Welcome to Episode 279 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

This is the hardest role to recruit for in your MSP, but when you get it right, it can lead to an explosion in sales. Now you thought it was hard finding a decent level three technician or a service desk manager. Well, no, this role is even harder. And even though thousands of people can do it, you wouldn’t want to hire the vast majority of them.

Let me tell you what this role is, why it’s so important in your MSP and how to find the perfect person for you, someone who’s going to help you win new clients and grow your profit.

Now, this might be controversial to some, but I believe that every MSP should have an in-house person making outbound phone calls. Phoning leads and prospects and trying to find the golden nugget opportunity. That’s when an ordinary business owner or manager is kind of almost ready to switch from their incumbent MSP, and it’s the best time to start talking to someone.

Having a phone person, well, they can find them purely through doing the hard work and that’s doing something that you personally would never want to do, which is of course, picking up the phone repeatedly day after day after day, just calling these people. And these aren’t sales calls, by the way, this is not some kind of Wolf of Wall Street boiler room.

These are relationship building calls, to find out who is nearly ready, willing, and able to have a conversation about switching MSPs.

And then book in a 15 minute video discovery call with whoever does the selling in your business, which of course might be you or you might have a salesperson. And then you or the salesperson does the heavy lifting of booking the actual face-to-face sales appointment and of course closing the client. I know that you can do that. If I can get you in front of the right people, you can do that, right? Well, this is one of the best ways to get those 15 minute zooms. As I said, it’s an in-house person role rather than using a telemarketing agency. And there are some telemarketing agencies out there, some great ones out there, but there are also many rotten ones. And I always like to take a long-term view with any kind of marketing infrastructure that you’re putting in place. So honestly, I do believe you’ll be better off hiring someone to work within your MSP doing this. They may actually be based at home, but they’re just doing it for you. They’re not doing it for anyone else.

A back to work mom is great for this. You are looking for someone who has had a career break but who was previously in a professional role and yet they have no desire to return back to that lifestyle for whatever reason. Now, ideally, she doesn’t have any kind of professional selling or calling background, otherwise she might bring lots of bad habits to the party, but she does love being on the phone. So what is a bad job for you and me, and a distress activity, is fun for her. Just calling people all day long.

Actually you’re only looking for her to do two to three hours a day, two to three days a week. That kind of flexible part-time work is perfect for many back to work parents working around the school day. So anyway, let’s assume that you are committed to that role. I’ve hired and fired lots and lots of telephone people and I advise all of the members of my MSP Marketing Edge service to go out and get one. And I’ve noticed that there are three critical success factors in any phone person.

The first is that they need marketing support. If you just give them a list of people to call and say – just call these people, see who’s ready to switch – well, that’s a horrible job for anybody because it’s just cold calling and there’s not a human on the planet who really likes cold calling, let’s be honest. Would you want to just cold call people all day long? Me neither. I’d rather do anything, I’d rather lose a finger than do cold calling. So a better option is warm calling, and this is where you set up a marketing system to build audiences, grow relationships with those audiences, and then the final stage of what you’re trying to do here, which is to convert relationships. You’re looking to convert them from being a lead to being a prospect to being a client.

We’re talking here about the three step lead generation system that I often talk about in my YouTube videos and on the Podcast because it is so very powerful. If your phone person is calling people who are connected to you on LinkedIn, who get educational emails from you, who may already have seen 10 or 20 pieces of your content over the last year or so, well guess what? That’s not a cold call, that’s a warm call. And that’s going to be a dramatically easier conversation. That makes total sense, right?

The second critical success factor is to use a CRM properly. So firstly, make sure you have an actual CRM and you’re not just trying to use your PSA for this. A PSA is not a marketing tool, it’s an operational tool. So go get a proper CRM, and the low cost no cost one include MailChimp, MailerLite, and of course Growably, which is free with a Tech Tribe membership.

Now, the thing that’s critical is using that CRM properly. You must set it up so it’s easy for your phone person to know who to call, see what relationship building activities have already happened with them in the past, and then for them to be able to leave simple notes that can be referenced by somebody else in the future. You always kind of need to assume that your phone person today will be a different phone person in the future. They might change. So any notes from calls today must make perfect sense when a different person is accessing them in a year’s time. And a side note on this, some MSPs actually attach the VoIP recordings to the CRM record. Personally, I think that’s a little bit of overkill, but I can see the benefit of doing that if you can automate it.

Okay, our final critical success factor is that you must keep your phone person motivated. Now, this is a hard job and even somebody who likes making outbound phone calls will have days where they just can’t be bothered because there is a lot of rejection. There’s a lot of work to do to get that rejection. And there’s an even greater deal of work to do to get the desired results. So some easy ways to keep your phone person motivated is to remember one of the reasons that any back to work parent goes to work, is to have adult company. Now, I’m a sole parent myself, and my child now is 14, but when she was younger, she was like eight or something, there were days where I was desperate to speak to other adults and do adult things, not just do drawings and have tea parties with dollies, although I do miss that now I have to say. So keep your phone person motivated by keeping her involved in what’s happening in your business.

Maybe she joins the big group teams call that you do every Monday, even though that’s actually quite an operational one, it helps her to feel that she’s part of something, part of the team, that what she does matters. She can see the results of her work as new clients come on board and start to be discussed by your technicians. Maybe if on Fridays, if you do a team lunch, you get her involved in that. Either she comes into the office to take part in it or you send a pizza to her home so everyone is having pizza in the office or at home at the same time and jumps on a Teams call, which is a social. And definitely of course, get her involved in social events.

There’s one more thing that I recommend that you do, and it does require a little more of your time, but the payoff from this is massive, and that’s where you coach your salesperson. You jump on a call together and the first thing you do is you play back a recording of one of their calls, something that you kind of listen to together. Pick one where they have actually got through to someone, just look for the longer calls, you want one where they’ve had a conversation with someone, not just where they’ve been rejected from the gatekeeper. And then you can talk about three things in that call. You can talk about what went well and your phone person can do the same, they can say what they thought went well. And then you can talk about what didn’t go so well, and again your phone person does the same, what they thought didn’t go so well. And then finally, you talk about one thing that they should do differently next time. So what goes well or what went well, what didn’t go so well, what should you do differently next time? And it’s only one thing that they should improve for next time because good coaching is 15 minutes, right? And it’s 15 minutes a week. But in that 15 minutes, you tackle one small problem every week until months and months and months down the line, your phone person is just performing dramatically better.

It’s so tempting to try and tackle everything in one big call, but I promise you you’ll get faster progress if you tackle one small issue every single week for the next X number of weeks. Now, let’s look at the big picture of this. The more you integrate your phone person into your team, the more that they will realise what an important part of the process they are and the more likely it is that they will perform at a very high level for hopefully a long time to come.

If you wanted the fittest, most amazing, most ripped body ever, you know that there would have to be a lot of sacrifice and discipline to make that happen, right? And really, it’s no different with your MSP’s marketing. If you want to have great marketing that delivers one new client a month, then you need to make some sacrifices and have lots of discipline. But what sacrifices and what kind of discipline?

Let me tell you what MSPs with the most successful marketing do every day and how you can emulate them. And don’t worry, it’s not as hard as it sounds.

You should read this book. It’s one of my all time favorites and has pride of place on my business bookshelf. It’s called The Compound Effect written by Darren Hardy. And it shows how tiny actions done every day can lead to big success over time.

Good habits and smart choices add up to amazing results, while bad habits hold you back.

Let me give you two examples, one about eating well then one about your MSP’s marketing. So here’s the eating one. After your dinner tonight, you choose fruit instead of a chocolate bar, which is a tough choice, and I still battle with that one every night. And of course, there’s no immediate payoff is there, other than the short-term feeling of feeling a bit smug. But if you repeat that for a hundred nights, 200, 500, a thousand nights, all of that fruit adds up. Your body is healthier, your weight might even be lower because you haven’t eaten a thousand chocolate bars or you haven’t taken a thousand hits of high sugar and unnecessary calories.

Now let’s look at the equivalent in marketing. Today, you find 10 minutes to post a really good piece of content on LinkedIn instead of dealing with some low level tickets that have come in. And I know it’s tempting to jump on your PSA and do a few password resets or just set up new users just to save your help desk team the hassle. But in the spirit of this saying, you should only do what only you can do, and that’s a great saying, you should only do what only you can do, please don’t jump onto your PSA. Because your technicians can’t post great content on LinkedIn. Only you can. And choosing to do something difficult, like creating content, versus something easy, like doing a password reset for a client, is exactly the same as chocolate versus fruit. Repeat it for a hundred, 200, 500 a thousand days, and all of that activity adds up.

Never forget that ordinary business owners and managers don’t know what they don’t know about technology. And that lack of knowledge encourages something called “inertia loyalty”. It’s where they’re more likely to stay with their incumbent MSP, in fact, way past the point that they’re fed up with them. Or put another way, people only buy when they are ready to buy. And on that day, the very day they wake up finally ready to speak to other MSPs and think about switching. Well, that’s the day you finally benefit from “the compound effect” of a thousand days worth of work on LinkedIn. If they’ve read some of your posts and they like what they see, it doesn’t mean that you are guaranteed to get the sale, but you should at least get a place at the table to fight for a sale. And that’s a good start, right?

You can extend this across more than just LinkedIn. Imagine you developed really great habits, sending out all sorts of regular marketing across multiple platforms. And imagine that prospect waking up on the day that they’re ready and over the previous thousand days they have seen a handful of your posts on LinkedIn and maybe even commented on one or two of them. Maybe they’ve read several of your weekly LinkedIn newsletters. Maybe they’ve chatted briefly with you over a few direct messages. Maybe they’ve opened one in four of your weekly educational emails. Maybe they’ve read a few blogs on your website or watched a couple of your Tech Update videos on YouTube. Maybe they’ve read a few of your printed newsletters that you mailed to them and then they stashed the rest into a desk drawer. And maybe they even briefly chatted to your phone person a couple of times. How likely is it that this prospect now will want to talk to you today?

