix those before you spend more money on lead generation.

If you scored 10 to 17, then your revenue layer needs some attention, and you’re actually probably working harder than you need to to grow it because maybe you’re not maximising what you already have in place. New clients are expensive to win, and existing clients are cheaper to keep and to grow, like I was saying at the very beginning. So shift some of your energy here before going out and just looking for more new leads and new clients.

And then finally, if you scored under 10, obviously you know you’ve got a lot of work to do and the nos are showing you the areas you need to look at. If you’re like three to five years or more in business, it might be worth you switching your attention to fix these things before you try and win new clients because adding more clients to this will just accelerate the problem. This is kind of a strategy of plugging the leaks first, and then you could go back to episodes 350 and 351 and build out your lead generation engine on top of what you’ve built here. So basically what I’m saying is if your retention or your upselling or your account management isn’t great, maybe it’s worth improving that first and gathering that extra revenue first and then taking that extra revenue and putting it into new client generation.

So that’s it. If you’ve done all three episodes and you’ve worked through all three of them, you’ll now see what kind of score you’ve got out of a hundred, just briefly.

If you’ve got anywhere between 85 to 100 across those three episodes, then you have an outstanding marketing operation. No need to listen to this podcast anymore. I’m joking. We’ll always have new ideas for you, but genuinely you have a very strong top 20% operation there. So keep the good habits, keep the systems going, but do keep measuring and improving.

If you’re 65 to 84, that’s very solid, but with clear gaps, you’ve clearly got good instincts and you’ve clearly put some strong systems in place, but you now know with all of the nos across the three episodes, the specific areas that are holding you back.

If you’ve scored 45 to 64, you’ve got work to do. Your marketing is good, but inconsistent, and your revenue systems might be underdeveloped. So again, go and look at those nos and just work on the most important things first. You’re not going to build them all out quickly, but over the next 12 months, there’s plenty of work to do there.

And if you’ve got under 45, go back to the beginning – Episode 350, Question 1 – and just work through everything again because these three audits have told you exactly what to fix. Now you’ve just got to go out there and you’ve got to implement the work.

This is part two of our three-part marketing audit where we’re auditing your lead generation machine using my three-step lead generation system. Build audiences, grow relationships, and convert relationships.

Welcome to Episode 351 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge.

This is part two of our three-part marketing audit. Last week in episode 350, we looked at your foundations, that was your ideal client profile, your unique selling proposition, so basically who you want to work with and why they would choose you, then your website and your LinkedIn setup. So if you haven’t yet listened to that one or watched it on YouTube, please do go back and start there, those foundations are so important.

But today we’re going to go deeper into the engine room because we’re auditing your lead generation machine using my three-step lead generation system. Build audiences, grow relationships, and convert relationships. I’ve got 30 questions for you in total across this episode. It’s the same as last week. You’re scoring yourself with a yes or a no answer for each one, and I’ll tell you what your total means at the end. Let’s go.

SECTION ONE: Build audiences.

So in this first section I’ve got 10 questions for you asking whether or not you’re reaching enough of the right people to market to.

Question 1: Do you have a LinkedIn audience of at least 500 people who are decision makers at the kinds of businesses that you want to work with?

Marketing is very much a numbers game, and especially for MSPs because the sales cycle is so long, and therefore you need to have as many irons in the fire as you can. You need to have at least 500 connections on LinkedIn, but better… 1000, 2000, 3000.

Question 2: Are you adding new ideal prospect connections on LinkedIn every single day?

I do think this is something you should be doing every day. In fact, not you, but maybe someone on your behalf, perhaps a virtual assistant or someone on your team. But every day you should be attempting 10 connections. You find those people you really want to do business with and you go and connection request them. And there’s lots of different ways to do this. You could use an automated tool. You’ve got Dux-Soup, for example, or Meet Alfred, I think those two are both still going. I say I think because I haven’t personally used them for a few years and they do come with huge caveats of be very careful… LinkedIn hates automated tools.

You could also just use Claude, open LinkedIn in your Chrome browser and you’ve got the Claude plugin that can use LinkedIn for you. It’s slow, but it will get it done. Or as I say, just use a human. That’s the approach I prefer. And even I attempt 10 connection requests every single day. We’re up to about 8,500 to 9,000 connections on LinkedIn now, and we’ve done it the slow, long, hard way. And they’re good solid connections because I have a VA, Christelle, who every day is connecting only to MSPs and to vendors within the channel, it’s a very targeted list. You can do exactly the same thing. Now, even if you only get one or two people accepting your connection request, you’re still building your list every day, which is great.

Question 3: Do you have an email list of prospects separate from your client list that you are actively growing?

Most MSPs have their client list and they will email them, often from within the PSA. I believe you need a CRM separate and that’s where your prospect data sits. And you should be sending out regular emails to those prospects at least once a week, which is not overkill. Once a day is overkill, once a week is absolutely spot on because they’re only opening about one in four of your emails anyway.

Question 4: When someone connects with you on LinkedIn, do you have a process for getting their email address into your CRM?

A few weeks back in the podcast, we talked about the two different types of audiences. You’ve got borrowed audiences and owned audiences. So a borrowed audience is LinkedIn. So LinkedIn isn’t your audience, you don’t own that audience, and LinkedIn could kick you off at any point. In fact, if they caught you using one of those automated tools we were talking about earlier, like Dux-Soup, they could kick you off the platform and you lose all your connections. So a good safety rule is to build that audience in a way that you own it. And your email list you own. Even if your CRM bans you, you can take your data and move to a different CRM. So I believe that you should be adding your LinkedIn connections into your CRM every day. You literally go and find their email address, we’ll talk about that in a second, and you add them into your CRM.

You’re doing it for two, three people a day or once a week you’re doing it for 10 people, right? It’s fine. I know it’s technically against all of the data protection rules, but you’re a small business adding business connections into your CRM. The first email you send them, tell them what you’ve done. Say, “Hey, we’ve just connected on LinkedIn, I hope you don’t mind but I’ve added you to my email database. I’m going to send you one email a week telling you how to grow your business using technology. If you don’t want it, you can unsubscribe below.” I get my MSP Marketing Edge members to do this, and the vast majority of people just ignore it, as in they stay on your list, they just ignore that email. Now and again you get an idiot hitting reply going “Rah” but don’t worry too much about those people, worry about the 9 out of 10 who just ignore it and suddenly you’re connected to them on LinkedIn and now they’re in your CRM as well, which is great.

Question 5: Are you using data enrichment tools or manual research to find the email addresses of your ideal prospects?

So how do you actually do that? Well, you can do it manually, it’s simple. You go to their contact details in LinkedIn. Often their email address is in there or you can brute force search for them. So for example, if it’s me and I’m at mspmarketingedge.com, you can go and Google in speech marks “paul@”, “paul.green@”, “paulg@”, “pgreen@”… you get the idea. There’s only about seven or eight different variables for email. Most people are going to have one of those, so you can put that in speech marks and believe me, you know when you found a valid email address, it just comes up with results. Or the smart way to do this is a data enrichment tool. So something like Apollo or Lusher, some of these are plugins as well so when you’re on LinkedIn, it’ll come up on the side. You pay like a dollar or something like that to uncover the email address and you just copy it into your CRM.

