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.

MSPs not yet using direct mail to warm up leads are missing out on a major marketing channel – here’s five ideas to get started. Also this week, do video testimonials like this to influence prospects, and how MSP owners unintentionally self-sabotage their marketing.

Welcome to Episode 349 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge.

If you’re not yet using direct mail to warm up leads and find out who’s nearly ready to buy from you, then I believe you’re missing out on a major marketing channel for your MSP. Back in May this year, I was a guest at the MSP Show in London, and I got to share a stage with Ian Luckett, Darren Strong, and Mit Patel.

These are all people who’ve been on this podcast in the past. It was great to meet particularly Mit for the first time in real life. And we were talking about what it takes to grow and succeed with your MSP.

Anyway, later in the day, I was interviewed by James Steel for the GTIA on Location YouTube channel, which by the way, is well worth you looking up, there’s some great content on there. And James asked me a whole load of questions about marketing, but the one that really got me going was when he asked about direct mail.

I’m a massive fan of direct mail for MSPs, and I think it’s one of the most underused tactics in the whole channel.

So today I want to give you five smart ideas for making your direct mail stand out and actually get a response. And let’s start by asking why direct mail at all? And remember, I’m talking about stuff that’s sent through your letterbox, physical real life stuff. Well, here’s why. In 1999, yes I was alive then, I had 1000 pieces of mail come through my post box every single day. I mean, we were inundated with mail back then. Those of us that were alive, we remember what it was like. So we had all of this stuff in our post box, but we would only get three emails. And today of course, it’s the other way around, right? Everyone’s inbox is full. Their email inbox is full, their notifications inbox is full, their social media feed. It’s all ping, ping, ping, ping, ping. It’s a complete digital mess.

So our brains and our inboxes in our digital world are completely full. We’re now getting 3000 things every day digitally, but the physical post, well, that’s almost empty by comparison. In fact, just before recording this, I went out and I checked my mail. Where I live here in the UK, I have an external mailbox. I haven’t checked for a week, which shows how unimportant it is. I just went out there and I’ve got two pieces of mail that were sent to me. One’s like a bank statement that the bank can’t actually physically switch off, they don’t know which computer’s sending it to me. And then there was a letter from some company about something and three flyers for Domino’s and stuff like that. So there’s not a huge amount of physical mail. And this is good because it allows you to stand out in a space where there’s not a lot of competition.

A well-crafted piece of direct mail gets physically handled, which means it’s noticed. Notice what I just said there. I went out of my way to go and get my post. I don’t go out of my way to check my notifications or my email. It’s just something that I have to do every day and something I choose to want to stay on top of so I don’t have 67,000 unread emails, which my girlfriend currently does, which is driving me crazy I’ll be honest. But your competitors are almost certainly not doing this, right? They are not sending direct mails. And that means that the physical mailboxes, the physical postal space of all of the prospects in your area or your vertical, that could be yours.

Now this works brilliantly alongside LinkedIn. Imagine if you were hitting the same prospect in two completely different places. So you send them a message on LinkedIn or even just email them and the message is about the thing that you’ve sent to them in the mail, the thing you’ve shipped to them. That’s very powerful. You can message someone about the same kind of thing using two or three different platforms and that’s not overwhelmed. Three pieces of mail in a week is too much. Three emails on the same subject in the same week is too much, but the same kind of communication on three different platforms is very, very good marketing. So let me give you some ideas that you can take away from this and actually go and have a go.

And the first of them is something called a lumpy envelope. So a flat letter gets opened last or not at all. And by flat, I mean it’s literally physically flat. There’s clearly a bit of paper in it and that’s it. There’s nothing intriguing in that at all. Whereas if you get something that’s lumpy or bumpy, that always gets opened first out of curiosity. And this is why for years and years, and I don’t know if they do this where you are, but here in the UK for years, charities, when they used to send out sort of charity appeals in the mail, they would put a little pen or a pencil in there for you. Supposedly for you to fill in the form and send back your donation, but actually it made it lumpy. You’d get something you weren’t expecting and you’re like, “Ooh, what’s this inside here?”

So here’s what you could do to do this. You could put something small and physical inside the envelope. This could be a stress ball, it’s a pretty common thing for MSPs to use, a stress ball with your branding printed on the side. It could be a USB stick, perhaps one that has printed on it, “Do not put this in your computer.” Yeah, you know that’s the first thing that people are going to do. I mean, it could be as simple as just a branded pen or a small toy or something like this. Really the item that you send out in the mail, it should tie into your message somehow. So a stress ball that says, “Is your IT giving you stress?” That would work perfectly. Or like we said, the USB that says, “Don’t plug this in.” And when they do, there’s one file in there that says, “Read me” which says, “We told you not to plug this in. This could be malware.” I don’t know how people would take that actually thinking about that. But the curiosity alone of having lumpy mail or bumpy mail dramatically increases your open rates.

Now, it is worth you knowing that the cost per mail is going to be higher depending on how your postal system works. Typically, if it’s lumpy, if it’s got bulk, you end up paying more for it, but you’re sending this to a small targeted list. When it comes to direct mail, it’s always quality over quantity. There’s no point sending out thousands of these, but you would send out 50 to your hottest prospects, particularly if you can follow them up by phone.

Idea number two, a personalised letter that genuinely looks personal. So for this, you wouldn’t do something that’s been printed with your logo on it. Instead, you go the complete opposite. You pull together a letter that looks like a real human wrote it. So for example, this could be a handwritten envelope. You might actually put a real stamp on there and yes, that means a little bit of licking stamps. I think most stamps have their own glue these days, but they would put their first name at the top, that kind of stuff. The opening line should reference something specific about their business or sector. Essentially, it should feel like you have sat down and physically written this to them.

So you wouldn’t write a generic letter inviting them to a webinar or “Is this a good time to talk about your IT?” or something like that. Well, actually, maybe you would. Maybe you’d write a letter to someone that says, “Dear Dave, can I ask an open question? Are you happy with your current IT support? If you are, please throw this in the bin. If you’re not, please call me on this number, or please email me on this address, or here’s my live calendar,” or something like that. And actually the more it looks like someone has just personally written the more likely it is to be opened and read and of course acted upon.

So there’s a couple of ways that you could do this. You could either do it yourself on your computer and download a handwriting font and then print that off on your printer. It’s kind of cheating if you do that though, and everyone can tell. So I would say go the extra mile. What’s the extra mile for this? Well, something like, for example, there are services out there that will either use robo writers. I mean, it’s literally a robotic arm that has a pen and that will write. There is even a service, there’s certainly one here in the UK, there’s bound to be one in the US, that will get actual humans to write these letters for you.

And I suspect that we as humans can tell when something’s being robo written versus handwritten by human. Because handwritten by humans, there’ll be kind of a lack of consistency, won’t there? Even people who’ve got really nice handwriting that there are different ways that the letters are written, whereas I guess a robot just does it exactly the same each way. But even a robot is better than printing something. So just go have a look for services for that and that’d be really interesting for you to test that and see how that works.

Okay then. And idea three, the follow-up sequence. So one piece of direct mail rarely works and that’s why earlier I recommended you send them out in small batches when you have a phone person to follow them up for you. But actually what if you sent three pieces of direct mail over six or nine weeks? You could do something simple like the first piece could just introduce yourself and offer something useful to them. No hard sell. Maybe just say we’ve got an IT services buyer’s guide on our website, something like that. And that in itself is only going to interest to people who are nearly ready, willing and able to have a conversation, but that in itself is a valuable piece of direct mail.

And then three or four weeks later, you could send another direct mail, which might reference the first letter and say, “I sent you this thing. We have an IT services buyer’s guide. Did you want one?” Or you could offer a new idea. You could say, “Oh, we’ve just written a guide about increasing your business’s productivity with Copilot or with Teams.” Essentially, you’re just gently reminding them that you exist, but you’re still adding more value into their life. And then the third one you could send again another four or five weeks later, just could be a very final piece with a very simple clear call to action. “Are you looking to change your IT company in the next six months? If you are, here’s my live calendar.” Something like that.

And each letter should feel like a natural continuation of a conversation, not sort of three separate campaigns. And if you think about it, this is the kind of thing that you do with an email sequence or a LinkedIn messaging sequence anyway. So it’s a really smart way of just building a relationship with someone. The difference is you’re doing it in that space where there’s no competition because no other MSP is writing to them. Most people, if they’re going to do something like this, they’ll do one letter. They don’t get any responses and they say that it fails, “Direct mail doesn’t work for MSPs”, which is nonsense.

A sequence and especially when you have the follow up, this is where the results really come. And I cannot stress this more, and I’m going to say it for the third time. Send some direct mail to someone and expect a response. You’re not going to get it. People don’t act on it that way. But the real power of that direct mail is to make it easy for you to follow them up by email or LinkedIn message or definitely the phone. Send someone a postcard or a letter and phone them a week after they receive it or three or four days after they receive it. And I promise you, I promise you, it’ll be so much easier for you to a) get hold of them, and b) actually have a conversation with them. And even if they’re not in the right place at that time, that’s okay. The point is you’re having a conversation, you can then schedule them for follow-up in a year’s time or whenever is going to be an appropriate buying time for them.

When someone gets a piece of direct mail, they do pick it up intending to do something, but often it then just goes down again. Whereas if someone in your office, or you, follows them up by phone, they’re much more likely to have a decent conversation about their business. So the way to look at it is that the direct mail opens the door and makes it easier for callers. Right, I’ve got two more ideas for you. Let me whiz through idea four and five.

Idea four is the grabber at the top of the letter. So it’s a physical object actually glued to the top of a letter and that really increases readership. So the classic examples from back in the day are a coin or a $1 bill or something like that. And you say, I wanted to get your attention before this gets lost. Or another classic one is like a sticking plaster, like a bandaid. “Is your current IT support just patching over the cracks?” You could do a tea bag, couldn’t you? Let’s have a virtual cupper and talk about your IT.

This sounds gimmicky, but I’ve looked, not recently, but in the past I’ve looked at data on response rates and just adding the teabag or the coin or the sticking plaster or something like that works because it’s unexpected. These are lower costs than sending a stress ball or something like that. Important though is that the attention grabber that you’re gluing to the letter must link to the content of the letter. The whole letter explains the object.

And then idea five is send something worth keeping. So instead of just sending them a letter that’s going to go in the recycling, send them something that’s got shelf life. I mean, I mentioned earlier like the IT services buyer’s guide, that can be a very good thing to send out to your hottest prospects. Or you could just do a one-page guide and maybe even laminate it. “Five questions to ask before you switch your IT provider.” Or if it’s towards the end of the year, you could send a small desk calendar with your branding on or a printed checklist, IT security, something like that, or Copilot ideas, something they’ll pin up next to their desk because stuff like that tends to stay there.

The idea is that every time they look at something that’s pinned up on their desk, your name is there. And that’s some very important passive brand building between now and when they’re ready to buy. In fact, the wall planner is a great example of this principle, something useful that stays visible. And I’ve got a wall planner I’m going to offer to you very, very shortly.

Before I do, let me just throw in a bonus sixth idea, something I just thought of… Printed newsletters. These are still a massive and criminally underused tool to stay in touch with hot prospects because the beauty of a newsletter is it’s seen as an educational and a communication tool, it’s not seen as a piece of sales literature. And that means it gets stuck on walls, it gets passed around a business, it goes in drawers and stays there for years. I’ve heard from quite a few MSPs who sent out newsletters for a number of years and then later on down the line, they’ve won deals from someone they actually stopped marketing to and they haven’t marketed to them for a few years, but that person rang them out of the blue talking about a newsletter that they’d sent three years before. And this is why we actually give newsletters to our B2B MSP Marketing Edge members because the newsletters are so powerful.

Just a reminder on this direct mail that the list, the people you’re sending this to matters as much as the creative of what you actually send to them. And none of this works if you’re sending this to the wrong people. So you do need to either build or buy a list of the exact businesses that you want to work with in your area. Of course, LinkedIn is a brilliant source for this. You can find the decision makers, get their business address, or you can just get their domain name and use a data enrichment tool to build that list for you. As I said earlier, a small targeted list of 50 ideal prospects, the kind of people that make you salivate at the thoughts of working with them, do those people brilliantly and that will always beat a mass mailing of 500 people that you’ve just bought from a data broker.

Direct mail is not dead. It’s just been abandoned by the vast majority of businesses who can’t be bothered to do it. And that is your opportunity. Pick one of those six ideas, put together a list of your 50 dream prospects and send them something genuinely surprising. And don’t forget to follow them up by phone. If you do this right, not only will they remember you, but you might even get a really hot lead and even a sales meeting out of it.

Earlier on, I mentioned a guy called James Steel. I told you that he’d interviewed me at the MSP show a few months back. Well, he actually runs a service called MSP Testimonials. You can look him up on LinkedIn. And he gets testimonials for you so that you get all the benefits of social proof without having to actually do the hard work. And yes, I’m going to get him back on the show in the next few months.

But in the meantime, let me give you my take on how to do video testimonials properly because getting this right can genuinely transform how quickly prospects trust you. Why are video testimonials so powerful? Written reviews are good and have power, but video testimonials are on another level entirely. And that’s because a prospect watching a real client of yours talk unedited on video about their experience, well, they get three things at once. They get the words that they’re saying, but they also get the tone that they’re using with their voice and they get the body language. And those three things together is all of communication.

When we are talking to someone face-to-face or to a certain extent on a video call, you lose a bit on a video call and in video so it’s not perfect, but when you’re talking to someone and you can see their body and you can hear the tone of their voice, it just communicates at a higher level than a few words can. Even a phone call. A phone call where you’ve just got someone’s voice doesn’t communicate as well as a video call does, doesn’t communicate as well as a video or seeing someone in real life.

A written review is better than nothing, but video testimonials are better than everything.

I looked at some stats for this and 92% of B2B buyers trust peer recommendations over any other form of marketing. So your videos will put that recommendation right in front of them on your website and on LinkedIn. And the reality is most MSP websites have no video testimonials at all, which means even you having just one of those puts you ahead of almost all of your local competitors. That’s pretty cool, isn’t it?

Now, the biggest mistake that MSPs make with their testimonials is saying to a happy client, “Hey, could you write us a Google review?” And then just leaving it at that. And you get from that generic written reviews full of cliches. So they say things like, “Great service, very professional, would recommend.” And they say that because they don’t really know what to say. And also it’s a job to be done, right? It’s like, “Yeah, okay, I’ll help you.” Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, done. But when someone says, “Great service, very professional,” unfortunately that has zero impact on the people reading it.

So that being said, if you then ask them to do a video testimonial and perhaps ask them to just record it, that’s not going to work. Most of them aren’t going to do it, and those that do do it will just give you those generic words. You’ve actually got to get something going with them where you’re having a two-way conversation. You’re off camera, they’re on camera, but they’re just answering your questions. And that’s so much easier for them actually. It’s a bit of hard work for you, or you hire someone like James to do it for you, but it’s so much easier for them to just answer questions.

So what makes that great video testimonial and how do you get it? Well, you want to get the client talking about a specific problem they had before they came to you. The before is really important because then it shows how much the after has transformed their business. So you would get them set up, maybe you’re doing this on a call, maybe you’re doing it in real life. You’ve got a perfectly good camera, it’s in your phone, anything that’s like less than five years old is a perfectly good camera. Make sure the lighting’s all right. Get perhaps a little time icon them that’s plugged into your phone. That will do the trick. And then just ask them a series of questions.

So you might ask them to describe their business. You might say to them literally, “What kind of technology problems were you having before you came to us?” And the thing with asking questions like that is you’ve got to kind of go a little bit deeper and we call it pressing the pain in interviewing. So if someone says, “Oh, we were very disorganised,” you ask a follow-up question. “How did that disorganisation cause you problems? What was the biggest thing that made life difficult for your staff?”

And you’ll notice that all of these questions are open questions. So you’ve got closed questions where the answer is yes or no. “Did you have breakfast today?” That’s a closed question. The answer is either yes or no. But what you want when you’re interviewing someone is open questions. “What did you have for breakfast today?” The answer to that is almost infinite.

So get them talking about the before, the pain they had. Get them talking and describing the moment they realised that something needed to change. That’s very much an emotional hook. People don’t change MSP because their brain is telling them to, they change because they’re sick to death of it emotionally. When business owners are choosing you, it’s always an emotional decision why they pick you over someone else. So we want to see that in your video testimonials. What’s that emotional hook?

And then ask them questions that get them to explain what life looks like now. And we want them to be very concrete and specific. So literally you say to them, “How has this made a difference to your business? How much easier is it to run your business working with us?” That’s a bit of a leading question there, but there’s nothing wrong with that. The best interviewers in the world use leading questions all the time to get the responses they want out of someone.

Do you know what you’re trying to get from these video interviews and the best testimonials, they make a prospect think, “Oh my goodness, this is us. This guy here or this woman here is describing my situation.” And that’s why you want it to be very, very specific about the problem they had, how you helped them, and the outcome that they had. Now in terms of length, the interview may take 15, 20 minutes, but you want the outputted video to be around about two to three minutes. It’s one of those where less is more. So two to three minutes of their best bits is perfect. Don’t put your questions in, just their replies. And obviously you can get this stuff edited. Well, AI can edit it for you. Descript is a pretty good tool for that, or you could just find a human on Fiverr or Upwork to do that for you.

I’ve been interviewing professionally since I was 19, which is quite a long time. So let me just give you a few other things, a few other ideas of getting the best out of the people that you’re interviewing. First of all, never hand them a list of questions in advance. Never ask them to prepare anything. If you give them a list of questions or you ask them to just have a think about stuff, then you get wooden scripted answers. The best thing is no prep. They come in, you sit them down, you make them comfortable, you chat to them before, and then you just to keep asking them questions.

You can ask the same questions again if you’re not happy with the response, you can ask the same questions again, but don’t ask using the same words. So for example, I might say to someone, “So tell me what your life was like or tell me what your business was like before you started working with us.” And the answer they give isn’t quite right so two more questions later I might just throw in, “And before we were on the scene and working with you, you must have had some problems. What were they?” Do you see how that’s the same question, but I’m kind of just asking it in a different way.

So it’s okay to brief them lightly, you can tell them what you’re going to ask, you can tell them they haven’t got to memorise anything, you can tell them to be relaxed. I’ve already said about you asking open questions, not closed questions, that’s really important, but also let them ramble. Some people are talkers. I’m a talker. If you’ve ever seen me being interviewed by someone else, you see the fear in the host’s eyes when they realise they asked one question and I can do a 10 to 15 minute answer. I don’t always do it. But actually, if someone does that and they’re just talking naturally and it makes sense, let them talk. Your job is to be invisible as the interviewer, it’s all about the client’s story. That’s everything, getting out their story and getting them to talk about it on camera.

So let’s say you’ve been through this process, whether you’ve used someone to do it for you or you’ve done it yourself, what do you then do with your video testimonials? Well, obviously they go on your homepage of your website, that’s the biggest place to put them because probably you’re getting most of your traffic there. You’d weave them into your sales processes, so you’d send out some of your testimonial videos to a warm prospect before a meeting.

Obviously you’d put them on LinkedIn as well. You could actually put the full version, like the whole interview. You could put short clips on as well. No one’s really going to go and watch it, but the fact that there’s a 20 minute version there shows that your client is really happy to keep talking about you. Maybe actually just the two to three minute version as I’m thinking about that, the two to three minute version and some clips. You’d put it in your email newsletter that goes out to prospects. Any kind of social proof that lands in someone’s inbox or their LinkedIn or anything is absolutely perfect.

One great testimonial interview can generate weeks of content. In fact, James Steel’s service turns his interviews, which are around about 45 minutes, he’ll turn them into a whole bunch of different marketing assets. So you’ve got the video of course, but he’ll do shorts, and quote cards, and a case study PDF, and a sales one pager, and social posts, and even landing page copy and all of that kind of stuff. And that’s very powerful.

One video testimonial from one happy client done properly and used consistently across your marketing, will do more to convert warm prospects than almost anything else that you can produce. Your clients would probably say yes if you only just ask them. So go and ask.

If you’re an MSP Marketing Edge member, and thank you if you are, last week I mentioned the website framework inside your portal. This is something you can use to make your website better with the structure as you improve it. It’s also a very, very good framework if I do say so myself. So this week I want to tell you about something that goes hand in hand with that framework. Every month I do a live website review for one of our members. So I go through literally their entire website and I measure it against that framework and then give specific suggestions for what to change to generate more leads from the website, because that’s the only reason you’ve got the website, right?

Each review runs around 20 to 25 minutes and it is genuinely so detailed. I don’t just skim it. It’s a proper but structured critique. So the way it works is a monthly draw. When you’re a member, you enter once and you’re in that draw forever. So the longer you’re a member, the better your chances get. If you haven’t entered yet, log in now to your portal and just go over to the website reviews section, you’ll find it in the navigation.

If you’re not yet a member, we have two separate memberships available. We’ve got B2B, which is to help you to win more business owners as clients. And then we’ve got co-managed IT, which is about helping you to win IT directors as clients. And each of these is only available to one MSP per area. You can check which of these is available for your area at mspmarketingedge.com/membership.

Featured guest: Cory Dunham is an Executive Advisor, Business Growth Strategist, and Speaker who helps service businesses grow through clearer messaging, stronger team alignment, and consistency. As the founder of Cory Dunham Advisory and CEO of BDB Marketing Design, LLC, he works at the intersection of leadership, messaging clarity, and strategic business growth. With over 30 years of business and marketing experience, Cory helps leaders and teams become more visible, more aligned, and more effective so they can build trust, generate momentum, and grow sustainably.

We all know that we should be doing more marketing and most MSPs genuinely intend to. So why is it that so many talented, hardworking MSP owners look up at the end of another week or month or quarter and realise their marketing still hasn’t happened?

My special guest today has a fascinating, if slightly uncomfortable answer to that question. It turns out the biggest obstacle to your marketing isn’t your workload, your budget, or your lack of ideas. It’s you. And specifically how you’re getting in your own way without even realising it.

I’m Corey Dunham and I help service-led businesses get really clear on creating consistent business process.

Oh, we like the sound of that, especially in the context of marketing, which is why you’re here today. So thank you, Corey, for joining us on the podcast. So we’re going to talk today about how the owners of the MSP kind of screw up their own marketing by getting too involved in it, by overthinking it, by fiddling with it and getting their fingers in. There’s a time and a place to do that and there’s a time and a place to let go. And I know that you work with hundreds and hundreds of business owners across the planet, not just MSPs, but other kinds of businesses as well. And I know you see this and you battle this on a regular basis.

So before we kind of jump into that, just tell us a little bit about you. I know you’re in Michigan in the US, but what’s your story? How did you get to be the guy you are today working with businesses, helping them with their marketing and their processes?

Yeah, for me, pretty much raised in Michigan and my stepfather started our marketing business, family marketing business back in 1980, which is 46 years at this point. And I’ve been involved since late 80s, since graduating out of high school, so it’s been 40 years for me. And throughout that whole time, I have been introverted, quiet, shy, and have had imposter syndrome and I’ve never really wanted to work with people. I’ve always wanted to be behind the scenes, behind the computer, in production and support and helping people out, but never wanting to have leadership level influence.

And then through the decades, I’ve been around so many mentors, great business people, great people in terms of learning to develop some extroverted characteristics or people skills, that have allowed me to really communicate well from my introversion. And a lot of people don’t think I’m introverted from speaking and keynotes and everything I do right now. But I love helping people out. I love empowering people, especially when they feel so limited in everything they’re doing and just giving them both the boost to say, “Hey, I’ve had some transformation. I totally believe you can have transformation with some tweaks, some learning lessons, or developing some skill sets.”

And I have a family, I’ve been married 26 years and three kids in college. So I love that family aspect and developing that passion for why do we work? We can do it because we love what we do, but that also funds a lot of the experiences and fun stuff in our personal lives.

Yeah, exactly that. In fact, the best and most balanced business owners are the ones that have got that “why” haven’t they? They’ve got the “why” of the family. And the reason we’re doing this is not just to pay the bills, it’s for this. There’s not many marketing companies left on this planet that were started in 1980. So bravo to you. And did you say it was your father-in-law or your father that started it?

My stepfather started it. Yes.

I mean, bravo to you for sticking in that business for so long, which is amazing. And it’s interesting you talk about being an introvert. I always thought I was an extrovert because I used to be a radio presenter, I was a journalist, I’m happiest on a stage, but I’m happiest on a stage when I’m talking to an audience. And then I discovered years ago that when I’m off a stage and the audience is coming to talk to me, that makes me feel uncomfortable. And someone told me, it might have been on this podcast a few years ago, someone said to me, so an extrovert is someone who gets energy from a situation like that, an introvert feels exhausted after a situation like that. And I realised that actually I’m an extroverted introvert, which was a big insight for me. And it sounds like you’re in a very similar place. Basically, you and I are going to need to lie down in a darkened room after we’ve done this podcast, right?

Yeah. And I’ve actually shifted. So I used to be more in that realm of I need some time out or I never wanted to be around people or speak. But now it actually really gets me excited and actually increases my energy level when I’m doing it. And even afterward, I’m so jazzed up by it I don’t need the rest most of the time. So I don’t know what’s going on with me. Maybe I am the extroverted introvert, like you said.

But I guess we can change. We change, we mature, we’re different people than we were back in the day. So let’s jump into marketing. So you know that most people listening to this, they own their MSP, they operate their MSP as well. Not everyone, but that’s the core of our listenership or people watching this on YouTube. And you and I know this very well because we deal with it every single day. What is it about owners, business owners that makes them overthink their marketing, makes them interfere with it, makes them stop stuff that’s working, makes them carry on too long with stuff that isn’t working? Why do business owners, and it’s not just MSPs, it’s all business owners. Why do we do it? Why do we put ourselves through this year after year after year?