All of that content that you’ve put out all of those days across all of those channels has created the perception that you are the local tech authority and the best prospects want to hire experts and are willing to pay a little bit more to do so. A bit of a side note now, best of all, you don’t need to actually do all of this work yourself. You should retain responsibility for making sure it happens of course, and maybe even responsibility for creating it or coming up with the ideas. But you can get your team or virtual assistants to do the hard work of actually writing it, editing it, and certainly loading it. This is one of the most important ingredients at the very core of my MSP Marketing Edge service. We give you everything that you need, but we recommend that you use virtual assistants or even our own marketing implementers to make it happen for you.

Featured guest: Neal Schaffer is a digital marketing expert, best-selling author, and global keynote speaker with a passion for helping businesses transform their marketing strategies.

As the founder of PDCA Social, he has guided organisations worldwide in leveraging digital, influencer, and social media marketing for real results.

Neal hosts the Your Digital Marketing Coach podcast and is the author of six books, including the recently published Digital Threads and Maximizing LinkedIn for Business Growth. His mission? Educate and empower.

So here are some common words associated with finding new clients for your MSP: frustrating… mystifying… slow. But actually for some, it’s also unexpectedly scary. Not scary because of how the bank balance looks, but scary for you personally. You’ve probably heard me say before about the importance of putting you in your marketing, but how do you do that if the idea of doing that fills you with dread?

My special guest today can help you to build a personal brand on LinkedIn. He can help you to get over your fears and show you why your leads and prospects will see you and your MSP differently.

Hi, I’m Neal Schaffer, a fractional CMO, author, educator, speaker, who specialises in digital content, influencer social media marketing.

And thanks so much for joining us on the show, Neal. We’re going to get you to talk today about LinkedIn. There are two areas in particular that I want to talk about. The first is MSP owners developing their own professional brand on LinkedIn. We’re going to talk about what you should do and what you shouldn’t do. And I think it’s also overdue that we talk about AI on LinkedIn as well, and how you can use AI as a content creation tool. Again, let’s look at the good things and the bad things about this because I know that you are a particular expert on both of those issues. So Neal, let’s do a bit of credibility checking with you. Tell us a little bit about you, your career, what you do with MSPs and with other kind of businesses and why we should trust what you’ve got to say about LinkedIn.

Great. Well, I should start out by saying I started my career in B2B sales – semiconductors, embedded software, network management software – so I know a lot of the space somewhat indirectly that the MSPs deal in. And being in B2B sales I also understand that the MSPs that I engage with are very focused in sales and business development, but very light on the marketing side, right, where they can use a lot of help. So I bring that B2B sales experience as VP of Asia sales.

I did all my work in Asia actually, even though I’m an American, so I had to work with people in different cultures – China, Japan, Korea – and I began to foster this really holistic business perspective. So fast forward, I moved back to the United States after living 15 years in Japan after graduating from university, and it’s 2008 and LinkedIn is starting to boom. I got heavily involved in it. I launched a blog and lo and behold, I ended up becoming invited to speak at events. I published my first book back in 2009, which was on LinkedIn called Windmill Networking: Understanding and Leveraging and Maximizing LinkedIn.

January 2010, I got consulting gigs lined up and I decided to pull the plug from corporate and go solo from then. So over the last 15 years from 2010, I ended up writing my second book on LinkedIn called Maximizing LinkedIn for Sales and Social Media Marketing, really taking that B2B perspective on social media and on LinkedIn, which has become quite mainstream today. But I also do social selling, trainings for salespeople, financial services, other industries. I’ve been invited to speak at events like a conference put on by Motorola for their internal employees, and I recently decided there’s been a lot said about LinkedIn over the years, but I think that I still have a perspective and a voice, and I want to give a new and fresh perspective on that.

So I just published a new book right now only available in ebook. I am going to expand it into a paperback, but it’s called Maximizing LinkedIn for Business Growth. And it includes the most up-to-date information, even my perspective on AI and how you can use that on LinkedIn.

So that’s my street cred. My motto is educate and empower. So I’m not an agency, I’m a fractional CMO, I work with businesses, it could be anywhere from three months to a few years, but it’s not a black box project or a consulting gig. I become an employee, I report to the CEO, and it’s really about transferring my IP to your team. So educate and empower is my motto. That’s the way I work, and I’m just excited to be here to help everybody virtually.

And if we were to cut you, Neal, you would literally bleed LinkedIn blue. That’s how much you are embedded with LinkedIn. I mean, we’ve all watched the platform change over the years, and the LinkedIn of old is completely different to the LinkedIn of today. I personally think Microsoft have actually been great custodians that they’ve made the platform better. And certainly if you look at other social media platforms, we’re talking about you Facebook and certainly you X, I mean let’s not even bring X into the equation, but if you look at Facebook, Facebook has steadily become a worse product in that it’s become more addictive and showing us more of the things we don’t want. And I know that they’re getting record revenues and profits, but I think eventually that’s going to come back and bite them. You can look at LinkedIn, and I use LinkedIn for my own marketing. I use it for my pleasure sometimes. I quite enjoy sitting looking at posts, and I don’t mind the odd advert or the odd sponsored things, but you get to see people you really know and the stuff that they’re doing. Is your experience of LinkedIn, because obviously you are a lot closer to it than any of us, is your experience as it’s developed over the last 10, 15 years that yes, it has become an even more valuable B2B tool?

Yeah, absolutely. And it’s funny because the MSP owners and others that I work with, and the first conversation we have, it’s the exact same first conversation I had back in 2008 and 2010. The conversation is that the MSP owner’s like LinkedIn but, I only want to connect with people I know, I keep it personal. Why are all these people sharing selfies, etc, etc. And what happens? Social media changes over time. The workforce now, at least in the United States, is a majority millennial. So of course it’s going to change with the times over the course of 15 years, things are going to happen, and I like to adapt. I’m a lifelong learner. I want to thrive in whatever environment I’m in as any B2B salesperson should, right?

Once you take your emotions, and I see this just in general with marketing, a lot of MSP owners have emotional, we don’t want to do this or we definitely want to do this. And once you take your emotions out of your marketing decisions and you look at the data and you treat social media more as a business tool, there’s still a personal side to it don’t get me wrong, I think that really the mindset shift really unlocks the opportunity. So yes, I agree with you. LinkedIn has only evolved. They’re now doing video, dedicated video tab on the app. There’s a wide variety of content that you can publish there that you can’t do in other platforms. It’s funny because from an engagement perspective, because LinkedIn makes money from various ways, not just from advertising because they have sales navigator, they have recruiting solutions, they can give more engagement in the feed and have less ads. And I think that shows, and I see a lot of entrepreneurs have actually shifted from an Instagram to a LinkedIn because they actually get more engagement there, and it truly has become more of an engaging platform.

Back in the day, Paul, I think you remember LinkedIn groups were the rage back in the early 2010s. I definitely generated a lot of traffic from them, business from them. But today it’s really the engagement’s in the feed, it’s in the content, and any MSP owner who is not taking part in that either in the content creation or in the engagement, which can lead to further conversation and leads, is really missing the boat.

Yeah, I completely agree. And LinkedIn groups was so exciting when they first came out and everyone rushed to join the relevant groups, but they never went back. And I think you’re right, it’s all in the feed now. Okay, just today, just about four hours before you and I have done this interview, I was chatting to an MSP, because I talked to two three MSPs a day, and I kid you not Neal, the question, this isn’t meant to embarrass this person who I’m not going to name, but one of his questions was: Should I really put my photo on my LinkedIn profile? And we looked at his LinkedIn and it was like a placeholder. I don’t know if it was like a LinkedIn placeholder or he uploaded a placeholder image, but it was a real head in-hand moment for me. And it’s really interesting that you say you’re having the same conversations with people that you were sort of 15, 16, 17 years ago. Tell us why as the owner of the business, every MSP needs to be all over LinkedIn and build up that personal brand and what does that personal brand look like in your opinion?

Yeah, this is a really deep conversation, but I go back into my sales history and there was one deal that I got from a very famous Japanese consumer electronics manufacturer. And my VP of sales said, Neal, only you could have gotten that deal a multi six figure deal, because it was the relationship I had built, right? Sales is all about relationships. Marketing is all about relationships. People buy from people they like, know and trust. We all know that. So why are we ignoring the number one place where we spend our time online, is social media. When I talk to older MSP owners, I realise that the people that don’t understand it are the people that don’t use it or they’ve never been influenced to use it in the right way because of people in their circle, people in their family, in their network, what have you.

But if I just dumb it down, and you see this book behind me Digital Threads, I actually came out with this book two weeks after Maximizing LinkedIn for Business Growth, long story. But I dumbed down digital marketing to three main components. We have search, email, and social. Search is that discoverability, which can also happen on social, but it’s primarily search engines and now we have AI search engines. We have email marketing automation, which I’m assuming every MSP owner is all over, and if not, they should be contacting Paul and get that going. And then we have the social part, and you can’t ignore that.

By staying off of LinkedIn as an MSP owner, you are completely ignoring one third of the equation where people spend the time.

And it’s not about, yes, we want to get direct business on LinkedIn, but it’s more about developing the relationships. It’s developing relationships with your employees when they post something up and you want to celebrate them. Or you’re salespeople who are actually sharing the fact that you’re doing an event next week or a webinar and you want to thank them for that. Or your customers, when they report record earnings thanks to your help, you want to be the first one to like it and comment on it. And when other people are talking about the challenges they have with their current MSPs, you want to be there to comment. It’s all these conversations and behind the conversation, it’s a real person. It’s not a 9-year-old trying to pretend they’re an 18-year-old on a TikTok or an Instagram. These are actual business people with profiles behind them. So you not having your profile photo is like going to a networking event or going to an MSP event and having a paper bag over your head.

