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Welcome to Episode 274 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…
Are audits still a good sales tool for MSPs?: Sell something small to start building a relationship before selling the thing you really want, which is of course, a managed services contract.Every MSP needs this strategic referral deal: There could be an opportunity for you to set up a win-win relationship with a local web agency near you, and it could get you more clients.Why your marketing must be about the prospect, not you: Your potential clients don’t care about you… they care about how you can help their business, so your marketing must be about them.Paul’s Personal Peer Group: How can you stop clients from contacting you directly? I have 9 suggestions for you to try.Are audits still a good sales tool for MSPs?
If a client tells you they’ve got a Trojan, your heart sinks. But what if there was a kind of Trojan that actually made you happy because it meant that you were going to make some more money and win some new clients. And don’t worry, I’m not suggesting you infect people’s computers, but let’s talk about why this sales Trojan is a good one, how it can boost your sales and ultimately have a powerful positive impact on your MSP.
We all know what a Trojan horse is, and we all know the Greek myth that gave it that name. But of course, we also know its place within cyber security, perhaps a term that was maybe used more in the past than it is today. But I believe you can use a sales Trojan horse. So what is this? It’s where you sell something small to someone to start building a relationship with them ahead of the thing you really want to sell them, which is of course, a managed services contract.
As an example, you would sell them a low level service first, with the knowledge that you’re going to overdeliver, do a great job, totally delight them. And that’s going to help you to sell them a proper monthly recurring revenue managed services contracts down the line, which is always the goal of everything we’re trying to do here. MRR first. There is only MRR, everything else is just establishing the setup of more MRR.
The beauty of a sales Trojan horse is that it’s a lot easier to sell someone something small than it is to ask them for a 12, 24 or 36 month contract.
They might not understand technology at the level you do but they do understand that if and when something goes wrong, their business is completely screwed. So by selling them something small first, it gives you the opportunity to build up a level of trust with them to build a relationship. And this actually has a term within marketing. It’s called front end backend marketing.
Maybe you’ve seen one of these people online selling something, perhaps doing something like a giveaway where they ask you to pay a little bit for postage and packing. So the thing they’re giving away, the book or whatever is free, you just pay the postage and packing. Or maybe you get a huge value item for $20, something like that. And what this person is really trying to get you to do is to buy something and feel satisfied with it, and then you’ll go on and you’ll buy something more expensive from them in the background or what’s known as the backend. They probably don’t make any money from selling you the book or the $20 item or whatever it is, but they will make money from selling you the $500 item in the background. And let’s say one in 10 people goes on to buy that item, no one would ever buy it as the first purchase, but some may buy it as the second purchase. That’s the theory of front end backend, and that works very well depending on your audience and depending on what you’re selling.
From an MSP point of view, the most obvious thing that you would sell to someone in the front end is a project. In fact, I had a thread on this in my MSP marketing Facebook group that any MSP can join. I asked the direct question: Would you sell a project just to start a relationship with a customer so that you could go on to sell them managed services?, which seemed like a very black and white answer where people were either, yes, 100% I would do that, or they were, no, I will not do that, I only want to get recurring revenue. I don’t want to sell projects. And of course, there’s no right or wrong answer. You have to go with whichever is right for you. But a project is the most obvious small thing to sell people. It’s not really a small thing, I mean, a project isn’t cheap, is it? It could be a $10,000 (or pound) project. The point is, it’s a one-off fixed thing. They know what it is they’re buying, they know when it’s been completed, they know when it’s been done successfully. And so that project allows you to build a relationship with this new client. And you and I both know that if you do a project, you’ll uncover other things that need to be addressed. Maybe even some of those things can be fixed during some kind of managed services contract. So I think a project is the ultimate sales Trojan horse.
There are smaller things that you can do, of course. One of our MSP Marketing Edge members is doing very, very well right now selling small amounts of cyber security training to prospects. So he’ll get talking to a prospect and he’ll sell them a session for no more than about £50, which is about $70, $80. And all it is is a lunchtime zoom, almost like a lunch and learn where he’ll get the prospect’s team onto a Zoom and take them through about 30, 40 minutes of cyber security training, really low level stuff. But it works well because he can then do a review with the decision maker after that training and talk them through some areas where they really should invest in their business.