Question 6: Is your LinkedIn audience made up of the right people?

So business owners and managers in your target market and not other IT people and vendors. So this is a common thing when I talk to a new member of the MSP Marketing Edge and they say to me, “I’ve got 1000 connections on LinkedIn.” And when we actually drill down into it, they have 900 IT people and 100 ordinary people. You need a LinkedIn that’s very, very focused just on your target audience. In fact, I have two LinkedIns. I have my old LinkedIn that it must be 20 years old, and that’s all of my old connections from my previous business and just people I know. And then I have my MSP LinkedIn, and that’s the one that I’m only connected to MSPs and vendors within the channel because those are the only people I do that. So it’s a very targeted, clean audience. Assuming you don’t have that, you might choose to open a second LinkedIn or you might just say, “Do you know what? I’m just going to clean this and delete my connections with all the other MSPs.” There’s no right or wrong way to do it. It’s what feels right to you. Just be aware if you do have two LinkedIn profiles. Again, LinkedIn doesn’t like it, so just make sure you have them open in different browsers. That’s a basic safety mechanism for that.

Question 7: Do you have a defined Dream 100, which is a specific list of businesses you most want to work with and that you are actively targeting?

The concept of the Dream 100 comes from a book called The Ultimate Sales Machine written by Chet Holmes. And in fact, if you’re watching this on YouTube, it’s up there just behind me on my background. It’s one of my favourite books and it’s perfect for every MSP. The Ultimate Sales Machine by Chet Holmes, go and buy it. One of the concepts he has in there is the Dream 100, which is the hundred prospects you’ve got that you most want to do business with. And it’s either because they’re such a perfect fit for you or they’re of a size that it would make a big difference to your business, or they’re kind of like a headline client. They’re a locally famous client or famous within your niche or vertical or whatsoever.

But the point is rather than doing all marketing to all of your clients, well, best practice is you do regular marketing to everyone – so a LinkedIn post every day, an email every single week – but to the hottest, hottest prospects, those are the ones you spend extra attention on. So you send them stuff in the mail, you post stuff to them, you send them direct messages, you call them. And it could be because they’re going to swap IT providers next year, or it could be because you just really want to work with them and you want to be in front of them when they wake up and they think we’re going to drop our MSP and move MSPs. So that’s the concept of the Dream 100. Do you have that?

Question 8: Are you growing your email list by at least a handful of new contacts every month?

Just as you need to grow your LinkedIn connections, you need to grow your email list as well. You have it segmented into your Dream 100 and then all other prospects, and obviously your clients are completely separate. But if you’re not growing that list, well, it’s like anything, if it’s not growing, then it’s deteriorating. Because the reality is in 2026, an email list is deteriorating all of the time. You have to keep adding people in just to stand still because you’re going into their spam, they’re unsubscribing, they’re just ignoring your emails. It’s harder and harder than ever before to get an email into their inbox, to get them to open it, to get them to read it, to get them to click on it, but it’s worth it because it’s a really, really good way to get in front of someone. If you can get in front of them on LinkedIn and on email and via some other methods like direct mail or like the phone, the chances of them talking to you on the day they wake up ready to switch MSPs, the chances of them talking to you has gone up dramatically higher.

Question 9: Are you regularly checking the quality of the data in your email list?

We mentioned data enrichment tools earlier, data enrichment is a great way to check that quality, but sometimes it’s just worth going through and looking and seeing what have we got here. Are you getting people signing up into your email list or you are adding people with their work domain name or is it a personal Gmail? Personal Gmail tends to be a lower value because you don’t really know who that is. Are they opening emails? Are they clicking? If they haven’t opened an email for, let’s say, 12 weeks, you should probably stop emailing them. There’s all sorts of email best practice out there that you can go and look up. Often your AI assistant will obviously tell you what the best advice is today, but you do need to keep in mind that quality of your email data needs to be looked at on a regular basis. It’s unfortunately not something you can just not think about anymore.

Question 10: If LinkedIn disappeared tomorrow, would you still have a way to reach the prospects you’ve built relationships with?

Now again, we’ve mentioned email, but obviously there are other ways. If you have their addresses, you can physically send stuff to them. If you’re connected to them on Facebook, you can send them messages via Facebook. If you’ve got their mobile number, their cell number, you can send them an SMS or a WhatsApp depending on the most used system in your area. You always want lots of different ways to connect with people. LinkedIn is a great tool, but far too many MSPs rely solely on LinkedIn, which is far too dangerous.

SECTION TWO: Grow relationships.

12 questions for you here to see if you’re nurturing your audience consistently enough that they can get to know you, like you, and trust you.

Question 11: Are you posting on LinkedIn at least three times a week, every week?

And that, by the way, is the bare minimum. In fact, best practice for LinkedIn is to post every single day. And that could be every single weekday, could even be every weekend day as well. Saturdays and Sundays can be surprisingly good times to post on LinkedIn. The thing with LinkedIn is it’s disposable. Something you post today, even if it’s highly engaging, it’s gone within a couple of days. So you need to keep adding new content that’s relevant to the audiences that you are building.

Question 12: Is your LinkedIn content written for business owners and managers and not other IT people?

This is a relevance question. And if you are trying to build up audiences of business owners, then obviously you’ve got to write about things that ordinary business owners find interesting. You’ve got to show them and talk about things that they are interested in. They’re not interested in tech. They’re not interested in servers and cloud and cyber security. They are when it affects them, but most of the time they’re not. But they are interested in productivity, growing their business, having their staff complain less. So you’ve got to give your audience what’s relevant to them.

Now, if for example, you were building up an audience of IT directors because you wanted to sell co-managed IT, then obviously the content you put in front of those people would be completely different because IT directors do want to hear about technology, but they don’t want tech tips from you. What they want to do is they want to talk about strategy. They want to talk about cyber security strategy. They’re actually super busy, they’re far too busy in their role, and they want you to acknowledge that, and that would encourage them to start a conversation.

And as a side note, we have a marketing membership to help you win co-managed IT contracts. We have two memberships now, one to help you win business owners as clients, and a second one to help you win IT directors as clients. You can see details of both of those at mspmarketingedge.com/membership.

Question 13: Does your content focus on their problems, their fears, and their outcomes and not your services and technology?

As I was just saying there, those are the things they’re interested in. If you can hook into the thing that’s annoying them right now or the thing that they’re scared of or the thing that they want, lots of those things, then you are going to seem more relevant to them. And if you seem more relevant, if they perceive you as more relevant, then they are much more likely to talk to you on the day they wake up and they’re ready to think about switching MSPs.

Question 14: Are you sending a regular email to your prospect list ideally every week?

So once every day is overkill, I would say two or three times a week is overkill, but one email a week is not. I mentioned earlier they’re only opening about 25% of your emails anyway. So if you send an email a week, they’re only reading one email from you a month, right? If you send an email once a month, they’re only reading it once every four months. One email a week is perfect. And obviously the kind of content that you put into email is a different format to LinkedIn, but the subjects can be exactly the same. Hopes, wants, fears, problems. Those are the kind of things that engage ordinary people and also IT directors.