90% of the content that we process as visual. And generating that like, know and trust, often comes down to the visual, not just in your profile photo. I would go further. We can look at your profile. All roads lead back to your profile. What is that header image you have? Or the cover image? You have a featured section which you can feature visuals. Are you featuring them there? I recommend my clients to feature visuals throughout their profile, but it really begins with that profile photo. So then you begin to ask, well, Neal, what sort of visual should I have? And this really comes down to your branding and content strategy. So I find when I talk to a lot of MSP owners that the MSP is really shaped in them. It’s their personal brand offline that has brought in the business and the referrals to bring in even more business. It’s now about translating to be online.

I think back before social media, I worked for a startup out of Ottawa, Canada, and my CEO founder would come over and because he was a CEO and I was VP of sales, I’d be able to get some pretty high level people at the Sonys and the Panasonics and the Sanyos and Sharps to meet with them. And he would tell these stories of why these other companies decided to work with us or why he started the company or why they decided to put this one feature in or provide this managed service or whatever it is. And it’s those stories that I think every MSP founder listening to this has. It’s now a matter of translating that into content. It’s a matter of translating that into visual branding. And it requires a mindset shift. It also requires working with a company like yours, Paul, or a fractional CMO or a consultant or someone.  But I think once you make that switch, once it’s now we’re accompanying a mindset shift with a strategic shift and actual implementation, you begin to see a lot more activity, and the activity is really strategically focused.

So yes, the personal branding, the entrepreneurial approach is that visual branding that makes clear, because there’s a lot of other MSPs out there as we know, what is different about your company. It’s often in the colours, the visuals that you use on your website and your logo, or maybe you have a motto like mine is educate and empower, whatever you have. And it’s bringing out those visuals in that cover image so that when people go to your profile, they immediately know who you are, what you do, and what your company does. But it also goes into the story, the storytelling that I talked about that you can infuse in your content, that you can infuse in your profile. So instead of having a very boring profile, which isn’t engaging, you have something that becomes more of what we would call in digital marketing a lead magnet. So I believe it’s the storytelling, it’s the emotional connections, it’s done through the engagement and the feed, but it really starts with your profile, putting your house in order, and then starting to slowly create this content, which really is an extension of what you’ve been talking about all along offline.

Yes, that makes perfect sense. And I know a lot of MSPs struggle with the fact that on LinkedIn, the kind of content that perhaps they want to talk about, like technology, cyber security, backups, ransomware, all of that kind of stuff is the kind of stuff that ordinary business owners and managers aren’t interested in. And the fact that sometimes the more personal content is more appealing, again, a lot of MSP struggle with that. I used a plugin into my Chrome about six months ago to have a look at my own LinkedIn. I can’t remember what the plugin’s called, but it showed that my most engaging piece of content ever was to do with a birthday gift that I’d given to my dad on his 70th birthday. I’d done a little off the cuff video, it was actually him in a World War II bomber. It didn’t fly, but it did what was called an airport run or an airstrip run where they run it down the airstrip. And I couldn’t believe that was my most engaging piece of content. All of the content I put out about MSP marketing, no, don’t care about that. That was the most engaging thing. Now I’m quite happy because that’s just part of my personal brand. It shows that I’m a good son, I’m enjoying time with my family, all of that kind of stuff. Do you think that kind of personal content and that kind of real life content has a place and what proportion of that should be in the mix?

Yeah, no, absolutely. And that’s a great point. I have a dedicated chapter on content in Maximizing LinkedIn for Business Growth because that’s really what it comes down to on a day-to-day basis, outside of that engagement, once you have your profile and the branding down. So there’s different types of content. There’s your professional content and then what I would call engagement content. And engagement content, the more personal type of content will always get more engagement, and therefore the next time you have professional content, it’ll get a little boost in the algorithm. So you actually want to have both. And that engagement content, I mean, it’s hard enough to get some MSP founders to talk professionally on LinkedIn and become a content creator, even if it’s technical and professional, it’s even harder to go the personal route. And that’s why I recommend, if you’re not doing this, start with the professional technical side, putting your own storytelling into it so it becomes quasi personal. It becomes your story unique to you and your brand, your company, your story, or your services, what have you. But slowly over time, you also want to consume other people’s content. If you’re listening, you didn’t know this, you can follow people on LinkedIn without connecting to them, just like you follow people on an Instagram. So that’s an easy way if you don’t want to connect with anyone and everyone, if you want to sort of see what your competitors are doing, what other MSP owners are doing, I highly recommend you do some searches. You find some MSP owners that are actively publishing content. And inevitably, Paul, whenever I do a social selling training, I’ll always try to find the one or two people in the organisation or at competitors who are already doing this pretty savvily. And that is the best way to convince others when they see, oh my gosh, that person’s getting a hundred likes and 20 comments in every post, they sort of wake up to the opportunities that exist there.

So that would be my advice, not just publish, but consume from your industry. And I think over time, you’re going to get it. The light bulb’s going to switch on, and you’re going to find a way to craft your own unique story. And maybe it isn’t directly related, maybe like ransomware, like my father, may he rest in peace, he got hit by ransomware, he lost decades of photos from his personal computer. Now, I hope that this never happens to anybody that’s listening, but even something like a ransomware or cyber security, it also affects us personally. And you could share those personal stories from yourself or anecdotally, and it’s engaging content. I mean, I don’t want it to be negative content, but it indirectly also relates to what you do. So you need to find those different angles. The Venn diagram of overlaps is, I think, where you’re going to find your best success.

I love that. That’s great advice. Thank you. Final question for you, Neal, let’s talk about AI. So we all know there’s a thousand AI tools out there, another thousand were released just today. So there’s plenty of AI tools. We all know now the limitations of what it can and can’t do. In terms of creating content, where do you think that fits in? Because we’ve talked a lot here about essentially authenticity and being the real you and using the platform in that way. And obviously AI is not the real you. So how do you recommend MSPs use AI to augment and make that LinkedIn content just easier?

Yeah, so I’ll start with the comment on tools. I, like many others because I’m in the digital marketing industry, when all these tools came out, I was a big fan of them. I didn’t even use ChatGPT because I was so interested in all the different tools which provide different recipes, which basically tee up all these wants – You want a LinkedIn newsletter? Boom! You want a Google ad? Boom! And then I realised over time, and especially because some of these tools had their own webinars and they were showing what they were doing, that I could basically do the same thing in ChatGPT. And that to me is the only tool I think you need for AI today. There’s other specialised tools out there, don’t get me wrong, but I would go deep in the Chat GPT, some like Claude better, some like Google better, pick one. But I would start to organise everything in there and allow it to use its machine learning to better understand you, your voice, your products, your industry, what have you. So that’s step number one is finding that tool. To me, it’s ChatGPT. It’s a series of custom GPTs.

The next thing is, what is your content creation workflow, right? So as many say, AI is not a strategy, and I used to say social media replaces nothing, it compliments everything, and the exact same thing for AI. So how are you creating content now? And inevitably you’re going to find you start with an idea, and AI is great for ideas. We talked before we started the recording of how we can get ideas. You don’t know what to talk about today or this week or this month? Ask ChatGPT for ideas. Tell them who your target audience is, what you normally talk about, what interests them. And you’re going to get lots of ideas. Some are going to be okay, some are going to be bad, but there might be one or two good ones that you can work with and reflect upon. So you have the idea, you create the content and then you edit the content. Grammarly is a great AI editing tool, for lack of a better word. And then you publish the content and where ChatGPT and AI really shines, it’s in the ideation and in the repurposing. So if you are creating blog content or, I mean the podcast is a great example, podcasts, video podcasts are the king of repurposing. I know that your MSP is probably not doing a podcast, that’s okay, but I just want for analogy’s sake to understand, and I do the same thing with my own podcast, is that we can take the video, we can grab the audio transcript.

I use audo.ai I don’t use ChatGPT for transcript. I think audo is the best AI transcript tool. I then cut and paste that transcript, put it into ChatGPT, and from that, I can create anything I want. I can create a LinkedIn newsletter, I can create an email summary, a LinkedIn post. And here’s the thing, I would never recommend you use AI to create content from scratch, but if it’s already your content, it’s already your voice. You don’t need to have a podcast. You can record yourself into your iPhone and then upload that transcript or use the audi.ai app and then put that into ChatGPT. Anything that you create that is a derivative of that content is already you. It’s already your perspective, your thoughts. From there, yes, you can edit it as I think you should, but it’s you, right? So you’ve already gone over that hurdle of creating AI content, which is not going to engage. It’s going to be very bland. You’re not going to make any progress with it. But when you start to use your own content and you edit it and then publish it, the end reader will not think it’s AI content because it will reflect what you have to say. And especially that final edit when you put it in a more human voice. But what AI cannot do is convey emotion and storytelling. And if you can do that in your content that you feed into ChatGPT, you’ve just solved the biggest issue and you are way ahead of the competitors who are still just churning out AI generated content. So I think every MSP owner, every MSP company listening should be leaning pretty heavily into AI at this point. I think 90% of businesses around the world already are, or at least in the United States. So it is a no brainer, but be careful how you use it. Make sure that if you go according to my advice, you’re not just creating AI generated content that is just going to make the world more noisier. It is a more strategic use of AI that’s actually going to save you more time. So that, wow, I already have my content set up for the next week. Great. Spend that time to engage, spend that time to create, to spend more time crafting better content, dig back into the stories, not just of the MSP owner, what about your sales team? What are the stories that they’re facing with customers or customer success stories. You can then begin to be more of an artist in terms of engaging with people and creating even better content.

Yeah, I love this. So using AI as an augmentation tool rather than actually the be all and end all in itself. Great advice. Thank you, Neal.

Tell us about what you do. So you’ve got books, you’ve got podcasts, obviously you’re a fractional CMO as well. Tell us about all of these things and how we can get in touch with you.

Sure. Well, I am Neal Schaffer, the real Neal. So it’s N-E-A-L-S-C-H-A-F-F-E-R. So nealschaffer.com. Neal Schaffer in the socials, hit me up on LinkedIn, we’d love to connect and continue the conversation. You can find my books on Amazon. I actually have a book printer in the UK for those listening there, so you can get it pretty quickly there. It’s not being shipped out from America, but on Amazon or wherever else you buy books. And I also have a podcast called Your Digital Marketing Coach podcast. If you want to get a broader perspective on everything, digital marketing.