As owners, I think it’s just the perspective that you come from.

With most owners, their business is their baby. Nobody can do anything better or make better decisions than they can toward a thing that’s so close and intimate to them.

So they’re not separated from that, their entity, their business. They should have a perspective that, “Okay, it’s a business, I have values and vision for it. However, this is a team aspect.” And you have to consider what team you have and be really clear both in the communication, your vision, your direction, and then being willing to communicate that in a clear way.

I’ve seen situations with me as an owner and other owners that they think they’re clear. However, when the message gets passed, many times things are left out or just very unclear. And I also take this from my experience as getting a private pilot’s license and that we have to be extremely clear in those communications when we’re talking to a tower, whether we want to request to take off or request to land. There’s specific things we have to say in order to make sure we understand what is happening. And just by asking the question after you communicate something and just by asking, “Does everybody understand?” And people shake their heads, that does not mean people understand.

No, that’s very true. And it’s really interesting, the pilot analogy. A little secret into my life, one of my YouTube favourites is watching videos of air traffic control conversations with planes that have perhaps got into difficult situations. Do you remember when Harrison Ford landed on a taxiway like 10 years ago? And that video is out there and he calls himself a schmuck. But it’s fascinating. It’s really easy to see how he made the mistake when you watch back because all these air traffic control conversations are there.

And actually you’re right that the aviation industry has standardised what we say and why we say it. But in our businesses, we can’t do that. Do you think the problem is that we as owners have as much time as we want to think about something? So we might think, “Oh, this is broken and this is what we want to do.” And then we’ll go away for two weeks, three weeks, think about it, let it settle, be happy with it. And then by that point, we’ve convinced ourselves we know exactly what to do. It’s A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, “Hey team, everyone, I want you to do ABCD. Everyone all right with that? Yep. Good.” And of course that’s the first time they’ve heard it. So we’ve had three weeks to sit on it, reflect on it, control freak it. They’ve just heard it and they’re thinking, “What the hell just happened?” Do you see that a lot?

I do actually. And I want to even go into that a little deeper in terms of it’s not just over one, two or three weeks. It is many times after hours, all through the night, through their interactions. It keeps hitting in their head. They’re dreaming about it. They wake up thinking about it and it irritates them that they’re not getting any results they want. So therefore they think, “Oh, we got to have this happen.” And depending on the culture in this business, they don’t listen to other people.

They don’t take many other people’s advice. And if you haven’t created the culture of trust and a safe space, then I’ve seen it in many cases where I’ve worked in these situations with owners and they just take over everything. And if you say something opposite, they say they might have an open conversation or culture, but when you say something, you know you’re either going to get penalised or you’re going to get looked down or you’re just going to get ignored for the umpteenth time. Which then at that point, people get resignated to the fact that why even contribute or say anything that might be a positive impact.

Yeah. No I agree. And the greatest asset and the greatest liability of us as business owners is that we never get fired. We keep going and as long as the business has clients and revenue and profit, we keep going. And as I say, that’s the greatest thing for us, but it’s also the thing I think that holds our business back more than anything. So what other owner level decision making do you see? And let’s pivot this back to marketing. What other owner level decision making do you see that directly impacts marketing? Is it holding onto the wrong thing for too long? Is it not having patience? Is it those and other things?

Yeah. I don’t know that it’s holding onto things too long. I feel it’s just the patience level in that it’s hard in many of our marketing efforts. I can’t remember the saying decades ago, but one person said, “Man, my marketing is working. 50% of it. I just don’t know which 50% it is.” So I think not being able to really identify the direct correlation with your marketing and your efforts many times allows for somebody’s change like, “Ooh, let’s do something different. I want this to grow. I have some goals. I have some aspirations. I have a vision. Let’s make this work.”

And by changing directions too fast and being impatient, you are going to lose some of that consistency, some of the trust development that you’re creating with people and confusing all of your clients and prospect by what you’re doing because you’re going over here, you’re going over here. Rather than maybe making a smaller decision to tweak only one thing, you got 10 things that you could tweak, tweak only one and see how that works. It’s the same thing as developing software. You don’t want to tweak 10 different things because you have no idea. And if something breaks, which one of those things broke or is now sucking away the outcomes that you want?

Yeah. Just as a side note, that 50% of your marketing thing, and you’ve been watching me, Corey, so you know I haven’t Googled this, my brain says it was a guy called John Wanamaker who was I think like a 19th century entrepreneur, a business owner. But I’m sure there’s a thousand people now Googling that to see that I’m wrong. So we’ll move on from that. You’re right. The analogy to software there, the comparison to software is spot on because MSPs are very technical, process driven people who instantly understand that if I change 10 things at once and I get a better performance or a degraded performance, which of those things, so we’ll change one thing at a time. But then in their marketing, they do completely the opposite. They’ll change everything. They’ll change all the headlines and the images and they’ll try a different approach and they’ll do Google Ads instead of Facebook etc. etc.

I guess this is where the frustration comes in and it’s frustration and it’s the emotional thing, isn’t it? The emotional impact of marketing not working. It’s the most common complaint from MSPs. My marketing does not work. How do we as business owners arrest that emotional reaction to that so that we can change one thing at a time or give it time or give it patience or whatever we need to do?

A couple of things is, and a lot of things I do in my work with MSP owners is that you have to work on yourself first. It’s all about self leadership before you’re leading other people. Yes, we have impact and influence on other people, but you’re leading yourself and developing maybe this new skillset of slowing down when it comes to making decisions and really being thoughtful about it. Bring in more people that are important on your team, get their honest opinion. And like I said earlier, you have to create this culture of trust.

Two things I know for me that I’ve had to work on and I’ve seen this with other owners is that they don’t admit their mistakes. When everybody else makes a mistake, it gets known, it gets felt. But when they make mistakes that are obvious to the whole team, they don’t own it. They don’t show it. They don’t apologise. So now they’re in a different level from everybody else on the team. And once again, trust within your team decreases because they say, “Wow, the owner doesn’t take ownership of their mistakes and what they’re doing.”

So be more humanising and be more human in those areas. And then really work hard to create an environment of trust, not false trust, but truly listening to people, acknowledging them when they contribute, appreciate that they’re willing to share what’s happening there. Because everybody involved with you wants to succeed, they don’t want to wake up every day and have a tough time at work because they’re dealing with stuff at home already. They want to go to work someplace they’re excited about, someplace there’s a passion, a mission, and they have support for, and they have the tools to do their work with.

So making it an easier situation for that human being to do their work and to be able to actually communicate with you when they have a challenge of some sort, and to open up about something that might be a little more vulnerable than normal. Whether they have a medical issue, their kids are sick, whatever it may be. But just being open for that. And like I said, as an owner, I’ve had a challenge coming from back in the 80s and 90s being in business. I’ve seen this with other people, even in for a short period of time, once again, it’s their baby, they own it and nobody else can help out. They’ve got to learn to change these mindsets and attitudes. I think having a mentor and a coach many times, whether it’s a mentor, coach, a friend, somebody can tell you the truth without you getting ticked off or them felt like they’re going to lose their job. That’s important to have a different perspective helping you.

Yeah, that’s really cool. And I love how what you’ve just talked about there applies to the entire business, doesn’t it? It’s not just the marketing as much as that’s great marketing guidance. It’s easy to recognise that’s just general good advice for running your business. Okay. Corey, thank you so much for your wisdom on today’s show. Just tell us a little bit about what do you actually do with MSPs to help them with their businesses, with their marketing, and what’s the best way to get in touch with you?

One of the biggest areas is I coach the leadership. I get them clear and aligned with what they’re pursuing. Then we help with team alignment and then also help them with that consistent business process for producing the revenue that they’re seeking. And the best way to contact me is either through LinkedIn. I’m on there along with my podcast, which is unapologeticleadershippodcast.com. And then on my website, corydunham.com.

Here are six psychological weapons of influence that you can apply to your MSP’s marketing to win more clients. Also this week, three hot marketing ideas around Copilot, and the surprising secret for talking to clients about cyber security.

Welcome to Episode 348 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge.

One of my all-time favourite books is called Influence by Dr. Robert Cialdini. And today I want to walk you through his six psychological weapons of persuasion and show you exactly how they apply to winning clients for your MSP.

Now, this book which I’ve owned for about 20 years, in fact, if you’re watching on YouTube, the copy I’ve literally got in my hands now, I’ve had for a round of 20 years or so, it was actually first published in 1984. Of course, it’s been updated since, but it is still, in my opinion, the definitive work on why people say yes.

Dr. Robert Cialdini is a psychology professor, but he specialises in marketing. He’s still active now, I don’t know if he teaches still, I think he’s in his 70s, but he’s in New York, I believe.

He’s identified six psychological weapons of influence, and we can apply every single one of them to your MSP.

So let me take you through them and give you an example of how each one can help make your marketing so much easier and more effective.

The first is something called reciprocity. People feel compelled to give something back when they’ve received something completely free or something of high value at very, very low cost. So for example, I give away a free MSP marketing wall planner, and I do that partly because I want to educate thousands of MSPs around the world how to have better marketing. But also I know that in giving someone a physical free wall planner that I’ve had printed at my cost, that I’ve mailed out to them at my cost, there’s a certain level of reciprocity in that. And many, not all, but many of the people who get one of those wall planners will come back and buy something from me at some point in the future.

And by the way, if you don’t have one of those wall planners yet, I’ll tell you in just a few minutes how you can get one completely free. And there is no obligation to buy anything if there’s a psychological obligation that’s set up in your brain and that’s just good marketing from Dr. Robert Cialdini. But you can do this as well so you can give away free guides, you can give away other kind of lead magnets, scorecards are working really well right now as a lead magnet, and there’s still some reciprocity from that. You could do a really in-depth LinkedIn post, you could do a major in-depth guide on cyber security or something else on your websites. All of this is reciprocity in action.

What you’ve just got to remember is that when you give genuine value first, then the prospects feel a pull towards you before you’ve ever asked them for anything, ever asked them to buy anything from you. So practical question on this, what are you giving away that’s actually useful? So things like a buyer’s guide or a sales brochure, those kind of things are okay, but the more value you can give in your freebie, in the things you give away, the better.

And just a reminder, by the way, if you’re a member of the MSP Marketing Edge, we have a book called Email Hijack. That’s available to our B2B members. You can get it in the portal right now. It’s in the tool section and it’s kind of like a book, a fictional book about an email compromise attack. So you can very quickly update that with all of your details, put that on your website for free. People just enter their email address and you email them or physically post them, mail them, ship them a copy of email hijack. But that is a great example of a high value giveaway that you haven’t really asked much for. You’ve asked for their email address and their physical address, that’s it. It’s going to help you to build a relationship with prospects before they’re ready to pick a new MSP.

So Dr. Ciardini’s second weapon of influence is commitment and consistency. Once people take a small step, they want to stay consistent with that decision. So getting someone to download something or attend a webinar or even just reply to an email that you’ve sent to them, every small yes makes the next yes easier. And this is why nurturing is so important. You may have heard me talk on this podcast before about the fact we are not hunting. Hunting is one-off activity where you go out, see an opportunity, and you kill the clients, you kill the prospects, you hunt them and you bring them in. I’m much more interested in farming.

Farming is where you are growing something. You are very slowly working hundreds and hundreds of seeds at the same time to grow them. And some of them will turn into big trees that you can harvest into clients. Essentially, you’re building a trail of small commitments that leads you to a meeting. So from a practical point of view, what’s the smallest possible yes that you can ask a cold prospect for? And actually the easiest is hit reply to an email. “Hit reply to this and tell me what you think about this” or asking them to comment on a LinkedIn post or something like that, or even just getting a hold of them on the phone just to find out a little bit about their business. All of these little things, they help to build a relationship with them and at the point they’re ready to switch MSPs, they’re going to want to be consistent and continue that conversation with you.

Number three is social proof. You’ve heard of this before, right? People look to other people like them to decide what the correct course of action is, especially when they’re uncertain about what to do. So for ordinary business owners choosing an MSP, they are very, very uncertain because they don’t understand the technical stuff. That’s kind of easy to understand if you are targeting business owners. Now, if you’re targeting IT directors for co-managed contracts, obviously they do understand the technical stuff, but they are operating from a position of greater fear.

Business owners are scared of making the wrong choice, picking the wrong MSP because it will cost them time and money. IT directors are typically employees. If they get the wrong choice, if they pick the wrong MSP, it could cost them their job, their career. That’s actually a bigger perceived risk for them than it is the business owner. The business owner loses money and time. It’s annoying, but it’s not the end of the world. The IT director could lose their job and their career. That is the end of the world. So even though both of these people are completely different, they want to know that other people like them have trusted you already because that makes you perceived to be safer.

So we know that social proof is made up of three primary tools. You’ve got testimonials, reviews, and case studies. So a testimonial is where someone gives you a review of the business, but they give it to you, you’re in charge of it, you can edit it. And a testimonial’s okay, but it’s not as good as a review. A review is a testimonial that goes on a third-party platform. So people will look at it and know that you haven’t edited it. It’s very, very powerful.

My recommendation is always that you pursue reviews on third-party platforms and then you copy those reviews into your website and other marketing and you just say where you got it from. So for example, get Google reviews and then take the very best of those Google reviews and copy them, either screenshot them or recreate them into your website. So you’ve got testimonials and reviews, and then the third form you’ve got is case studies.

A case study is telling a story. It’s essentially the same as a review of a testimonial, but it’s a structured case study and you see someone’s journey from the problem they had to the solution that you put in place to the outcome, which is of course always a much better outcome because they’re working with you. Now, specific and named social proof is always, always better than generic social proof. So “Jane at XYZ Accountant saved three hours this week”, is always going to be better and more powerful and more persuasive than someone just saying, “Great service would recommend”.

And I know that MSPs hate putting people’s photos and their names and their job titles and the name of the business. I know you hate that because there are security concerns and I understand that, but the reality is if you have a good system in place for your client to make sure that it is you and your technicians calling them the persuasive power of publishing the name of your client and their photo, which is best practice, it far outweighs the security risk of you doing this thing.

So a practical action on this. When did you last proactively ask a happy client for a review or a testimonial? The answer to this of course is you systemise it. So you either have something built into your PSA. You know when you close a big ticket and it sends out the little faces thing, it says, “Are you happy?” And they can tap the happy face or the sad face or the one in between. If they tap the happy face, that should take them to a page asking them to leave a review. If they haven’t done so already, you have to set up basic rules for this kind of thing. That’s one good system. Another good system is just to ask everyone after their first 90 days with you or when you’ve completed a project for them. Both of those are great times to ask for reviews. And you should also explain why you want reviews.

Another little thing that Cialdini has put in one of his books I’ve read somewhere is that when you give someone a reason why you’re asking for something, even if the reason doesn’t make sense, they’re much more likely to go along with it. The example he gave was, and this shows how old this was because it’s about photocopying, but when there was a queue of people for a photocopier, if you said to someone, “Hey, can I just cut in the queue?” Nine times out of 10 they said no. Whereas if you said to someone, “Hey, can I cut into the queue because I need to do some photocopying?” Even though that reason doesn’t make sense, everyone’s there because they need to do some photocopying, the person was much more likely to let them into the queue. It’s curious, isn’t it? So when you’re asking people for a review, you just say to them, “Would you mind helping me out by giving us a review please, because we’re trying to attract more clients like you.” Simple as that.

Okay, next weapon of persuasion from Dr. Robert Cialdini is authority. Now, people follow credible experts. They want to be led by someone who they perceive knows more than they do. And this is exactly why, for example, why I do this podcast, it’s exactly why I do a LinkedIn newsletter every week, and why I do things like a wall planner, why I’ve written my book MSP Marketing Start Here, which you can get on Amazon and Audible and Kindle.

Now I’ve done all of these things to help demonstrate my perceived authority. You can do the same thing as well. You can write a book. In fact, that book Email Hijack I was talking about earlier for our MSP Marketing Edge B2B members, that’s a really great example of this. You can publish guides, you can write a LinkedIn newsletter, you can talk, go and speak at local events or events within your niche or your vertical. The MSP who publishes useful content and speaks at events and puts on webinars is automatically perceived as more authoritative than the MSP who doesn’t. And trust me, the vast majority of your competitors are not doing this.

So what are some of the other authority signals that you can put out there? Well, things like good credentials, accreditations being mentioned in the media, as I’ve already said, speaking at events. All of these are authority signals. So a practical suggestion for you, where on your website and where on your LinkedIn does your authority come through? Can I go on your website and your LinkedIn right now and see you speaking at events, see the guides and books and things that you’ve published, or join your webinar? Because as I said, your competitors are not doing this. This is a big opportunity for you.

Then we’ve got weapon number five, which is liking. People buy from people that they like. It really is as simple as that. And likability comes from how similar you are to the person you are talking to, how familiar they are with you, and this is why building a relationship with someone is always a good idea before you ask them to choose your MSP. And it also comes from genuine warmth as well. The more your real genuine personality comes through in your marketing, the more people will feel like they know you.

Please don’t ever try to be someone else. You might watch me on YouTube or listen to me on this podcast and think, “Well, that Paul seems all right.” I hope you think that, and maybe you’d think, “I’ll try and be like Paul.” But I’m just being me, right? It’s taken me many years to get to the point where I’m comfortable being me. And I know that some people don’t like me. They don’t like the way I present, the way I talk, the ideas I’ve got. And do you know what? I’m okay with that because actually it’s better to be yourself, be authentic and have some people, a very small proportion of people that don’t like you, whereas most people will like you because they’ve got something to hook onto. They can be attracted to your genuine authentic personality. It’s really important that people feel like they know the real you.

And they might not spot you being inauthentic or unauthentic, but they will feel it. We have all sorts of incredible gut reactions and gut feelings inside ourselves, and they warn us when something doesn’t feel quite right. And you trying not to be you is going to trigger that in someone else. So just be you. Be the authentic you. And I promise you these days where anybody and everybody does content and video, being yourself is the best thing you can do. So a practical thing then, does your marketing sound like it’s coming from a person or does it sound like it’s coming from a corporation, from a business? The more authentic and real and human your marketing is, the easier you’re making it for people to like you. And it is so important.

And then the final weapon. The final weapon from Dr. Cialdini is scarcity. People want what they might not be able to have. And real scarcity is much more powerful than manufactured scarcity. Prospects really can smell the difference. I’ll give you an example. Our MSP Marketing Edge membership, we genuinely only work with one MSP per area. Well, it’s one per membership. So we’ve got one B2B member and one co-managed member. And it’s genuine so that no one’s using the same marketing in the same marketplace. And we actually have more people, this is true. We have more MSPs on our waiting list than we actually do as active members. So it’s genuine scarcity because it helps keep our quality high and it keeps everything working for me and for our members.

Now for your MSP, you can’t use anything like scarcity of software, scarcity of tools because we all know that software is endless. it’s limitless, it never really runs out. So your scarcity is your time and your attention. For example, onboarding. Now genuinely, you can probably only onboard one client per month, right? Or maybe two at a push because I know how onboarding takes so much work from you and all of your team. So actually you can use that. If you’re having two or three sales conversations, you can say, “Hey guys, look, as you’re making this decision about which MSP you’re going to go to, and obviously we hope you choose us, just be aware that for quality reasons and for workload reasons, we only onboard one client a month. We already have someone right now for this month. Next month we currently have free and the month after, but I am about to pencil someone in for next month. So do you want me to pencil you in for that or did you want to go for the month after?” And that’s genuine scarcity, right? Because you are then just onboarding one client a month. And I know that actually for most MSPs, just winning one new client a month would be chef’s kiss, beautiful.

So positioning yourself as selective rather than desperate is one of the most powerful things you can do. So just to tie that one up with a practical suggestion, again, do your prospects know that you’re not available to everyone, that actually you won’t work with everyone. You have a very, very clear idea of an ideal client. What’s a good fit for you and for them. Are you telling prospects about that? Are you telling them that you have a scarce amount of onboarding? These are smart things to work in. They’re not the only reasons they would choose you, but they’re a persuasive tool and they will help them to make the decision. Nothing’s worse than a prospect, just not making a decision, never getting back to you. You want them to be yes or no, black or white. Which is it going to be? And that’s one of the weapons you can use to help make that happen.

Look, Cialdini’s point in his book is that these aren’t tricks. These are how human decision-making actually works already. We are built this way, we are wired this way, and we’ve been like that for thousands of years. When prospects are thinking of working with you or not, they’re not making rational decisions. They’re making emotional decisions and then they’re justifying them afterwards using their brain. They’re justifying them in a rational manner. The MSPs who understand this, do marketing that is completely different and superior to those who don’t understand this. So if you haven’t read it yet, please go read Influence by Dr. Robert Cialdini. It’s on Audible if you want to listen to it. 80% of it is great. 20% of it is a bit of a slog to get through, but you can just skip over those bits. But I promise you it will change how you see every piece of marketing that you produce. You’ll never be able to look at a prospect conversation the same way again.

Copilot is one of the biggest commercial opportunities sitting in front of your MSP right now, but you might not yet be using it as a marketing tool. So let’s fix that with three specific ideas that you can act on straight away.

And the first idea is a Shadow AI webinar. Now, most business owners already know that their staff are using AI. They just don’t know who’s doing that and which AI tools they’re using. So Sandra in accounts might be using ChatGPT. Dave in Sales might be on Gemini. Someone else might be using Claude and all of them of course are using personal accounts.

And I think business owners are starting to wake up to the fact that this is a risk because where’s all the data going? If they’re taking our business data and putting that into their own personal AI, what are we liable for? How do we protect our data? What happens if Dave in sales leaves and he’s got like 50, 100, 200 leads worth of data in his Claude? How do I even know he’s got that data there, let alone actually stop him from taking that data away from the business?

This is a perfect webinar topic because it’s the kind of thing that business owners are already thinking about right now.

The best webinars, the best events, the best content in marketing is about things that people are already thinking about. So here’s a suggested topic. Is AI being used in your business without your knowledge? And what’s the risk? And we can be pretty certain that someone somewhere in the business is using AI either on their laptop or on their phone.

So this is not intended as a Copilot sales pitch. It’s a genuine educational event all about shadow AI. You’ll need to explain that term to them because they won’t understand it. And it’s also about data governance as well. And as you talk about these problems, it will become clear when you talk about the capabilities of Copilot that is the natural solution because of course data can be controlled, you can set up guardrails, it’s secure, it’s the Microsoft approved answer. And if they’re already in the Microsoft ecosystem, it’s a lot easier for them to roll that out to their business.

And people who attend this webinar are going to be warm. They’re going to be people who’ve turned up because the problem for them is real. They’ve either actually got the problem and they’ve noticed it, or they’re fearful that they’ve got that problem and they want to head it off before it becomes something that does damage to the business. So you will get a bunch of people registering for the webinar, a proportion of those, let’s say a third of those will actually turn up to the webinar. That’s fine, that’s normal. You send out the recording to the other two-thirds and you follow up everyone within 24 hours and you do this every single time. This is really important on a webinar.

The first people you follow up are the ones who attended and you’ve called them asking for a bit of feedback. You’re not really interested in their feedback, but it’s a way of starting the conversation.

You’re like, “Oh, hi, John. I know you were on my webinar yesterday. I’m just curious, what was the most useful thing you found from it? ” So you get them talking about the subject and that leads naturally into a conversation about, “So tell me what the situation is in your business right now.” And you as someone who does sales all the time, you may or may not be a trained salesperson, but as the owner, as someone who does this a lot, you will very easily turn that into a conversation about their business, what else they’re doing right now. Is it worth the two of you meeting? Could be just for a coffee catch-up or it could be for a formal meeting to discuss their technology and their business. That’s a really powerful thing.

So follow up the people who attended first and then follow up those who didn’t attend. You might choose to track who’s opened the email and watched the video, there’s various tools to do that. But again, that would prioritise them for you. Call the people who’ve attended first, then call the people who didn’t attend but open the video, then call the people who registered but didn’t attend and didn’t open the video. You’re much more likely to get hold of the people at the beginning and it will tail off as you get towards the end.

Idea number two is a Copilot ROI conversation, return on investment conversation with your existing clients. So you may know this already, that your existing clients are your easiest wins for any kind of new thing that you introduce because they already trust you and you know everything about them. Now, most small businesses are still at the experimentation stage with AI. They’ve probably dabbled. Maybe the business owner has got Claude or ChatGPT. Maybe they’re still on the free level. And we all know that people who use the paid tool learn dramatically faster than those that kind of get stuck on the free level. But maybe the business owners that you’re talking to that you’re looking after, maybe they haven’t yet committed.

So the conversation to have with them is that you’ve been looking at what Copilot is actually doing for businesses like theirs. And you’ve been looking at the savings, you’ve been looking at the productivity increases and talk to them about real things like hours saved or data protected or systems automated. You can take a real life example that they’re doing their business. Or if you don’t know, say to them, “Tell me something that you’re doing within your business that you are pretty convinced you could make more efficient, you just don’t know how to do that.” And it’s bound to be some manual process where someone’s copying data into this spreadsheet and then over to this database and checking this and doing that. And you can tell them how Microsoft’s own data shows these real productivity gains. You can actually use that in your client conversations.

One thing that I think works really well is to frame this around a specific role in their business. So you could say, for example, “Your finance team could save X hours a month on report drafting” or something like this. Take a real life thing where you can spot manual processes or where there’s just excessive amounts of admin and talk to them about how together you could explore using Copilot to do that in a way which is safe and productive and they stay in control. This is an upsell conversation that’s dressed up as a helpful conversation and it is genuinely helpful.