Question 15: Does your email content feel like it comes from a real human rather than from an AI or a marketing department?

This is one of the things that we’ve been doing within the MSP Marketing Edge for the 9 or 10 years that we’ve been running it. We have a huge process with lots of people. I’ve got Clare and Laura and Sarah and Ami oversees the whole thing. And they’re humans who are writing all of the emails and all of our content as if it’s one person talking to another person. The best educational emails and the best LinkedIn content, in fact, the best content full stop, is from one human to another human about something that that human finds interesting and finds relevant to them.

Be very careful if you’re creating your own email content with AI. Be very careful that the AI isn’t just falling into its AI pattern. Really, you should use the AI as a tool to help you. Don’t get the AI to do it for you, use it to enhance what you are trying to do. That’s the right way to use AI to write emails or content. Or you could just do something like take our canned content from the MSP Marketing Edge and put your own spin on that using AI, which quite a lot of our members are now doing.

Question 16: Are you replying to every comment on your LinkedIn posts?

This is a must. LinkedIn brought in a new thing at the backend of 2024. Again, we’ve talked about it in the podcast in recent weeks. It’s called 360Brew, and this is where LinkedIn have stopped looking at all of your posts individually and deciding who they’re for and whether they’re any good, they now look at everything you create. So LinkedIn is building up a picture of you, which is why it’s really important that you’re very consistent with your content. But also they look at the kind of comments that go on your LinkedIn posts and the replies.

It’s now a golden rule that if someone comments on your LinkedIn posts, you must reply to them. And not just a, “Thanks for your comment” or a thumbs up, you’ve got to actually add some value to that. Keep the conversation going, that’s really important. In fact, there is a great way to use AI tools. You could have the Claude plugin in your Chrome. You could get it to look at your LinkedIn comments and suggest a reply to you. Just make sure that the reply sounds like it has come from you and not from an AI.

Question 17: Are you tracking which prospects are engaging repeatedly with your content?

When someone likes something or comments or hits reply to an email, it’s engagement and engagement is good. Now we mustn’t chase engagement for the sake of it. Lots of MSPs say, “Oh, I put this stuff on LinkedIn and I don’t get engagement.” We don’t want engagement for the sake of it, but engagement as a signal is good. When someone’s thinking and nearly ready to switch MSPs, they start to engage more with your stuff. The rest of the time they don’t. They might read it, they might perceive it or might not, it doesn’t matter. It’s there for that moment that they’re kind of ready to think about talking to someone. And that’s the point they might comment or they might reply to an email or something like that. So it’s really worth you tracking that.

Good CRMs will obviously be able to track opens and clicks within emails. And I know email scanners can kind of screw that up a little bit, the more sophisticated CRMs do take that into account, but it’s worth you just however you are doing it, just saying, “Interesting… this person here has commented on three of my LinkedIn posts and they replied to an email. Let’s have a look at that person. Let’s reach out to them. Let’s give them a phone call.”

Question 18: Would a prospect who’s been following you for six months feel like they genuinely know you and your opinions?

And this is again about being consistent. It’s about you being you and not just having an AI doing stuff for you. It’s really important this. People buy YOU… they don’t buy the business, they don’t buy the brand, the logo, the service. They buy from the human. So whoever is doing the selling to the clients or whoever is the front person of the business, it’s really important that it’s you that you’re putting out there, the real you.

I’m the front person in my business. I do no real work in my business, I’m just the front person. I do all the webinars, and this podcast, and videos, and talk to all of the members, and that’s all I do. And what you are hearing now and what you’re seeing now if you’re watching this is the real me. Yes, I’m in my own studio and I’ve got my nice background and all my kit and stuff, but this is the real me. If we were talking one-on-one right now, I’d be waving my arms around just as I do on the videos. I’d be talking exactly like this and I’d be saying the same kind of things, because being human is so important. Otherwise, they can’t get to know, like, and trust you. These things are really important.

Question 19: Are you consistent enough that prospects would notice if you stopped showing up?

Now, this is a big one as well. It’s a quality score of are you being engaging, are you putting the real you out there? Would anyone notice if you vanished? The reality is a very small number of people would notice, but if they would notice, then that’s a good thing. And you only get that by being consistent. We’ve done this podcast every single Tuesday since November the 5th, 2019. I’ve done a Friday email every week for 300-something weeks in a row. I’ve done a Thursday email to my members for 450 weeks in a row. I do all of this stuff and it is a bit of a hamster wheel, but I do it because it’s showing up and it’s important. And I guess the day I stop showing up, I don’t know what would happen to me, but if something awful happened to me and I stopped showing up, I like to think that some people would notice, which is a good thing.

Question 20: Does your content ever include personal stories, opinions, or specific experiences, or is it just generic advice?

Again, part of being a human is putting stuff out there. Talk about the real things that happened. You can talk about a client being breached or a mistake they made or a problem that you had in the business, but you can make it anonymous. You don’t have to name names, but the more you tell real stories, the more real you come across. Because this is what we do, isn’t it? As humans, we tell real stories. And when we meet people, we bond over storytelling. Our brains are used to it. It’s what we did as cave people.

I’ll tell you a very quick real story about me. I’m not going to give you the whole details, but think of it as a tease for a future episode of the podcast. In my last business, which was a marketing agency for healthcare, like veterinarians and opticians and stuff, I once on a Sunday evening after two beers, deleted the entire web server and deleted the backup. And I deleted a hundred of our clients’ websites. And I didn’t sleep much that night. Our web designer saved my life at 10 the next morning because he’d taken a backup of the entire server on a hard disk like a week before because he didn’t trust me, because he thought I was technically incompetent. And obviously he was right. There we go, real story. I would never normally admit to something like that, but doesn’t that make me a normal human being? I made a bad mistake, I made it worse, and a member of my staff who didn’t trust me saved my life. I mean, literally saved the business. We’d have gone if I’d have deleted those hundred websites.

Question 21: Are you repurposing your content across more than one channel?

For example, do you turn a LinkedIn post into an email? Do you turn an email into a LinkedIn newsletter? We put out so much content, but really there’s only about 200 different themes, maybe 250 different themes across all of it. And I don’t actually personally use a content calendar to plan. I much prefer going with what do I want to talk about today? But if I was to get Claude to analyse all of my content for a year, it would probably say “There’s 200 odd themes, Paul, you just keep coming back to the same themes, but you attack them from different angles.” Like this, everything I’m talking about in this audit, I’ve talked about on the podcast before or in a LinkedIn newsletter or in emails or on blog posts. But in talking about it in an audit, I’m taking all of those themes and I’m just finding a new way to talk about the same kind of content. Does that make sense? That’s something that you can do as well.

Question 22: Have you posted any content in the last month that got you a direct reply, an inquiry, or a conversation with a prospect?

Now, as I said earlier, we’re not chasing engagement, but sometimes you just need to ask people, “Can we work together? Would you like to have a conversation?” And sometimes just putting something on LinkedIn saying, “Are you thinking of switching IT companies? Is it worth us talking? DM me.” Or sending that out as an email. “Are you thinking of switching IT companies? Is it worth us talking? Please hit reply.” And you do that once every two or three months, and you never know it might generate a conversation for you.