There are other things that you could sell along these lines, maybe such as selling them something like backups, a basic service like this, or even selling an audit. And I know that audits have fallen out of favour as a sales tool, but a solid audit where you are looking at someone’s systems and telling them what they should improve, I still think that’s possibly the ultimate sales Trojan horse. Because it’s low cost to them, high value for you. You get to dive into their systems to have a look and do the audit, and don’t you always find something which really needs to be followed up with them, which creates an opportunity for you. So tell me, do you think this is something that you’d actually use in your MSP?
Every MSP needs this strategic referral deal
What if the secret to landing your dream clients was a key you didn’t even know you had? There’s a hidden strategy locked away that could open doors to better clients without LinkedIn, without websites, cold calls or marketing campaigns. And it’s so effective that the MSPs already using it, hope that you will never find it. Right now, let’s discover where to find that key, how to unlock new opportunities and how to transform your business.
In nature there’s a phenomenon called mutualism. Those are two very hard words to say, a phenomenon called mutualism. Now, you would know this better as a symbiotic relationship. Think of little birds called oxpeckers sitting on the back of zebras and rhinos, and those birds eat the parasites off the animal’s body, which is an easy meal for them, but it also helps the zebra to stay healthy. In fact, they’ve even been observed warning short-sighted rhinos of approaching humans. They’ve got a good symbiotic, win-win relationship there. And there’s an opportunity for you to set up a win-win relationship just like this with a local web agency near you. And the good news is there’s no need to eat worms or anything like that.
From the point of view of ordinary business owners and managers, you and a web agency both do the same thing – “computer stuff”.
Now you and I know that websites and managed services are completely different sides of “computer stuff”, but this explains why your clients sometimes ask you whether you build websites. And believe me, they are asking their website agency whether or not they can help when their computers don’t work properly. Can you see the opportunity here? When a client asks about websites or SEO (search engine optimisation), you say, well, we don’t do this, but we work very, very closely with a local web agency. Let me connect them to you. When the web agency’s client asks them about IT support, they say, well, we don’t do this ourselves, but we work very, very closely with a local IT support company. Let me connect you to them.
Long-term, you could build this into your strategic reviews or your quarterly business reviews. You could generate loads of highly qualified leads for your chosen web agency partner and they could do the same for you. But how do you find a web agency partner? You are looking for a proper agency here, not a one man band who designs websites in their spare bedroom. Nothing wrong with that, but you want a bigger business that’s going to send larger prospects your way. One person band web designers tend to attract two to three user businesses. The best agency partner is someone that you already know. Is there a local web agency that you’ve met at networking events, or are highly respected in the local area? If not, and you need to create a relationship from scratch, and this needs to be done slowly.
Pick a few target agencies and reach out to the owners on LinkedIn. Tell them you’ve had a great idea for mutual benefit, and would they like to meet for a coffee to discuss it. If they want to know what it’s about in advance, you can send them this podcast. I’m actually serious because it explains exactly what’s in it for you and for them. And hello web agency owner.
When you do meet them for coffee, don’t just jump straight into, Hey, what do you think about this great idea? Should we do a partnership? Should we pass leads to each other? I would approach this more like a sales call. Start slowly, build a relationship. Ask them open questions about their favourite subject, which is themselves and their business. You can ask them things like, How’s business right now? What’s going well and not so well? What are you struggling with right now? Where are you hoping to go in the next three to five years? And what are your biggest problems and opportunities? Remember, the more you talk about them, the more intriguing you’ll be to them. And it’s weird how that works.
Sadly, this isn’t something that can be rushed. Relationship building takes time, but it is worth it as you have the opportunity here to build a solid referral foundation with a business that has exactly the same clients as you but isn’t in competition with you.