And even clients who don’t immediately buy Copilot consulting from you or some level of engagement, they become warmer and warmer and warmer because you’re their supplier, their partner who is thinking ahead for them. This of course also generates referrals because happy clients talk to other business owners about the conversation that they’ve had, whether or not they’ve bought the thing that you have talked to them about.

Idea number three is LinkedIn content, positioning you as the local Copilot expert. As we are right now at this moment in 2026, very few MSPs in any given area are posting regularly about Copilot in plain English. So business owners are seeing news about AI everywhere, but really no one’s translating it for them into business owner speak. So that’s the opportunity for you. You can become the go-to voice in your area for “What does this AI stuff actually mean for my business?”. So post regularly about specific Copilot use cases, but don’t talk about features, talk about benefits. Talk about real scenarios. Here’s how a 20-person accountancy firm used Copilot to cut their month-end reporting from two days to half a day.

Whatever you do, don’t go anywhere near here’s how a business lost people or managed to reduce payroll or managed to reduce headcount. If the business owners choose to do that, that’s fine. But a lot of people are scared that that’s what AI is all about, about reducing people. Whereas you and I know that actually it just makes your existing people more productive so they can get more done. They can do more stuff. So yeah, sure, maybe you don’t need to hire more staff because your existing staff can cope with more business. That’s not a bad thing because no one lost out on a job there.

Use short, specific, jargon-free content. Write it for someone who doesn’t understand AI, someone who doesn’t understand IT or technology. And if you do this often enough, like once or twice a week at minimum, then over time this is going to build authority and probably even some inbound interest as well because people will come to you rather than you having to chase them. But it does also give you a reason to reach out to your cold connections. You could say just in a DM on LinkedIn or in a phone call, you can say, “I’ve been posting about Copilot quite a lot recently and there’s one here that’s about CPAs, about accountants. I know you’re a CPA, I though this might be relevant to you.” That kind of cold outreach via DM or even a phone call, that can be really good because you’re showing that you’ve got something that could be and should be relevant to them.

The way that I see this is that Copilot isn’t just a product that you sell. Right now it’s a huge conversation starter. It’s a credibility builder and it’s a reason for you to get in front of prospects who are already worried about AI, but they don’t know yet who to trust. The MSP who shows up first talks in plain English and is genuinely helpful, wins that relationship.

If you’re an MSP Marketing Edge member, here’s something inside our member portal that’s worth your time right now. It’s the Standout MSP Website Framework, because your website is either working for you or it’s working against you and most MSPs don’t know which. So the framework walks you through exactly what your website needs to do and say to turn visitors into inquiries. It covers how to make it immediately obvious who you help and what you do for them, how to build trust before a prospect has spoken to you, how to answer the pricing question without committing to an actually very specific number, and what your call to action needs to be to get people to actually take the next step.

This framework is built around how real business owners read and decide, it’s not built around how MSPs think they read and decide. So if your website currently looks okay, it looks fine, but it’s just not generating leads, I bet you I have the answer to why this is the case. So please log in to the portal, you can find it in the training section. It’s in both portals, the B2B one and the co-managed one.

And if you are not yet a member of the MSP Marketing Edge, there are two memberships available in each area. We’ve got B2B that’s designed to help you win more business owner clients. And then we’ve got co-managed, which is designed to help you win IT director contracts, one MSP per area for each of these. Now you can check if yours is available without having to put in your contact details. You just put your postal code or your zip code at mspmarketingedge.com/membership.

Featured guest: Craig Taylor is a Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) since 2001, and a 30-year veteran of Cyber security. In 2014 he co-founded a cyber security training company – CyberHoot – to help businesses of all sizes and industries learn cyber literacy.

During his career, Craig has led cyber security organisations ranging from Fortune 50 companies (JPMorgan Chase, Vistaprint) to MSPs serving dozens of individual clients.

Craig is a Rotarian (Portsmouth, NH) and a sports enthusiast. He enjoys fundraising for cancer research, having raised $150,000 by riding in the Pan Mass Challenge for the past 12 years.

So you and I know that cyber security is one of the most important conversations that you can have with a business owner. But the business owners themselves, well, sometimes they glaze over a bit, don’t they? I’ve got a special guest today who’s about to reveal the surprising secret for how to talk to clients about cyber security in a way that always interests them.

Hi, I’m Craig Taylor, CEO and co-founder of CyberHoot. We teach cyber literacy to the world.

And what a mission that is for you, Craig. Thank you so much for joining me on the podcast today. We’re going to talk about how to have those important cyber security conversations with your clients without having to delve into fear, uncertainty, and doubt. FUD. Everyone has heard of FUD and for many years that was the standard way of having the conversation about cyber security. But things have moved on, cyber security itself has moved on, the conversations need to move on and you are obviously an expert at doing this. So that’s what we’re going to delve into today. Just first of all, tell us a bit about you. So how do you get to the point of educating the world about cyber security?

That’s a great question. So if I go back in time, I have a degree in psychology and I knew right away I wasn’t going to do a PhD, so I decided I have to get a job doing something else. And I fell into cyber security. For 30 years I’ve been doing cyber security, had my CISSP in 2001. So lots of experience trying to build resilient cyber security programs for businesses from Fortune 500 – JP Morgan, Chase, Vistaprint – down to the MSPs of the world where I’ve spent many years working with MSPs. And what I’ve found on the market was really disappointing. It was fear and uncertainty and doubt, shameful. You clicked on a phishing link, now you’re punished. That does not change behaviours.

And a light dawned on me about six years ago within CyberHoot’s 10-year journey. I remembered my operant conditioning psychology degree, which says essentially for 75 years, punished behaviours are never extinguished. They don’t stop. It’s an external focus or locus of control, but rewarded behaviours are repeated. That’s been proven as well. BF Skinner did and lots of studies since then. So we pivoted at CyberHoot, we said, stop punishing and shaming people with fake email messages to the inbox. Those messages where your IT team sends it to you or your MSP and you click and, oh no, that was a test. I failed it. Now I’ve got to watch this video, I’m not in a good mood to watch, I don’t want to learn.

There was a study recently at BlackHat last year that said people spent 10 seconds watching those videos and then they walked away because they just aren’t in a frame of mind, and it doesn’t change behaviour. So we changed to a in-browser exercise where you choose safe or unsafe indicators throughout an email, six or seven different questions, the sending domain. And the beauty of doing it in a simulation in the browser is we can emulate real hacker domains. So we can change an M in Microsoft or Amazon to an R and an N, similar to what a hacker might do for a few days before the domain is taken down. So our testing is much more well received.

As an MSP, I think the listeners of this know your lifeblood is the value you add to your customer relationships. If you’re sending fake messages to the inbox and tricking your clients and their employees, you’re eroding your lifeline. You’re sawing the branch you sit on off the tree. What you need to do is reinforce good behaviours, reward and gamify that experience so that people want to participate. And that’s really what we’ve been able to accomplish in our exercises.

We have leaderboards that suddenly we introduced leaderboards a month ago, no, maybe about four months ago. And Paul, we started to see senior leaders at the companies we train starting their assignments for the first time. The only thing we could think of is that they saw their leaderboard status on this anonymous leaderboard. We’re in a company of a hundred and I am 95th in the list as a leader. I can’t do that, I can’t be 95th, I have to be first at everything. And so they started doing the training.

Gamification makes it fun. It makes it like play instead of work. People get engaged and they compete with one another.

We get support tickets like, why is my colleague ahead of me when we’ve done the exact same things? And so people are having fun learning cyber literacy and the behaviours are sticking. That’s the big thing. The outcome that we just always sought after and wanted was people to look at an email and go, huh, I remember my HootPhish training. The sender looks, oh my gosh, there’s a period in the wrong place. I’m not going to click. I’m going to report it.

Yeah, I love that. And do you know what? As you were describing these psychological concepts, that makes perfect sense. I have a 15-year-old daughter who right now as I’m recording this, she’s about to do her big exams here in the UK, which kids do two years before high school ends in the US. But in the UK, they’re called GCSEs. And any UK MSPs listening to this or watching this on YouTube will know that you have a month of hell where you’re trying to drag your 15, 16-year-old kicking and screaming through the most important exams of their life that literally dictate their entire future. But they’re not yet quite mature enough to get that because it makes a lot more sense to do with 18.

Anyway, so I figured out a long time ago that that whole the stick doesn’t work. The carrot absolutely works. And we all know this inherently. And yet it’s weird, isn’t it, that we’ve developed all these, and I say we as a channel, have developed all these cyber security programs that are, stick, stick, stick. You’ve done the wrong thing. I’m going to hit you, hit you, hit you. And maybe it’s because exactly as you said, and I can’t remember the psychology words you used, was it locus of control? Is that it? Internal versus external. So as the leader of a big business or a big whatever, if I’ve got 500 people that work for me, it’s easier for me to hit the 200 people that do something wrong because I can figure that out more easily than constantly rewarding the people that get this right. Is that correct?

It is and it isn’t, right? Because you want engagement and engagement only occurs when you reward good behaviours, when you have positive reinforcement. Think about dog training. You can train with a shock collar or treats. And what does the dog prefer? Treats. What does the owner prefer? Treats. We don’t like to press the button and shock our dogs. But the best analogy I’ve thought of is back to the children. My three-year-old daughter was walking towards the road one day in our backyard and I didn’t notice at first. And I heard a car coming and I saw she was close to the road and I screamed as loud as I could. And she froze instantly, sat down and began to cry, which was the exact effect I wanted. But that’s what our fake email phishing testing is doing. It’s freezing people in the moment from clicking, but not teaching them why.

I had to work with that daughter for the next five years to say, “Look at the cars going by. It’s really dangerous if you were to walk out on that roadway without knowing that you look both ways.” And teaching them the positive behaviours to exhibit before they could go out on their bike and those sorts of things. That’s what we’ve forgotten to do with our employees. In the moment, clicking on a fake email can lead to drastic consequences… ransomware. Is this email compromised? And down the road, wire fraud, all hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages. So the thought is stop them in the moment, but that doesn’t work long-term. You have to educate them on why and how it works.

With the HootPhish exercise we do, I like to say we teach people how to phish, feeding them for a lifetime of secure, efficient, confident email processing. And they internalise it. Users internalise it and they enjoy learning the lessons instead of the slap them on the wrist. “Oh, I won’t click today.” That’s feeding them a phish for today. Tomorrow they’re going to click again. You need to explain the whys and the hows.

Yeah, I love that. And make it fun. Make it fun is the big takeaway from this. So we’re going to talk in a second about what exactly your business does and how you work with MSPs. But before we do, let’s take this one step further. And so obviously you’ve got the software solution, which is your answer of how MSPs can make it fun, but what are some other ways that MSPs can have the right kinds of conversations with people without falling back on fear and uncertainty and doubt? What techniques do you suggest that MSPs use or avenues of conversation other than the software solution?

So you need to explain what the companies out there are up against. There’s a lot of folks that don’t know what they don’t know regarding cyber security. So you can explain that the number one way companies are breached is email phishing attacks. The number two is password hygiene. So when you’re sitting down with a business owner, you can ask things like, “Have you funded and encouraged the adoption of a password manager? Because if you haven’t, then you’re guaranteed that all your employees are reusing their favourite personal password or their VPN password. And if it’s not MFA or two-factor protected, hackers can just look it up on the dark web and log into your VPN. Done. You’re done.” I mean, that’s not fear and uncertainty, that’s just facts.

And so you need to explain what’s out there, what the biggest risks are. Phishing is the largest risk today because AI is creating 10 different emails that appeal to you, Paul. Your specific social media profile online can be fed into AI and I can send you 10 things that you desperately want to click on because it pertains to your passions in life, whether you like your children, your dog, your sports, your family, your business, and you’ll want to click on those things. So we need to teach exactly what’s going on in those spaces. And you just have to have a candid conversation with your clients to say, these are the ways hackers are breaking in.

Then we can also help you with things like data retention strategies. I worked on a forensic investigation with a law firm this year that had 20 years of case studies on their network and they were breached and the data was exfiltrated and they had to go talk to or email or contact 20 years… They had to find the customers from 20 years ago but they didn’t know where they were. Now, if they had done any kind of data retention strategy that said, we haven’t touched anything older than five years old and archived that, they don’t have to delete it, they can archive it to a place where it’s safe and it’s offline and it’s available. It just can’t be attacked. It can’t be stolen. And they would’ve had five years of this or three years of this or the current work that they’re doing.

So you can have these really candid conversations with your clients about easy, simple things you can do to mitigate risk. And truthfully, these methods like password manager, it’s an efficiency tool as much as it is a security tool. Password resets waste 10 hours a year per employee times a hundred employees. You’ve got a lot of lost productivity there and employees are happier when they actually can click a link and get to where they need to go and they’re logged in automatically. So those are the kinds of conversations I would recommend.

I love it. Thank you so much, Craig. Let’s just very briefly finish with, tell us a little bit what your platform does. What’s the benefits for MSPs of using this? Although I think we’ve just been talking about that for the last 15 minutes, let’s be honest. But also just tell us where can people get in touch with you and come and see what your software does.

So reach out to [email protected] and you can book a free demo and we have a free trial for 30 days if you wish. We’ll give any listeners to this that mention the MSP Marketing podcast 20% off for one year as a discount. What we do is we send out short three-minute videos once a month, short HootPhish exercises in the browser, not attacking people in their inboxes. So it’s a complete awareness that I’m going to learn about phishing. I’m not being tricked. So it builds your relationship with your clients. Retention goes up with CyberHoot versus down with a fake email phish testing. We also have dark web monitoring. We have a whole bevy of things, product training. When you roll out that password manager, we can send your employees one email with 10 links to videos from OnePassword or Keeper or Bitwarden to teach your users how to use this product, reducing the cost to your help desk of tickets. How do I do this? How do I do that? So it’s 100% automated.

Many of the products out there take a lot of precision work to define these specific fake email phishing tests. It can be too hard, too easy and lead to a lot of erosion of goodwill. With us, it’s 100% automated. You don’t pick anything, you just turn it on, synchronise with Google Sync or Microsoft Entra Sync, and it runs itself. It’s the lowest cost of ownership out there for a learning management system for MSPs in a multi-tenant environment. And our website is cyberhoot.com.

Let’s look at why webinars are an amazing way for MSPs to grow their business primarily because most MSPs aren’t doing them. Also this week, get up at 5am every weekday to grow your MSP, and before you do any marketing or sales, you MUST get these foundations right.

Welcome to Episode 347 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge.

So have you ever thought of doing webinars to promote your MSP and if you have, what stopped you from actually going ahead with it? Were you worried that perhaps no one would turn up or worse than no one… one person would turn up? Or maybe you were worried about your own performance. Let’s look at why webinars are an amazing way for MSPs to grow their business primarily because most MSPs aren’t doing them.

And let’s just address this right from the start. Yes, there is room in the world for more webinars. You might think there are too many webinars already, but that’s just because you’re inside the channel. Outside the channel, they are getting lots of webinars about the law or carpentry or manufacturing or whatever line of work your prospects are in, but they’re not hearing a lot from MSPs that are pushing technology and talking about the importance of cyber security.

There’s plenty of business out there to be won through webinars, but you’ve just got to approach it the right way.

Most MSPs think the goal of a webinar is all about getting the attendance numbers in. Get 50 people on a webinar, get big conversion rates. That’s not what it’s about at all. The real goal of a webinar is intelligence. It’s telling you something about the leads and the prospects that you’re talking to right now, the people who are in your CRM or who are connected to you on LinkedIn. I mean, even if you just look at who has done something, so who registered for a webinar in the first place?

Actually, you could take that back a step and say, who clicked the email link to have a look at the webinar that I’m promoting? Who then registered for that webinar? Who then showed up for that webinar? Who stayed for the majority of it? Who asked questions? Who booked a meeting or did something afterwards to say thank you? All of this tells you really interesting things about the leads and prospects that you are talking to. And it helps you to kind of sort out the wheat from the chaff. It helps you to show who are the hottest prospects right now and where should you be focusing all of your attention. I mean, the very fact that someone would attend your webinar or even register for your webinar that says something to you.

Now, you might know that with my members, I work either helping them to win B2B business, which is what most MSPs want, more business owners, or I help them to grow their co-managed business, so helping them to reach IT directors. And in both these instances, webinars can be a really, really powerful tool. It can help you to see who through their behaviour alone is worth me talking to. Who’s worth me following up, ringing them, sending more emails to them, sending stuff to them in the post in the mail.

Someone registering for a webinar and turning up for a webinar and being engaged with a webinar, it’s like their hand going up. These are buying signals that people are inadvertently sending to you and it’s great for you because you then know exactly who you should be following up and exactly who you should be talking to over the next couple of weeks. Now there are three, if you like, kind of three tiers of heat after a webinar. By heat, I mean, how hot is a prospect.

So the first tier is where someone has attended and they’ve asked a question or they’ve stayed to the end. So they’ve turned up, they’ve stayed engaged. In fact, if they’ve asked a question, they’re the hottest possible engagement. These are the hottest people and they’re the ones that you should be on right now. Someone who attends a webinar, regardless of the subject, let’s assume it’s just about something technology. It could be cyber security, it could be productivity, it could be about co-managed IT if you’re trying to win co-managed IT contracts.

The fact they attended and stayed and engaged with you, that shows they’re interested. Now, the timing might not be ready for them to actually take the next step or go and buy from you, but I would definitely ring them straight after the webinar. You could ring them and lead with literally, “It was great to see you on the webinar. I loved that question you asked me. Hey, did I answer that question well enough for you or do you have follow-up questions to that?” And in a one-on-one environment, someone is much more likely to start asking follow-up questions and that’s more engagement, right? Now you’re on the phone with them, you can push to have that proper discovery call or even to have that in real life sales meeting. So that’s the first level of heat.

The next level of heat is where someone’s registered and they’ve attended, but they’re passive. They’re a lurker. Lurkers are going to be 90% of people who show up on your webinars. In fact, there’s something called, I think it’s something called the 90/1/9 rule. When you’ve got any kind of performance or show or webinar or even something like a community or something like that, 90% of people who use that are not going to engage with it. They’re lurkers. They just want to turn up for seeing what’s there. 9% of them will engage in some way and 1% of them will take a bit of a leadership position. So 90% will do nothing. 9% will engage and 1% will create new content or ask amazing questions that just contribute, but the vast majority of people are lurkers. So if you can get people to show up to your webinars, that is where most of them are going to be. They are just going to be warm.

Now the next level of hotness down is where they registered, but they didn’t show up. And it’s still worth following these people up because even if someone’s registered that says to you that there is a level of interest there. And actually what you may find is that they may register for two or three webinars and eventually they will show up for one. The thing about a webinar is, and you’ve done this and I’ve definitely done this, is we get to the day where we really intended to go onto the webinar and then 10 minutes before we’re looking at our watch and we’re like, “Oh, I’m really busy today. Do you know what? I’ll watch the recording.” And you will find that for every person who shows up to your live event, two or three or four will watch the recording, which just goes to show that’s true. But obviously the downside of them just watching a recording is there’s no engagement. You don’t know what questions they would’ve asked, etc. etc.

So there’s your three lead heat registers there. And actually with the no shows, I forgot to say that no shows are not dead leads. As I say, send them the recording, watch who watches it. You may even invest in some kind of software which tracks for you, not just who’s opened it, but who’s watched to the end. Someone who opens it and watches 30 seconds are not as hot as someone who’s opened it watched three quarters of the way through, that’s going to be a much hotter prospect.

But all of the purpose of the webinar and the reason that you’re doing it is to find out who’s hot right now so that you can then follow them up. Webinars should not be done just for educating your audience or entertaining them. The webinars should be done because they help you to see who are the hottest people to speak to. So you can put all of your tiny amount of resources onto just those people. So your follow-up sequence should be different for each of those tiers.

So the hottest tier, as I say, they should get all of your attention. I believe if they’re hot, and that means they’ve attended and they’ve engaged with you, personal outreach within 24 hours. Reference something specific from the webinar, their question or something they liked or something like that, or go in just with a question about the webinar. It’s a really easy way to start a conversation with them.

All of the other people, of course, you should send out the recording. You should send them your live calendar. You should say, “Hey, as you know, we help local businesses with this kind of stuff. Here’s my live calendar. The next step is to have a 15-minute one-on-one conversation with me. ” Some of those people will book that conversation when they’re ready to do that. So that’s how I see webinars. I see them as a way of sorting the wheat from the chaff, but what do you actually do a webinar about?

Well, I believe on webinars, topic choice is absolutely everything. So you have to pick a subject, not that you are interested in presenting, but a subject that your ideal prospect is genuinely worried about right now. So as an example, it might be cyber threat topics. I mean, they don’t want the ins and outs of today’s big cyber threat because they don’t really care. Unless it’s something like, CrowdStrike. CrowdStrike, which took down the world, all the planes stopped, didn’t they? So when something like that happens, it’s very much on the mainstream news then it’s of interest to them. But all of the other stuff that’s in front of you today, they don’t really care about it. But you can talk to them about how other business owners like them have been threatened or hit by cyber security problems. If you work with a client and they got breached and you rescued them, perhaps they got breached because they didn’t follow your advice, you can use the anonymised case study of that to educate other business owners. This is not using FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt), this is purely an educational thing.

So cyber security threat topics are great. Compliance deadlines are great because they’re deadlines and in marketing we love deadlines. AI… AI is everything right now, right? Copilot, go and do a Copilot webinar. I know loads of MSPs who are putting on Copilot webinars and they get loads of people registered and loads attend because people want to roll out Copilot. They want to use AI strategically in their business and they don’t know where to start. And you can use this either to sell your general managed services or even some Copilot consulting.

These kind of topics, they pull in warm audiences with a pain, and that’s the key thing. They pull in people with a pain. When someone has a problem to solve or something they want to gain or a need or a want, they’re dramatically more likely to engage with you. And if they engage with you, they’re dramatically more likely to actually go on to do some work with you down the way.

Webinars also give you a reason to reach out to your LinkedIn connections and particularly cold LinkedIn connections to people you don’t really know. You can reach out to them and say things like, “Hey, I thought this would be relevant to you. I’m doing a webinar series. It’s for local business owners. I don’t think you’ve attended one yet. I wonder which of these subjects might be relevant to you. Are you interested in cyber security? I’m doing that in the next couple of weeks, or I’m doing one about Copilot AI next month,” Or whatever the subjects should be.

Now that brings me onto how often should you run webinars? Well, I believe you should run them quarterly at a minimum. You might even choose to do them monthly because you could do the same three webinars but just on a repeating pattern. So it could be productivity, cyber security, AI. So every month you have a new webinar, but actually you’ve only got to do three webinars and just do them on a repeating loop. And the compounding effect of this builds your reputation. You’re trying to be perceived as the local technology expert, right? Well, either locally or in your niche, your vertical. So doing webinars on a regular basis makes you an expert.

There’s something that hasn’t changed in the AI age, which is that experts create content. And yeah, sure AI can do that for you super easily these days. So now you need to bring yourself above just the blog articles and the LinkedIn stuff that everyone is knocking out with AI, and you can tell it’s AI most of the time. You need to write seriously write proper things like a book or you need to present, go and present at live events or go and do webinars on a regular basis.

Experts share what they know and how it helps other people. So if you really want to be seen as a technology expert, doing a quarterly or a monthly webinar is a great way to do this. So there’s a lot to think about there and I know that webinars are scary, but you’ve got to remember this. Webinars are not just a great way for you to find out who’s hot right now and give you an easy in to start a conversation with them, but the MSP who runs webinars on a regular basis is automatically positioned as the authority and most people in most marketplaces want to buy from the authority.

Would you like to hear my personal confession? I got up at five in the morning every single weekday for 15 years from 2005 to 2020 and not because I’m a masochist of some kind or extreme. It’s not because I don’t sleep well. I sleep very, very well, but it’s because I wanted to work on my business.

And actually 2005 was when I started my first business. I sold that in 2016, which is when I started working with lovely MSPs and I kept that habit going until it stopped in lockdown. And I’ll tell you a bit more about that in a second. But getting up at five in the morning allowed me to have a chunk of time every single day to do the important things that grow your business.

The biggest problem as a business owner is how do you find enough time to work on the business when you’re so busy working in the business.

Now, let me tell you some stuff that kind of made it easy for me to get up at 5am I kind of had a head start because my previous job before I started my business in 2005, I was a breakfast radio presenter so I was getting up. You know the people you hear on the radio in the mornings, who listens to radio, it’s 2026 Paul, but if you do, they all sound a bit up and high and woo and jolly. Often that’s because they’ve already been up for a couple of hours. So my show started at six in the morning, I was up at four in the morning and I was at work by 4:30.

So getting up at four in the morning and quitting that job when I started my own business, getting up at five in the morning actually felt like a lie in. So I will admit, yes, I kind of had it easy, but it was still a hard habit to keep going for all of those years. 15 years I kept that going. Unfortunately, I lost the habit in lockdown. I started sleeping in a bit more. We all did, didn’t we? Because our lifestyles were different, better in some way. Whitehaired Paul today needs his sleep, so now I get up at six and I don’t know if I could ever get up at five again, but the principle behind getting up at 5am every weekday has never changed.

You’ve got to remember this, the only real silver bullet to grow your MSP is taking action. Action. It’s all about the action. Loads of people know what to do. Knowing what to do isn’t the problem anymore. In the age of AI and with people like me and hundreds of other people who know exactly what you need to do to grow your business, knowing what to do is not the problem. The problem is taking action. And whatever the problems right now in your MSP, action can overcome them. You can call it if you like, the will to act. The will to act means you know you’ve got things you need to do, you know that they’re difficult but you are choosing to protect time at the beginning of every working day to get things done.