SECTION THREE: Convert relationships.

In this section I’m going to ask you eight questions to check whether you are turning warm relationships into actual meetings because that’s why we do all of this marketing stuff.

Question 23: Do you have a process for identifying when a prospect has warmed up enough for you to reach out to them directly?

I was saying just a few minutes ago about what if someone’s liked a couple of your posts and hit reply to an email… you should call that person. But really that should be a system, it shouldn’t be haphazard. Who is looking at your email stats? Who is looking at your LinkedIn? It needs to be that same person. Who is looking at all of them? It’s not like you’re connected to 50,000 people, but you’re looking for that small number of people who are showing signs of engagement and then who picks up the phone? This needs to be systemised within your business.

Question 24: When you do reach out to a warm prospect, does your message reference something specific?

So actually, if they have liked a post or they’ve replied to an email, could you mention that? In fact, could you reply to their reply and just get them talking or ask them a question in return? I send out a lot of emails to our prospects and I’ll get perhaps two or three replies every day from MSPs around the world. And some of those, we then go on and have a really good email conversation. I’m not pitching, I’m not pushing stuff, but sometimes they’ll ask about what we do. Sometimes they’ll ask a marketing question. I’m always happy to answer any question from any MSP because sometimes some of those people go on to work with me, sometimes they don’t. But the point is it’s a level of engagement. If you did want to email me by the way, you can email me directly [email protected], and I’m more than happy to have a chat with you.

Question 25: Are you inviting warm prospects to a low pressure next step?

No one really wants to jump straight into a sales meeting unless they know they’re ready to have a sales meeting. For most people, they want a lower step. So you could do something like a webinar. You could just send them through a guide or something or give them an interactive quiz, like a scorecard. Or the real sort of next step that really works if you can get them onto this, is a 15-minute discovery call. So literally a Teams or a Zoom meeting and just having a chat with them. And obviously the purpose really of that discovery meeting is for you to qualify that person, check that you want to do business with them, and then get them into a proper sales meeting.

Question 26: Do you track your MQLs, marketing qualified leads?

This is the number of prospects who show genuine interest, and are you tracking them? A marketing qualified lead is someone who is showing a level of engagement. They’ve hit reply to an email, they’re doing something like that. Are you tracking those people and tracking if the numbers are going up or down? Because when you start tracking them, you can start doing more stuff to get them to reply to you. If you know, for example, that someone who replies to an email and has a chat with you is much more likely to book a discovery call, wouldn’t you want more of those? Of course you would. So you need to track them so you can proactively try and get more of them.

Question 27: Do you track your SQLs?

SQLs is sales qualified leads. Look at it as the number of discovery calls or sales conversations you have each month. Now you may track them in your head, but it’s really important to write them down. You have to write them down because otherwise there’s no way of tracking them. And we are looking for trends. Are you trending up or are you flat or are you trending down?

Question 28: Are both of those numbers growing month on month even if slowly?

You have to track it so you can see if they’re growing.

Question 29: When a prospect goes quiet after being engaged, do you have a process for gently re-engaging them rather than just hoping they’ll come back to you?

People go quiet for a number of different reasons. We all have trends and things that are big for us and then we move on to something else. It could be that they’ve decided not to move MSPs for a year or two, they’ve signed a contract with their existing supplier again, and that’s why they go quiet. But wouldn’t it be good just to know that? And really the process is pick up the phone. If you’ve had a meaningful conversation with someone and they’ve ghosted you, it’s gone quiet, just pick up the phone or send them a voice note. Send them a text message, voice note or WhatsApp, if you use WhatsApp in your area. Send them a message and just say, “Hey, I haven’t heard from you for a while. Just wanted to check in, see where you’re at. If it’s not something you want to look at now, could you just let me know and I can come back to you next year?” There’s nothing wrong with asking that.

Question 30: Could you look at your pipeline right now and name at least three warm prospects who are moving towards a conversation with you?

This is the, “Are we filling the pipeline?” question. And if you couldn’t name three of those people, then obviously you need to do more work getting more marketing qualified leads and more sales qualified leads. I know most MSPs don’t have enough leads, that’s the whole purpose of this podcast and everything I do with my members on the MSP Marketing Edge. But it’s really important that you track these things and you’re looking at these things on a weekly basis because if you don’t have enough people, don’t feel down about it, just take action to get more of those people into your marketing funnel.

Let’s work out your score.

Add up all of the yes answers across all three of those sections, and you want to work out how many yeses you’ve got.

If you’ve got 26 to 30 yeses, then you have a solid lead generation engine. Don’t change anything. Well, you can tweak it, you can improve it, but it’s good. It’s up and running, it’s firing on all cylinders, you’ve got good audiences, you’re nurturing them consistently, you’ve got a process for converting warm relationships into meetings. You can feel smug, you can feel happy, and you can move straight onto next week’s episode 352 where we look at getting the first purchase over the line. We’re also going to look next week at account management and upselling. More on that in a second.

If you’re scoring somewhere between 18 and 25, then the engine is running, but maybe one of the cylinders is misfiring… I’m not really a petrol head car person, but you get the idea. Some parts of your system are clearly working, but there are gaps and I’ll be honest, that’s costing you leads. So go back through your no answers and just try and find two or three fixes that you think will make the biggest difference to building those audiences, growing the relationships, and converting the relationships.

And then if you’ve got 10 to 17, you’ve got an engine, but it hasn’t been switched on. So you’ve got some activity happening, but it’s not consistent or it’s not connected enough to generate reliable leads. And consistency is almost certainly your biggest problem. So pick one channel, it’s probably LinkedIn, commit to it, show up every single day and just build from there.

And then if you’ve got under 10 yeses, well, you haven’t built your engine yet. But that’s okay, that’s exactly what this audit is for. And actually, I can help you. If you go onto my website, mspmarketingedge.com/3step, and it shows you how to implement my three-step lead generation system.

So that is part two of your marketing audit. We’ve done 30 questions today over the three sections and now hopefully you should have a really clear picture of whether or not your lead generation machine is actually working or just running in the background, making some noise, but not actually producing anything. The no answers are the areas for you to look at. So next week in episode 352, we’re going to finish this three week audit talking about revenue. How do you get that first purchase over the line and how well are you doing with it? How do you keep your clients so happy they never ever leave? It’s essentially retention, how do you make your retention bomb proof? And also how do you grow the value of the relationships that you’ve already got? How do you get them to want to buy more from them? We’re doing that next week and I’ll see you then.

To mark our 350th episode I’m giving you a complete audit of your MSP’s marketing. By the end of this you’ll know exactly where to focus your marketing efforts to create a stronger foundation.

Welcome to Episode 350 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge.

It’s episode 350 and I can’t quite believe that we’ve actually made it here. We’ve been doing this every single Tuesday since the 5th of November 2019 and we’ve not missed a single week yet. So to mark this big anniversary, I’m going to do something a little bit different.

Not just today, but over the next three episodes, I’m giving you a complete audit of your MSP’s marketing. We’re not just talking about theory here. I’m actually going to go through a practical numbered checklist that you can work through right now, so that you can assess where you stand with your marketing.