Why your marketing must be about the prospect, not you
Featured guest: Scott Robertson has 30+ years of public relations and marketing communications experience with a wide range of consumer and business-to-business organisations including: the National Association of Music Merchants (NAMM), the NAMM Foundation and Hewlett Packard.
Prior to founding Robertson Communications (RobertsonComm) in 2012, he most recently held the position of director of marketing & communications/PR for NAMM. During his 10+ years at NAMM, Robertson is credited with restructuring and strengthening the organisation’s branding and member communications. Before NAMM, Robertson led and grew Copithorne & Bellows/Porter Novelli Orange County office, taking it from a handful of staff and less than $500,000 in revenues to 28 staff and more than $4 million annual revenues in less than three years.
Robertson is the author of the book “Just Stop It: Your Survival Guide to Marketing Myths, Mistakes and Misgivings,” a Certified StoryBrand Guide, an accredited, active member of the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) and holds a master of science in corporate communications degree from Lindenwood University as well as a bachelor of journalism degree from the University of Missouri-Columbia School of Journalism. Robertson previously hosted the award-winning podcast “May the Best Brand Win” on Entertalk Media.
This is the worst marketing crime that any MSP can make, and yet I see it on almost every single MSP’s website. It’s so bad that it’s costing you money, it’s making people not want to engage with your MSP. My special guest today will tell you what it is, why it’s so bad, and how to fix it in minutes.
Hi, I am Scott Robertson and I fix bad marketing for MSPs and tech companies all around the world. I’m happy to be here today.
What a fantastic intro. And thank you so much for joining me on the podcast, Scott. And I think you and I have that thing in common, don’t we? That we see so much bad marketing all across the internet from MSPs all over the world, and clearly both of us have the same mission, which is to go and fix that marketing.
I must just comment, obviously most people are going to be listening to this on the podcast and what I’m about to say is a very visual thing, but you have a better blue shirt on than me. For those people watching it on YouTube, they’ll see that your blue shirt is a much better style, that it fits better. I’ve got one of my tatty blue shirts on today, whereas you’ve got a very smart blue shirt. So Paul needs to up his blue shirt game.
In fact, what I’ve just done there is I’ve just committed one of the sins that I know we’re going to talk about in this interview, which is that I’ve been talking about myself and no one cares about me. They care about how they can help their business by listening to this podcast. So we’ll come back onto that in a second. Before we do, let’s find out a little bit about you and establish some credibility. So who are you? What do you do? And give us the brief version of your working life story that’s got you to where you are today.
Yeah, absolutely. That’s easy, it’s kind of like a play, I can summarise it in three acts. In the first act of my career, I worked for PR agencies. I was recruited to do high tech PR in Los Angeles, and I was moved from Missouri out to LA to do that work. The second act of my career, I worked in-house for a large nonprofit organisation who needed a lot of help with branding and marketing in the music industry space. And that was a lot of fun, I’m a musician, so that made it fun for me. And then the last act, which I’m in now, yay, is I run my own business. And I help entrepreneurs and business owners really understand marketing at a higher level.
A lot of my clients don’t like to do marketing. They would rather do anything else but marketing, but the world forces them to do marketing or close the business. So it’s not really a choice. You’ve got to do it and you’ve got to do it in a smart way, and I help them see a better way to do marketing. I think that most marketing, I will tell you, Paul, is terrible, is awful. And I think that our profession miseducates people and I think that we settle for bad marketing all over the place when we don’t have to. We tell the wrong story, we use the wrong stuff, we’re speaking the wrong language. And I think that the marketing industry miseducates at a massive level. We don’t talk about strategy, we don’t educate business owners about why we do what we do and what we’re trying to accomplish. And I think that that is a shame, so I try to be on the side of the line that Seth Godin’s on and Donald Miller’s on and that you’re on, and try to be one of the good ones in an ocean of garbage, an absolute ocean of marketing garbage.