It’s the choice is the most important thing. There were many mornings that I work at 5am and it was a struggle. It really was. And there were times when I just pulled my laptop into the bed with me and I worked in my bed at 5am, which sounds a bit sad, but it helped me to grow and sell one business and it’s helped me to grow another business. Now as you’re listening to this, you might be thinking, “Well, 5am is too extreme. I’m going to do 9am or 5pm or I’m going to do two in the morning because I’m a night person. That’s fine, you do whatever works for you.

Me, I’m a morning person. I do my best work in the morning. I get tired by the time I get to the evening. I’ve been like that for years. So for me, I work better in the morning. The one thing I would say is however and wherever you’re thinking of doing this, make sure you do it as a weekly thing. It’s a really easy temptation to just batch everything into one admin day a week. And I know loads of MSPs that do this. They say, rather than doing 60 or 90 minutes every morning, every weekday, I’m just going to do a whole day on Fridays.

But what happens is that when you get to Fridays, the days get completely hijacked by all the crises and the catching up that have happened Monday to Thursday. So you get to Friday and you’re like, “Oh my goodness, what a week, clear up, clear up, clear up. It’s lunchtime, go and have some lunch.” Before you know it, it’s three in the afternoon. You’re exhausted because it’s the end of the week and you end up doing two hours. Whereas if you do an hour a day, every day, it’s five hours, I recommend 90 minutes, that’s seven and a half hours a week versus two or three hours on a tired time on a Friday. Those admin days are way, way too fragile.

So as I say, a better approach is to find and protect 60 to 90 minutes every single weekday to work on the business not in it. And that should be a minimum, not a target. 60 minutes is definitely the minimum. I would say do 90. Once you’ve done 60 minutes of work, the extra 30 minutes doesn’t have the same impact. How can I explain that better? If you do 60 minutes, you need to put time aside, you need to find an environment to work, you need to separate yourself from hassle and clutter and noise. But once you’ve done that 60 minutes to keep going for another 30 minutes gives you a lot more value back than if you were to stop and try and do another 60 minutes the next day.

So 60 to 90 minutes, 90 will be great. Two hours will be even better. And as I say, 5am is too extreme for most, which is fine, I get that, but aim for the same time every day so it becomes a habit. Turning this into a habit is the golden thing. Have you ever read a book? It’s called Atomic Habits by James Clear. It’s an insanely great book. I think it’s the bestselling productivity book in the world right now and it’s all about turning actions, things that we want to achieve, into habits. And this is exactly this.

This was a habit for me of getting up at 5am and working on the business and it was such a core habit that even if I’d been out like on my Christmas party the night before, I still woke up at five the next morning, even if I’d only had four hours sleep. I didn’t always work in that environment, but you get the idea. My brain was so used to waking up at five to do work. One final thing on this is that environment matters. And I mentioned getting away from clutter and hassle and noise. Where you do this work is really important.

So over the years I went to different places depending on the age of my child. So when she was just a baby, I had an office at home. When she became a toddler and she figured out that daddy got up early every day, I got an office away. When I had an office full of staff, I had an office away from my staff. These days I do it partly from home or I’ll go out to a Starbucks or a hotel lobby or something like that. It doesn’t really matter where you do it as long as you can get work done and you’re uninterrupted. No one can call you, no one can text you, certainly no PSA, no Teams emergencies aside. There’s always a once a year emergency, that’s fine. But for the rest of the time, for the other 364 days or however many days, 280 isn’t 280 working days a month, then you must not be interrupted.

And what not to do with this time is easier than what you should do. Let me tell you some stuff you shouldn’t be doing with this time because it’s for working on the business. You shouldn’t be doing emails, you shouldn’t be doing admin, you shouldn’t be doing social media. Basically you shouldn’t be doing anything that’s working in the business. If it’s a job that someone else can do, then you let someone else do it. You as the owner should only do what only you can do. So wh

at you should do with this time, well, actually you can kind of drill it down to three things:

So win new clients, get your existing clients to buy more often, get your existing clients to spend more. If you improve those three areas, the profit will follow, I promise you. And once you’ve got more profit, you can invest that back into the business to buy back your time and your life. This is how we grow businesses. We focus on increasing the amount of cash in the business. Then we invest that cash into other people to do work that you necessarily don’t have to do and then you carry on growing the business and eventually more of that cash sits in the business bank account and enters your bank account.

Now one pro tip on this, well, I’ll give you a pro tip and a tool recommendation as well. The first pro tip is at the end of each day, organise the next day’s activity list before you finish. This is a hardcore habit for me, which I still do every day. Even if I’ve got no time, I will take five minutes to stop and organise the next working day. Because it means when I start the next working day, and I don’t work at 5am now, but I do spend three or four hours of every working day working on my business and I know exactly what I need to do because I organise it the day before. I promise you organising it the day before is so much more efficient than on the day. Often you’ll be in the shower in the morning and your brain will go, “Oh, I’d put X Y Z first, but actually it needs to be Z X Y.” So just sleeping on it overnight helps you to reorder that list.

So that’s the first thing. The second thing is let me just give you a tool recommendation. I use a tool called Todoist. I know everyone has their own personal favorite tool. I’ve been the paying user of Todoist for 15 years and I checked just before recording this podcast, I’ve now completed 78,482 tasks over the 15 years. Now, whether you use Todoist or Microsoft To Do or whatever you use, because there are thousands of them out there, use a productivity system that works for you, but make sure you do use some kind of productivity system. If you don’t have organisation and focus, you can’t operate at the level needed to grow your business.

So protect some time every single weekday working only on your business and never working in your business and being highly organised and disciplined. And do you know what? Because you don’t have to do that at 5am, instantly that’s just got easier for you. All you’ve got to do now is do it the first time and have it in your mind you’re going to repeat it. Could you do this tomorrow morning?

If you’re a member of the MSP Marketing Edge, don’t forget that we are just three days away from new content dropping. So this podcast comes out on the 7th of July 2026 and on Friday, which is the 10th of July, we drop all of the new content into our two portals. And we do this on the 10th of every single month. We have two memberships, there’s a B2B marketing one, which gives you all of the marketing content you need to attract and warm up business owners, and then we have a co-managed marketing one, which has got different content to help you attract and warm up IT directors. And it has to be different content because IT directors think and buy in a completely different way to business owners.

Now, unlike all of our competitors and all of the big vendors that just give you content and dump content and say, “There you go. Off you go. Get on with it.” They don’t really tell you what to do with it – we have a complete system. So we tell you exactly what marketing tasks that you need to do and how you can get other people to do them for you. And by other people, I mean your team or a virtual assistant. We give you new content on the 10th of every month and we give you world-class support. In fact, every day a few of my members jump onto a one-on-one video call with a member of my team and we are chatting with many more of them on email or in our knowledge base at all times.

Do you want a bit of this? If you’re not yet a member, as I say, there are two memberships available – B2B to help you win more business owners as clients, and co-managed to help you win more IT directors. And each one is only available to one MSP per area. Check if yours is available at mspmarketingedge.com/membership.

Featured guest: Brian Gillette is the founder of Feel-Good MSP and host of The MSP Sales Podcast. A former MSP VP of Sales, he specialises in an empathy-driven, “FUD-free” sales process that prioritises client trust, authenticity, and peace of mind.

I’ve got one of my friends back on the podcast today and what the two of us do to help MSPs is perfectly complimentary. I help MSPs to generate leads and get those leads onto sales discovery calls, the 15 minute calls, and Brian sort of picks up from there taking MSPs through the sales process until you have a client.

Today we’re going to talk about why MSPs so often fail with their marketing and sales efforts and for many it’s because they just haven’t got the foundations right before they start.

Hi, I’m Brian Gillette. I’m the owner of FeelGood MSP and the host of the MSP Sales Podcast.

Boom. And Brian Gillette is back on the show. It’s been far too long. Thank you so much for joining here. It’s awesome to be on because just a few months back I guested on your launch of your brand new thing. It’s the biggest thing that you’ve ever launched. It’s called Foundations, and you’re going to tell us a little bit about that later on in this interview. But I did want to get you on today to talk actually about foundations, not the new program that you’ve launched, but actually the sales and marketing foundations that MSPs need to have in place because you and I know we work with enough MSPs to know that most MSPs don’t have those foundations in place. So that’s what we’re going to explore in this interview. Before we do, just tell us who are you, Brian Gillette.

Right. Wow. Where to start? I’m a complex flower, Paul, you know this. I’m a sales guy. I turned an IT sales guy back in 2017 when I discovered managed services by accident because I wanted to get into tech sales, but at the time I didn’t think I was smart enough to be in SaaS sales. So I was like, maybe I’ll do something else in tech. And I feel like tech is the future. And I found managed services and I was like, “Oh, this is awesome. I love selling services.” So anyway, that’s my background, I’ve been in sales for 15 plus years and been in MSP for a decade of that.

And for those of you watching on YouTube and you’ll see how young and beautiful Brian is, you’ll wonder if he actually started those sales, his sales career when he was seven years old. And the answer to that is of course yes. So you started FeelGood MSP, it’s got to be coming up for about five, six years now.

Yeah, five years in July. And your first interview with me was almost exactly four years ago.

Wow. Has it been that long? That’s crazy how quickly the time goes. And so you’ve been working one-on-one and in groups with MSPs and helping them get the sales right. And it’s really interesting, I think when you came along five, six years ago, Jennifer Bleam I think she just started around the same time. There was a lady called Fiona Chalice, I think Fiona still does bits and bobs in the channel, but there wasn’t really anyone else properly doing sales and working with MSPs on the specific techniques and understanding the psychology of the buyer and stuff that today you and I might think is the basics, but I think the majority of MSPs still struggle with this stuff. Why do you think MSPs struggle with getting these basics of their sales and their marketing right?

Well, that’s an interesting question because in some ways the basics, the external basics, I’ll call those the tactics, they can grasp, but there’s this prerequisite to being successful in sales and marketing, which is a level of understanding, the way you put it was the human psychology of it. And I think that’s actually where they get stuck. Because anybody can hire an agency to go make cold calls for you, hire an agency to go make content for you. And those are manifestations, those are tactics that are important in creating leads, but if you don’t actually understand how to connect with another human being on an empathetic level, then their marketing is going to come across as hollow. And frankly, they’re not even going to see it. They’re going to scroll right by it because it can’t penetrate their mental spam filter.

So I think the real foundation that people miss is the psychology of selling. There’s no psychology in IT. They’re different sciences. And so I think in that way, it’s not like one of the romance languages where if you understand one of them, you can kind of fiddle around with the other one. It’s like Chinese and Klingon. They’re just so different that unless you’ve studied the psychology, then a lot of the tactics won’t have any teeth because there’s no human connection in it.

So for the average MSP that’s owner-operator and it’s them plus two, three technicians and an admin person, so they don’t yet have the resources to take on marketing people or take on salespeople, which I think is 80% of the MSP market, by the way. I guess for those people, when you’re fluent in Chinese and actually suddenly you’ve got to talk Klingong, maybe you don’t even know that it’s called Klingon. You know that you can’t quite understand, but you’re not quite sure why. Would that be the right way of looking at it, that sometimes not even knowing you’ve got a problem or you’re speaking a different language is the issue?

Yeah, that’s right. And it’s because the agencies of the world, they are selling a promise prematurely to the MSP audience for a lot of reasons. But if somebody is natural at sales and then they succeed at sales, it’s like if somebody wins the lottery, then you went and say, “How did you do it? And they went, “It works. Trust the system, liquidate your assets, spend it all on tickets, trust me.” That’s awful advice because it’s not up to them that that happened to them. Success happened to that person and they didn’t cause it. But the danger is that somebody wins a lottery and then they take mental credit for picking the winning ticket, picking the winning number.

And sometimes that happens on the agency level where people are even more natural or they’re predisposed to be good at sales and then they don’t understand that they have some baseline understanding of sales that the average person doesn’t start with so they forget to teach those things. So what they do is they teach you the right things in the wrong order. MSPs start with all the end in mind and they go, “Well, I’m doing all the end play sales and marketing things, but nothing’s working.” Because they’ve skipped the whole foundation of it. And so you’re right, they don’t know what they don’t know, but they don’t even know that there was a level one because they were sold that level three is where you start.

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. So do you think agencies do this inadvertently? Because as you say, I don’t run an agency, you don’t run an agency, but we both know people who do. And some of them are very, very good. Some of them are the other end of the scale and there’s a lot that sits in the middle. My take on agencies has always been that the owner or the person of the most highest level of competence in the business says to the MSP or any business they’re working with, “Oh, you know that thing I’m good at,” which might be SEO or it might be pay-per-click. They say, “Oh, this is the route that you do it, ” because exactly as you’ve just said there, that’s the thing they’ve had the most success with. So they’re not doing it maliciously, but it’s just a case that the only route that they’ve seen is to do X, Y, or Z. And yet often that might not be the right solution for the MSP that they’re working with.

Yeah, that’s right. It’s very rare that you find somebody who just has malintent, like I want to rip people off. Even the people who are true con artists, they are playing mental gymnastics to justify it in their own brain while they’re taking advantage of people. Usually what I have found is it’s the Dunning Kruger effect. The Dunning Kruger effect, for anybody who’s unfamiliar, it’s really interesting and I’m going to butcher it down into two soundbites, which is that when you are incompetent, you aren’t self-aware enough to understand that you’re incompetent. So people get a baseline of education. So somebody takes a writing 101 course and then they go, “I’m Ernest fricking Hemingway. I’m the greatest writer of all time because I got an A in writing 101.” But they don’t understand there’s like a thousand more hours of education they could get, but they don’t know about any of that sphere, that domain of knowledge. They’ve mastered a little domain of knowledge and then they assume competence in the whole area.

And then the inverse happens on the Dunning Kruger effect, which is what happens to our MSPs is the curse of knowledge where you have so much information and knowledge in your head, a lot of it is now subconscious knowledge that you forget what it’s like not to have that knowledge. And so we find that true masters oftentimes have a lower self, they assess themselves lower than people who are brand new in terms of their overall skill level because they know enough to know how much they don’t know, versus a novice doesn’t.

So somebody sees success, they strike gold in on tactic and then they go, “Oh, I’m a marketer now. I can teach marketing.” And then they go, “Well, if I could do SEO, then I could do all these other things.” But that’s not necessarily true. So it’s actually incompetence is the right word. There’s probably a more elegant way of saying that, but it’s when you have a small sliver of information, you assume you know everything and that’s the danger of working with somebody who was successful one time projects that success and says, “I can recreate this. ” But very often they can’t recreate it, which is why we see many agencies with so much churn. And why we talk to so many MSPs, Paul, who have lost so much money trying five or six or seven different things.

Yeah. So it’s really sad because by the time you have that conversation, they’re blaming marketing. Marketing doesn’t work or sales doesn’t work, which of course is nonsense, of course it does. I think maybe what you’re looking for is unconscious and conscious incompetent, whereas there’s four, isn’t it? There’s conscious competent, unconscious competent, you get the idea. Take those two words and put them together in the four variations. So some people are consciously aware of where their skillset ends and many people are not aware. I completely agree with you on that.

Let’s move away from agency bashing, which is a favourite subject when you and I talk to actually getting into those foundations. So if you take that average MSP, and we’ve now established they’re talking Chinese, but the people they want to speak to speak Klingon. The average MSP knows so much about technology. It’s become unconscious. It’s literally embedded in their soul and that means that they’ve forgotten that the average Joe that they speak to doesn’t have that understanding right down to the average person doesn’t really understand the cloud, it’s just data’s out there, they certainly don’t understand ransomware, they really are many, many books behind on AI, let alone pages behind. So with all of that, when you start talking with MSPs and let’s bring in your new foundations program, what are the basics and the fundamentals that the MSPs need to have in place before they start going out and doing the tactical stuff and the strategic stuff to actually generate leads and try and book appointments?

I will say that the thing that nobody wants to hear, but which is the truth, is that 80 to 90, maybe even more than 90% of the ingredients you need, you already know what they are and you might already be cooking with some of them. But the analogy I’ve been using that’s been helpful for me in describing this is that,

MSPs are mistaking sales and marketing for a list of ingredients rather than a recipe.

Now a recipe includes a list of ingredients, but what does it also include? A list of tools that you need, a series of events. The order in which you do the tasks or do the items on a recipe is critical to the success of a dish. If I’m trying to make pasta and I don’t take the noodles out of the packet and I put the whole packet in the boiling water, I’ll get melted plastic water. I won’t get cooked noodles.

That’s what people do is they go, “Well, I need content.” Okay, so they just run out and start posting content every day, but they haven’t even figured out who are you trying to sell to and what do they care about? Well, that’s throwing an unopened pack of noodles in the water. The other thing is the series, again, the series is important. How much time you spend on each item is very important because I got a cold caller, it’s been three weeks, he hasn’t made any money, I fired him. Well, that’s like if you boil your noodles for 12 hours and you cook your beef for five seconds, you’re not going to make a very good dish. The amount of time you invest in each one is important.

The sequence that you do them in is very important and the tools that you use for each one is very important. You can’t cut vegetables with a crayon. You have to have a knife. So the mistake people make is that they fixate on one guru or one thought leader who is very good at the chopping part and then they buy a $10,000 knife thinking, now I can make this dish. But in reality, they just overinvested in one tool. And what they need to do is zoom out. Sales and marketing is not magical. It’s make yourself known, agitate or create a problem, introduce a solution, build enough trust where they buy it and then tender payment. That’s all you have to do. There’s nothing new that I can teach you that you’ve never heard of. There’s not some new social media platform that you don’t know about yet that all of your prospects are hanging out on and there’s no MSPs there. That doesn’t exist.

But if you focus on the true fundamentals, the true foundations of get my list of ingredients, my list of tools, and then start with “Step one, do this, step two, do this, step three, wait 14 days, then do this.” Then we have found that when people simplify it, and don’t get cute, don’t try to build, don’t try to vibe code a CRM that’s rocket powered. You don’t need that. You could do this on Excel. You could make a $2 million a year business using Excel. You shouldn’t, but you could. You know what I mean? A poor workman uses this tools where we have no shortage of idioms here, but if you’re focusing on, I just need more and more tools, more and more tools, it’s because you’re not executing the very simple steps.

So the simple first step to the recipe is you need to build an ideal customer profile. And for us, that includes understand what is your value proposition to that person? What is your differentiator to that person in a way that they care about, not like we’re a Kaseya shop versus a Connectwise shop, obviously they don’t care. Response times is not different. There’s nothing different about saying you’re fast. There’s nothing different about saying you don’t use tech talk. There’s nothing different about saying that you actually care. There’s nothing different about saying that you’re local. Because every MSP says those four things. So if you’re using that to make yourself different, well, I’ve just given you your next task. You need to go and ask yourself, why am I actually different? Why am I actually better? But when you’ve done that homework, which by the way, we have a whole agent for that does it for you now in 30 minutes. It used to take us five weeks.

When you’ve done that homework, all of a sudden the outbound messages they’re going to resonate with someone because you wrote it to someone, not to everyone. And then those people are more likely to reply. And then when they reply, you’ve been trained on what you’re supposed to say back, and you know what the next action they should take is, and you know how to sell that next action to them, not sell them the contract, but sell them the next step in the process and make them understand why they need this discovery call, why they need the onsite consultation, why they need to sit through a presentation with you. And when you can break it down into those pieces, you realise that it’s just like building a server, it’s just like migrating emails. It’s anything that you once didn’t know how to do, but now you have an SOP for it and you could do it in your sleep because you’ve done it so many times.

I love that. And I think it’s the breaking it down into a simple, let’s not call it simple because there’s still a lot of complexity in that, but it’s a list of things. In fact, your recipe analogy is perfect. If we’re going to pick one of those, let’s pick being the chef in the kitchen. And you’re right, it’s not just about having the ingredients, it’s knowing what to do with them and getting the timing right. I think that’s absolutely beautiful.

So let’s finish off, just tell us actually what’s in Foundation. What inspired you to put this new program together? And I say this, it’s a bit of a loaded question because I’ve been following along with you with this over the last few months and I know what you’ve put together is insane. So what inspired you to put it together? What actually is it and how do we access it?

Yeah. Well, the answer, the first one why I made it was that we have another program which is pretty intensive. It’s a bigger financial investment. It’s a much bigger time investment. And I have found that that’s the best way to have success, of course, invest a lot of time and money into something. But really the majority of MSPs, they don’t have five to seven hours a week to spend with me. They just don’t have it. They need 15 to 25 minutes a day and they need to be able to do it at 8pm or 4am not when I’m on a live call. They need to do it when they have time to do it. So we’ve been setting out to answer that question for the last two years. How do we make something that’s available just in time for the MSP but that doesn’t compromise the integrity of the education?

Because I could just turn all my videos into TikToks and make them faster, but you’re not going to learn anything. So it was about how do we reduce it down to the simplest stuff you have to know so that in 15 minutes a day you could learn in as little as 90 days how to open, how to qualify and how to close and how to go find that business. So it’s training for sure. We have most of my learning management system is included in Foundations. I’ve been making these courses for five years. I don’t know how many hours of education it is, but it’s quite a bit, all broken down into like 12 to 20 minute videos.

And then it’s the tools. So we now offer a full CRM. It’s designed for outbound deal generation. It’s not GoHighLevel. It’s a really low-fi, low learning curve, but complete CRM. It’s a well-established CRM called Contact Science that partner with us to make a fully integrated white labeled version of it. We then help you implement the CRM. We help you migrate your data into the CRM. There’s handholding two calls a week with the president of the CRM named Melanie McCaleb, who will literally show you how to use it as many times as you want.

And then in addition to that, we have additional tools like I mentioned the ICP agent. We have 500 plus hours of coaching calls run by me, which nobody else in the world has that much specific training data. So we are now looking to ways to augment the MSP’s time and give them as much leverage as possible. So an MSP could spend 30 minutes and get five weeks of work done. That’s what we want to set out to do. So we’re building these new agents one a quarter that is designed to integrate seamlessly into the sales execution workflow.

The first one is the ICP agent. It interviews you, it’s trained on 50 hours of calls of me interviewing people building ICPs and then it will build you a really exhaustive, you’ve seen Paul, the document that it makes it’s pretty thorough and we’re working on a bunch of new agents now and all sorts of different things to help you write LinkedIn posts and as many things as we can. We’re looking for the, what’s the highest friction point that’s stopping somebody from executing outbound and getting leads? Okay, let’s make a tool so that it will do that for them or do that much faster. It’s essentially training and tools and community. That’s what Foundations is.

I love it. And yeah, that ICP document, you sent a sample one to me a few months back and I’m like, wow, how many humans have sat there and put this together? And of course the answer is none, but the AI has been trained on, as you say, hundreds and hundreds of hours of your work. So I’m looking forward to seeing these new tools as you roll them out. Just let’s finish off then, Brian. Where do we go to find out about foundations?

So feelgoodmsp.com/foundations. You can learn all about it. We now have all of our pricing transparent on all of our programs. Of course, we still have the accelerator for somebody who wants coaching. They want to interact with me three to four times a week on live Zoom calls. That’s of course still available. But if you’re a six-figure MSP, you’re the owner and you need to get yourself $10 – 20,000 new MRR in the next six months just to get yourself some breathing room or hire your first SDR or whatever the case is. You are who we designed this for. You can learn all about it there and get started. It’s only a 90-day commitment to begin. 

Facebook has a new ad system that could be a game changer for MSPs. Also this week, where should you put your LinkedIn energy… personal profile or company page?, and meet the guy who built an MSP from zero to $20 million in six years.

Welcome to Episode 346 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge.

I want to start with something that I think is genuinely underused by MSPs and that’s Facebook advertising. Now, just to give some context to this, Facebook advertising was really hot for MSPs like years and years ago and then suddenly it wasn’t. It stopped being an effective way to reach people, but actually I think it’s back. Let me bring you up to speed.

Now I know what you might be thinking. Facebook, Paul, really? Isn’t that where your mum posts pictures of her garden and people just argue about politics and yes, it is that. But it’s also something else.

Facebook is the most universally used social platform on the planet. 3.5billion people use Meta’s platforms every single day. And that includes the business owners and managers that you want to reach.

Of course they’re on LinkedIn and that is still the primary social platform because they use that for work. But what if we could reach them during their downtime? They’re almost certainly on Facebook or using other Meta products and that makes it a very interesting place to advertise. As I said, for the last few years, I’ve been pretty lukewarm about recommending Facebook ads to MSPs. The targeting was getting harder after the iOS privacy changes of a few years ago and the costs were creeping up and the results were kind of inconsistent.

And most MSPs just don’t have the budget or the time or the patience to run the kind of long test cycles that Facebook advertising used to need from you. But something changed at the very end of 2024 and it matters enough that I think it’s now worth revisiting this whole question. So Meta introduced a completely new advertising engine. It’s got a great name, it’s called Andromeda. And if you haven’t heard of Andromeda, then you’re not alone because it obviously wasn’t front page news. But in the world of digital advertising, it’s actually a pretty big deal. Here’s what Andromeda is and why it matters.

Previously, Facebook’s ad system worked by letting advertisers define their audience very precisely. So you’d pick interests, age ranges, job titles, locations, obviously, behaviours if you could, and then the system would try to match your ads to the people that you described. And that sounds sensible, but the problem was the algorithm was really blunt. It would find one ad in your campaign that seemed to be working and dump all of the budget into that ad, kind of ignoring everything else. So it was very rigid and actually got less effective over time, especially as privacy changes made the audience data less reliable.