Before we start, grab a pen and paper because you’re going to be scoring yourself as we go along. Actually, the score is simply yes or no. Yes, we’re doing this or no, we don’t. I’ve got 40 items to go through today and there’s going to be more next week and more the week after.

So today we are going to look at the foundations of your marketing. We’re covering things like your ICP, I’ll explain what that is in a second, your USP, we’re going to look at your website and we’re going to look at your LinkedIn setup. And as I say, there are 40 questions in total across this episode. So count your yes answers as we go and I’ll tell you what your score means at the end. Let’s get started.

SECTION ONE: ICP – Your Ideal Client Profile

We’ve got six questions in this first section and your ideal client profile means that you have a very strong grip on exactly the kind of client that you would like to work with. So I often ask brand new members to our MSP marketing edge, tell me about your ideal client profile and they’re like, “yep, yep, we’ve got all of that sorted out, we know exactly what we want.” And actually their idea of an ideal client profile is, businesses round here that’ll spend at least $400 or $500 a month or whatever the case is.

Actually for a good ideal client profile, you need to go more into detail with that. The more you have a real grip on exactly who you want to do business with, the more relevant you can make your marketing. Because one of the biggest tricks and secrets to marketing is making it seem really relevant to the person that you most want to reach. So I’m going to go through six questions and as a reminder, you’re answering yes or no. So just write these down. You can just do like one, two, three, four, five. And at the end we’ll go through what it means depending on how many yeses and nos you’ve got.

Question 1: Have you actually written down a specific description of your ideal clients?

And if you have, have you included these kind of things? The size of your ideal clients, the kind of sector that they’re in. I mean, it could be that you’ll work with literally any business or you might just prefer professional services, for example you might like manufacturers. Have you written down the location of where the ideal client is? Now, you and I know that you can look after clients all around the world, but you may choose to have clients that you can physically visit at least once a year just so you can show your face because we all know there are benefits still of meeting people in real life. And do you know what the job title of the decision maker is? For example, if it’s smaller businesses, which is typically up to 50 staff, is it the operations manager, the CEO, something like that? So that’s the first question is have you written down, literally in writing stuck on the wall of your office or whatever is the case, do you have that written down? Really important.

Question 2: Does your marketing speak to one specific type of person rather than any business, of any size, anywhere?

So the whole point of having this ideal client profile is to narrow down your marketing. When we start marketing, it feels as though the more wide our marketing is, the more people we’re going to reach, but that is not the case at all. What actually happens, and it’s kind of weird but I promise you this is the case, the more narrow your marketing and the more you talk just to the ideal person that you’d like to work with, the more likely they are to be attracted to you. But also weirdly, the more attractive your overall marketing is.

We only work with MSPs. I mean, literally every single page of our website and everything I do on LinkedIn is MSP, MSP, MSP, marketing, marketing, marketing. There’s no end to it. And yet at least once a month, maybe a couple of times a month, I’ll get approached by someone outside. It could be a vendor within the channel or someone outside of MSPs saying, “Do you think you could help us?” And it’s almost like the more specific you are, the more attractive you become to everyone.

Question 3: Do your current best clients, so the ones who if you could you would clone, do they match this ICP?

Now there could be a mismatch if you’ve decided you want to go off in a different direction. So a lot of MSPs, they get five, sometimes 10 years in and they’ll just take almost any business that comes in. But at the point you’re getting intentional about growing your MSP, you have to ask yourself, “Hey, do we want more of just anything? Or do we want more manufacturers? Do we want more lawyers?” I mean, some people hate lawyers, some people love lawyers, but what do we want more of? So it’s okay if the current clients don’t quite match the ICP so long as you’re very clear that going forward, we only want lawyers, CPAs, accountants, financial people, people that sit within professional services, for example.

Question 4: If you work in a specific vertical or a niche, does all of your marketing make that specialism obvious?

So let’s take the lawyers example. If you would take any kind of business, but actually you’d like lawyers, you want to really drill down and just focus just on lawyers. If I looked at your marketing, your website, your homepage, your emails that you send out, does it within a couple of seconds say to me, “This is for me. I am the practice manager or whatever, the managing partner of a legal practice. Is this talking directly to me? ” And if the answer is no, then you are missing a trick on that one. In fact, you’ll know this if you’re an Instagram person or a Facebook person, which I do now and again, and you’ll see that the adverts these days, and there is a reason for this, it’s because the advertising system has changed, but the adverts these days say right upfront who the audience is for.

So I might be looking at an advert which says, “Hey, are you an MSP between two and 10 staff or between 200,000 and two million revenue?” And that instantly says right at the start of the advert who that’s for. And it’s exactly the same with you with your verticals. If you want to work with lawyers, you’ve got to say upfront, “Do you own or manage a legal practice with at least five staff or at least 10 staff?” There’s nothing wrong with saying really clear and very proactively in your marketing exactly who this is for.

Question 5: Could a stranger read your homepage and immediately know what kind of business you work with?

And actually there is a test for this. The test is you go networking, just go to any old networking meeting, go and find someone that you don’t know that you’ve never met before, do the whole shaky hands, what do you do? Etc. etc. And then when they say, “What do you do? ” You say, “Well, can I ask you a favour?” Grab your phone, pull up your website on your phone, give it to them and say, “You tell me what we do.”

And the power of this, and it’s kind of scary if you were to do something like this, but the power of this is that if they can’t tell you immediately from your own website what you do, then you’ve clearly got a problem. Even if they’re not in the audience, let’s say they’re an accountant and you are talking to lawyers, they should still be able to say, “Oh yeah, so you guys help lawyers grow their business using technology.” I mean, that’s exactly the kind of thing that you want to hear back.

Question 6: Have you ruled out the types of clients you don’t want so you’re not accidentally attracting the wrong people?

So for example, manufacturers are very yes or no, love or hate within the channel. So some MSPs love manufacturers because they love the complicated setups and the unusualness of it and the challenges. And other MSPs don’t want any of that. They want lawyers and CPAs and office workers where it’s the same system being rolled out again and again and again. Little bit more boring, but it’s a lot more consistent and it’s easier as you scale that up. So do you know and as part of your ICP who you don’t want to work with?

SECTION TWO: USP – Your Unique Selling Proposition.

So if your ideal client profile answers the question of who you want to work with, your unique selling proposition answers the question of why would they want to work with you? So this is very much looking at things from their point of view, which as I say, is a marketing superpower. So we’ve got seven questions here and the first is this.

Question 7: Can you finish this sentence right now without hesitating? We help achieve by ?

If you can’t answer that, then you don’t have a unique selling proposition. You may think you do, but the beauty of a USP is that you know exactly why your ideal client would buy from you. So if you can’t answer that, you’ve got some work to do on that.

Question 8: Does your USP avoid these words?

These are all bad words because they’re overused… proactive, responsive, trusted partner, great service and tailored solutions. I know those last two are two words. But if you’ve got any of those words in your USP, you need to strip those words out because they’re not differentiators. I promise you, as someone who has looked at more than a thousand MSP websites over 10 years, maybe even more than that, I promise you those are the words you see again and again and again. So they may feel to you like they’re the message that you want to get across, but from the prospect’s point of view, they see them all the time. If they see a word all the time, it cannot be a differentiator.