Alex, from an MSP based in Florida, wants to be able to capture a success story from a client that his MSP has really helped. His question is: What’s the best format for a case study?

The best case studies tell a story from the prospect’s or the client’s point of view. And the reason we do that is that the mind responds better to stories than it does dry facts, because stories trigger emotional responses. So let me give you the format for a great case study, and let’s pretend this is a business owner, client of yours who’s been breached in some way. They’ve had some kind of cyber security breach.

The first thing you do is you set a context and you might say, This is a problem that many business owners like you face, or This is a problem that would be horrendous for any business owner. I need that context. I need to understand that that case study is talking to me. Me being the person that you most want to reach.

The next thing you do then is you demonstrate relevance. So you might for example say, One in four small businesses will have a cyber security breach this year. In fact, it’s more now, isn’t it? It’s one in three… One in three businesses will have a cyber security breach this year. You have a one in three chance of this affecting you in 2025. Do you see how that suddenly makes that relevant? So I’ve had the context set for me and now it seems relevant.

Next, you lay out the problem. The problem then of course is the story that you tell. So it could be that my staff come into work one morning, they switch on the computers, it’s red screens or the data’s missing, or the computers just don’t seem right. You tell us what the problem is. But the next stage is where the magic happens because there you poke the pain.

Imagine you’d cut your arm and someone comes along and says, does it hurt there? And you say, yes, it does. So they poke it. Ow, ow, ow, ow. That’s what you want to do in your case study. Someone being breached and losing a bit of data or being locked out of their systems isn’t the pain, that’s the problem. The pain is what does that mean… they can’t talk to their customers, they can’t make outbound or even receive inbound phone calls because their VoIP system’s down as well, they don’t know where their data is, they don’t know if someone’s got it or it’s just been locked, they can’t sell anything, they can’t service anyone, they can’t do transactions, they don’t even know if they’re going to be in business tomorrow. Pain, pain, pain, pain, pain. Do you see why you would do that? That’s a big part of the story. We are not scaremongering here. We are not selling with fear, uncertainty, and doubt. What we’re doing is poking the pain. If you’ve got this problem, what does it mean? What’s the consequences of that?

And then the final two steps are to present the answer. And the answer is always something that only an IT professional like you can do. And in this case, of course, it’s the proactive work that they should have done before, and then what you would do if a breach like that happened. And finally you show a happy outcome, you’ll always need to end a case study on a happy outcome. They’ve had a problem, this was the problem, we poked the pain of the problem, but this is what happened as a result of working with you.

Now, my final thought on this is that the best case studies come from interviewing your clients with the outcome of a case study in mind. So you decide what you want them to say, and then you ask the right questions to help to generate those answers. In a written case study, you can just use the general gist of what they’re saying, it never has to be word perfect and quotes in newspapers and magazines are never word perfect. But of course, in a video, which is the best kind of case study, it’s impossible and indeed undesirable to change what has been said. And that’s where a professional well briefed interviewer will be invaluable. Get them to do the interview for you, knowing what outcome you want from it.

And then once you have a case study, put all of your case studies on your website and consider getting them printed into mini booklets. Put them across all of your marketing. Something like mini booklets are very inexpensive these days, and they’ll have so much greater impact when you hand one over to a brand new prospect.

Welcome to Episode 278 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

Are you doing your MSP’s SEO wrong? Make sure you hear this first. Because if your MSP could really do with finding new clients and you need them to find your website, everything could be changing with search engine optimisation. Why? Because AI and voice search is on the rise. So let’s find out if you can use it to get more traffic to your website and whether you need to change your MSP’s marketing plan.

Tell me, how often do you search for answers using just your voice and how often do you use an AI tool to search? Whichever specific tools you prefer to use, I think we can all agree that sometimes it’s just easier to ask Alexa or Siri to search for something or get ChatGPT to do a whole ton of research for us. But have you yet considered how that might affect driving traffic to your MSP’s website?

We don’t talk a lot about SEO, search engine optimization, on this podcast or in these YouTube videos. I’m not an expert at SEO, there are much better people than me at this and I prefer to get on guests to talk about subjects where I don’t have a specific expertise. But I think we can take a holistic overview of the change in something as big as search. Now if you are as old as me, he says looking at his gray hair, you’ll remember when search was really clunky and difficult…yep, I’m talking about you AltaVista, back in the last millennium, and I’m feeling every single one of my 50 years right now. But honestly, if you weren’t alive back in the mid to late nineties, you have no idea how bad search was.

Yahoo was kind of doing its own thing by doing it manually. It was compiling manual links and editor driven lists of stuff. And then you had kind of basic search engines like AltaVista. There was a popular one here in the UK that was called Ask Jeeves, like a butler type character, and I think that was ask.com across the world. Now of course, we didn’t know that the search experience was bad until something way, way better came along, and that thing was Google.

Google really did change everything back in the day. Its method of crawling the web and ranking web pages according to backlinks, which is how many other sites actually connect to them. And also its ability to figure out what the page was about, that was revolutionary at the time. And you can argue that Google has been so utterly dominant in search in the last 25 years and even though that dominance is now under threat from a number of different ways, the next big shift after Google came along was of course the shift to mobile search. But what’s that, about 10 – 15 years since we all needed to make sure that our websites were optimised for mobile search and mobile access. But that’s all very much a routine thing in 2025.

Search itself is now undergoing it’s next revolution, which is where you’re doing the searching without accessing Google directly.

Let’s look at the first of those, which has been around for some time and that’s searching with your voice. There are all sorts of stats online about how much search is actually done just through voice. And you can summarise all the different stats, certainly just looking at what’s happening within Google, as a quarter of all searches in the Google app are now done by voice. I guess that’s when you hit the little microphone button to do that. To me, that’s not really voice search, that’s just an efficient way of adding text into the Google app without having to actually press anything.

So what about proper voice search like Alexa? I use Alexa two or three times a day for simple stuff, like what time my next reminders are or cooking timers, that kind of thing. Oi, I’m not talking to you… she just went off in the background. But I’ve been taught over the years by Amazon, the owners of Alexa, not to rely upon her for proper answers to anything other than trivia questions really. Because if I have to hear the phrase – an Alexa answers contributor has written or according to the website complicated url.com – you get the idea. It’s fine when you are with your family and you’re sat chatting and you want to remember whether or not a specific celebrity is dead without having to pull out your phone. That’s what it can be quite useful for.

But would I use Alexa or Siri to search for an MSP near me? I don’t think I would. Maybe I would use it to search for a restaurant that’s open and engage with them and maybe even ask what the menu is about. But would I do it for a managed service provider? I really don’t think so. Because don’t forget, managed services is one of the most difficult and complex B2B sales that there is. And that means that people need to go through a very big research phase and they can’t do that research phase while having a conversation with what is essentially a dumb voice assistant, because the intelligence is just not there. It’s deeply frustrating when you’re trying to do anything more than just look something up, something basic. So the obvious answer there surely is to get AI to do researching for us, and this is where I think new search gets really interesting. Because actually AI can do the searching and can do the research phase for you.

Just for this video and this podcast episode, I asked ChatGPT to do something for me. The instruction I gave was this exactly this: I am looking for a new IT support company. I’m based in Milton Keynes (which happens to be where I live here in the UK), please summarise the top five providers that I should be talking to and what the differences are between them. And you know what? ChatGPT did a great job. It pulled up five local companies and for each one it summarised what each of them would do for me. Now it specifically summarised a sentence for each as well called key differentiator. If I believed everything that ChatGPT told me, then this would’ve made my research really, really easy. I could now just book appointments with those five MSPs and the latest version of ChatGPT even gives you the website. So I could just click and have a look at the five different websites.

I’m sure in the future and probably not that far off, it will actually be able to book appointments for me, when it’s an agent and it can access Calendarly and access my calendar. It’s not quite there yet, but I’m sure that’s no more than a year off. I did a very similar search for the same terms: IT support Milton Keynes, on Google. And interestingly, I didn’t see the same five companies in the same order. They were there on the page, but not in the order that ChatGPT put them in. I don’t think that really means anything at this stage.

But let’s ask what this does mean in terms of what you are doing with your marketing right now. As I said at the beginning, I am not a technical expert at this, but it’s clear to me that the AI search and probably the voice search as well when it becomes smarter using AI, is just going to be a very efficient way of getting information out of your website and ordering it for someone.

So I think we may be about to enter a new era of optimisation on our websites. For years, it has been about search engine optimisation and trying your hardest to get your website to the top of page one. I can see how that’s going to change. I don’t know how it’s going to change. If I did, I would make a fortune selling that to Silicon Valley. But we’re going to need some kind of AI search optimisation and that’s going to be about, I think, making sure that the information we most want people to see in a summary is most easily picked up by AI. And my initial online research shows that that’s about getting the right keywords, it’s about getting the markup right, so that’s the information you put in the backend of the website that the humans don’t see, but the crawlers do, the robots do, and also creating the right kind of content on your website.

And I’ve made it my mission for the next few months to find a real expert in this and get him or her onto a future YouTube video and also of course in the MSP marketing podcast. In the meantime, if you’ve gone in depth into this, and if you’ve done a lot of work on your MSP’s website, I would love to hear what you’ve done, whether or not it’s made any difference, any big difference to the leads that you’re generating from your website. I think we’re very much on day one of AI and voice search, but it’s so clear to see that this is the direction that we are headed in. We are going down that route and it’s going to become increasingly important.

My final thought on this is to remember that all we’re talking about here is new ways of getting your MSP in front of people. New ways of getting people to come to you and come to your website and see that you are around. It’s still humans that are making the buying decisions, not the AI, the AI doesn’t decide for you, it just summarises what you offer. And that means you need to keep focusing your overall marketing on showing people who the people are behind the business and don’t get too logical with it, give them emotional reasons to pick your MSP. I personally can’t see that changing for years and years. I could be wrong, but it’s something that we’ll keep coming back to.