I love the fact that you just put me on with Seth Godin and Donald Miller there, both of whom are fantastic authors. For those people listening and watching read everything Seth Godin has ever written, he’s a prolific writer. He writes a blog a day and a book a year pretty much. And Donald Miller, we haven’t featured Donald himself but we featured StoryBrand, which is his book, on the podcast before. It’s an amazing book to read.
Let’s go back to that example I was just mentioning earlier, and you’ll remember I started talking about me. And obviously that’s completely the wrong approach with marketing. And Scott, you see MSPs doing this all the time don’t you? Talking about themselves rather than talking about the customer, the prospect.
Yeah, and Donald Miller, if he was here, he would say is it’s very simple to see why. MSP wants to build a website, they don’t know anything about marketing, they go to a website design firm, the website design firm asks them, what’s your message? They get in a room and you’ve got the blind leading the blind right there. You’ve got web designers who I wouldn’t trust to write the words, that’s not their skillset, they’re designers. There’s a step that comes before that, and that’s the brand messaging step. I’m a StoryBrand guide. You mentioned my buddy Don Miller, and what’s important about StoryBrand, is it gets the client out of the message. It gets them out of the hero role, which you can’t take anyway, it’s already been cast and you didn’t make the cut. The customer is the hero. And so it puts you in the guide role. And the guide role is so much more important because the guide role has already solved it for the hero. It is really important.
When I talk about miseducation, people confuse an internal marketing message with an external one. And an internal one is your why, your vision, your values, your about us. And I mean, you should take that out to your next retreat and put on your matching t-shirt and just go off on all of that with your staff. But you don’t ever let that stuff creep into an external marketing message because psychologically speaking, you have eight seconds to make an impression. And if you don’t involve that customer’s brain in a story that solves their problem, their brain will shut off and they will move on from you and you will lose them.
The first goal of marketing is curiosity. How do we make people curious? We make people curious by making marketing about them. It sounds really obvious, but I’ll be damned if I don’t fix that seven times a week.
I wish I was solving different problems, but you have to solve that problem. You don’t solve that problem and the company goes nowhere and everything is a waste from there. So like I said, the biggest problem with marketing is that there’s a fundamental miss on the fact that it’s not about you. Don’t put a picture of yourself on your website, no one cares. If you need that kind of validation from your parents, call them up after when you’re done and have them tell you you were a good son or daughter, whatever you need, that kind of thing. Don’t use marketing for your own self validation and ego trip. Make it about them.
Your hero image on your website needs to be about the customer, once you solve their problem. How did you get them from the stress and pain that they’re feeling. I saw a website this week, Paul, where this coach had four pictures on the website, he just did a photo shoot, and he had four photos of himself on the website. And so I said, This is a website where you’re the target customer, right? And he said, No, I’m not the target customer. I said, Why are there four photos of you? I don’t know how we’re supposed to handle that, but it’s not about the customer, so it’s not going to work. So you have a website out there that’s going to be totally ineffective. The customer’s going to say, there’s already a hero in this story and I’m going to move on. And when you talk about MSPs, they solve some really important stuff. Lean into those problems that you solve. I mean, if the technology goes down in a business, the business goes down. If your email is down, you’re out of business. So it’s so important what they do, and they leave that on the table all the time. They talk around it and not add it.
Yeah, I completely agree with you. Well, I agree with 99% of what you just said, and I’m going to just unpack your answer and I’ll tell you what the 1% is I disagree with. You mentioned about being the hero and the guide. And again, for our MSPs, listening and watching that is completely down to StoryBrand, it is a great book. I like to talk to people about it from a Star Wars point of view, which is when you are crafting the story of your MSP, you’re not Luke Skywalker in that story, you’re Yoda. You’re the guide, you are the person who is helping to drive things along, but ultimately the story that’s happening is about your customer, who is Luke Skywalker? So let me just throw that one in.