Andromeda replaces all of that with a completely different approach. Instead of you telling Facebook who should see your ad, the AI figures out who should see the ad by itself based on your creative, based on the actual advert that you’ve created. So your ad becomes the targeting signal. The system watches how people respond to it. It looks for patterns, it detects who engages and who converts. And then it goes off and finds more people like them across the platform. So there’s no interest targeting required and no demographic filtering required. You just go broad and the AI does the matching for you. And this is really exciting.

Because it’s been running for over a year already, the results from advertisers who’ve adapted to this properly have been really impressive. In fact, Meta’s own data shows a 22% increase in something called return on ad spend, ROAS. It’s a way of measuring how much business you get out of your ad spend. So they’ve shown a 22% increase for advertisers who fully embrace this new Andromeda approach. Advertisers are reporting 17% more conversions at a lower cost when they restructure their campaigns around Andromeda’s logic.

So what does all of this mean for MSPs specifically? Well, a few things.

First, the audience reach argument for Facebook is now a lot stronger. Business owners don’t leave Facebook and other Meta products at five o’clock like they might do with LinkedIn. They are on Facebook and Instagram and all of the others in the evenings, at the weekends, during their commute. They’re not necessarily in business owner mode when they see your ad on a Meta platform, but that can work in your favour because they might be more relaxed so they might be more open. And an ad that talks to them about a problem that they think, “Oh yeah, we’ve got exactly that problem – are you worried about what would happen to your business if your IT went down tomorrow?” That kind of stuff can land very effectively in that context.

Secondly, the targeting problem has largely gone away. So under the old system, trying to reach the right business owners and managers in a specific geographic area with your Facebook ads, it was really hard. You’d try and layer the interests and the job titles and kind of just cross your fingers and hope for the best. But now, under Andromeda, you don’t need to do that. You just let the creative do all the work for you. So if you can write an ad or better still film an ad that speaks directly and specifically to a business owner’s pain, then the system will find the people who have that pain. It will find the match. And that’s a big change because your audience is fairly well defined even if it’s not a huge volume of people.

Oh, and by the way, yes, it does still work under specific geographical limitations, although that is still something that a lot of people report does still need some improvement. Of course, for you as an MSP, it’s not such a big issue, right? Because you can work in theory with any business anywhere. Would you be that upset if you won a new client in the next town and it meant that now and again, you had to drive 30, 40, 50 miles to go and see them? I think for most people, the thrill of winning the new client would override the downside of having to jump in the car.

Third then, and this is the bit I find most interesting, you no longer need to run hugely complex campaigns. The old advice was to split test endlessly, run retargeting sequences, build all these elaborate funnels. Andromeda has simplified all of that. You can run one campaign with a handful of creative executions of different approaches, different adverts. You can let the AI then optimise all of this for you. In fact, some advertisers have actually stopped running separate retargeting campaigns. You know the one where you show adverts to people who’ve already visited your website. They’ve done that because the algorithm is smart enough to know who’s seen you before and who hasn’t and they’ll serve the appropriate ad automatically.

This all sounds so cool and obviously it’s never going to work exactly as designed because nothing ever does. And AI… we all know AI is not perfect, but I’ve been slowly and gently and just sort of on the edge monitoring this for a year or so for our own marketing as well as for your marketing. And I’ll be honest, it certainly seems to be a lot better than it ever used to be. I’ve got a couple of friends who are putting up to $10,000 to $20,000 a month into these Meta ads and they’re getting much better results than when they had the equivalent kind of spend a few years ago.

So question for you, and I know you wouldn’t spend $20,000 a month on it, but a question for you, would a sensible Facebook ad strategy actually look right for an MSP right now? Well, if you’re going to do this, just start simple. Pick one clear message, something that’s rooted in a fear or a frustration that your ideal client has. So it shouldn’t be about your services or your stack or your accreditations. Focus the ad on a problem that talks to them. Which could be cyber attacks on businesses.

You could say something like “Cyber attacks on businesses like yours or up significantly. Is your IT provider watching for threats 24/7?” Or it could be something like, “Most businesses only find out their backups don’t work when they actually need them.” So you could pick one message, run two or three variations of that message with different images, slightly different copy, that’s the words that you write. Or as I say, what will be better is a video advert. Use very broad targeting. Go for business owners and managers in your geographic area, but just keep the audience definition very loose, let Andromeda do the hard work.

Now here’s the thing. If you do this, you need to give it six to eight weeks. You need to spend a few hundred pounds or dollars of budget before you judge the results. And it is the thing that the more you spend, the quicker you get to results. In fact, in any kind of ad campaign, you either need to give it time or you need to give it money, or ideally both. If you give it time and money, you get much better results at the end and you find out what works the best. The system needs time or money to learn.

And here’s the thing about Facebook advertising for MSPs in 2026. It’s not going to replace LinkedIn as your primary relationship building channel. LinkedIn is still where you do the slow, steady farming that I talk about on this podcast all the time, but I believe that Facebook can now compliment that with a paid awareness level that puts your name in front of local business owners who’ve never heard of you on a platform they’re actually using every day. And it’s likely that most of your competitors aren’t doing this, which means the space is yours if you grab it and go for it.

We talked earlier about Facebook advertising and how the Andromeda update has made it worth a second look, but I do want to come back to LinkedIn because there’s a question that comes up constantly from new members joining my MSP Marketing Edge and I want to give you a definitive answer.

The question is this, “On LinkedIn, should I focus all of my attention on my personal profile or my company page?” And to me, the answer is clear, unambiguous, and backed by 3,000 million data points. I made that number up, but you get the idea. It’s a mountain of data. The answer is your personal profile. Full stop. And here’s why.

LinkedIn’s algorithm treats personal profiles and company pages in completely different ways and those differences are not subtle.

All the data from last year and this year to date is consistent across every study that I’ve looked at. Personal profiles generate somewhere between five and eight times more engagement than company pages posting identical content. In fact, one study found that personal profiles deliver 561% more reach than the equivalent company page. And organic reach for company pages has dropped 66% since 2024.

In other words, if you’re putting most of your LinkedIn energy into your company page, then the algorithm is quietly making sure that almost no one sees it. Only about 2% of LinkedIn’s feed is made up of organic company page content. 2%! You can look at that yourself. Go into your LinkedIn feed. How often do you see updates from pages? Not very often is the answer. Compare that to top creator content from personal profiles, which actually makes up 31% of the feed.

LinkedIn is explicitly built to show content from people not from businesses and LinkedIn has been very deliberate about this direction. It wants to be a place where humans connect with other humans, where a business owner in your town feels like they’re getting useful content from a real person that they’ve come to respect over time. And that means that a company page, no matter how well maintained, can never replicate that feeling. It always feels like it’s a brand talking, but people trust individuals far more than they trust brands. In fact, 92% of B2B buyers trust content from individuals over content from company accounts.

So what does all of this mean practically for your MSP? Well, it means that you pick one person to be the face of the business on LinkedIn and for most MSPs, that’s the owner and then everything flows through that one personal profile. All of the daily posting, the connection requests to ideal prospects, all of the conversations, the direct messages, all of the relationship building. That on profile is your LinkedIn engine.

Now, if we’re doing all of that one personal profile, does the company page matter at all? Well, yes it does, but for a very specific purpose. At the point when a prospect is seriously considering working with you, they’ll almost certainly look up your company because that’s just how people buy things these days. They Google you or they get an AI recommendation and then they check you out by looking at your website and your LinkedIn company page.

And if your LinkedIn company page looks neglected with no content for six months, a blurry logo, it just creates doubt, right? It makes them think, “Hmm, is this business serious? Are they still active?” Doubt kills inquiries before they ever happen. So you do need to keep your company page alive, but alive doesn’t mean active in the same way that your personal profile is active.

Here’s what I suggest. Post something on your company page once a week. That would be great. Or even just once or twice a month, that’d be fine. You could share your podcast episodes in there, if you do a podcast. You could cross post your LinkedIn newsletter in there. You could put up the odd piece of news or the odd achievement, a bit of celebration from your business. Just keep it ticking over. So when a hot prospect lands on your company page during their due diligence phase, it reassures them and doesn’t create doubt ever.

But don’t pour your energy into it. Don’t write content specifically for it and definitely don’t expect it to reach new leads or new people because the algorithm is just not going to allow that to happen at any meaningful scale unless you’re willing to pay for LinkedIn ads. And if you do want to run LinkedIn ads, that’s a different conversation for a different day, but you do need the company page for that, which is another reason to keep it maintained.

So to summarise, because I want this to be crystal clear, your personal profile is where you build audiences, grow relationships and ultimately convert those relationships into meetings and new clients. While your company page is your digital shopfront that prospects have a look at during due diligence. Treat them accordingly and give almost all of your time and attention to your personal profile. Just keep the company page tidy and updated and please don’t let anyone convince you otherwise because the data tells the truth.

If you’re already a member of the MSP Marketing Edge, I want to make sure that you know about something that a lot of our members find genuinely transformative inside our member portal. It’s the training library and I don’t just mean a few videos that someone recorded in a hurry. It’s a proper structured collection of training that walks you through every major area of your marketing.

Now, as you may know, we have two memberships available. So in our B2B marketing membership, there’s everything from how to maximise LinkedIn, how to build a proper marketing machine, right through to how to improve your website or build your unique selling proposition with my standout MSP system. There’s also operations training on things like finding and motivating an outbound phone person and what to do if your business needs a course correction.

And then on our other membership, which is all about helping you to win co-managed IT, this is the newer one and one I’m really proud of. There’s a full sequence of training that takes you from understanding why B2B messaging backfires with IT directors, all the way through to identifying your ideal co-managed clients, adapting your website and LinkedIn, applying my three-step lead generation system to this very different audience, and driving the sales process through to a closed deal.

All of that training is there available whenever you need it in bite-sized chunks that you can actually get through in one short sitting. So if you are a member and you haven’t yet explored the training section recently, just go and have a look. Go into the portal, there in the navigation it says training.

And if you’re not yet a member, as I say, there are two memberships available, B2B, which helps you win more business owners as clients, and co-managed, which helps you win IT directors as clients. And each of those is only available to one MSP per area. Check if yours is available at mspmarketingedge.com/membership.

Featured guest: Juan Fernandez is a visionary force in the MSP and channel technology ecosystem. As

One of the best things about doing this podcast is I get to meet new people who give me amazing ideas. And frankly, they enrich my life with their energy and their way of thinking, and that’s absolutely the case with today’s guest. He was introduced to me as someone who’s been highly successful in his business. In fact, he grew an MSP from nothing to $20 million in just six years, but also he’s such an innovative thinker that he’s come up with a brand new concept and he’s going to share that with you right now.

My name is Juan Fernandez and Paul, one of the opportunities that I love to share is a lot of my experience. I’ve been a builder for many, many years of my life. I built enterprise, I built all different kinds of corporations, but my favourite one is building MSPs. And so previously I took an MSP and went zero to 20 million in about six years and then exited that successfully and across 16 states. And during that time I learned a lot about how to build, how to lead and how to grow organically. And I didn’t have a lot of frameworks.

I created a lot of those methodologies and looked at sales and looked at operations and looked at all the things. And a lot of that’s what I’ve been interested in sharing back. So as I exit, I went ahead and did a few things. I got bored. I wrote the MSB Owners Handbook, something that was a give back book to the community to take some of those models and activate them. But then I also invested in SaaS companies and other, and I brought some SaaS companies to market and invested in a number of great things. And so arrive us to this moment all these years where I’ve been giving back to the community and now I’ve acquired some MSPs and have stripped them down and rebuilt them in this modern era. And we’ve also launched MSP-aaS. And so it’s a really exciting time and it’s an honour to be here.

Well, it feels like we have a legend on the podcast, finally got you on the podcast. You’ve just taken the record for the longest intro, which is fine, I’m good with that. But yeah, we have so much to talk about. So I wanted to get you on when you launched MSP-aaS, that was when you and I chatted on LinkedIn. And we both know Mark Copeman very well, who is another legend in the channel, but I wanted to explore with you what MSP-aaS is. We’re going to do that towards the end of the interview, but I’d love to just delve a little bit more into your story and what you’ve done and the book. The book looks amazing. And I think it’s going to be one of those books that every MSP should have on their bookshelf. So let me rewind you a little bit, if that’s all right and go back to when you first got into the channel. So you said at the beginning of your introduction that you took an MSP up to $20 million, is that right? Give us the brief story of what happened there and how did you do it?

One of the things that I talk about all the time is when you’re getting ready to do something, a lot of folks do things in a different way. I talk about the accidental entrepreneur and I built another IT company previous to that back in the early years. I took to about three million after two years. And it was an early day of the old model of break/fix and government contracting and the first days of really starting to manage infrastructure. And then that was not my biggest success, but I learned a lot about what I didn’t know and I spent a lot of years fooling around how to actually make it work.

And so when I started the biggest MSP that one I’m talking about, one of the things that I spent a lot of years doing was ironing out what it was going to take to make money. I ironed out a lot of who I should bring with me in terms of talent, what was the conversation, who was the customer type. Previous in my career, I built a lot of industry and enterprises. So I worked in the financial sector, I worked in the private sector, I worked in a number of different entity types building them and realising what made them tick. Why did the board make a decision? Why do executives buy? What are the things that they’re looking for? Why is this cost consciousness?

And taking all that and putting it into this model and then ultimately launching that model back in 2015 and we started off really small in a little place called Durango, Colorado out of nowhere. And then if anyone knows anything about it, there’s about 7,000 people in that city. So of all the places to start an MSP in the middle of nowhere in the mountains is probably in a vacation town. It’s probably not everyone’s first choice. So we picked the hardest place to start to validate our thesis and then we continued on from there. And then we went into big city like Dallas, Houston, Austin, League City and others and Tulsa and Oklahoma.

And we went into each of those cities and really took those cities over by becoming the point of presence and really allowing customers to know that we were the trusted advisor. We went into a lot of those chambers and we basically presented ourselves as a trusted advisor in those spaces and became their de facto referral point. So anybody that came in there was like, “Oh man, have you guys met this IT company? They know what they’re doing because I mean, we learn a lot from them and they’ve helped our business.” And so we started to see this, but really what I unpacked, and you’ll love this, Paul, because there was something interesting as we were building a framework for our success, I was illustrating that same thing back to businesses on how we delivered their success.

And ironically, what was interesting was that those businesses had never seen a framework for business success. And they were like, “Well, how are you doing this? Juan, how are you growing this so fast? I need some of that. “I’m an SMB too. And I was like, “I thought you knew what you were doing.” And they’re like, “No, we’re entrepreneurs too.” And I was like, “Oh my God, well, let’s try it together. And does this work for you too?” And next thing you know, I became their business advisor, I was their trusted partner, I was their growth partner. And next thing you know, we were all growing together and that’s how the thing exploded because they came raving fans and the next thing you know, we were all just doing great business. So still great friends with a lot of those people and today they still cheer me on and it’s just really fun to look back at that journey. So thanks for asking, Paul.

Yeah, thank you for sharing that with us. So if you were to crystallise that down, I like talking about practical stuff because that’s what MSPs want… practically, what do I do? And it’s very hard I appreciate to crunch six years of millions of decisions and millions of wrong steps into what to do. But what you just talked about there is turning people into raving fans, it’s a difficult thing to do. It suits your personality type and I can see it suits your desire to help and to get involved with other people. If you were to crystallise some of the things there into practical actions that an MSP owner listening to this or watching this on YouTube could do, what would those be?

There’s a couple of things that I focus on a lot. In the book, MSP Owners Handbook, I give away a lot of the models around how to activate success. And I’m not selling you the book because we don’t make any money on the book, the money actually goes back to the community for certification, but there are some key moments. I always say I have a ring of a hundred keys. Everyone’s like, “Juan, I want the hundredth key, I just want to unlock the last door to success.” And I’m like, “Actually, you need key number four.” And so key number four and one, two, and three, first of all, in order for us to deliver success, you have to go through the process of understanding how to deliver success.

People buy plans that equal their success was probably the first equation that I thought was the one thing that unlocked everything. My plan gets you somewhere and that is through the thoughtful use of technology. I’m able to intersect technology on your growth mechanic was really the first one that I felt this is the thing for them. So focusing on not the tech and not the talk and not any of that, but having business conversations around how technology’s an enabler and coming into the room talking like that really changed the whole conversation.

We’re on their playing field now and having conversation. They’re buying everything that I’m asking them to buy because they can see the transactional and the improvement in the ROI. The friction was devoid because of the fact that they understood that there’s a mechanic of secure business versus just doing business. The conversation switches when you start to change how you approach and that comes from the way you tool on the backend. I see a lot of people grabbing products and saying, “Hey, I need you to buy this.” I don’t know why I need to buy that. There’s no business reason why I need to buy that. So they say no. And we went “no” hunting throughout our entire ecosystem of tracking no and learning how do we get yes. We spent a lot of time. I mean, I was in the field so I had to teach people really quickly how to be successful.

Stop asking questions that lead to no. That’s a dumb question. Ask questions that lead to yes, because we can do this.

So we had to create processes that generated an outcome and we said, “Hey, do companies like yours have this problem?” Absolutely. Well, we have a process for your success there. And they’re like, “That’s different.” So that little tweak is so impactful and that’s so easy to do. It just takes a second to sit down and figure out what success are you delivering and how do I ask them the right question to get them to that point to say yes.

I love that. And you mentioned the book again and this is the book plug time. So just tell us again what that book is called and what’s inside and you said that you wrote it to give back. So is it literally with the power and clarity of getting out of that business and stepping back and looking back and saying, “What did we do? What were the playbooks that made it?” Is it literally that that you’ve just put in the book?

 So the book is the MSP Owner’s Handbook. This is the first of a series, we have a couple. This one in particular I talk about because it’s a QBR edition and this was an area of activation. Inside it has worksheets that you can go and get and you look at asking questions and looking at the life cycle of the customer and really diving into some of the things that really I felt were the moments that we should start thinking about now in this next evolution. I mean, this was many years ago that we put this out, but now here where we stand.

I have a talk now and one of the questions I ask is, what do you do when what you do isn’t what you do anymore? We got to start thinking about the new value equations, right? How do we start becoming more valuable to the customer and not focusing on the noise? And that’s really where the birth of MSP-aaS was, but we’ll get there. In the book, there’s a lot of worksheets and again, yes, the cost of the book does go back. It goes into a fund and then people that apply on the give back page, we give that money to certifications because I know how hard it is to get started.

I was once a young technician trying to figure out how to pay for my A+. I had to do it twice because I failed the first time, but we all start somewhere and this was my, remember where I came from moment, where we could give back. And so a lot of that learning of building tooling and delivering success is in the book and it was a collab between me and Marnie Stockman, which again, she built Lifecycle Insights and then exited that to ScalePad. So it comes from a point of knowledge and presence and there’s a lot of good value. We’ve received tons of feedback over the years and hopefully people get value out of it on the show and into the future.

And it’s on Amazon I presume?

It is on Amazon, correct.

Yeah. Audible as well?

No, I don’t believe it is. I think it’s just hardcover right now. We have to do that.

As someone who’s recorded his own book, which is on Audible, it’s called MSP Marketing Start Here, I’ll just plug my own book, you’ve got to do it. You’ve got a great voice for this. I can just imagine you reading that book and it’s a bit of a pain and Audible has very strict rules about what you can and can’t do, but once you’ve passed their audition process, it’s a breeze, it really is.

I want to have to look at having you maybe read it because I don’t have a cool accent.

I knew I’d give you something to do off this. Let’s finally talk about MSP-aaS, which you mentioned a few minutes ago. So what is this? The second I saw your announcement about this a few months back on LinkedIn and I went and looked at your press release and I went and looked at the website. I’m like, okay, this is an interesting idea. And this is new. And obviously you and I know that every day in the channel, 15 new things are launched, but they’re often variations on a theme, aren’t they?

Someone’s taken something and they’ve adapted it slightly or they’ve put a new spin on it or it’s cheaper or it’s better or whatever. And that’s not intended as a criticism because every launch has hundreds and hundreds of hours that’s gone into it. It’s just an observation. And then about once, two, three times a year, someone launches something and you’re like, “Oh, okay, that’s new, I’ve never heard of that, I’ve never thought of that. ” And MSP-aaS was one of those. So we all know what as a service means. We all know what an MSP is. What have you done? What have you bolted together as MSP-aaS?

One of my favourite comments during the interview process, because we did 30 plus interviews and it was insane to talk about. But one of my favourite comments that came back to me was about this, they said, “Do you understand astronomy?” And I said, “Yeah.” They’re like, “You know about 3I Atlas. It’s this meter that came out of nowhere at speeds no one’s ever seen on a perfect trajectory.” And I said, “Yeah, I’ve heard of that.” And they’re like, “This is kind of like that. When none of us saw it coming, it has a trajectory towards something that’s very different and it’s gathering everyone’s attention because it’s something new and different.” And I said, “Can I use that?” And they’re like, “100%.” Because I was like, “I couldn’t have said it any better.” But that being said, MSP-aaS was born out of a desire for me to do a couple things.

And I have a great team of wonderful folks that decided to come on this journey with me because there’s been some opportunities in the channel where I feel like there’s been some compression. And what I saw as, I call myself a resident MSP is it became a voice of a few and I love community. I have this whole mantra called community over competition and I love bringing people together to do new things. And MSP-aaS was by attempt to restimulate the entrepreneurial ecosystem and get new blood in here to fill in some of the gaps and add some wonderful voices back in here that I felt like we were losing some of that community over the last few years.

And so I’ve been very adamant about sharing and so I wanted to give people the opportunity to grow their business and then share. And so we started on that path and so MSP-aaS, if you think about it as an ethos, it curated something new and different. So we are a 24/7 service provider, but on top of that, we’re what we call the world’s first elastic service provider because some MSPs need everything, which we can terraform new earths and get them up and running and they can get started with profitability day one instead of having to go through all these long, arduous moments of contracts and implementation and training. Like day one they can flip us on and it’s ready to go and it’s profit before expense. So they can go and they can get signed up and they literally can wait till they close a customer and that moment they pay and they actually get money in their pocket day one, which is not an entrepreneur journey.

None of us have ever known how to make money first. We had pain first, then money. So this changes the mantra of how you get there and then the elasticity allows us to deliver if you already have certain products or you have an RMM or PSA that you love or you have a security product that you love, we can manage it, we can run it, we can escalate, we can work through SOP. We’re all ITIL framework, so we have ability to manage and wherever the MSP is delivering value, allow them to still do that like, “Hey, I already have a contract. I can’t use yours because I’m already in.” That’s totally fine, we’ll work with yours and work with that and we can manage it. It’s no problem.

So we act as an OEM and can manage all things and provision all things and deploy all things across tons of vendors that have come together on this community over competition initiative to create this elasticity to give us the opportunity to get people and our MSP partners to grow really fast and we’re all on the bus together to help them. So we’ve done some really cool things with vendors that have never in their lives thought about doing something like this and some of the announcements that you’ve heard up until this point are proof of that concept. So we’re just having a lot of fun and really focused on our partner success.

Yeah, I love it. And it seems a very natural next step for you based on I didn’t know you particularly well, obviously I knew of you, I didn’t know you particularly well before we had this conversation and I can see now how that’s a logical next step for you in your journey, which is amazing. What are you going to do in 10 years time? That’s the question. We’ll find out in episode 700 and something in 10 years time. Quan, thank you so much for being on the show. You’ve been very generous with your time, with your ideas. So MSP-aaS, it’s where do we go to find out more about it and also what’s the best way to get in touch with you, whether it’s about MSP-aaS or just because you’re a cool guy and we just want to shoot a message to

You. I’m a very big community guy for everybody that’s out there. If you want to come and learn more about MSP-aaS, please do me a favour and go to msp-aas.com. If you want to come over to LinkedIn and find me, I’m Juan Fernandez and just type MSP on the end. I’m the only one that’s out there. You can click to book time. My cell phone number is on there as well. You guys can grab anytime you need. You need an ear, you need a chat as an entrepreneur, you’re trying to figure it out or maybe you’ve been around for a while, you need some advice I’m always available and my wife is well aware of that as well. So just know that time knows no limits with me. It’s all about community and helping everybody get to that next evolution.

How to choose the best CRM for your MSP by answering a few key questions. Also this week, the most important metrics to focus on, and how MSPs can actually make money from AI.

Welcome to Episode 345 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge.

One of the most common questions I get from MSPs when they start thinking seriously about their marketing is, “Which CRM should we use?” And on the surface that sounds like a really simple question, but actually the more you dig into it, the more complicated it becomes. Isn’t that always the way? Because this isn’t really a question about software. It’s a question about frustration.

What MSPs are really asking when they ask me about CRMs is, “Paul, where do I put all my prospect data? How do I build a pipeline that I can actually see? How do I know who to follow up and when to follow them up? How do I stop things falling through the cracks? And why is all of this giving me such a headache?” Those are all the kind of questions that MSPs really have.

So before I walk you through the four types of CRMs that MSPs tend to use, let me say something to you. It may be slightly controversial.

I believe there isn’t one best CRM for MSPs. There’s only the best CRM for how your MSP markets and sells itself.

And those are two very different things. And the reason so many MSPs end up with the wrong tool or with a perfectly good tool that they never really properly use, is that they chose the software before they defined the marketing process and that’s backwards. The tool should serve the process never the other way around. Let’s look at the four types of CRM based on the four types of MSP.

The first type is what I’d like to call PSA led MSPs. So these are MSPs who basically live inside their PSA. ConnectWise, Autotask, HaloPSA, Synchro, Atera, Kaseya, whatever it is. Their agreements are in there and this may be you. The billing’s in there, your tickets are in there. So for you, the idea of keeping your sales activity in exactly the same place feels logical and tidy. And actually if your sales are largely driven by referrals or renewals and everything’s kind of straightforward and simple, then this can work perfectly well. If you’re not trying to build a sophisticated marketing engine but you just want visibility on leads without having more software, then that might be the right answer for you.