Can you hear those crickets? There’s a good chance that’s the result of your MSP’s efforts to find new clients and drive sales. It’s a common problem. You’ve tried this, you’ve tried that. Well, this is going to be music to your ears. How does a 1000% success rate guarantee sound? It’s a sales promotion for MSPs that have been in business for more than three years. Right now, let’s talk about what it is, how simple it is, and the boost it could give your MSP.

Now, this one doesn’t apply to brand new businesses, but it’s perfect for MSPs that have been around a few years or longer because there’s a sentence that I hear now and then from the MSP owners that I’m working with. The sentence is: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, we used to do *insert thing here*. It worked really well, but we stopped doing it for some reason – and quite often the “for some reason” is no real reason at all. As in no one ever made a decision to stop it. It just stopped. Perhaps someone went on a vacation, maybe it just never started again after a long weekend away. Who knows? But it stopped and no one ever started it again. And this happens across the board in every area of the business. It can happen with the way that tickets are handled or with how client information is logged. Quite often it happens with sales and marketing processes.

One of my MSP Marketing Edge members said to me, “Oh yeah, we used to send out case studies to prospects before we met them, but we stopped doing it for some reason.”

And we then had a very long conversation about how sending those case studies out in advance of a meeting shows that your business is safe. This is solid powerful social proof, which works because most people prefer to do what they can see most other people doing. And if the prospect perceives that the business is safe before meeting with the sales guy, then guess what? The sales conversion rate and the overall order value will go up. Now, even if it’s a tiny shift upwards, that adds a lot of additional net profit over one year, three years, five years, whatever.

I promised you the perfect sales promotion, that’s 1000% guaranteed to work. Let me tell you what it is. It’s something that you did in the past that worked really well, and then you either never repeated it or it became routine and it just stopped. And then no one ever noticed that it had stopped, so it never started again. Actually, it’s probably not one thing. It’s probably a whole series of different things that all worked together to give you overall a better result. Here’s an example. In a previous healthcare marketing business, which I sold and exited in 2016, we identified five key actions that had to happen before a sales meeting in order to give us a two in three close rate. So for every three meetings we took, we closed two of those prospects into clients. And these steps were to ensure that we had qualified our prospect properly and fully engaged with them at an emotional level and made sure that they’d absorbed some social proof and made sure that they’d locked off enough of their time for the appointment.

And these five key actions, they were that difference between a one in three close rate and a two in three close rate. So that’s a fairly major impact on net profit from small actions. Double the results for the same amount of work. So as you can imagine, I systemised the implementation of them and I built a warning system, which was a results dashboard to tell me when something had broken down. Now, back then, and bear in mind, this is like 2013 to 2016, we used to mail out physical DVDs featuring video case studies to our prospects. As I say, don’t judge me, this was a very long time ago. One day my admin person, she ran out of DVDs and she didn’t tell anyone. No one knows why, but she just carried on posting out the appointment confirmation letters, but without the DVDs. And I noticed within a few weeks as my dashboard showed that our overall conversion rate had slipped.

So that was my cue to follow the system through and to diagnose what was broken. And it literally took 20 minutes and one tense conversation and an order had gone in for a hundred more DVDs sent off to the DVD duplication people. So here’s your opportunity. Let me spell this out for you – Number one: spend a few hours looking back over old promotions strategies and tactics. What did you used to do that worked really well? What did you try once that was a hit but has never been repeated? And what are the small actions in your MSP that have the greatest impact on net profitability? Number two: bring them back, implement them. Number three: build yourself a warning system that tells you the next time they fall over. Simple as that.

What is that 1000% guaranteed to work promotion that you could bring back for your MSP that you know is going to work?

Featured guest: Eric Dingler is a global marketing strategist and digital nomad who has lived in 15 countries over the past three years with his wife and four teenagers.

Drawing on his firsthand insights as a perpetual first-time customer and data from hundreds of campaigns, Eric developed the Marketing Momentum Framework—a transformative approach to help simplify the work of a business owner to attract and retain customers.

Great news, the hair pulling can stop. When growing an MSP just feels confusing and complicated. You pull your hair out in frustration, but it doesn’t have to be that way. Here comes a solution you can just swipe and adapt. I just can’t promise that your hair will return. MSPs are often at risk of making marketing way too complicated. So my special guest today is going to share a simple marketing framework that you can swipe and adapt.

Hey, my name’s Eric Dingler and I am a digital marketer, but I’m also a digital nomad and I’m excited to unpack that with you today.

Thanks for joining us on the show, Eric, and the first thing I’m going to ask you is what is a digital nomad? I may kind of know the answer to this because you are a guy from the US but you’re actually speaking to us from the UK.

That’s right. Yeah. My family and I. So it’s me, my wife and we have four teenagers, and we’ve been travelling full time for three years, and a little over a month and a half, two months ago, we landed here in the United Kingdom. And we plan to spend the next couple of years in this part of the world.

I love it. And whereabouts in the UK are you based at the moment?

Liverpool.

Liverpool, a fine city. There’s many good things and bad things about Liverpool, but let’s not have that conversation. I’ll just say I’ve only been to Liverpool twice, and one of those times I was threatened and pinned up against a wall by someone within 30 seconds of stepping off a train. But that’s a story we’ll leave for another day.

Let’s talk about marketing. So Eric, you are a marketing expert. I know you work with a growing number of MSPs and you’ve got a particular marketing framework, which we’re going to explore a little later on in the interview. But first of all, just tell us a bit about your background. So how did you get into this wonderful world of marketing in the first place?

Hey, that’s a great question and I’m going to do my best to give you the very succinct answer. So I was actually in ministry, and so because of that, I was the guy that also had to do all of our marketing. I ran a summer camp for 15 years and then my wife and I planted a church. And so we had to do all the marketing for that. And in that process, we also at one point decided we wanted to adopt two children. So we adopted two of our four children. We needed to make $50,000 to fund our adoption.

And so I started doing marketing for other people as a side hustle, just as a way to make some supplemental income. It blew up, people kept referring people to us, and by the time we brought our kids home, we had raised more than enough and decided to continue in the marketplace as a way to fund a nonprofit that my wife and I started. So we started a nonprofit. I moved from ministry space to the marketplace, and we now run our agency as a way to fund our nonprofit where we come alongside other families and help them with their adoptions.

I love this. You and I met like seven minutes ago and already I love your lifestyle; the travelling, the fact that you’ve adopted kids, the fact that you’ve got a nonprofit, the fact that you’ve got this marketing agency and it’s there to give you a great life with your children. I absolutely love everything you’ve said so far.

Let’s talk about marketing frameworks. So you and I, in the very brief pre-interview conversation we had, we talked about frameworks, and as anyone who’s ever listened to this podcast or watched our YouTube videos knows, I have a very simple three-step lead generation framework, which we give to MSPs: build audiences, grow relationships, convert relationships. And all my work is based around helping MSPs to implement that. Tell us about your marketing framework. So what is it and how did you come up with it?

So our marketing framework, we call it the marketing momentum framework, and ours has four parts to it. And really it developed as we were travelling full time because what I didn’t expect to happen was, I didn’t appreciate the fact that we were going to be become perpetual first time customers. And by that I mean every three to six months, it’s sometimes even a month, we move to a new city. So we have to find new barbers and hairstylists, new grocery stores, new dentist, eye doctor, our son, our 12-year-old needed new eyeglasses, so when we got to Liverpool, we had to find eyeglasses. I have to find coworking spaces, I have to find office equipment to replace a cable or something.

So we are just regularly finding new businesses all the time. And I started noticing patterns that I was able to start talking to our clients about. And over time, this just kind of coalesced to realising that the way we say it is, every dollar you’re ever going to make in business is going to start as a lead. And so that’s the first thing we look at, the lead gen, like you talk about. And the first part of our framework is awareness. Now there’s two types of awareness. Self discovered awareness and created awareness.

I don’t have to tell somebody they need a dentist, they know they need a dentist. But a company may not know that there is other people out there with the expertise to help come alongside them and take care of their technology, like MSPs do. And so there is some awareness that has to be created out there. When somebody becomes aware, then they move to consideration. That’s a second stage. Well, who am I going to buy to? Who am I going to give my money to? And then from there you have they move to the actual purchase experience.

Every single customer is one of three types: they’re either a raving fan, a roaring critic, or they’re silently satisfied.

Personally, I’m the silently satisfied customer of thousands of businesses because very few of them capture my contact information and begin to develop a relationship with me after the purchase. We may do transactions once a month, I may get a transaction email, but I’m not getting any nurture emails. And that’s fine and I’m happy, but I’m silent about it. And that’s the problem. And so what we do is we come alongside and we go, all right, if we’re going to create awareness, how do we do that? Where’s the best place to do it? Once somebody moves from awareness to consideration, how do we make sure you’re the easiest and obvious choice? During the purchase experience, what information are you gathering? Where are you storing it in a way that’s easy to leverage it for marketing? And then how do we turn silently satisfied customers into raving fans?

And each of those, there’s a multiple of different tactics in each one of those. And we work with each of our customers and we give them basically a, we call it a pantry list, and we tell them we have all of these ingredients in our pantry and you can go in and say, well, I like this one, this one, this one, and this one. And that’s the recipe for your marketing strategy that fits inside the marketing framework. So there it is. That’s the whole thing.

I love that. That’s just beautiful and you’ve covered off almost everything in the customer journey there, which is absolutely perfect. What you’ve got there is obviously is a strategy. And do you find that MSPs and some of the other businesses that you work with that often when you start talking about marketing, they just want to jump straight into talking about tactical stuff. They want to talk about what can we do on LinkedIn? What can we do on email? What should we do with our website? Do you find that you’re constantly having to reposition people back to, Hey, let’s get the right strategy in place first?