The one thing I disagree with there is where you say about putting your photo on your website, and I say this as someone who has about 25 photos of himself on his own website, as you were saying, I saw a website this week where there was just four photos of the guy, and I’m thinking, yeah, was that mine? But I recommend to MSPs that they do put photos of themselves on their website. I’ll tell you why, Scott, because let’s say you take any size town and there’s 20 MSPs, and you go and look at all 20 of those MSPs websites, they all look the same, right? They’ve all got stock images of servers or computers or the same sort of geographical images of their town. And if there are photos of people, they’re the stock image technician image where he is always the beautiful looking guy with a beautiful beard, and he’s smiling and he’s got the headset on and they all look exactly the same. And then you come across one MSP that puts a photo on of them, of their staff, of their family. They actually talk about themselves, they name themselves, they’re like, Hey, I’m the owner. And to me, in a world where everyone looks the same, that kind of differentiation is absolutely beautiful.
So let’s turn this into a debate. I never really have debates with the guests on this podcast, so it feels like a good time to start that. I know that there’s no such thing as a right or wrong approach, but tell me what you would do instead of that. What would be a preferable way for you of handling that situation of trying to differentiate?
Yeah, absolutely. Thank you. And I totally hear what you’re saying. So there is an appropriate time in the story. If Donald Miller was sitting here next to me, he would say, there is an appropriate time in the story to talk about yourself. When you are demonstrating empathy and authority as the guide in the customer’s story and you want to show yourself, then it is appropriate to show yourself at that point. What I was basically saying was sometimes it’s the first image and sometimes it’s the image after that and sometimes the human brain sees that and goes, it looks like this story already has a hero. There’s four photos of this person who looks like the hero, and that’s not me, I can’t relate to that. It looks like somebody that runs an MSP to me, you know what I mean?
You have to make sure that all of your marketing collateral, I say website, but it could be all of your marketing collateral, it has to have a controlling idea that solves the customer’s problem. If it doesn’t, your marketing is an absolute waste of time, psychologically speaking. We’ve studied the human brain for long enough now that we know that human beings have a very short attention span. We’re in the short attention span part of our species’ evolution. And as a marketer, if you don’t know that, then you will fail. You will not understand how to make people curious and build that relationship, which marketing has to do.
And like I said, I think human beings are very interested – we’re biologically wired to be interested in ourselves. And so as a marketer, ethically, we could argue it all day long, the science proves it massively by the way, but as a marketer, you have to know that, and you have to lean into that so that you understand how to speak the language or the brain is going to shut you off. The minute the brain determines that what you’re saying is irrelevant to us, it will try to conserve calories and it will shut down on you, and that’s a marketing fail.
So what you want to do to win at marketing, you have to make sure you’re speaking to the brain in language that the brain wants to hear. And the only language the brain wants to hear, Paul, the only language the brain wants to hear is, how is this relevant to me right now? Go. And you have eight seconds. And the minute you deviate from that, what we say in StoryBrand is, the minute you stop talking about the customer’s problem is the exact minute they stop paying attention to your brand. So it’s very important.
When I go to MSP’s websites, I see the same kind of buzzwords: robust solutions, no downtime, these kind of things. It’s like, show me the pain, make me feel it. What does it feel like when my systems go down? What does that feel like? Show me. Make me feel it with the words that are coming out. And if you make me feel it and you give me that emotion, then you’re actually doing branding, and you’re actually doing branding the right way. Because in the places that people don’t want to talk about Paul, that’s why they’re on the website. There is a problem, a splinter in their mind that is saying, my MSP isn’t getting it done in some way right now, and I have to pull that splinter out of my mind and this and company could be the solution to doing it. So show me. Show me that you understand what it is that you’re really doing and don’t use a bunch of marketing buzzwords that doesn’t speak to the problem.
If I was doing an MSP website, I would say: You’re frustrated, if email is down, you’re down. If you’re down, you’re not making any money. You have payroll, you have other things as an MSP owner, but if your business is down because of technology, it is critical. If you have ransomware and those kind of things, those are mission critical things that just generic bullet points and words don’t really get that done. The same kind of warmed over sounds good marketing copy. Punch into that problem. In StoryBrand we always talk about, give me a problem you can feel. Show me a problem that hits me that I can feel, and now you’ve got my attention. Now you’ve got my attention in the same way movie writers and screenwriters get your attention by having something horrible happen to the character in the first few minutes of the movie. They do that to keep your attention because your brain won’t pay attention otherwise. Simply true.