Question 9: If a prospect or when a prospect reads your USP, would they say off the back of that, “so what”?

If they would say “so what”, then you score a no on that question. The so what test is a great test you can apply to almost any kind of marketing. So for example, if you want to talk to lawyers and they’re lawyers with at least 10 or 20 staff, and if your USP doesn’t make them go, “Oh, this is for us” then it has failed the so what test. These days they don’t say so what, but they just kind of move on to the next thing.

This so what test is something that I learned in journalism college in 1992, 1993. It was one of the first lessons we learned was anything that goes into a newspaper or radio, as the training I was doing back then, has got to pass the so what test. Otherwise, it’s not of interest to the listeners and the readers. And actually you can apply that to all of your marketing as well. Your USP has got to pass the so what test.

Question 10: Could you complete this sentence? We are the only MSP in our area that…

What goes on the end? If you’ve got nothing on the end, then you’ve got no differentiator. We’re the only MSP in our area that helps big legal firms to grow faster with technology. Can you see how it doesn’t really matter what the words are, but if you don’t know instantly how to complete that sentence, you are missing something from your USP.

Question 11: Does your USP appear on the homepage of your website as a headline? On your LinkedIn as a headline? And do you have it memorised as your elevator pitch?

That’s three different places to use the same thing. And you use slightly different words, but your USP, once you’ve encapsulated it down to a sentence, something that you can say to someone else that they instantly understand what makes you different. You use it as the headline on your homepage, the headline on your LinkedIn, mostly the same just a few tweaks of the words, and you have it saved in your brain as an elevator pitch so if you ever meet someone and they’re potentially a good ICP, a good ideal client profile fit for you, then you know how to say to them why they would want to work with you.

Question 12: If you Googled three of your local competitors right now, would you sound genuinely different to all of them?

In fact, this is one of the tests of your USP. You go onto the web, you Google IT support in your vertical or your area, and you go and look at all of the websites of your competitors, or you get your AI friend to do it for you. But it’s kind of better for you as a human to do it. Maybe you and your AI friend doing it together and you’re asking yourself, our USP once it’s there in our marketing, does anyone else have that marketing? I guess it would make sense to do that in advance. The reality is 80% of websites in any market or MSP’s websites in any market are pretty much identical. So just in doing this exercise and making yourself stand out, that can make a real difference.

Question 13: Have you tested your USP on a real business owner, obviously outside of the channel and asked them if it means something to them?

So you remember earlier I was saying go networking and show your website to someone. The next time you meet a lawyer or whoever is your ideal client. Why not say to them, “Can I ask a big favour please? So we are always looking for clients like you and we’ve just changed all of our marketing. Can I show you something on my phone? Would you just tell me, and be brutally honest with me because this just helps me and I’ll obviously happily return the favour, does this talk to you? So you’ve described yourself as the perfect kind of client for us. I’d like to know if this is the right thing.” Does that make sense? I mean that’s a scary thing to do, but it’s a very smart thing to do.

SECTION THREE: Your website.

This of course is a big one because even in 2026, your website is the most important marketing asset that you have at your disposal. Every single person who is thinking of working with you at various stages will check you out on your website. They check your websites and they check your LinkedIn. We’ve got some stuff on that coming up. So we’ve got a lot of questions in this section. I’m going to speed them up a little bit because a lot of them are very simple questions. In total, we’ve got 18 questions here and you’re answering yes or no to each one. Now we’re going to start with the five questions that every single prospect asks themselves and you need to know whether or not your site answers them.

Question 14: The first thing people ask themselves – Is this for a business like mine?

So this builds on the work that we’ve just done about the ideal client profile and your unique selling proposition. Does your homepage make it immediately obvious who you work with and what size of business you’re built for? It’s okay to say we work with larger businesses of 50 or more staff, or we are built for small businesses up to 20, 30 staff. And I know you’d always like more users, but sometimes an MSP that does really well with 20-30 users or staff just wouldn’t cope with 100, 200, 300. Not that they would come knocking, but people want to know that you and them are the right size for each other.

Question 15: The second thing that people ask themselves – Do these people understand my world?

This is a big one. So you’ve got to ask yourself, does your website talk about the problems and frustrations that your clients and prospects have rather than technology and processes? No one really sets out to go and get another IT company to get another MSP. The reason they have an MSP is because they want the outcomes. They want the outcomes where they just want their technology to work. They want it to help them to grow their business, not hold their business back. They are fed up of their staff complaining and they’re fed up of it just being an unknown entity.

You can talk about those frustrations and those problems and how you take them away because you make sure that technology is there ready to help them grow, things don’t go wrong so often so their staff don’t complain so much. And you will help them budget their IT infrastructure as they grow, which you do with roadmapping and all that sort of stuff. So the more you talk about problems and frustrations and the less you talk about technology and processes, the easier it is for them to answer that question.

Question 16: The third thing that people ask themselves – Can I trust them?

Can I trust you essentially? Does your website have specific social proof? Named people, photos, names, companies, maybe even job titles where they’re saying very specific things about you. If they’re saying, “Oh, great service, would recommend,” that’s not social proof. These days that kind of generic social proof doesn’t work. It has to be specific. Specificity sells. We need real stories from real named clients.

And I know that there’s always the worry of a security concern if you put the names of your clients and photos of them on the website. I understand that, but you can systemise around that. You can educate your clients about making sure that any call that they get that they verify, it is actually from you guys and not someone that’s trying some kind of security scam.

Question 17: The fourth thing that people ask themselves – Roughly what’s it going to cost me?

Does your website address the pricing question in any way, even if it just explains what affects price rather than not saying anything about it? This is such a big thing. And last year I read this book. It’s called Endless Customers, written by Marcus Sheridan. It’s a reinvention of his previous book called They Ask You Answer. Highly recommend that you get it. We’ve actually partnered with Marcus Sheridan on a project called msppriceguide.com and it’s an interactive price calculator that’s powered by AI and you put it on your website and it completely answers this question.

It tells all of your prospects immediately roughly what it’s going to cost to work with you. And it is only roughly, you’re not held to it, it doesn’t have to be an exact price because that comes from the sales process, doesn’t it? Because if someone asks you how much is what you do, the answer is how long is a piece of string? So an interactive AI-powered pricing calculator helps you to answer that question early on. It just gives them comfort and security that it’s in the right ballpark.

If they’re thinking, I’m not going to spend more than $20 a month, and the price calculator says it’s $70, $80, $100 a month, then they know that you are not for them. I mean, let’s be honest, they’re going to struggle to get good IT support for $20 a month. But the point is if it’s roughly around what they expected it to be, they’re going to move on to the next step. This is so important. This is literally a lead killer, which is why I partnered with Marcus and his team. Please do go and have a look at that, msppriceguide.com.

Question 18: The fifth question that people ask themselves – What do I do next?

Is there a very clear low risk call to action? I recommend, and this is best practice right now, a 15-minute discovery call, your live calendar embedded on every single page of your website. And you say to them, book a 15-minute call with us. 15 minutes on a Zoom or a Teams where they just talk to you as the technology advisor, not the salesperson, but the technology advisor. 15 minutes is nothing. Everyone will book a 15-minute call without really overthinking it. But the point is they’ll only book it if they’re nearly ready to take the next step.