Yeah, because what we see is we’ll be talking about something and I’ll be walking through it with somebody and I’ll say, Hey, this would be someplace where maybe you want to use pay-per-click ads. And immediately I’ll get, Oh no, I did pay-per-click ads in the past they didn’t work. And 99% of the time I already know the answer to the question. And I’ll go, when you ran that ad, did it go to a landing page or the homepage of your website? And 99% of the time, the homepage of my website. Well, that’s why it didn’t work. See, running ads is just one tactic in an overall strategy. You have to know what’s happening before and after and you have to bridge all of that. And so somebody’s coming to a computer screen with a question in mind, they do a search. If your ad is addressing that question, now the next thing they see needs to continue that conversation or you’ve broken the story, you’ve created an open question, and they don’t want another open question. They want to answer their question they came to.

If you bring them to your homepage, now you’ve created a question of, Oh, now where do I go? And people, they’re just not going to do that, they’re going to click the back button and move on to the next thing. And that’s kind of the thing when almost all the time when I share that with someone, it’s like a light bulb for most of them. And they’re like, Oh, okay. And now they start to understand we got to take these tactics and put them into a complete strategy, just like you said, taking the customer on a journey. And that’s kind of where it comes into and where I see people struggling with tactics, but Paul, people are bombarded every day with, you got to be on LinkedIn, you got to be doing this, you got to be on this social media, you got to have ads, you got to have your website SEO, and they just get overwhelmed and they think they have to do all of those.

Yeah, I completely agree. We work with 700 MSPs and we try and make everything as easy and as small and simple as possible, and one of the hardest things is noise. Battling that noise. There’s so many great places out there to get advice, but as you and I know, there’s so much advice from so many people and sometimes it’s good advice, sometimes it’s bad advice. Sometimes the people giving the advice have done it. Sometimes they haven’t done it, but they tried it once. Like you say, the pay-per-click example, pay-per-click works for me because I did this once or pay-per-click doesn’t work for me because I did this. And this is the upside and the downside of the internet, isn’t it? Which is any idea or any opinion can be disseminated to absolutely anybody right now. I can’t imagine the internet is going to be exactly the same in 30 years time because that’s just too much noise and anybody can say anything, but hey, that’s what we’ve got in 2025, so we’ll just have to work with that for right now.

Let’s just finish up by looking at the first two parts of your formula, which were of your marketing momentum framework, which was awareness and consideration. So for the vast majority of MSPs, lead generation is the big thing. When they can get somebody in a sales meeting or even on an exploratory discovery call, then the vast majority of the time they can take that through and turn that person into a client. Their issue is getting those discovery calls. Their issue is getting in front of people in the first place. Their issue is even getting people to be aware of them. Now, I’m not going to ask you to drop down to a tactical level for the reasons we’ve just been talking about, but imagine if I was an MSP and you were starting to work with me tomorrow and we were starting to tackle that first and second stage of right, let’s increase your awareness, let’s get you so that people are even thinking to consider you, what are some of the specific routes that you might look at or the things you might consider to help me as an MSP?

Well, to get started, I would want to focus on doing less with more. So I’d want to focus on doing less things at the beginning with more focus and attention and really nail them. And so I would start out by explaining to you that there are only four ways to attract a new lead to get in front of a new lead. There’s only four ways. Now, within these four, you’ve got multiple options, but there’s only four: cold outreach, content creation, paid ads, referral and networking. And here’s a list of some options of what these look like. Which one excites you? Because that’s the one I want to start with.

If you’re really like, I love paid ads, I’m really excited about that, I see a lot of potential, alright, well let’s do that. Let’s do that because I’m not going to tell you, Well, we’re going to get you onto content creation and you’re sitting there going, What am I going to say? I don’t want to be on camera. I don’t want to talk in a microphone. Some people, they just, they’ll reluctantly agree because you’re the expert and they’re like, Well, if you’re saying this is what I got to do, then I guess I got to do it. But they don’t stick with it long term because they don’t enjoy it. Your marketing should be joyful, it should fun, and it should be rewarding. And so that’s the first thing we’re going to start out. Here are the four ways to bring in new leads. Which one of these excites you? Okay, what could that look like for you? And we just start brainstorming ideas and customise your strategy for that.

Then in consideration, we’re going to look at your entire online presence and we’re going to look at your website, any landing pages that you have, definitely your homepage, and if you’re a local business and meet the criteria for it, we want to look at your Google Business Profile and if you have a brick and mortar location, we want to look at your Apple Business Connect. We want to look at both of those, and then we want to come there. And so then what we do is we’ll ask you what are the most common questions you’re first asked by people and how can we answer those when people are pre-qualifying themselves? They’re showing up to your website with a couple questions in mind. Let’s answer those in a way that leads them to making contact with you or either leads them making contact with you or gets them comfortable immediately enough with you to take the next step, which is making contact. And those pre-qualifying questions, those vary industry to industry, and so we would have that conversation with MSP specifically for them.

Yeah, I love that. Thank you, Eric. You’ve been so helpful of this podcast. We’re going to finish with two very quick questions. The first of which is tell us about the services that you offer to MSPs and how can we get in touch with you?

Great, so we are a done with you marketing agency. We’re not going to ask you to turn the keys over to the kingdom, and we’re not going to do all of that. What we do is we come alongside, create a strategy, put all the pieces together. If we need to connect some software and things like that, we’ll handle all that kind of stuff, if you’re not comfortable with it. I told you before we started recording that in my experience, most of our MSP, they’re very comfortable with the techie side of it and they’re like, no, no, no, I’ll set all that up, they love that. They just need that strategy and that’s totally okay. If we need to tweak anything on their website, we help them with that. And so that’s our approach.

The best way for people to contact, I’ll give you two options. One, if you want to connect on LinkedIn and just connect there and get started on LinkedIn, ericdingler.com is going to forward you straight to my LinkedIn profile, you can do that. And then for some specific next steps for your business, if you go to my marketingscorecard.com, you are going to be able to download a one page marketing action plan. There’s a picture graphic there of the marketing momentum framework and some tactics for each of those stages. So you can look at that and what we’ve done is we’ve created a real quick, about four minute assessment that somebody can take, and at the end of that, it’s going to say, here’s where you’re doing great, here’s the stage where you might want to look at. You can take those results, put them onto the one page action plan, and then look down below and say, okay, here’s some things I can start to implement right away to elevate my awareness to increase customer activity in consideration. So my marketingscorecard.com gets you that assessment takes about four minutes, and then you get the one page action plan.

Neil from North Carolina is concerned about marketing his MSP because tasks that are too creative fall outside of his comfort zone. His question is: I’ve been wondering, is marketing an art or is it a science?

This is actually a really important question to ask, because if you consider yourself a scientific, logical person and yet you believe that marketing is an art, then that’s going to make you even less inclined to want to do marketing. And yet the only way to grow your business is to do marketing; to win new clients, to keep them, and to sell them more services. So let me give you my definitive answer on this.

I believe 100% that marketing is a science. Why? Because it’s a number of cogs that you can put in place that can be measured, analysed, and improved through testing. Well, actually, hang on a second, just thinking about that. It’s 80% science,  the other 20% is luck. Mostly luck in getting your timing right. You’ve got to get the right message in front of the right person at the right time. And what I’ve found over the years is that the more marketing you do, the luckier you become.

Put in place a marketing machine that operates systematically and consistently week in, week out, and you pretty much remove the luck element from it.

Welcome to Episode 277 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

Does this sound familiar? Are you completely overwhelmed with what marketing you should be doing in the short amount of time you have to do it? Well, many MSPs are in this exact situation. There’s so much information and advice out there, the problem is actually cutting through all the noise and figuring out exactly what you should do and in what order.

I spent years figuring this out and refining it. And finally, you can discover the most important marketing things that will bring new leads into your MSP. They’re all in my brand new, easy to read book. Stick around for some of the best highlights.

One of the coolest things about recording a podcast or doing YouTube videos or even writing a blog every week is that it allows you to go back and see where your mind was years and years before. I’ve been working with MSPs since 2016, and the core marketing advice that I’m giving to you today is no different to the advice that I was giving nine years ago. Sure, some of the tactics have changed, but the good solid basic marketing strategy is exactly the same. Because a good strategy doesn’t change for decades, it’s just the tactics that change.

What I’ve really noticed over the last four or five years is that I’ve got considerably better at explaining what you should do in an easier and easier way. And I’ve spoken to thousands of MSPs over the years and I realised that the majority of them, they don’t want highly advanced marketing tactics and clever strategies that are actually quite difficult to implement.

The vast majority of MSPs I speak to just want marketing to be easy. They want clear, simple recommendations of what to do and how to do it.

And that’s driven me to refine my three-step lead generation system and the tasks that I believe you most need to do are contained within that. Now, I don’t think this is a mission that’s ever really completed, but in the last year or so, I believe I have made a big jump forward. And one thing that’s helped me with that is writing a book on this subject. It’s actually just gone on sale on Amazon worldwide. You can get it on your Kindle, including in the free Kindle library thing. You can also get a paperback copy. Now I’ve written a few over the years, but I genuinely believe that this one is the most powerful book I’ve ever written, because it’s the easiest to understand.

It’s called MSP marketing: Start Here. And I actually physically wrote the first version on an eight hour flight from the UK to Las Vegas when I was speaking at Scale Con in October, 2024. And then I took a few months to refine it and refine it again and just simplify everything down.

Now the book is designed to be a short, 60 minute read. I want it to be super easy for you to pick it up and read it in one or two sittings and just walk away with a very clear checklist of exactly what you need to do to build audiences of people to listen to you, grow a relationship with them using content marketing, and then convert that relationship, convert them from lead to prospect to client.

I’ll let you into a little secret. This is actually the first of a whole series of books that I’ve got planned. You should see my master plan word document, I already have the next five books all planned out chapter by chapter. So this one, this first book is called MSP marketing: Start Here because it’s designed as the start point. This is the one book that I wish I could get all 40,000 MSPs on the planet to read. If it could be one book, it would be this book.