Yeah, exactly. Like Luke watching his aunt and uncle be killed by storm troopers. That’s exactly it. Scott, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast. Let’s just wrap up very briefly. Just remind us what it is that you do to help MSPs, and what’s the best way to get in touch with you?
Yeah, of course. I’m a resource for MSPs, for entrepreneurs, for anyone struggling with marketing. I’m in Phoenix, Arizona, and you can always find me at my website, which is robertsoncomm.com. You can book a time to talk with me there. I make myself very available to speak with business owners about their marketing problems. I want to be on the side of the line that fixes things in marketing. I don’t think that we’re headed in a good direction with AI, I don’t think that’s the right direction. I think less but better is going to be a superior approach. The world doesn’t need more. We don’t need more emails, we don’t need more videos, we don’t need more social posts. We need better stuff that actually speaks to a problem and actually solves it. That’s the mission that I’m on.
Paul’s Personal Peer Group
Sean runs his MSP in Colorado, and is feeling quite hassled by his clients. His question is: how do I stop clients from contacting me directly?
This happens to most MSP owners, and it’s the hardest thing when you used to look after these clients yourself because they feel they have some kind of special bond with you. And so they’ll email you directly, or they’ll call your mobile directly rather than actually speaking to the help desk that you’ve had in place for a few years. And this steals your personal time when you should be working on the business, not in the business doing tech support. And it also reduces your ability to sell more to them during a strategic review or a QBR because you can’t be the technology strategist and the first line support at the same time. Clients’ minds will only let you sit in one of those boxes.
There are a number of different ways to tackle this. You’ll probably put together a couple of these into some kind of blended solution. Let me tell you nine ideas that I’ve got.
Number one: set clear expectations. Now, this is easy with new clients and very hard with longer standing clients. Just remember that you have to educate them constantly. What’s top of mind for you is item 1058 in their minds list of priorities.
Number two: make it easy. Put stickers with the help desk number on every device.
Number three: have a standard operating procedure to roll out each time a client contacts you directly. Make a plan in advance so you don’t have the emotional trauma of wondering how to deal with it.
Number four: play dumb. Tell them you don’t know how to fix that as you focus on strategy these days, but you’ll ask someone on the help desk to call them immediately.
Number five: change your voicemail to say that you are not working today and for any support, please call the help desk on this number. And you can then let client calls go to voicemail every single time. If you want to, follow up with them the next day or when their issue has been resolved, just so they know that you care, but you don’t have to do the work yourself.
Number six: set up an email auto reply. This is the same principle as the voicemail.
Number seven: now this is a sneaky one, but some people quite like this. Fake being your own virtual asistant. When someone emails you, send back a standard reply saying you are your VA. Give yourself a fancy name. The real you is off today and here’s how to get support. And then tell them how to contact the help desk.
Number eight: get a second mobile number. Keep your old number that clients have been calling for years and let it auto forward calls to the help desk. But then get a second private number just for friends, family, and your team. And then finally,
Number nine: just make them wait. If they contact you directly after hours, do not take the call. Do not reply to their email because you’ll just encourage more bad behaviour. And I know that that feels wrong, but I promise you that overservicing clients can be as bad for a working relationship as underservicing them, as it sets unrealistic expectations. Make them wait, explain in a warm way how using the proper channels gets them faster support.
Mentioned links
This podcast is in conjunction with the MSP Marketing Edge, the world’s leading white label content marketing and growth training subscription.Join me in MSP Marketing Facebook group.Connect with me on LinkedIn.Connect with my guest, Scott Robertson on LinkedIn, and visit the RobertsonComm website.Recommended authors: Seth Godin and Donald MillerMentioned book: StoryBrand by Donald MillerGot a question about your MSP’s marketing? Submit one here for Paul’s Personal Peer Group.