So when you put your live calendar on there, and obviously people can still go to contact us and email you or fill in a form or phone you or write to you or whatever they do, send you a pigeon if they do that, but the point is when someone books in a 15-minute appointment it’s an indicator. It’s them putting their hand up and saying, “I am nearly ready to move forward. I just want to have a conversation.” It’s kind of like they’re checking you out and actually you are checking them out. It’s a good fit call. That’s what it really is. But we call it a discovery call. Your purpose on that 15-minute call is for you to push for a full sales appointment, which obviously happens offline.

So those are the first five questions that a prospect asks when they’re coming onto your website. We’re now going to whiz through a bunch of other questions about your website. And the first of those relates to your homepage.

Question 19: Does your homepage headline speak to the outcome that the prospect wants rather than just describing your service?

Like I was saying earlier, talk not about your technology, talk about outcomes. People don’t buy from features, they buy from benefits. So it’s not about the tech, it’s not about the services you manage. It’s about what they can do with it.

Question 20: Can a visitor tell within five seconds what you do and who you do it for without having to scroll down?

When someone first lands on your website, the thing that they see at the top, which obviously is a different amount of size depending on whether they’re on their phone or whether they’re on a laptop, we call this the hero section. It’s also known as the fold, this goes back to in the old days when you had newspapers, you remember the newsagent would fold the newspaper over and just put it on their counter. That’s where the concept of the fold comes. These days it’s more often called the hero section. Can I tell in your hero section what you do and who you do it for without having to scroll down? If I can’t, then you need to do some work on that hero section.

Question 21: Does your website have real photos of real people?

That’s you and your team and not stock images. It’s 2026, right? Stock images were bad in 2016. There’s no space for them anymore. There are plenty of photographers out there, good photographers who don’t charge a huge amount of money to come and shoot you and your team. So just get it done. If you are your team, just use yourself as the face of the business. I promise you, you will win more business by having real photos of you, maybe even you and your family, you and your team, you and your associates.

I promise you, you’ll win more business from that because humans buy from humans. The second they see stock images, no. AI images, they know they’re AI images, we’re still in the uncanny valley where we know it’s an AI image when we look at it or we’re not quite sure. I wouldn’t even use an AI image of you. Use real, real images that a photographer has taken, they’re not expensive, they’re not difficult to do, but if you have stock images or anything like that on your website, I promise you, you’re turning people off.

Question 22: Are all your accreditations, your certifications, your years in business clearly visible?

When we are talking to a prospect, we’re talking to their heart and their brain. Actually, we need to spend 80% of our time talking to their heart. They are making emotional decisions on whether to pick you or whether to pick someone else, but we do need to give the brain a bit of information as well. So we’re talking to the heart with all of this stuff we’re talking about with all the stuff I’ve mentioned so far, but the brain will want to look for a bit of evidence. Show me some accreditations, qualifications, memberships, how long have you been in business? All of that kind of stuff. It’s just ticking a box.

Question 23: Do you have at least one proper case study that’s a before and after story?

It’s really important. It’s a great form of social proof. A case study is where you’re taking someone on a journey. Now, the best kind of case study is where you video a client, you interview them. What was it like before they started working with you? What did you guys do to make it better and how has that made their lives and their business easier? That’s exactly the kind of stuff that works as a great case study. And the beauty of doing it on video is you can repurpose it. So you can edit that down into a short video for your websites, little clips of that to go onto social media, and you can turn it into a written case study that goes into a sales proposal. It can be used over and over again.

Question 24: Do you have at least one video testimonial on your website?

So a video testimonial is different to a case study. A case study is taking someone on a journey. You could have four or five minutes as a case study, whereas a testimonial is someone talking and saying literally like, “Oh, I’ve been working with your MSP for some time now and oh, what an experience. Whenever we have a problem, we just have to get in touch and they do X, Y, or Z.” Something like that is beautiful. So a video testimonial is very important.

Question 25: Do you also have written testimonials including the client’s name, job title, and company name?

So we need all of these things, right? All of these are called social proof. Social proof makes us feel that you’re safe. Social proof talks to the caveman inside us because back in the day, 10,000 years ago, if as a cave dweller we saw lots of people running, we just joined them. We didn’t sit and think about it and go, “We wonder why they are running.” We just ran with them because the chances were there was a dinosaur chasing them and it was hungry. I know that humans and dinosaurs never live together, but go with that. Saber-toothed tiger.

So social proof talks to us as a very base level. And when we see videos and we see written testimonials and we see clips of testimonials, it just sends a message to us saying, “These guys are safe. You can trust these guys. Other people like you trust these guys.”

Question 26: Is your Google review rating linked or shown anywhere on the site?

So it’s important to collect external reviews. Google is a great place to do it because actually by getting reviews on Google, you are helping to improve your Google juice. And yes, people are using AI to find an MSP, but they are still using Google. And as we know, Google is putting a whole series of changes in for the AI age. So having reviews in Google is great. Here’s a bit of a trick actually, solicit and collect reviews on Google to help your Google juice and get more Google testimonials. You can then take screenshots of those to feed them into your websites, or you can get a widget which sucks them into your website. That’s a very smart thing to do.

Question 27: We’re talking now about services pages – Are your services pages written from the client’s perspective?

So looking at their pain, their problems and their desired outcomes rather than a description of what you do technically. Now, services pages are not that important. People kind of just skip over them, but often they do that because they’re boring, because they’re far too technical and they talk about all the services. Remember, people don’t care about the services, they care about the benefits. In fact, there’s a great way of turning any feature into a benefit. If you list a feature and then you say the words “which means…” or “so that…”, and then you can list the benefit.

So for example, if you say, “We have 15 different scanning tools, which means you can just carry on with your work and if there’s a problem, we’ll detect it and fix it without it interrupting you.” Does that make sense? Yeah. So you have a feature “which means” or “so that”, and that goes into a benefit.

Now we’re going to ask some questions now just about the general website.

Question 28: Does your website work properly?

Is it fast? Does it look good on a mobile phone? Those things really do matter.

Question 29: Does it load quickly?

I mean like under three seconds. There are all sorts of speed tests you can do. Google has a speed test, that’s the one to do because what Google thinks about your speed does affect your ranking. It does affect how much organic traffic appears on your website.

Question 30: Does your location and your core service appear in your page titles and your headings?

So that Google and the AI tools know where you are and what it is that you do.

Question 31: Is there a call to action at the end of every single page, not just the homepage?

And that call to action, of course, being your live calendar.

SECTION FOUR: LinkedIn setup.

Right, we’re nearly there. We’re in section four, which is all about your LinkedIn. Remember we’re looking here at the foundations. So I’ve got the final nine questions all about LinkedIn. And they’re to do with your personal profile. When we talk about building up your LinkedIn, we’re always talking about your personal profile. So having a company page is important because they will go and check out the company page as part of their due diligence, just like they look at your website, they look at your company page. But in terms of building your connections and finding hot prospects on LinkedIn, it’s all about your personal profile.

Question 32: Is your profile photo professional, approachable, recent and on a plain background?