But a big word of caution. When a PSA vendor says their platform has a marketing module, that’s a little bit like a Swiss Army knife saying that it has a saw. So technically, yes, it’s true, but it’s not what you would choose if sawing things was something that you did every day. You can’t use that tiny little knife every day on a tree, can you? It’s just for the odd job. And it’s exactly the same with your PSA. Most marketing modules in PSAs, and I haven’t looked at all of them, so if I’m wrong on this, please email me and let me know. But most marketing modules in PSAs are not really up to the job of actually doing good comprehensive marketing every day.

The second type then is marketing-led MSPs. And these tend to be MSPs that don’t have enough leads and know that marketing has to be their principle growth activity. Again, you may be in this category right now. So they want to run campaigns, they want to publish content consistently, they want to capture leads through forms, and importantly, and this is the right thing to do, is use automation to follow up all of these leads.

So if that is you, the platforms to look at are things like HubSpot, making sure that you’ve got the marketing hub, HubSpot’s broken into lots of different hubs, so you’ll need the marketing hub. Or you could look at ActiveCampaign or look at Zoho One, or there are more budget-friendly ones like MailChimp or MailerLite. Or if you belong to The Tech Tribe, then you get Growably, which is built on something called GoHighLevel. And actually GoHighLevel itself is also worth looking at, although it’s cheaper to actually join The Tech Tribe and get Growably than it is to buy GoHighLevel independently.

So all of these platforms I was just talking about here, they combine contact management with automation and lead scoring and campaign reporting. And they all do those at various different levels. But here’s the thing, all of those tools I just mentioned there, they only make sense if you’re genuinely prepared to use those capabilities because some of those platforms are not cheap. I’m looking at you, HubSpot. We’re with HubSpot, I love it, but it’s $1,700 a month for all of the things that we use. It’s a massive, massive bill every single month and all of them come with a steep learning curve. I’m looking at you, HubSpot. HubSpot is perhaps the steepest learning curve of any software ever, but it’s worth it. And it took us pretty much a year to migrate our entire setup from Keap over to HubSpot. I don’t recommend Keap anymore. I do recommend HubSpot, even though we went through months and months of pain, it was worth it.

The third type of MSP is a sales-led MSP. So these are MSPs that are doing a lot of sales activity. They maybe even have or probably do have a dedicated salesperson, or maybe there’s a couple of partners within the business and one of the partners focuses all of their time on marketing and sales. And in this instance, the MSP wants clarity on the pipeline above anything else. So they want defined stages, they want forecasting, they want some accountability for follow-up. Actually, that’s more of a problem if you’ve got two or more salespeople and often they will want a dashboard as well that they can look at every day and understand what’s going on.

So if you’ve ever said out loud, “I genuinely don’t know what deals we’ve got on right now,” then you’re probably in this group. And in that instance, I would recommend something like Pipedrive, that’s a great choice if you’re in this group. HubSpot again is good for this, it has something called sales hub, which is like the functionality you switch on in HubSpot. Again, Zoho is worth looking at, Zoho CRM. Freshsales and something called Close. I’ve not looked at those two myself but I’ve heard other MSPs talk about them. So they’re all worth looking at.

And these systems are often simpler than the big enterprise platforms that we’re actually just about to talk about, but they tend to be far more structured than a PSA add-on. They have a different functionality to the pure marketing ones. So if you go get something like HubSpot, you can do the marketing hub, you can do the sales hub and you get both of those in the same software and they integrate, which is great, but obviously you pay the price for that in terms of cash. Whereas if you go something like MailChimp as your marketing tool, it doesn’t typically have the sales thing. So that’s typically where you have these separate tools. Ultimately, to have both tools, a really good marketing tool and a really good sales tool both in one CRM, you’re going to pay for that functionality. So these sales tools I was just talking about there are built more for sales clarity than for actual marketing ability, although they do all overlap in some kind of way.

And then we come onto the fourth type, which I’m going to briefly mention for completeness, but it’s very, very few MSPs. Certainly the kind of people who listen to this podcast or watch on YouTube are probably not in this group, and that’s enterprise-led MSPs. So for these businesses, these MSPs, we’re talking Salesforce, Microsoft’s Dynamics 365, NetSuite CRM, they’re very powerful, they’re very expensive. You think $1,700 is a lot money, Paul, Salesforce you probably can’t even switch it on for less than a few thousand dollars a month because these are enterprise solutions and they demand a level of process maturity and some level of internal ownership that most MSPs just don’t have. Certainly not the kind of MSPs that this podcast and this YouTube channel is aimed at.

So if you don’t have those clearly defined sales stages or solid reporting requirements, if you don’t have someone internally who can spend half of their working time maintaining data quality and just hygiene of your CRM, then these systems are not for you because they become very expensive, very over complicated. They’re kind of just big, expensive, over complicated databases more than anything. And you don’t want that. You want your CRM, whatever you choose, whether it’s down at the free to get going end of the market, like Mailchimp or at the very expensive but very good tool set end, like HubSpot, you want them to be revenue driving assets. That’s what they’re supposed to be.

So to pull all of this together, before you ask yourself which software should I use, which CRM should I pick? A much more important question first is: How do you generate leads? How do you turn those leads into warm prospects? How do you convert them into clients? If you know the answers to those three questions really clearly, then the right CRM quickly becomes a pretty obvious choice. But if you can’t answer those three questions, no software in the world is going to rescue you. The process always must come first.

Have you had a chance to listen to or watch last week’s podcast? Because back then I said that every MSP needs to think of itself as a media company and a marketing company rather than a technical company. I’m not going to go into that again, you can just visit episode 344 or we have them all on every podcast channel. But today I want to take that one step further…

Once you accept that marketing is a core function of your business and not just something you kind of get round to when things are quiet, the next question becomes – How do you know whether or not your marketing is working? And this is where a lot of MSPs go wrong, not because they don’t measure things because they do. MSPs are actually really good at measuring things. Your PSA is full of data, isn’t it? You’ve got ticket volumes and response times and resolution times and SLA compliance and all of that kind of stuff. I know that stuff gets tracked and reported and reviewed, which is all great.

Those metrics, the ones I was just talking about, they matter for running a good service operation. But the problem is none of those numbers tell you whether or not your business is growing, or whether your marketing is working, or whether or not you’re lining up winning new clients in the next month or the next quarter. They just tell you how well you’re looking after the clients you already have. And yes, yes, I know that’s important, but it’s only half the picture. And for many MSPs, it’s actually the only half they’re ever looking at.

So when I ask an MSP owner how their marketing is performing, the answers I usually get are things like, “Oh yeah, absolutely, our LinkedIn following has gone up, or we’re getting more website visitors, or we had a 22% open rate on our last email.” And those things are not meaningless. Audience size and engagement are indicators of potential future growth, but they are very far from the numbers that matter the most. Because you can have 10,000 followers or connections on LinkedIn and win zero clients, but you can also have 200 connections on LinkedIn and be having three sales meetings a month.

Followers and connections don’t pay your bills. New clients absolutely do. So what should you be tracking?

Well, you might be surprised by this because I believe that when it comes down to it, you should only really be tracking two numbers, just two. But if you can get these two numbers right, everything else in your marketing will just make sense, it will just contribute to new clients.

So the first thing to track is something called MQLs, which stands for marketing qualified leads. An MQL is someone who’s engaged with your marketing in a meaningful way, which suggests that they might one day be ready to buy. I mean, it’s a big might, but it’s kind of a level of engagement. So not just someone who likes a post or opens an email, but someone who has taken a more deliberate action. Maybe they’ve downloaded something or they’ve replied to an email or they’ve clicked through to your website from your LinkedIn content and they’ve spent a little bit of time on it. All of these things are good measures of engagement. Maybe they’ve responded to a direct message or they’ve asked you a question or they’ve just generally engaged in a way which signals something beyond passive consumption. They’re being proactive, they’re warming up, they’re not ready to buy yet, but they’re moving in that right direction. So that’s the first thing to track.

The second thing to track is SQLs. So we had marketing qualified leads. SQLs are sales qualified leads and an SQL is someone who is actively considering switching MSP. They’ve probably had a discovery call or some kind of level of conversation with you. They’ve asked about pricing or services and you can see that they’re asking the right kind of questions and they’ve agreed to maybe a Zoom or a Teams meeting or something like that. So if they’re not there right now, they are right on the edge of a live buying conversation. Does that make sense?

Now here’s why these two numbers are so important. Together they give you a clear picture of whether or not your marketing machine is functioning properly. So if your MQL number is growing month on month, then your marketing is working. You’re pulling people into your world, you’re warming them up and they’re engaging with you. If your SQL number is growing, then your conversion process is working. You’re turning warm relationships into real opportunities. And if either of those two numbers, the MQLs and the SQLs is flat or worse, it’s falling, then actually you know where the problem is.

So you’re either not generating enough warm interest and that’s a marketing problem or you’re not converting that interest into conversations, which is a sales process problem. Two very different problems with two very different solutions. And you can only really see the difference if you’re tracking both of those numbers. And actually, as we said, most MSPs aren’t tracking either of those numbers. So if you’re still watching the vanity metrics like follow accounts, open rates, you’re feeling good or bad based on how many people are connected to you on LinkedIn, then unfortunately you have no idea whether your marketing is generating actual commercial momentum or not.

What I’d encourage you to do if you haven’t got a CRM that does this for you, well, we were just talking about CRMs, weren’t we? Go and get one of those, or if it comes to it, just set up a simple spreadsheet. And at the end of each week, write down how many MQLs you added that week, how many people took a meaningful step forward and how many SQLs are currently active, how many live buying conversations do you have going on right now?

And that’s it. Those are only really the two numbers you need to track. You could track all of the others because they feed into them, but if you just tracked your MQLs and your SQLs every single week, that’s going to make a difference because I know it’s a cliche, but it’s true that what gets measured gets managed. So if you’re serious about consistently growing your MSP, those are the two numbers that will tell you what’s actually working and what’s not working right now.

If you’re already an MSP Marketing Edge member, you probably know that one of the most used parts of our service is our world-class support. Unlike all of the other content suppliers out there that just give you content and leave you with it, we give you three things. We give you, first of all, a system for your marketing. Then we give you all of the marketing content you need to run that marketing system. And then thirdly, we give you what we believe to be the world’s greatest support while you’re implementing that marketing. Those three things have been designed to fit together to help you get results.

We’ve got our very lively members only Facebook group. We have our weekly events and member calls. And of course you can book a one-to-one call with a member of my team at any point. In fact, we do have members who will have two or three one-to-one calls a month and that’s great. That’s a service that’s there for all of our members. Anything that we can do to help you implement your marketing and get more of those marketing qualified leads we were just talking about, and the sales qualified leads, that’s what we’re here to do and how we can help you.

If you’re not yet a member we now have two memberships available. We have B2B marketing, which helps you to win more business owners as clients, and we have co-managed IT marketing, which helps you win more IT directors as clients. We only work with one MSP per area for each of those memberships and you can see if your area is available or not by entering your postcode or zip code at mspmarketingedge.com/membership.

Featured guest: Jennifer Bleam is the founder of MSP Sales Revolution and the creator of the AI Monetization Launchpad . She is a best selling author and long-time MSP industry advisor who helps MSPs confidently lead high-value business conversations with their clients.

Today her work focuses on helping MSPs navigate the emerging AI opportunity. Not by turning them into AI developers, but by teaching them how to guide the conversation, uncover opportunities, and build real AI revenue.

We’re all talking about AI every single day because of course we’re all using AI all day, every day, right? I certainly am, and I wouldn’t be surprised if you are as well. But here’s the one conversation that we’re not having about AI. How are you making money from it? As an MSP, you’re very well positioned to make a lot of money helping your clients to get their heads around AI. You may only be two or three pages ahead of them in the book of AI, but you’re two or three pages ahead of them, and that’s a significant advantage for something that’s moving faster than anything’s ever moved before. My special guest today is an expert at helping MSPs make money from AI and here’s her advice.

Hi there. I’m Jennifer Bleam and I’m the Sales Sherpa. I help MSPs get more revenue usually from their existing clients.

And Jennifer’s back on the show. Welcome back, Jennifer, it’s been too long. I can’t remember when you were last with us, but you’re one of those people that should be on the show every single year because you always deliver so much value. And I’ve been following you on LinkedIn over the last few months, stalking, let’s call it what it is, I’ve been stalking you on LinkedIn and you are starting to answer the questions that MSPs are asking me, which is really interesting. And the questions that they’re asking me, which I can’t yet answer, which is why I wanted to get you back on the show, everyone is talking about AI every single minute of the day, and this is the question that MSPs ask is, “How do I turn AI into revenue?” And you put out a post three, four months ago, I can’t remember what it was, but it piqued my interest of like, hmm, Jennifer’s a smart cookie and she seems to have figured out that answer of how does an MSP turn AI into revenue. So tell us what you’ve been doing over the last year, because I know you’ve gone really, really hard into that area.

I have, and that’s exactly the question I’m asking. There’s all this AI buzz and kind of the first step is I want to use AI inside of my own MSP, whether it’s for ticket triage or whatever, all the things, there’s a lot of different ways to use AI. And then that seems to whet the MSP’s appetites and then they’re like, “Wait a second, this really is magical. Maybe it’s not going to solve every problem in the world, but it’s in the same box as technology, like my clients see me as the technologist or the trusted advisor. How can I make money from AI? Am I selling the tools? Am I having conversations? What does that look like?” And so you’re right, I went all in on AI, I actually killed my core offering, it is gone. I no longer do anything other than help my MSP clients have AI conversations, discovery, and then monetise AI. So that’s what I’m all about.

Amazing. So without asking you to give away all of your secret sauce, because I know you do a lot of work with MSPs directly, give us an idea of some of the areas, because I guess we could guess some, couldn’t we, such as helping businesses to implement AI or helping them roll out Copilot or whatsoever. But are there many more areas that MSPs just haven’t thought of?

Yeah, there really are many areas. So Copilot is usually where most MSPs start. It’s very normal, I take a license, I mark it up a bit, maybe I give some expertise and expert advice on which level they should go with. Sometimes they do some kind of access control or database management. This person should only have access to this data silo, etc. But it is much broader than that. And it almost shifts into a consulting conversation. So it is everything from, would you like me to add AI to our quarterly business reviews? And I’m speaking that way to an MSP. You’re going to message it a little bit different to your clients, but literally that is valuable to the small business owner because as an MSP, most of the MSPs I’m talking to are a bit overwhelmed also.

As of the time of this recording, I have a Claude Cowork license and I have one use case for it and I feel like that is barely starting and I’m a bit overwhelmed. Even though I’ve been in the AI world, I’m great with Gems and custom GPTs and Perplexity and like you named the LLM, I’ve probably used it. But then when I shift into Agentic, it’s a little overwhelming. I’m a little concerned about security. So if I’m overwhelmed, if the MSP is overwhelmed, so is the small business owner and more so. And for that reason, that strategic advisor or the QBR conversation or TBR conversation, that’s a piece of it. So that’s one revenue stream.

And then you asked for kind of commonalities. I’ll give you one that we’re seeing and it’s what I call the hub and spoke methodology. This is really for those companies that have 50 to 100 employees and up. And when we get into companies that large, what we are finding is they have multiple disparate software tools. So I just did some consulting with a large security vendor and they had, let’s call it Salesforce is the hub. They then have, maybe it’s Pipedrive is a spoke where their sales pipeline lives in that tool, and maybe they have a finance tool, and maybe they have a how close are they to becoming the top tier client?

And so all of a sudden, I’m telling you every single phone call I learned about three new software tools that had data lakes or maybe data puddles is a better way to put it because they were all in these disparate tools and they had so much data they were sitting on, so much intelligence they were sitting on, but for even a salesperson to make a decision, they would have had to log into 12 tools, which means they weren’t doing it. So there was literally data sitting there not being used. And we’re seeing that same exact thing inside of a small and medium sized businesses where they have multiple data lakes and we need to pull, not necessarily that we’re pulling all of the data from one into Salesforce or whatever we choose as the hub. It’s an intelligent, like a matching. Which pieces do we really need and how do we get those into the single hub and what is that single hub? And then you can get into security provisions. But once you’ve got the data in there, you can start to do all kinds of fun queries. And right now you can’t do queries if they’re in disparate places. So that’s one of the commonalities we’re seeing is just that hub and spoke around data.

I love the concept of the hub and spoke, and it does make sense. People are going to look back in 10 years time, I was going to say 10, 20, 30 years time, five years time and say, wow, do you remember when people used to have their data in lots of different applications? So what’s normal to us today is going to be almost like Victorian to people just five years from now.

Do you remember when people used to have a server in the closet? So many companies that do, but most of them don’t have a server in the closet. And our children and grandchildren are going to be like, “What’s a server?” Just like, “What’s a cassette tape?” So you’re 100% right.

Well, granddad, did you use to book your own restaurant tables? Because of course within a few years, we won’t be booking our own restaurant tables. Now on that note, I must declare when we are recording this interview, which is right at the end of March 2026. This won’t go out on the podcast till I think it’s like June. And the reason I’m doing that is because you mentioned Claude Cowork earlier, Codex as well, I think. You mentioned a couple of things. And it’s like all the tools of today at the end of March, by the time we get to June, it could be like Claude is the one, isn’t it?

I’m using Claude so much. I’m gently experimenting with Cowork, with caution. I’ve discovered the other day that the Claude browser plugin can operate my stuff in my browser and I’ve set it to keep asking me permission, but I’m watching it scroll through a hundred of my LinkedIn newsletters to analyse it. And I’m like, “Whoa.” And it’s slow and it’s clunky and it forgot all the data when I shut the plugin. But it’s like, if you can do that now, what can it do in 12 months? So that caveat, that’s the word I was looking for. The caveat is we are recording this at the end of March because by June Perplexity might have come up with Comet seven or something.

Which actually leads onto my next question, you’re doing this full time now, I’m a dabbler, so I watch a lot of YouTube videos and I haven’t got around to downloading OpenClaw yet because I’m a bit scared of it. I’ve got the Mac Mini, but I never actually downloaded the software. So I’m a dabbler, you do it full-time, but an MSP has other things to do like keeping their clients secure, actual what you get paid to do, projects, managing stuff. Do you see a lot of fear from MSPs that it’s too easy for them to fall behind when they’re setting themselves up as the font of AI knowledge for the small business clients they’re looking after?

Yeah. So I hear two different fears. I hear the fear of falling behind and there’s some technology ways that you can stay up. You could set up an RSS feed. So I have an RSS feed that goes into mymonday.com and then once a week I just scan through all of the headlines and usually the headline I can eliminate two thirds of the headlines and the ones that are interesting I can double click on. And so that is one way to stay up to speed. So I do hear that a little bit.

The bigger fear is what happens if my clients are doing this without me? So that introduces shadow AI. Some MSPs are a bit leery to bring up AI because they don’t feel expert enough. And so then we introduce shadow AI. Another organisation comes in, deploys whatever AI solution it is. It almost doesn’t matter what they deploy. If they’re not an MSP or an MSSP, they probably are not thinking about security like they should. And so most MSPs are torn right now, “I know I need to be bringing this up, but I don’t feel like I know enough.” So it’s less about falling behind and more like an identity shift. If you’re using a large language model, if you’re using Copilot, if you’re either vibe coding or you understand the concept of automations and agents and you could maybe list one or two use cases, you are way ahead of your clients, way ahead, and that’s enough to guide the conversation.

Yeah. I guess there’s a saying in the expert world, which you and I have both heard because we position ourselves as experts at what we do and there’s nothing wrong with that. I always recommend MSPs position themselves as experts exactly as you say. But the common thing is, and this isn’t such a problem for people like you and me who have got a few years under our belt, but that whole thing of be careful not to listen to the expert who’s only one page ahead of you in the book.

I guess which obviously you and I, we’ve read all the books and we’ve lived that life for 10, 20, 30 years, whatever is the case. I guess the issue with AI is everyone is only one page ahead of everyone else because the book is being written as we speak and actually we’re still on page one of chapter one of the book.

Yes, I call that the intelligence tsunami because a lot of people will say AI is growing exponentially and it is, but really what we have is that large language models are growing exponentially and the ability to create video content is growing exponentially and agents are growing exponentially and tools are growing exponentially and then we stack them all on top of themselves and it’s no longer exponential growth. I don’t know what the word is. I don’t think we have a word in the English language to say exponential cubed. I don’t know what that word is. And so I call it the intelligence tsunami. If you stand on the shore and just watch it is going to be devastating. If you’re brave enough to get on the surfboard, you’re going to really have a significant advantage over the poor people that are on the sand.

Although I guess the other way of looking at it is that by knowing that there’s that tsunami is coming, you can help those people move to safety and that’s where the MSPs help their clients, which I love. Okay, so two final questions and then we’ll just talk about what you’re actually doing to help MSPs right now make money out of AI. So it’s kind of the same question, but with a negative and a positive slant. I try very hard to make everything positive on this podcast because I try to create the podcast I want to listen to. I have to tell you, my girlfriend caught me listening to my own podcast the other day. I was in the car listening to this very podcast. She kind of got in and she said, “Are you listening to yourself?” I’m like, “No, no, not at all.”

Anyway, the question is about the future. And it’s a bit of a crystal ball thing because no one knows and everything moves so fast. It’s crazy. So I read a blog by a guy called Ed Zitron. I don’t know if you’ve come across him, Jennifer. So he writes a very negative blog. It’s called Where’s Your Ed At? And it’s very negative, but he would call it realistic in that he writes about the economics of AI. I’m glad you’re writing that down now. You’re going to love this. He writes the longest blog articles. They’re all like 10,000 words. But he writes about the economics of AI. And I forget the numbers, but for example, let’s not name names, but your big players are basically spending $5 to $10 to win a dollar. And so all of them need billions and billions of dollars of funding every year. And he compares that to every other economic cycle of in human history and it’s unparalleled and it obviously can’t continue like that forever. So if I was interviewing Ed Zitron, which makes me think actually I should, if I was interviewing him, he’d have a very negative opinion of AI and that whatever AI can or can’t do, its current model isn’t sustainable. I’m paying what, $22 a month for ChatGPT, maybe the same again for Claude, I’m paying for Gemini and actually I’m probably burning several hundred dollars worth of compute and tokens and all that stuff in the back end. That can’t go on forever. So I guess what I’m asking from you is, and I know you’re a natural positive optimist, so what do you see as the optimistic next couple of years for AI? And do you see a potential downside of where actually one day we’re going to have to pay the $300 a month for exactly what we’re doing now?

Okay. So let me answer this twofold. First of all, I literally just skimmed an article this morning that said the commoditised $20 a month model is going to have to die because we’re shifting from $20 a month to $200 a month in terms of agentic token spend. Sometimes it’s $100 a day is sometimes what I’m hearing. And so it breaks the mental model of, “I’ll just stack up these different tools for 20 bucks a month.” So I don’t think you or he are that far off base. I do think the models will need to shift, but I think there will be a gradual shifting because I think what we will see first is pretty significant consolidation. And I think we’re already seeing the beginnings of that because if we think about, let’s say maybe Q3, Q4 of 2025, every new release was pretty massive.

We went from micro context windows to mac huge context windows. Now it feels like we are still seeing, outside looking in, feels a little bit like one upmanship, Copilot releases something and then ChatGPT releases something, then Perplexity, but the releases from ChatGPT today to ChatGPT in three weeks are much, much smaller. And that’s how it is with anything. As you move up the scale and you’re much better and better and better, you can’t change it by 50%. You can’t get 50% better because you’re already nearly perfect. And so we’re seeing that already.

And so what that means is that in a year, give or take a bit, it’s going to be a pretty flat playing field. And what it will become is that maybe ChatGPT and Claude, let’s just compare those two. They have different context windows, they have different writing styles, but broadly they do the same thing or the one that does more, which at the time of this recording is probably Claude, will either buy up and close down ChatGPT, OpenAI. We’re going to see consolidation. I mean, we’ve seen Microsoft do that historically where they buy up a really tiny competitor and then they just close the doors. And I think we’re going to see similar things there. So consolidation first and then probably the shift from small dollars to larger dollars monthly.

Yeah. And definitely towards Agentic. And I think we can all see that that’s when AI gets really useful, when it can actually do stuff for us.

Yeah, totally agree.

Yeah. Okay. Thank you. Jennifer, this has been amazing. I’m conscious that this interview is already out of date. Literally, you and I have just finished recording it. It’s already out of date. So we need to get you back on. Maybe we should just get you back on every week just to talk about AI. So give us a brief overview of what do you actually do then to help MSPs make money from AI and what’s the best way to get in touch with you?

Yeah, for sure. So I have an eight week program called the AI Monetization Launchpad and my MSPs come in with no packaging, no pricing, no offer, no sales process, no outward facing lead magnets or branding. And when they come out at the end of eight weeks, they have all of those things. They have a package, they have a price. More importantly, they have pipeline. They have real valid AI opportunities in the pipe, not usually closed yet because eight weeks is a very short amount of time to start a deal and then close it, especially in this world. And then I also have a program ongoing where people can get lead magnet packets and webinar packets and help with closing. It is all around creating AI opportunities and revenue. Those are my two key offers right now. And you can go out to my website, mspsalesrevolution.com/aioffers to get 10 AI offers that MSPs should be selling right now and then you can poke around. I’ve got blog posts and videos and all kinds of content out there to help.