I try not to do really overt plugs in my videos and on the podcast, but I’ve got to be honest, if there’s one book that you should buy and read this year, please make it this book. It is just a 60 minute investment, I promise you. And I help you make the link between how important good marketing is to live the lifestyle you most want to live. I’m not joking. If you can set up a marketing system that helps you to onboard one new client a month or whatever your MSP can handle, that will change your life forever. You’ll have a great cashflow, great profits, and ultimately you’ll be able to live exactly the lifestyle that you want to live.

In this book, I take you through my three step lead generation system. I tell you about the 11 tasks that are contained within it. It’s all there on the page, and as I said, you can read it as a paperback or on your Kindle. And I should have an audible version out later in the year. Did you know you have to kind of audition for Audible? Got my posh British voice on to do my best audition. Anyway, go and search Amazon now, MSP marketing: Start Here. Follow my easy plan and you really can change your life.

I’ll let you into a little secret. This is actually the first of a whole series of books that I’ve got planned. You should see my master plan word document, I already have the next five books all planned out chapter by chapter. So this one, this first book is called MSP marketing: Start Here because it’s designed as the start point. This is the one book that I wish I could get all 40,000 MSPs on the planet to read. If it could be one book, it would be this book.

I try not to do really overt plugs in my videos and on the podcast, but I’ve got to be honest, if there’s one book that you should buy and read this year, please make it this book. It is just a 60 minute investment, I promise you. And I help you make the link between how important good marketing is to live the lifestyle you most want to live. I’m not joking. If you can set up a marketing system that helps you to onboard one new client a month or whatever your MSP can handle, that will change your life forever. You’ll have a great cashflow, great profits, and ultimately you’ll be able to live exactly the lifestyle that you want to live.

In this book, I take you through my three step lead generation system. I tell you about the 11 tasks that are contained within it. It’s all there on the page, and as I said, you can read it as a paperback or on your Kindle. And I should have an audible version out later in the year. Did you know you have to kind of audition for Audible? Got my posh British voice on to do my best audition. Anyway, go and search Amazon now, MSP marketing: Start Here. Follow my easy plan and you really can change your life.

Did you know that people only buy managed services for one of two reasons? So if you want to make more money, you need to understand and get comfortable with these two reasons. It’s then, and only then that any marketing you do can actually be effective and not a complete and painful waste of time.

Let’s take a brief dive into what these reasons are, how you can influence the way your prospects see you, and ultimately make a ton of money for your MSP.

Tell me, have you read a book called Ready, Fire, Aim by Michael Masterson. It really is a great book packed with goodies, and I love the emphasis inside on taking action. I was flicking through it again just a couple of weeks ago when I re-read the section on something called frontend/backend sales. And the frontend is what new clients see and buy, so this is the core products that they see you selling and they use to compare you against other MSPs. So for you, that might be the basic support you offer, or if you’re still doing break/fix, it would be that.

Now the backend is all of the other products and services that clients go on to buy once they’ve bought the frontend. That’s a recurring service contract, it might be some kind of software, maybe even hardware, particularly if they’re doing hardware rental through you and of course projects. Lots of lovely backend for you. And typically backend sales are far more profitable because you don’t have to pay the cost of acquiring the client again, they’re already your client, and B, you already know them. So the impact of delivering the extra service is less.

Remember, the goal here is increasing profit, not just turnover. Anyone can grow a business at the expense of profit. The trick is to grow turnover and net profit at the same time. And for that, you need to sell a lot more in the backend. People only buy for one of only two reasons, sometimes they buy for both those reasons, but you need to feed both of these in the backend services that you sell.

Most purchases are made to either fix a problem, we call these needs, or they are to make the buyer feel good, we call those wants.

You should have an almost endless supply of backend services to meet both of these criteria. But focus more on the wants than you do on the needs. Michael Masterson writes in his book that 90% of all purchases are made to satisfy wants. Once someone’s a client, they will buy more from you so long as you put more of the right things in front of them. So here are three questions to ask yourself. 

Number one: What problems do my existing clients have? What desires do they have? Number two: What products and services can I offer to meet those wants and needs? And number three: How do I communicate those products and services in the least salesy and most efficient way? Now, this next bit’s interesting because the answer to question one will come from talking to your clients. The answer to question two will come from talking to your clients. And guess where the answer to question three will come from? Yes, it’ll come from talking to your clients. It really is as simple as that.

In fact, you should systemise you or whoever is the big decision maker in the business talking to clients at least once a week. If you are the CEO of a grocery store, you’d go onto the shop floor to do this, and your equivalent to the shop floor is manning the help desk for a couple of hours. Or if you can’t do that, then make customer satisfaction follow up calls. Or if you don’t want to do that, perform some formal strategic reviews or QBRs, quarterly business reviews as they’re known. Or just pick up the phone and just call a couple of clients every week just for a chat. It’s possible to be close to clients and how they’re feeling without losing the necessary helicopter view needed to lead the business into the future. In fact, if you want to feed your backend of extra services you can sell them, it’s essential to do this.

Featured guest: Patrick O’Donnell is SVP, Americas Sales, Barracuda (a cyber security solutions provider) where he is responsible for accelerating Barracuda’s sales, driving the go-to-market strategy, execution, and programs for the sale of security, data protection, and XDR offerings through the channel.

Building a successful MSP isn’t just about what you do, it’s also very much about the way you think. There’s a whole movement towards a very specific way of thinking. And if you and your technicians have this way of thinking, then you’ll achieve immense things. And if you don’t, frankly, you’re probably going to be battling against the wind.

My special guest today, he helps MSPs to embrace this mindset, and he’s going to explain it to you in a way that makes it so easy to understand and implement within your business.

I am Patrick O’Donnell. I’m Senior Vice President for the America Sales for Barracuda Networks based in New York.

Amazing. And thank you so much for joining me on the podcast, Patrick. So we are going to explore something today called a growth mindset, and why every owner and manager of an MSP needs to have a thing called a growth mindset. And don’t worry, in this interview, we are going to explore what exactly that is, where it’s come from, and Patrick’s going to make it really, really easy for us.

Let’s learn a little bit about you first of all, Patrick. You work for Barracuda, tell us what you do at Barracuda and what’s your background.

So my background really since I got out of grad school, has been in sales and in tech sales. I started with IBM, most of my career spent at IBM, both in the US and overseas in Asia and China and Japan. Worked for GE for a little bit, their GE digital division. In the last several years I was priorly at Datto, and for the last year and a couple of months, I’ve been at Barracuda. So I run the US North America sales organisation for Barracuda. We’re a fairly well-known cyber security company.

I’ve been in business for 21 years, 100% channel focused, helping our customers and our partners solve challenging cyber security and helping our customers protect against threats. Whether it’s email network security, application security, or things like extended detection and response, 24/7 security operations centre. We cater to all kinds of partners, resellers, VARs, solution providers, as well as MSPs. And MSPs serve a lot of customers who may not be as sophisticated in terms of having large IT staffs or chief information security officers. They’re fairly underserved, but what they do know is they do need security and they see the evolving, expanding threat vectors, and they want to be protected against that. So we help our partners protect their end customers.

Amazing. We’ll talk a little bit more about Barracuda towards the end of the interview. You sound like you’ve had one of those cool careers where you get moved abroad and you get to live in another culture and really enjoy yourself for a couple of years. Now, I’ve never done that, and I suspect the vast majority of people that are listening to us or watching this on YouTube have never had that kind of corporate, you get a week’s notice to move to Japan or something like that. Is that as cool as it sounds, or is it actually a bit of a drag when it happens?

Well, anytime you move, it’s stressful, there’s always stress, and we had young children at the time, but we loved living in Japan and we loved living in China. We were there for about five years in total. So a great experience for the family, for myself, to experience other cultures and be resident in that geography is a gift. It was a gift to me and a gift to my family and my kids. It’s an experience they’ll never forget, nor will I. And so it was a lot of fun. But yeah, moving halfway around the world does introduce some stress. But it’s a great company behind us with IBM and great markets in which to sell and serve and support customers. I love living in Asia. It was a great experience.

And then one day you got the phone call, you’re coming back to New York. It’s like, oh, do I have to really? Anyway, we are talking about this thing called a growth mindset today. Let’s start right at the beginning. Let’s assume that our MSPs listening and watching this have never heard of growth mindset before. So can you introduce us to the basics? What is this, where does it come from, and why is it so important?

I think a large part of what we’re going to talk about with growth mindset is based on some work from a pretty renowned psychologist, a professor at Stanford University, Carol Dweck. And for anyone who’s interested and may not have read her book, she actually wrote a book about this, which is incredibly instructive, it’s very interesting. It’s called Mindset, the New Psychology of Success. A lot of things I’m going to be talking about as it relates to whether it’s MSP or end customer or any type of partner or any individual or any company, it’s based on her work. And so her research is on this concept of mindset. There’s a growth mindset and there’s a fixed mindset. And so she talks about the difference between those two sets of beliefs and how they could impact the firm in a good way and in a not so good way. And how do you recognise that and how is that translated into behaviours? And how can you get your team, whether you’re a team of two or a team of 10 or a team of 300, how can you get your employees and your management team adopting a growth mindset versus a fixed mindset? And what does that look like?

That’s the basis of the growth mindset research that she’s done, to help companies and people understand where they fit, how they can adopt some of the growth mindsets. And what are some of the downsides that business owners, particularly MSP owners, need to be sensitive to recognise when it exists and what did they do about it.

Yeah, no, that makes perfect sense. So can you give us an example of a growth mindset and a fixed mindset. And I appreciate, I might be putting you on the spot a little bit with that, but if we were to take, let’s say, take two technicians, let’s take technician A and technician B, technician A has a fixed mindset. What does that look like? Technician B has more of a growth mindset.

Well, the fixed mindset, as Carol talks about, is this belief that in a fixed mindset your innate abilities and talent and intelligence is limited. And so when you have that belief system that your abilities and your intelligence and your talent are somewhat limited and can’t be impacted, that impacts and is manifested through certain types of behaviour. 