So not quite a passport photo, but does it look like you now and is it professional? Like I was saying earlier, photography is cheap, so when you get that photo shoot done of you and your team, you get lots of different shots of you, make sure you have a good professional photo of you on your LinkedIn. And as an aside, it should be the same photo of you on your LinkedIn, on your website and on your business card. Yes, you should put your photo on your business card.

I change my photo around about every two to three years, depending how fat I’m getting, how the old neck’s drooping and how the cheeks are getting a bit, whatever, and obviously the grey hair… well, it’s all gone grey now, so I don’t have to worry about that, it’s just I guess as the grey hair starts to drop out, I’ll need to update my photo. But when I do that, I change it on my LinkedIn, on my website, everywhere I have that photo. It’s really important you do that for consistency reasons.

If you are using a Photoshopped photo of you from 2007 and that’s on your LinkedIn and then someone turns up on a Teams call with you and you are like a 20 year on fatter, older version of yourself, I know that it’s funny, it’s a joke, but actually it’s not because it’s almost like you’ve pulled the wool over their eyes over something as simple as your appearance, which matters a lot less to them than it does to you. Consistency, people want consistency because it makes them feel secure. It’s all about how they feel here.

Question 33: Does your banner image communicate what you do and who you help rather than just showing your logo?

So of course your banner is that image at the top of your LinkedIn personal profile and it’s really important what you put in there. So in mine, for example, it says something like “Grow your business with the MSP Marketing Edge”, and it has a URL in there as well. They can’t click it because it’s the banner in LinkedIn, but it’s a really important way of getting that out there.

Question 34: Does your headline on LinkedIn describe the value you deliver to clients?

Not just saying what your job title is. So if it’s just “Founder so-and-so IT”, then you’ve lost out on that. Like we were saying earlier in one of the questions, you take the same headline on your website and you adapt it for your LinkedIn headline as well.

Question 35: Is your About section written in first person, focused on your ideal client’s problems and ending with a clear call to action?

That About section is really important. You write it as if you have written it to them. It’s you, one person, talking to them, one person. Really important. And it needs to basically take them on a small journey. So you talk about their problems, don’t talk about technology, but you talk about the outcomes that you deliver, and then there’s that clear call to action. Literally, you put the link to your live calendar or maybe like a link to your website with a live calendar page right there at the end of your About section.

Question 36: Does your featured section contain something that moves the prospect forward?

So for example, a link to your website or a useful resource like an IT services buyer’s guide, we give one of those to all of our MSP Marketing Edge members. Definitely a way for them to get in touch, that link to your live calendar.

Question 37: Does your profile read like a sales page for your MSP rather than a CV for a job application?

People sometimes get confused with LinkedIn, even people who run their own businesses and own their own businesses. LinkedIn is a job hunting platform for people who are employees and that’s a very important platform. I have lots of friends who are quite high up, some of them in quite impressive companies, and they’re always keeping their LinkedIn profile up to date because they never quite know when they’re going to have to use it for job hunting.

But for you as the business owner who wants to use it to attract prospects, you’ve got to remember that LinkedIn is a different platform for you. You use it in the same way, but it’s to talk to prospects, make them think, “Okay, I should talk to these people” and kind of tell them the outcomes, the reasons why you understand their problems and you can help solve those problems.

Question 38: This is moving away from your personal profile page – Does your company page have a professional logo, a banner image, correct contact details, and an About section written for prospects rather than about your history?

So again, this is about getting the basics right. Your personal profile is about you. People buy from people, so the two of you connect on there, but your company page is about the company and needs to have all the details about your business.

Question 39: Has your company page been updated in the last 30 days?

Every Thursday I go and add something to our MSP Marketing Edge company page and it’s normally just a bit of news, something new that we’ve done or some new feature that we’ve added, but obviously I write about it as a benefit, not just as the feature. And I just do that as part of my system. 50 weeks of the year, don’t do it at Christmas, 50 weeks of the year, there’s something new going on the company page. So when a potential member is doing their due diligence on us, they can see that we are active, we’re constantly adding something to our company page. I’m updating my personal profile every day with new content, but I’m doing the company page once a week. That is a great cadence.

Question 40: Do you have a process, even if it’s just a basic one, a system for adding new ideal prospect connections every single week or better still every single day?

So I just mentioned having a good cadence for content, adding content every day. I believe that you should be reaching out and adding new connections every day as well. LinkedIn has changed the rules for this over the years, it used to be that you could go and do this almost like as a once a week job, but now there’s all sorts of limitations. The more money you give them, the bigger you can do.

But I believe that connecting to ideal prospects is something that should be done every day. You as the owner or the driver of the business shouldn’t be doing this. It’s something that a VA or someone somewhere should be doing on your behalf. But imagine if every day you attempted to connect to 10 ideal clients, ideal prospects in your area, and let’s say just two or three of those accepted. That doesn’t sound a lot, but you’re attempting 50 connections a week. Someone will accept somewhere around about, let’s say eight to 10 a week and you are just slowly, consistently building up your LinkedIn connections over a number of years.

And that’s not rocket science, right? And that’s not going to get you into orbit quickly, but it’s slow and steady and it’s a system and someone else can do it on your behalf. And slow and steady always wins the race when it comes to marketing your MSP because it’s a marathon, right? There’s so much that you have to do. The trick is doing it all consistently and turning it into a system.

Let’s work out your score.

Awesome. We are so nearly done, it’s just the scoring to do and you need to add up all of your yes answers across all four sections. How many yeses have you got out of 40? If you answered all of those questions, either as yes or no, how many have you got?

If you’ve got 35 to 40 yeses, you have some of the strongest marketing foundations of any MSP anywhere in the world. Your marketing base is solid and you are ready to move straight onto next week’s episode, 351, where we’re going to start to build a lead generation engine on top of what you’ve already got there.

Now, if you have somewhere between 25 and 34 yeses, then that’s really good. That’s still like leading class. Most MSPs don’t have that many. So you’re very good in places. Obviously you’ve got some gaps to fix. You’ve clearly got the right instincts, but there are some specific areas to go and improve. So now you can go back through the questions where you had to write down no, and I’d just pick out sort of the top three to fix before you do anything else. And then of course you can come back for next week’s episode 351.

Now, if you scored somewhere between 15 and 24 yeses, this is good. You’ve got some of the foundations in place. You need to do a little bit more, because at the moment there’s a possibility your marketing might be working against you in some of those areas. So before you invest any more time or money in trying to generate leads, just go back and fix some of those foundations. Almost everything we’ve just been talking about there is kind of one-off items. So you want to make sure that you’ve got those basics in place first because if you go off on a big lead generation campaign and they come to your website and it’s broken or there’s a LinkedIn profile that’s seven years out of date, those are kind of wasted leads.

And then finally, if you score anywhere under 15, then don’t spend another penny on marketing until you’ve worked through this audit and fixed the gaps. You have to get the foundations right first. And you can do these at the same time as doing lead generation, but most of these fixes are really straightforward, they need your attention just once. You do them, you can use an AI tool to help you with them, you get them done, they’re in place and that’s it, you can then just move on. But even if you just spent a couple of weeks just every day just doing one of these items and making them better, in just the next couple of weeks, your marketing foundations are going to be so much stronger.