MSPs must build audiences and relationships before selling IT support, which is why marketing is so important. Also this week, why technically superior MSPs lose deals to “average” competitors, and how MSPs can build resilience every day.

Welcome to Episode 344 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge.

I want to start today with something that landed in my email inbox a few weeks back from a guy called Tom Orbach. Now, he writes a newsletter called Tom’s Marketing Ideas. I’ve been a paying subscriber for a while. He’s sharp, he’s very original and when he says something, I really do pay attention.

Now, the subject line of his email was this… Every company is now a media company. And after I read the newsletter, I just couldn’t stop thinking about it because I believe he’s absolutely right and I believe it matters enormously for your MSP. Let me explain what he wrote about and then I’m going to add my own layer on top of that.

So Tom’s argument started with a data point. It was about OpenAI and how they’d recently spent over $100 million to acquire a podcast, which is kind of weird if you think about it because they didn’t acquire another technology company or any kind of software platform, they spent all that money on a podcast. In fact, it was two guys who’d been doing a live tech show for just 17 months. And then the week before that, a fintech company called Plaid, which by the way is worth $8 billion, they bought a newsletter with 200,000 subscribers and actually Tom listed company after company after company that have done the same thing.

HubSpot bought a newsletter with 2.5 million subscribers. Stripe bought a founder community. Semrush, which is an SEO tool, they bought several SEO publications. And these are not media companies, these are software and technology businesses, but they’ve all been spending hundreds of millions of dollars to own audiences. So before we explore why, let me first of all just put something out there to the universe. If there’s any business that wants to come and buy this podcast for let’s say $100 million, then please email me. Obviously I’m joking. (I’m not joking. Email me.)

Anyway, let’s look at why all of these big businesses are doing this and why even though these are big businesses buying podcasts and newsletters and stuff like that, it’s still relevant to you as an MSP. They’re doing it because they figured out something that most businesses are still catching up to. In a world where AI can produce infinite content at practically zero cost, the one thing that can’t be replicated is a trusted human voice with a loyal audience. Attention is the scarcest resource in business right now and the companies that own attention don’t need to chase customers anymore. The customers come to them. Tom Orbach in his newsletter puts this brilliantly. He says,

“The company that teaches about the industry earns the right to sell the tool.”

And that sentence is basically the entire philosophy behind what I do with this podcast, with my LinkedIn newsletter, with my weekly emails, with all of my content. I’m not really selling my MSP Marketing Edge membership. I’m building audiences of MSPs who trust me. And when they’re ready to take their marketing seriously, I’m the person they’re going to think of.

Now, here’s where this is applicable for you because the good news is you don’t need to spend $100 million on a podcast network, but you do need to think of your MSP as a media company. And what does that mean in practice? It means you should be publishing content consistently. Something that educates the business owners and managers that you want to work with. At the very least, a weekly email, a weekly LinkedIn newsletter, a short video, ideally every week or every month, a blog post every week. And not all of these at once. Pick one or two, do them consistently, do them week after week after week and then systemise them so someone else is doing the hard work on your behalf.

I write this podcast and I read this podcast and my team do all of the rest of the work, and believe me, they do a lot more work on this than I do. But you would do this because the business owners in your area are out there already consuming content every day. And the question is whether any of that content is coming from you. If it’s not, they have no relationship with you. And when the day comes that they’re finally ready to switch from one MSP to another, if you’re not out there with your content and they’re not consuming that content, you’re not there in their head and in their heart someone else is.

And you know there’s something else that Tom Orbach says that I want to reinforce? He says that in 2026, every company has access to the same AI tools and can now publish endless content at almost no cost. And every company blog now reads kind of the same. 2000 words are very well structured, SEO optimised, annoyingly forgettable content that sounds like it could have been written by anyone about anything. And do you know what? People can feel this. They are drowning in slop and they are hungry for something real. A human who actually works in the industry has real actual opinions, who tells them what’s happening and what to pay attention to. That is the opportunity for you.

And it connects to something that I believe very deeply about, which separates the MSPs that grow from the MSPs that stagnate, because here’s the second part of what I want to say today, and it’s something that I’ve observed of many, many, many years working with MSPs all around the world. The most successful MSPs are not the most technically brilliant ones. They’re also not the ones with the best tech stack or the most certifications or the slickest operations. The MSPs that grow the fastest and the most consistently are the ones where the owner has made a fundamental mindset shift. They’ve stopped thinking of themselves purely as a technology business and started thinking of themselves as a marketing and growth business that also happens to deliver excellent IT.

And that sounds like a subtle difference, but it really isn’t. It changes everything about how you spend your time, what decisions you prioritise, and what kind of business you end up building. When you’re running an MSP that’s primarily focused on operations, your whole day is consumed by tickets, clients, staff, vendors, firefighting. Marketing is the thing you’ll get round to when all the other things quietened down. And things never quieten down, do they? So marketing never happens.

When you’re running an MSP that’s a marketing and media company first, you protect time every single day for the activities that grow the business. You treat your weekly email as non-negotiable. You treat your LinkedIn presence as a business asset, not something you’ve got to do. And you end up thinking about your audience, your message, and your pipeline in the same way you think about your SLAs and your response times. All of these things matter, but in most MSPs, only one of them gets proper attention.

Tom Orbach, the guy that writes the newsletter, he’s right. Every company is now a media company. And I’ll add to that that every MSP needs to become a marketing company as well, those two things together, not instead of being a great service provider, but alongside it. The MSP that teaches, that shows up consistently, that earns the trust of its local market through content and personality and genuine helpfulness, that MSP does not have to chase clients. Clients find them. And trust me, that is a very different and much better business to own and run.

Can I say something that might make you feel a little uncomfortable and a little not particularly humble, even if it’s actually true? Technically you are probably better than some of your competitors. Do you agree with that? Maybe your tech stack is stronger, maybe your people are more capable, maybe just your systems and processes are more robust. And yet, despite all of that, every single day some local businesses choose another MSP instead of you.

And so the question that should be keeping you up at night is this. Why? Why are they picking MSPs that technically aren’t as good as you? What on earth is wrong with these people? Most MSPs assume that the answer is to keep improving the service, so better tools and processes and delivery, all of that kind of stuff. And while all of these things are absolutely true and they matter, they don’t solve the core problem that’s costing you new deals.

The issue usually isn’t about effort or quality or commitment. It’s usually down to how buyers perceive you.

And that is a completely different problem because here’s the reality, to an ordinary business owner or manager, someone who doesn’t live in our world, most MSPs look broadly the same. That’s not intended as an insult, it’s just how human decision making works when someone’s buying something that they don’t fully understand.

When a business owner starts thinking about switching IT support companies, they go into research mode. So they might Google a bit, probably these days ask an AI tool to do some research for them, they’ll skim a few websites. And they might shortlist two or three MSPs and start to compare them. Now from their point of view, this is actually really hard because for most MSPs on their websites and their marketing, the messaging looks and feels the same everywhere. It’s all about we’re proactive, we’re secure, we’re responsive, we’re reliable, we’ve got great service, we’re your trusted partner. And none of that is wrong, but none of it helps them to choose when everyone’s saying the same things.

When buyers can’t clearly see a difference between options, they will default to one of two things. They’ll either pick on price or they won’t switch. They’ll stick with their incumbent, this is absolutely true. And neither of those outcome works in your favour. This is why, and if you’ve been listening to this podcast for a while you’ll have heard me say this before, samey kills sales, even for technically excellent MSPs. What’s happening is that most MSPs are accidentally positioning themselves as just another option. Not because they lack the expertise, but because they explain their business from their own perspective rather than from the buyer’s perspective.

They lead with features instead of outcomes, with process rather than reassurance, and with technical competence instead of clarity. And the result of this is that your average competitors, the people who technically aren’t as good as you, they are winning deals and beating you to win deals simply because they feel easier for a non-technical person to understand and therefore easier to choose. And that’s the key shift that most MSPs never make.

Do you know really this is a positioning problem. If a buyer can’t quickly answer three basic questions: Who do you help? What outcome do you deliver? Why are you different? If they can’t answer those three, they will not choose you. And not because they dislike you, but because their heart cannot differentiate you from all the other MSPs. And if the heart can’t differentiate, the brain cannot justify picking you. Those two things have to both be won over.

So what’s the answer? I believe you need a USP, a unique selling proposition, and I want to be really clear about what that is and what it isn’t. A real USP is not a slogan or a clever line. It’s the foundation that makes everything else work. It’s what turns your website, your LinkedIn and your sales conversations into something coherent and distinctive instead of interchangeable. So here’s a simple way to test where you stand right now.

Open up your AI tool of choice, ask it to look at your website and the websites of three or four of your local competitors, and then ask it this question. From the point of view of a stressed business owner who doesn’t understand IT, how different do these MSPs sound from one another? Let me give you that question again, it’s such a critical question. So you ask AI, From the point of view of a stressed business owner who doesn’t understand IT, how different do these MSPs sound from one another?

Now, if the answer that your AI tool gives you is not very different, then that’s not a failure, it’s just a blind spot. And actually it’s one that almost every MSP has at some point. Strong positioning usually anchors around something very specific and very deliberate, which might be the outcome that you deliver, or the sector that you specialise in, or let’s say a value that your ideal clients care about above all else, like compliance for example, or even the human personality behind the business. That’s the approach that I’ve taken with my business, it’s our big differentiating factor is me. Obviously we’re very good at what we do, but no one can ever copy me. It’s what makes our business unique.

What matters for you is that you’ve got to give the buyers something clear and memorable that they can grab hold of that they can latch onto. Here’s a core positioning format that works really well for MSPs. We help achieve by . I’ll give you an example… We help to by . Or here’s another one… We help by .

These are great USPs, you’re more than welcome to swipe these and adapt them and use them. Here’s one more for you. We help by . Now, these are kind of internal statements that you just use for you to know what is our USP, but can you see the difference between those statements and the usual, we’re proactive, we’re reliable, we’re a trusted partner? The same kind of language that every MSP defaults to. Once you’ve got a core positioning statement locked in, something that will guide all of your marketing efforts inside your business, everything else follows.

It’s then kind of easy to change your website. It’s easy to tweak your LinkedIn. It’s easy to make sure you’re having the right sales conversations. You stop sounding like every other MSP and you start sounding like the right one to your ideal clients. So here’s the question to sit with after today’s show. What’s stopping you from just doing this and fixing this? Because the answer is probably a lot simpler than you think.

If you’re a member of the MSP Marketing Edge co-managed membership, which is there to help you win IT directors as clients, have you had a look at the training yet? Because if you go into our co-managed portal, you’ll see training right there in the navigation. And we have a ton of training to help you understand why marketing for co-managed IT contracts is so different from marketing B2B.

Business owners and IT directors think and act in completely different ways. So it’s a completely different relationship you build with them. It’s a completely different type of buying and you have to market to them in a completely different way. So that’s there right now if you’re a member.

If you’re not yet a member, just to let you know, we only work with one MSP per area. So one for our B2B marketing membership and one for our co-managed marketing membership. You can see if your area is available at mspmarketingedge.com/membership.

Featured guest: Steve Judge is an award-winning, international motivational speaker, two times world champion in paratriathlon, author, coach, and workshop facilitator. He shares his journey that took him from wheelchair to world champion and beyond in business.

MSP’s live in a world of relentless and complex changes, challenges and uncertainty. In this podcast Steve will share the Golden Wave of Resilience needed to combat constant pressure and the need for peak performance. It will empower the audience to unlock the essential habits that high achievers use to succeed in this competitive world.

It’s really hard work being a business owner, more so I think in the MSP world than in many other industries. Not only because you have a lot of reactive work that you have to do day in, day out, but also because the tech world is constantly changing at a speed that would genuinely astonish other business owners.

I mean, you go and ask a dentist about changes to their industry and yeah sure, they might get new technology coming out now and again like a better drill or a sharper pointy thing that they can shove into people’s mouths, but essentially their job is exactly the same today as it was 10 years ago, 20 years ago. The techniques and the training for other businesses like dentists improves slowly over time. If a dentist had to change at the pace at which you have to change, I don’t think they would keep up, do you?

And that’s why a lot of MSPs are literally exhausted a lot of the time because it’s so easy to blink and the amount of work that you have to do has just gone up again. My special guest today is an expert at helping MSP owners with exactly this problem. Let’s get him on right now and get him talking about how all MSPs can improve their own personal resilience.

Hi, I’m Steve Judge. I’m a two times author, two times world champion and now I’m an international motivational speaker helping people to achieve their goals.

Amazing. What a great intro. Thank you so much, Steve. You and I were introduced by an MSP that I work closely with called John Williams. He saw you speaking at an event and he sent me a text right there at that event saying, “You’ve got to get this guy onto your podcast.” So thank you, John, for connecting us, and thank you so much, Steve, for joining us on the podcast.

We’re going to talk today about resilience and MSPs, you and I were just chatting about the complications that exist for MSPs and how there’s almost no other job anywhere else in the world, apart from maybe being a politician, and who wants to be a politician, but there’s no other job anywhere in the world where everything just changes all the time, and how some MSPs thrive in that and for other MSPs it’s a constant battle to keep up with that. And you’re going to talk a lot about resilience and how you can help strengthen yourself.

But before we do, I mean, you’ve got a pretty impressive biog. You’ve obviously written these books and you were just telling me you’ve had a documentary film crew today in your house filming you. It’s all very cool. I’m sure it all didn’t start off like this. Typically, this kind of overnight success often hides 10 or 20 years worth of hard work. So tell us briefly what your journey has been. How have you got to the position where you are today?

Goodness me, overnight success, yeah, certainly not that. Where do I start? At childhood, I don’t know. I’ve had an eclectic life, let’s say that. So I’ve always loved running, always loved being fit, healthy. When I left school, I worked down the coalpits of Yorkshire, so I’ve been as a coal miner, then became an engineer. An engineer is very important because it’s very much about having problems and finding solutions and I like that as an engineer.

Going through my life, had a near fatal car accident in 2002 where I got both my legs crushed, was told that I may never walk again. That to me was a catalyst moment. That to me was for me to set goals and work towards them, having to grow my leg back by four inches, learning to stand again, learning to walk again. When I got to that stage, much as I was disabled in both legs, I started thinking about what I could do rather than what I couldn’t do. This is where the resilience thing comes in massively as well as goal setting.

So then I set goals, worked towards them physically in swimming and cycling, eventually got into running as a disabled athlete, competed as a paratriathlete, swimming, cycling and running. Became British champion in the year 2009, grabbed opportunities, set even more goals, used even more resilience to eventually become European champion and two times world champion. I then went on from there to retire from international competition and wanted to help others pay it forward almost complete the circle as it were.

And so they found the best way to do that was to become a speaker, a professional speaker. And so that’s what I do now. I travelled the globe sharing my story, but inspiring people to achieve the thing in their life that they really want, that thing that they’re passionate about, that thing that excites them. And on that journey, you know it, there’s going to be some potholes, there’s going to be challenges, there’s going to be barriers and hurdles and that’s where the resilience kicks in.

So I talk about resilience as well. I’ve literally just come back from Kuala Lumpur where I was speaking at an AI and cyber security conference there, very much about resilience because MSPs, they’re struggling with the change all the time.

Everything’s changing all the time and nobody likes change, but it’s about encompassing it, accepting it, and then taking action so you can move forward.

And I talk about the golden wave of resilience. So that’s what I do.

I love that. We’ll come back to the golden wave of resilience in a second. And you’re right, nobody likes change that they’re not in control of. And obviously us as business owners, we are in this unique position where we get to change our business and actually it’s our staff who have to sort of catch up with us. But we get this overconfidence that we’re in charge of change and then the world changes around us. And you mentioned AI, I mean, MSPs have been aware of AI so much more than the average business owner for such a longer time, but that’s not the only change. In the channel, obviously cyber security changes every four seconds. Telecoms has completely changed in the last few years. Even the nature of managed services as a concept is a complete change to how it used to be. Nevermind Microsoft and all the other changes. So it’s constant change, change, change.

You talked about goals and the average MSP owner that I know and that I work with in the MSP Marketing Edge, when they set up their business, they were initially trying to get control over what they did and who they did it for and how they did that work. And then that desire for control, once they get that control, it then becomes a desire for freedom. Freedom to live their life, enjoy their kids, enjoy their family, have a good lifestyle. And most MSP owners are working towards that freedom and that’s the goal. The goal is, I want to have enough time and enough cash to live the life I want to live, whatever that is.

And most of them get frustrated because they get trapped within the business. Now, Steve, I know you will have heard this story a thousand times, and this is not all MSPs but this is a majority of MSPs. If we take that as the goal then, the goal is growing our business, getting on board new clients, generating more cash, having more time, enjoying our life and making sure we do all this before we hit 80. Where does resilience come into this? Is resilience as simple as the will to get up every morning and do the difficult things or is it something else?

Resilience became a bit of a buzzword in the pandemic, which we don’t really talk about nowadays if we can help it. But yes, everybody says, “You need resilience.” And people are going, “Okay, so what is resilience?” And this is the thing, being knocked down and picking yourself up, bouncing back, not giving in, tenacity, dedication, dog with a bone, this is all resilience. But people are still saying, “Yep, but what is it? What does it mean? How do I grow it? How do I get better at it?”

So I’ve got this concept called the Golden Wave of Resilience and it starts off with some kind of change, adversity, something that wasn’t expected. For me, it was a car accident. For others, it might be various things in their life, in their career, whatever. You have that thing that changes. And when that thing happens, it’s horrible. And you go into a fight or flight. The oxytocin kicks in and you’re like, “Oh my goodness, fight or fight.”

So immediately after that, you have denial because you go, “This can’t be happening. I can’t believe it. Don’t worry about it.” And then you realise that it is happening and that’s when your testosterone kicks in. So if you imagine this curve, you started off with some kind of adversity, you’re now going down. The testosterone kicks in, you will get angry, you’ll get frustrated. You might slam a door or whatever or you might just shout or swear.

And then after that, you’ve got the sharing part. The sharing is where you need to offload. You need to share. And when I say the sharing part, what I’m saying is it’s really good if you can control this yourself. So being angry in your own way, going to the gym, gardening, screaming into a pillow, because if you don’t control the anger, it will burst out and it can come out at a really bad time.

The sharing you can share to others, you can share to your colleagues, to your friends, to your family, to a therapist, a counselor. And if you don’t want to do that, then share with yourself. You’ve got to admit to yourself as to what’s going on, what’s going on inside, how do you feel? Write it down, a journal. Maybe even listen to some poetry or some music or the lyrics. One way or another, you’ve got to do the sharing. You can’t keep it bottled in now.

Whatever you do, you will still hit rock bottom. So you’re now at the bottom of the curve and rock bottom is a horrible place. It’s dark, it’s depressing. You might be sulking, but like I said, you might be depression as well. So it’s a dark place. Now then how long you stay in this depends on how you control the anger phase and the sharing phase.

So one way or another, you will eventually see the light at the end of the tunnel, which is great. And that means acceptance.

Acceptance means that once you accept the situation, you can do something about it. Your hormones have settled down a little bit. You’ve got a bit of serotonin kicked in there. You can start seeing things clearly. You’re not going to lean on your excuses and you’re now going to take some action. Once you start taking action, you’re now coming back out of that curve. You take action, you get a dopamine release and you feel good about it. You think, okay, I’m going to do more action and feel even better. Serotonin, dopamine release, that will bring you up the curve all the way up to moving forward and back on track to where you were or working towards your goal.

Now, if you look at the curve, I usually have a diagram that I talk about and show the end of the curve is actually higher than the beginning of the curve, meaning that once you go through the golden wave of resilience, you’re at a higher plane than where you started. Meaning that change, adversity, all of that horrible stuff is a good thing because it takes you to a higher place, but you’ve got to go all the way through and you’ve got to do each section properly.

Otherwise, you’ll just be in a continuous circle. If you don’t share properly, if you’re not angry properly, if you’re not in rock bottom properly, if you say, “Oh, I don’t need this. I’ll just carry on because I’m just going to pull myself together and battle on … ” It doesn’t work. It does initially, but you’ve really got to listen to what your body needs and what you need to do to take you through to that higher pain. And that to me is a definition of resilience.

And that is a very clear definition, Steve. And the trigger thing at the beginning, I mean, you talked about the massive thing that happened to you and it’s an incredible story, but can it be something as simple as you lose a client? You lose a client that just tips you closer to not quite having enough cash to pay your staff and can people go through that process very quickly and end up higher as they go through that process or does it tend to be just the bigger things?

Oh, I think it’s everything. I think it’s losing your phone, your wallet, your keys, stubbing your toe. When you walk past the door and it catches you and your hand on, you’re just like, “Oh, why is it always happening to me?” You immediately go through the wave of resilience, you’re angry, you’re in denial. I can’t believe this. I can’t believe I’ve lost my phone again, denial, you’re angry about it, then you need to share, “Okay, how’s it going? It’s not the end of the world.” Yeah, but it is, everything’s on my phone that’s like rock bottom. And they go, “Right, where was I when I last had it?” Acceptance. And then you start looking for it, taking action, you find it hopefully, eventually, and then you move forward.

Everything is the wave of resilience. And the more you practice it with the smaller things like stubbing your toe or losing your phone, then when something does happen that’s big, that’s catastrophic, like losing a client, not having enough money in the bank, or getting a fine, or a car accident, whatever, you will still go through the golden wave of resilience, but you know what’s going on and it’s so precious. It’s so important to know where you are and what’s going on because that’s what you need.

You need the information. Dealing with it, yeah okay, that takes action and that takes more practice, I guess, but sometimes that’s when you can start asking for help. Now I say that with hesitation because sometimes it’s really hard to ask for help. I struggle with it, but that’s what you need, especially in the sharing phase, finding somebody that you can reach out to, that you can share with, that you can ask for help, that will really help you in the whole process of it.

I love that. And you forgot to mention the small thing that there is no coming back from. So it’s not stubbing your toe, it’s not losing your phone, it’s treading on a piece of Lego that your child has left on the carpet. We all know there’s no coming back from that. That just sits in a category of its own.

So in terms of building up our own resilience then, I think you’ve already given the answer to how to do that, which is to practice. To practice on the smaller things so we’re then learning and we’ve got that in place in our feelings and in our brain when we go through the bigger things. As you were saying that, the thought occurred to me of how do we help our staff? So how do we help technicians or how do we help even our children actually, our children, our staff, the other people in our life that we love, how do we help them to build resilience? Because obviously I guess you’ve got to want to build resilience in yourself before you can start to do it and go through this process and learn from it.

Yeah. I think it’s explaining it. I think explaining and for me, I draw the diagram and I say, okay, you’re really angry at the moment. This is where you are, you’ve got a bit of a way to go, so keep going on this journey, but you will come out the other end. And if they don’t understand what you mean, then explain to them and show them the graph so that they understand, like I said, the information is really important. And even the rock bottom when you’re sulking, and us men we can sulk for days, but when I’m in that process, I have a word myself and say, “I’m sulking.” I go, “Yeah, I know I’m sulking because I’m really annoyed about what happened.” And I say, “Well, okay, but nobody else is sulking. The world carries on. Everybody else is just moving on. It’s only you that’s sulking. So how long are you going to sulk for Steve?” And I go, “Well, I don’t know, a bit longer.” “Okay. Well, keep checking in on ourselves because when you’re ready, you need to stop sulking. You do need to pull yourself together. You do need to take acceptance and then we can move on.” And I go, “Yeah, okay, got it, but not yet. I’m still sulking.”

And sometimes it takes longer than other times, but you’re always checking in to see where you are so you can explain it to other people so that you can see where they are and say, “Have you talked to somebody about it? Or have you just gone for a walk or have you just sulked? Have you just watched Netflix and eaten some rubbish food or whatever? Because maybe that’s what you need to do before you can move on to the next stage.” And once they understand that you’re trying to help them and that they can see the process as well as you, whether it’s your staff, whether it’s your family or whether it’s your friends, it really helps them and that’s all you want to do. You want to help them through, but there’s some things you can speed up and know there’s a lot of things that you can’t, but if they know where they are, then you can almost hold their hand through the process and help them.

I love that. And the diagram you were discussing, is that on your website for anyone to go and have a look at?

Yeah. It’s on my website and I can send you a link to it and stuff. But yeah, it goes down and it comes up slightly higher than where you started. So it’s self-explanatory. But yeah, with all the descriptions as well, it’s really important.

Amazing. Well, look, you send that through to us and we’ll make sure that goes on our webpage. So we always do a full page that goes with every single episode of this podcast and that’s on mspmarketingedge.com. And Steve, just tell us about what you do. So how do you help MSPs? I know obviously you do your international speaking and you’ve got some books, but how can you help MSPs that are listening to this or watching this on YouTube and thinking, “Yeah, actually this guy talks a lot of sense.”

Just reach out. Okay. I’m here to help people and I love it when people reach out to me, whether that’s by email, go onto my website, www.steve-judge.co.uk. You can find my email, find my phone number, just reach out to me and ask for help and I will help you the best I can. That’s the best way. Yes, I do speak on the stage so I can speak at conferences. That helps. The workshops that I do are very much to do with goal setting, but there’s resilience section within that. The one-to-one coaching I do as well.

And then my books, the reason I wrote my books was to help people. On the stage, I speak for 45 minutes and people think they know my story and I think you know 45 minutes of my story and I’ve given out the best bits and the worst bits, but not all of the bits. So the first book I wrote was my autobiography and that’s got warts and all, it’s got everything in it. I think that’s a really precious book for me. It’s even got some poetry in it. It’s got some tunes for the journey. So you can’t judge my playlist. It’s my playlist and it is eclectic. It’s got things like AC/DC and Eminem, but it’s also got Chesney Hawkes and Bucks Fizz. It’s got a real spread, but it’s got lots of messages in there and lots of photos.

The second book I wrote again to help people. The second book is very much about goal setting. If you’ve got something that you desire that you really want, this book is for you. You work your way through the book, you do the exercises. Some of it is drawing a picture. Some of it is like making lists, but all the way through, by the time you get to the end of the book, you’ll have reached your goal. I call it your gold, which is why the book’s called Gold. Gold is an acronym for your Goal, your Opportunity, your Love, your Dream. What is that thing that you really want? And it could be personal, it could be professional, it could be your career, MSPs. They’ve always got goal setting and things that they want to do, things they want to learn, new technology, but it could be something more personal. It could be like you want to get a little bit fitter, a little bit healthier, you want to go more holidays, maybe even think about retirement. All of these to me are goals and that book helps you through.

Everything that I do is to help other people. I think that’s where I am in that position in my life that I just want to pay it forward. I want to make sure that the accident that I had all those years ago hasn’t had a detrimental effect on my life. And so I want to use it for the good that I can and to help other people. 

MSPs love healthcare practices for many reasons, so here’s how to reach them and win them as clients. Also this week, the 5 questions your MSP website’s MUST answer (or prospects go elsewhere), and the scary implications for MSPs when your clients buy cyber liability Insurance.

Welcome to Episode 343 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge.

Let’s talk about one of the most attractive client verticals that any MSP can go after. Healthcare practices. And when I say healthcare, I mean private practices specifically. So doctors, dentists, dental surgeons, optometrists, or opticians as they’re known here in the UK, veterinarians, we call them vets here in the UK, physiotherapists, cosmetic clinics, all of that kind of stuff. The kind of practice that’s owner operated or partnership run.

I mean somewhere that’s got a reception desk, clinical staff, and a growing pile of technology holding the whole thing together. This is not about hospitals or large health networks. This is about those small to medium-sized healthcare practices that need IT support and they’re probably getting it from someone who maybe doesn’t really understand their world, and that is your opportunity.

A heads up that this podcast is consumed all around the world and obviously there are lots of different healthcare systems out there. So for example, here in the UK, most doctors and what we call general practitioners, GPs, they work within the National Health Service, which is run by the government. So this means I’m not going to dive into specific details or specific laws for any particular country. Instead, I’m going to talk generally about how you can reach all of these kind of clients, whichever country you’re in. Because even though there are different laws and different systems around the world, these healthcare professionals all think and feel and act pretty much along the same lines.

So why do MSPs love healthcare practices so much? Well, let me count the reasons…

First of all, they’re almost entirely recession proof. People don’t stop going to the dentist when the economy wobbles. They don’t stop taking their dog to the vet. I mean, they might cut back on the extra spend such as having all their teeth replaced with those weird looking teeth that Hollywood people have, but they still maintain the basic essentials. So these businesses have a good solid base of revenue still coming in no matter what’s happening to the economy. In fact, these are businesses typically built on recurring appointments, loyal patients and services that can’t be postponed indefinitely.

Second, they are deeply dependent on technology. The appointment system, the patient records, the digital imaging, the billing software, the online prescribing, the payment processing. It’s all technology, right? And all of it needs to work all day, every single day, because when it doesn’t work, the consequences are immediate and painful. A dental practice that can’t access its patient management system on a Monday morning isn’t just frustrating. It’s losing appointments and revenue and it’s letting its patients down. And that’s the kind of downtime that gets you fired as their IT provider and the kind of risk that makes them incredibly motivated to find someone they can genuinely trust.

A side note, I worked with dentists in a previous business, one that I sold 10 years ago, and here in the UK, they call helping the patient’s “chair time”. That’s all the dentist wants, they want chair time. They want the patient in the chair, they want their fingers and metal things in the patient’s mouth, that makes them happy because they’re earning money, and anything other than chair time is losing them money. So it’s really good for you to get into the mindset of what is most important to the healthcare professional that I’m talking to here.

Third, they are regulated, very heavily regulated in some areas. So sure, different countries and regions have different specific rules, but the principle is the same everywhere. Healthcare practices handle very, very sensitive patient data. They have legal and ethical obligations to protect it. In the US, dental and medical practices have very specific compliance requirements around patient data. In Australia, Canada, and the UK, there are equivalent frameworks.

Even veterinary practices, which in some places aren’t covered by the same strict health data regulations, but they still handle client personal data and payment information and they’re increasingly expected to protect it properly. Compliance is both a burden and a gift for you as an MSP. It’s a burden for the practice owner because they have to meet it and it’s a gift for you because it creates a constant legitimate reason to have conversations with them.

Fourth then, and this one matters. They talk to each other. Healthcare professionals within a specialty are a very tightly networked community. Dentists know other dentists, veterinarians know other veterinarians. They all attend the same kind of conferences and belong to the same professional associations. They send referrals to each other’s practices. The referral flywheel in this sector is powerful.

One happy healthcare client, treated well and looked after properly, can easily open the door to three or four more clients. 

So how do you actually reach these people and win them? Well, let’s get into the practical stuff…

The first thing to understand is that the owner of a private healthcare practice is not primarily thinking like a business owner. They’re thinking like a clinician. A dentist’s identity is as a dentist, not as a small business owner. So when you talk to them about technology, you have to translate everything into the language of clinical practice. Not uptime percentages, but time their patients spend waiting because the system is down. Not endpoint protection, but whether their patient records are safe. Not disaster recovery, but whether they could open the practice on a Monday morning after something went wrong on the Friday. Does that make sense?

I mean, this is the same principle we always talk about in this podcast. It’s features versus benefits. But in healthcare, it matters even more because the emotional stakes are higher. A practice owner who loses patient data isn’t just losing data, they’re potentially losing their registration, their reputation and the thing they’ve spent their career building. So lead with that, but not in a scary, ambulance chasing kind of way, but in a calm understanding, we know your world kind of way.

The second thing to understand is where to find them. Healthcare practices are locally rooted businesses typically. So the dentist that you’re targeting is almost certainly in your geographical area. And that means local marketing tactics work brilliantly here. Local LinkedIn outreach to practice owners and practice managers, Google business profile optimisation so that you come up when someone searches for IT support for dental practices in the area, and attending local professional networking events where practice owners gather. Even a direct mail to a list of local practices, which you can often build yourself pretty easily from online directories and professional registers, that could work as well, or you could just use Google Maps for that.

One of the most effective things you can do is to create a vertical specific page on your website. Something that says at the top, something like IT support for dental practices or Technology for veterinary clinics. Make sure you do a different page for each vertical. So one for dentists, one for veterinarians, one for doctors. When a practice owner lands on a page that speaks directly about their world and the specific imaging software that they use, and the scheduling systems that they rely on, and the compliance requirements that they face, well, something just clicks. And that’s why you should actually name systems that these healthcare professionals regularly use, especially if you have experience of working with them, because then they think, “Oh, these people actually understand us.” That feeling of being understood is so much more powerful than any list of services that you could put on the page.

Third, create content specifically for this audience. So a short guide called something like The five biggest IT mistakes that dental practices make, or a blog post about what happens to a practice’s patient data if a laptop gets stolen, or a video walking through what a cyber incident response plan looks like for a small healthcare practice. Now this content does two things, a) it attracts the right people to your website and your LinkedIn and b) it positions you as the expert who understands their world before you’ve ever spoken to them.

Fourth, and I can’t stress this enough, get one client in the sector first. Even if it takes a little longer, even if the first one comes through a referral or a favour, get in, get that first client. Get your first dental practice or veterinary clinic as a client. Then look after them, like overservice them. Learn the sector from them, learn about the tools that they rely on and the language that they use and their stresses internally. And then go build a case study around that person. Get a testimonial from them because you can use that as the foundation for everything else that you do in this vertical.

One genuine client story from inside the sector is worth a hundred claims that you make on your website, because the real story proves that you’ve actually done it. And when another practice owner like them reads about a practice that sounds just like theirs and the problems that they had that you solved, that’s the moment they’re most likely to book in to talk to you.

Healthcare is a long game, like all good verticals, but it is a very, very good game to play. The practices are stable, the compliance pressure is real and ongoing, the technology dependency is growing year on year, and the referral networks are tight enough that one great relationship can seed a dozen more. So if you don’t currently have healthcare practices in your client base, this is a vertical worth some serious attention.

A few weeks ago, an MSP showed me their brand new website and they were really proud of it. And I could completely see why because it looked great, really clean layouts, nice colours, modern fonts, and they’d got AI to mostly put it together but guided by humans. Visually it absolutely did the job, and that was my problem with it because although it looked professional, it didn’t really say anything. There was no positioning, no emotional pull, no clear sense of what made this MSP different from their many, many competitors. There was no obvious reason for any prospect to land on it and think, “Ah, yes, this is the one for me.”

Now AI is brilliant at creating websites, but what it still can’t do is create meaning or connection or intent. And here’s the thing, plenty of MSPs have exactly the same problem even when they haven’t used AI to build their site.

Your website looks good or at least acceptable on the surface, but behind the scenes it’s not converting traffic into leads, then into sales appointments.

And that’s the only job a website actually has. So let me give you something practical that you can use right now.

When a prospect lands on your website, they subconsciously ask a small number of questions. And of course they don’t write them down, they don’t consciously think them through. But if those questions are not answered quickly and clearly, they’re not going to give you feedback or fill in a form to tell you what was missing, they’re just going to leave. They’ll go and look at another MSP instead. So here are the five questions that matter the most.

Question one, is this actually for a business like mine? Prospects want to recognise themselves almost immediately. If your website feels like it’s for any business anywhere, then it kind of ends up feeling like it’s for no one in particular. A strong website makes it super obvious who you work with, what size of business you’re geared towards, and the kinds of problems that you specialise in solving. Specific feels safe, generic feels risky.

Question two, do these people understand my world? This isn’t about technical brilliance or listing every tool in your stack. It’s about showing that you understand the realities your prospects live with every day. The pressure, the downtime, the security worries, their frustrated staff and the risk to their reputation if something goes wrong. If your website talks more about your technology than their problems, then you’ve missed the point. Prospects don’t want IT, they want fewer headaches. Understand this and show it on every single page of your website and you could be one of the most successful MSPs on the planet.

Question three, can I trust these people? Trust isn’t created by saying you’re trusted. It’s created by evidence: social proof, client stories, real examples from real people with real opinions. All of those do far more work than marketing claims ever will. If your website has no proof that anyone has ever actually been helped by you and given you money to do it, then the message you’re sending is, “We sound good, but you’re taking a leap of faith.” And honestly, most buyers won’t take that leap.

Question four, roughly how much is this going to cost me? And this is where so many MSP websites fall down. No one expects an exact price on a website, but complete silence on the subject creates anxiety. Your site should help prospects understand what affects the price, what a basic package looks like versus a comprehensive package and whether you are even in the right ballpark for their budget. Trust me, mystery does not increase conversions, clarity does.

Question five, what do I do next? You’d be amazed how many MSP’s websites forget this part entirely. After reading any part of any page on your site, it should be absolutely blindingly obvious what the next step is, why they should take it and what’ll happen when they do. We call this your “call to action”. And if your call to action is vague or kind of hidden somewhere at the bottom of one page or just on your contact us page, or even if it’s just a bit too timid, then prospects hesitate and hesitation kills momentum.

The best call to action is your live calendar. Ask them for a 15 minute video call if they’re a B2B prospect. For Co-Managed, you need a longer call because that’s a much longer in-depth call. There you should ask for a 30 minute call, but put your live calendar, embed it on the page. In fact, embed it on every single page. And if it’s a long page with lots of content and pictures and videos, then you might have that two or three places throughout that page. So it’s obvious for them that the next step is to book a discovery call with you.

So here’s a quick challenge for you then after those five. Open your website right now, or if you’re driving, do it later. Read it as if you’ve never seen it before then ask yourself honestly… does my website clearly answer all five of those questions or does it just look nice? Because a good looking website without any substance is just decoration, and decoration doesn’t grow your MSP.

This podcast episode’s been released on the 9th of June, 2026. And that means that brand new content drops tomorrow for the members of my MSP Marketing Edge membership. On the 10th of every month we release new content both for our B2B membership and our co-managed IT membership. So tomorrow we’ll drop into the portal all of the content for July 2026. And what we do is give our members a three-step marketing system that they can use to generate leads and all of the content that they need to implement that system.

That’s videos, blogs, Google business profile updates, LinkedIn newsletters, other social content, including posts, more videos, images, PDFs, carousels, infographics. Plus there’s a full marketing campaign, including a physical postcard to mail out, emails for you to send and a script for your telephone person. There’s also a guide and a printed newsletter for you to send to your hottest prospects. And this is just some of the new marketing content that we drop on the 10th of every month.

So if you fancy some of that for your MSP, just be aware that we only work with one MSP per area for each of our two memberships, B2B and co-managed. And you can check if your area is locked or available by entering your postcode or your zip code at mspmarketingedge.com/membership.

Featured guest: Justin Reinmuth is the President of techrug (The Technology Risk Underwriting Group).  Since 2004, he and his team have had the responsibility of managing risk and customising over 50,000 policies for IT Service Providers in areas such as Cyber Liability Errors & Omissions Insurance, Directors and Officers Liability Insurance, Employment Practices Liability Insurance and Fiduciary Liability Insurance.

As a Coverholder in Lloyd’s of London, techrug’s TechMal® (Technology Malpractice) Cyber Liability Errors & Omissions Insurance Policy is currently in place with over 2,000 Managed Service Providers, Managed Security Service Providers, Cloud Computing Companies across the United States.

I learned something that I really didn’t know from interviewing today’s guest and I wonder if you’re about to go on the same learning journey. It turns out that there are actually implications for your MSP if your clients buy cyber liability insurance elsewhere. Did you know that? Well, the good news is that my guest is going to explain what those implications are and also how you can mitigate them more effectively. And more exciting than that, he’s also going to talk about how cyber liability insurance can be turned into a new revenue stream for you.

This is Justin Reinmuth with techrug, the Technology Risk Underwriting Group.

Cool. And thank you so much for being here on the podcast, Justin, because we’re talking about something which bizarrely in seven odd years of doing this podcast I don’t think we’ve ever looked at before, which is cyber liability insurance. And you and I are going to talk about sort of the state of where it is as just where we’re coming up to the middle of 2026. We’re going to talk about the state of where it is, is insurance a good thing for business owners to buy, should MSPs be selling it, recommending it, but we’re not going to talk about specific policies or specific laws or specific countries. This is going to be something for every MSP everywhere in the world to just understand the state of the cyber liability insurance market as things stand right now.

So just tell us very briefly about you. And I’m very aware that asking an insurance broker to tell us their backstory is a dangerous thing to do, but give us a brief idea of you and how you got into being one of, I think you’re one of the world’s premier experts at cyber liability insurance. Is that right?

So I actually after graduating college got into the IT side. Some people say I was an MSP, I was not, this was pre Y2K when the world was going to blow up, it didn’t. Then came the advent of the offshore model. I had two partners. We had a couple large clients like ABC Radio. We did not want to go that direction. So got out of the IT business and I got involved in insurance in January of 2004 and for the first couple years, probably like a lot of agents or agencies, I did the landscape or the bakery, the manufacturer, the wholesaler, the home, the auto. But to me, it was rather a little bit boring. And I was sitting down with a client in 2008 that owned an IT company and he said, “Hey, do you specialise in IT? You seem to know a lot about IT.” So kind of pulled the two worlds together and today techrug stands for Technology Risk Underwriting Group. We are actually a cover holder in Lloyd’s of London. So essentially just from a high level, we’re basically an insurance company. So that’s a little bit about techrug and my background.

That’s so cool. Actually, Lloyd’s of London, just as a side note, it has this most amazing building in London. I don’t know if you come to London on a regular basis, Justin, but if ever you do and you get to actually go to the Lloyds of London building, it’s got these weird spiral staircases on the outside and it’s kind of a modern and an old building at the same time. It’s a fascinating building to look at. Goodness knows what happens inside, I guess people make a lot of money because we all know that insurance companies make a lot of money.

So let’s look at cyber liability insurance. And so I’ve been in the channel since 2016 and if I cast my head back 10 years, there was the murmurings of people should probably start to think about cyber liability insurance. And now I guess it’s a much more mature market. So when do you think was the tipping point at which it actually became something that the ordinary businesses really should look at?

January 2020. So up until that point, a lot of MSPs bought errors and omissions insurance for typical type of claims that they’ve seen in the past. So it would be breach of contract. My tech didn’t install MFA rider. They screwed the backup up. So it was typically there for an error, omission or negligence. And 2020 was the year of the ransomware attack against the MSP. So they would hit the RMM and then boom, start shutting down all their clients. So that was really where I think both from a, all of a sudden now instead of maybe looking at the cyber liability errors and omissions insurance, I’ve got to take it, to also really hardening up the systems internally. So that was the month and the year because I was on a couple claims calls.

That’s amazing that you’ve actually got it right down narrowed to something that happened six years ago now. And if I think about some of the early criticisms that I remember from MSPs who had clients who had cyber liability insurance, some of the early criticisms were it’s never going to pay out because you’ve got all of these caveats and all of these things you have to do and actually is the market more mature now because businesses are more aware of cyber security than they were sort of pre 2020 or is that still sometimes a bit of an issue and you need to be careful which policies you’re looking at?

Yeah. So if it’s for the MSP’s clients, last year in 2024, about 1% of the policies globally that were issued were cyber, that’s going to double by 2030. So you have the larger enterprise clients that get cyber. I mean, the large banks, the large hospitals, they get it. Really where a lot of the purchasing is going to come from is the SMB market. So MSPs are going to have to assist with that, making sure that the right security’s in place.

Sometimes an MSP or an MSP’s client can get into trouble on cyber with misrepresentation and reporting problems.

So a lot of times, we get this all the time where the MSP’s client doesn’t want to check with the MSP and the question will be, do you have MFA? Well, the client thinks, yes, I’ve got MFA on my email, but the carrier could be asking remote access, routers, switches, other areas. They don’t think to check with the MSP and that leads to a misrepresentation. The other problem is that for some reason, a lot of clients, if there’s an instance in the cyber policy, it’s called unauthorised access. So if somebody’s in the network that’s not supposed to be, there are reporting provisions in the policy. So kind of as a rule of thumb, within 60 days, you have to let the carrier know that this event took place. If you try to turn it in on the 65th day, there will be no coverage.

The other thing is a lot of people might remember the 60 days, but let’s say they renew April 1st and this happens on March 3rd. Well, you actually have to report it before you renew. So I think those two things in the past have been why some people think maybe why the policies don’t pay, but I think through education it’s getting better.

That makes perfect sense. And I guess actually I can see there where the end clients, it makes real sense for them to work in a much more integrated way with their MSP because obviously the MSP can be on top of those sort of things for them to make sure that their reporting is correct and that they understand that we all hate the terms and conditions of insurance, but we all understand why insurance companies do them because they’re not charities, they’re there to make a profit as well.

So do you see, because obviously you work with MSPs and as well as with the businesses on this, do you see increasingly that MSPs are recommending that their clients go and buy insurance policies? Are they reselling them or introducing them? Are they in fact using them as a way of helping the client protect or protect the client from themselves? Because it’s just struck me actually. If an insurance policy says you must have ABC in order and they’re good basic solid cyber security fundamentals, then there’s another reason why the client would have to say to the MSP, “Can you help me to make sure I stay at this level?” Does that make sense?

Yeah. And I think it’s really all of the above. So kind of piece by piece, obviously I think the MSPs need to educate their client before you go answering questions, please check with us. And that would be true in any profession. You’re not going to start thinking you can write off stuff on your taxes and not check with your accountant. So the MSP is really that trusted advisor. The other things that MSPs have to pay attention to is overstepping their boundaries. So you have to remember that the contract is between your client and the insurance company. So getting to if event takes place, the first thing that your client has to do once you told them that maybe someone was in the network that shouldn’t be, is report that to the carrier.

A lot of times the MSP can go ahead and start doing the work where you could get into trouble and we’ve seen it, you could potentially deny your client’s coverage because you didn’t have authorisation to do what you were about to do. We just came off an event where we saw a carrier went back at an MSP, they call it segregation, where they said, “Hey, had our client called us and we launched this SentinelOne product, we feel that it would have been a $15,000 claim. This was $106,000 so you’re going to pay us the difference.”

And they sent that to the MSP?

They sent them a letter which was forwarded to us.

Wow.

So segregation is, it’s not on a lot of people’s radar necessarily, but in terms of insurance, I mean it is risk management 101. I mean, if a pipe burst in your office, first thing you go and look and who was the last person to touch the pipe, right? You’re going to try to get someone else to potentially pay for that claim. And again, I always educate MSPs. The insurance policy that your client has is an insurance contract and it has things like pre-tendered costs are not covered, meaning that if you start going and doing things and you want the insurance company to pay you, you have to have approval to do so.

So as you’re saying this, Justin, it strikes me that there are possibly MSPs listening to this or watching this on YouTube that have just broken out in a cold sweat because actually that adds even more complication to an already complicated situation. Do you see this a lot or do you think this is something that’s going to raise its head in the MSP world more and more in the years ahead?

It’s going to raise its head. And it’s just right now, as we just discussed, the number of policies in 2024 doubling in 2030. So you’re going to start seeing this as more and more of a problem. And don’t take my word for it. If you Google cyber liability segregation, I did it about three months ago, and six of the 10 results were law firms that are hired by the insurance companies and they say specifically to go at MSPs and their vendors.

Wow. Okay. Interesting.

And I think this isn’t a scary thing. It’s more of a knowledge thing.

Oh, I agree. And let’s be honest, MSPs are used to liability and used to risk and used to complication, but it’s another thing to think about, isn’t it? So if you could wave a magic wand as someone who deals with this day in, day out, would you have it that the MSP is, I was going to say controlling, I don’t know if that’s the right word, but would you have it that the MSP is recommending to the clients? We recommend you get cyber liability insurance. We recommend this company you have free choice, of course, because obviously the MSPs can’t sell insurance themselves, but in doing so and introducing their clients to partners they prefer, does that then ensure that they’re at least getting told when policies have been renewed, when there are new terms and conditions coming in? Even as I ask that question, it strikes me that that’s just the most sensible way to do it.

I think there’s kind of a two-pronged approach, one you alluded to, are they requiring, meaning the MSPs, their clients carry cyber. So a lot of MSAs, master services agreements that we see from our MSPs that are in place with their clients, it tells the client, as your MSP we’ll carry this insurance, could be general liability, workers’ comp in the US, cyber liability errors and omissions, but it also asks the client to carry cyber liability insurance. So I think that I would put that in contractually so that you have a fallback or a safety net.

The other part of it is the MSP is the CIO of many of these organisations. So I think that they have a fiduciary responsibility to sit down with the client and say, there is a ransomware attack every 11-ish seconds, there aren’t house fires every 11 seconds, so if you ask me should I carry cyber insurance or home insurance, I’d say cyber, just the statistic. I think they need to educate the client that it is a hazardous world out here and there is insurance that’s available if you click on a link you shouldn’t have and it launches a ransomware attack. If you get tricked into sending money to someone you shouldn’t have. If you’re down, do you want business interruption? Do you want the insurance carrier to pay for your lost productivity? So I think having that conversation is extremely valuable for the MSP to have with their client.

Yes, I guess so. And one final thought is can this become a profit generator for MSPs as well? Because obviously the insurance world is a for-profit business, it’s not a charity, it’s there to make money. And if for example, and this isn’t a free advert for you because that’s not what we do on the podcast, but if for an example, an MSP was to work with someone like yourself, would they get introductory fees or referral fees or just a thank you or is it more the case that actually you just make sure that they’ve got what they need to help protect themselves and to protect their clients as well?

Yeah. So I think that you can use the stringent guidelines that the insurance carriers put into place in terms of what that client has to carry. Again, if you’re pushing them more and more to cyber insurance and you can’t get your client to do security awareness training or they hate the MFA and going through that extra step, they aren’t going to get an insurance policy that’s worth any weight in gold that they want to pay out without doing some basic things in place. So I think again, you can use your security stack and maybe align it with the insurance carrier and what they’re asking their client to carry and that will help push your client going from 8 of 10 services to 10 of 10 services.

Yeah, that makes sense. Justin, thank you for explaining that to us. That’s a whole new, I guess for many MSPs, a whole new opportunity, new world, new set of complications, I guess, depending on how you look at it that’s just opened up there. Just briefly tell us what do you do to help MSPs? So we know obviously you sell cyber liability insurance and you do that in the US and I believe you’re expanding into the UK and Australia market soon, but just tell us briefly what you do to help MSPs and what’s the best way to get in touch with you?

Yeah, absolutely. So we’re more than just cyber liability errors and omissions insurance carriers. So we work with our MSPs on the proper cyber security training. So if an incident does happen, how do you properly tackle that incident? Because there could be 10 ways to get your client out of a situation that they didn’t sign up for. And then properly write up an incident report, an IR report. We help them out on sales training. A lot of MSPs are struggling getting new logos over the last two years. We were able fortunately to work with several MSPs that have closed banks or gotten into the GRC space that couldn’t have before. So we help them out with attorney drafted templates, making sure they got the proper MSA and statement of work. So to me, it’s a big risk management pie. Insurance being one slice of that pie, but you also have to have the other things.

We’ll be live in the UK and Australia in Q3 of 2026. I appreciate you having us on here because I think what you do is fantastic and the education you give the MSPs is excellent. Our website is www.techrug.com. If you go there, you can click the contact us and we’ll get ahold of you. We also have different social media outlets, whether it’s LinkedIn, TikTok, and Instagram.