People with a fixed mindset tend to avoid challenges. They don’t receive feedback very well. They view actually constructive feedback as kind of a personal threat because it undermines this notion of their inherent abilities, which they think is limited. So they feel more challenged when they’re given feedback and don’t take it in the manner in which it might be intended by a manager or a team leader or even a colleague or peer. That’s not a good place if you’re an MSP business owner and you’re trying to grow.

You want people who adopt a more positive growth mindset, who feel that with energy, effort, guidance and constructive feedback, they can improve, they can get better, that their abilities, talents and skills are not fixed.

They can be improved, and guidance can be a pathway to growth. And so that’s kind of one of the main differences that Carol talks about in her book is for someone who does have a fixed mindset, first of all, how do you recognise it, and then how do you coach to get them to a more growth oriented mindset.

Yeah, I mean, that’s a great question in itself is how do you recognise someone with a fixed mindset? As you were talking about different mindsets to different technicians, I’m sure some MSPs listening to that would think, a lot of my technicians don’t take feedback well, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that in itself is an indicator of a fixed mindset. The way I always understood it was that if you believe in the fixed mindset that you believe you can’t grow, you can’t learn, you can’t develop that you’re born with these skills and yeah, you can do some training, but you never really change and get better. Whereas of course, growth mindset is the complete opposite of that. So what would you look out for in a technician to identify someone who is potentially locked as to what they think they can do?

There’s a couple of things. One we just spoke about, is someone who is hesitant or pushes back strongly on constructive feedback. That is kind of a red flag. Someone who avoids challenges, who doesn’t seek to go above and beyond or is afraid of failure. Typically, people who have a fixed mindset, fear failure and fear making mistakes because they feel it will reflect poorly on their sense of self and on their inherent abilities, which they believe are fixed. So it’s threatening to them. So they won’t go above and beyond. They will avoid challenges. They will be defensive when feedback is given, even though the feedback comes from a good place, they have a negative reaction to that.

They also see effort, in some cases, as futile. And if you’re an MSP owner, and let’s say you have a small MSP, but you’re growing, you’re growing really well, you’re hiring, you’re bringing on staff, and you’re serving clients and customers, those are not characteristics you want in your frontline employees, particularly if they’re serving your most important asset, which is your clients, your customers that you’re serving in a monthly recurring revenue model. You’re trying to deliver impact for the monthly recurring services that you’re billing for. You want people who adopt a growth mindset, not a fixed mindset.

Those are some of the things that I think owners should be astute for and not ignore. So when they see those signs, don’t avoid it, lean into it. Probe, ask questions, get underneath where that might be coming from, because if it’s left unchecked or employees aren’t challenged around some of those dimensions, that could be cause for concern and it needs to be addressed.

Yeah. Now here’s an interesting question. I’ve met, or spoken to at least a thousand MSPs over the years, it may be even more, and the vast majority who have started their own business do have that growth mindset, because I think it’s very, very difficult to be in either the kind of high impact corporate jobs that you have or to run your own business if you don’t have that. But I have met a small proportion of MSPs who’ve got that fixed mindset, and you can see it in their business. You can see it reflected in the people that they’ve hired. And typically, those people struggle.

When you’re the owner of the business you are not responsible to anybody. And I’ve always said that’s one of the double-edged swords of being a business owner, is that you are unfireable, right? The only way you get fired is if the business collapses because you’ve been so inadequate as a business owner. But there’s no boss to fire you, there’s no one to give you performance management. And we all see a lot of very, very bad, not just within the MSP world, but around the world, we see a lot of bad business owners managing to do 20, 30, 40 years in business just because they’re unfireable.

So how would you, as an MSP owner recognise if you were inflicted with a fixed mindset? And how would you start to identify that and how would you start to tackle it?

Most MSPs that I’ve worked with, and similar to your experience, they have a growth mindset because they want to grow their business, they’re open to how do they get better, they’re open to exploring new avenues whether it’s revenue, recurring revenue or new services or working with their teams to elevate their performance or their certification or their training or their development. But I sometimes see MSPs, MSP owners, who are just content with, I don’t want to grow my business, I’m happy the way it is, and that may be fine for them. But they still want to be profitable, even if they don’t want to grow their revenue, they want that revenue that they are and the customers that they are serving to be happy and well served. And for that, you need employees who will carry out that mission, whether your growth intentions are lower or higher, you want your employee base embracing a growth mindset every day, every week, every month.

So it does require a level of self-reflection. And if you don’t recognise that in yourself or your company or your management team, that’s a problem. But it starts with one question – What are your plans for growth? Often when I talk to new MSPs I haven’t met before, I say Talk to me about your business. Where are you growing? Where are you not growing? Where do you feel unsettled and uncomfortable in terms of your business or your business plan? And if they’re like, Hey, everything’s great, everything’s fine. I’m happy with my growth. I’m not looking for aggressive growth. I’m kind of happy and content with where we are right now. That’s kind of little bit of a red flag, right? I know I’m dealing with somebody who’s a little bit different than the norm because the norm is not like that for most MSP owners.

No. And let’s be honest, within the MSP world, there is no other sector where there’s so much change. I’ve only been here since 2016, and even in, what’s that, seven, eight years, nine years, I can add up, well clearly I can’t on the fly, the whole of the technical world has completely changed. Cyber security is so different today to what it was back in 2016. So I agree with you, I think for an MSP owner there’s always so many opportunities, new things, new ways of generating recurring revenue and new ways of protecting the clients from themselves.

It’s the nature of the beast isn’t it, of being an MSP and the world that we live in with cyber security. It’s fast evolving, and you almost have to have a growth mindset just to keep up with the fast pace and the growing threats.

Well, thank you for coming on to talk about this, Patrick. And I certainly think for everyone listening, watching this right now, you definitely should read Mindset by Carol Dweck. It’s probably on Audible because most great books like that are. It’s really funny. my daughter was taught this eight years ago at her school. She’s only 14. So at the age of six, they were teaching growth mindset. And in fact, I remember watching a Netflix show a couple of years ago, it’s called Drive to Survive, I don’t know if you’ve seen it, Patrick, it’s about Formula One. And one of the Formula One drivers had a big crash and a kid fan stopped him coming out of the pits and said to him, How are you going to use this crash to positively influence your performance going forward? And I thought, that’s just brilliant. You wouldn’t have heard kids talking that way 20 years ago. Came off as a bit precocious to be honest, but it was still great that the kid was asking a guy who’d just written off a $200 million car and he was asking him how the crash was going to help him improve his performance in the future. Because that’s how we want our kids to be thinking. So thank you for coming on talking about this. Just finish off Patrick by telling us a little bit about Barracuda. What exactly do you do? What are the benefits and how can we get in touch with someone?

Yeah, sure. Before I do that, again, I would echo the same thing you just referenced with your listeners on Carol’s book, it’s just a great book. And the last piece of advice I’d give any MSP owner is lean into it, challenge directly, but professionally and where you see something that gives you some pause that somebody on your team or your management team may not be embracing fully. Talk about it, lean into it, embrace it, challenge it.

As far as Barracuda, a little bit about Barracuda. We’ve been around for 21 years. This is not new to us. We have a very robust platform from email to network security, to application security to award-winning XDR services. We are a 100% channel company. We only work with the channel, whether it’s VARs or resellers or solution providers, the hyperscalers or distribution channel, but also MSPs. So we’re 100% focused on the channel and we serve for MSPs who serve the underserved market in SMB and the low end of enterprise, that’s their sweet spot.

That’s a big sweet spot for Barracuda as well, for customers who recognise that they have a challenge with cyber security, but may not necessarily have the staffing or the technical staff to be able to keep up with those threats. Barracuda makes it easy for our partners to be able to serve those clients with our award-winning platform. Starting with email, which is the biggest threat vector of all the way through network and application and data protection, backup and recovery. So classic MSP managed recurring revenue services.

We want to make it easy for our partners to buy, to consume, to deploy and manage our offerings. So that’s what Barracuda is all about. I would encourage anyone who’s listening to this podcast or YouTube, if they want to get in touch with me, connect with me on LinkedIn, I’d be glad to get you connected with other members of our team. Again, in service to MSPs who just do yeoman’s job protecting so much of our economy from the bad actors and cyber security threats. So we’re thrilled and honoured to work all kinds of partners and serve hundreds of thousands of organisations worldwide with our solutions.

Daniel in Michigan owns a new and quite small MSP. He only has one technician and somebody else that helps out from time to time and his question is: How do I free up my time?

Oh, have no doubt. It is impossible to grow your MSP and therefore reach your life goals on your own. Success is about doing the things you most want to do in life. And no successful person ever achieved their success without a ton of help from other people.

So the simplest way to do this is to pay other people to do things so that you don’t have to do them. You should develop a mindset, I know we’ve only just been talking about that with Patrick, but you should develop a mindset of you should only do what only you can do. Let me say that again because it’s so important. You should only do what only you can do. And anytime you catch yourself doing that something someone else could do for you, you are literally wasting your time and you’re not making any progress towards your goals.

So for every little job that’s on your plate, ask yourself, how can you DOA it away. DOA being an acronym for Delegate, Outsource, Automate. And it’s also worth communicating to your staff on a regular basis what you need to focus your time on and help them to understand the benefits to them. For example, by working on the business and improving, you are attracting new clients, you are growing your monthly recurring revenue, and this will help you pay them more. If they understand that taking stuff off your plate ultimately helps you to pay them more, everyone is happy and everyone is really focused. Plus you get loads more time to yourself.

Welcome to Episode 276 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

What if I told you there was a perfect moment to ask your MSP’s clients for a testimonial or review. But you must act on it super quickly, as that moment will very fast vanish. If you struggle to collect social proof from your clients, this is going to make your life so much easier and even allow you to systemise getting testimonials and reviews from your happiest clients.

So we all know that social proof is really, really important. Social proof is when people see other people like them acting in a certain way, and it gives them kind of a feeling of safety to know that other people have already tread the path that they are thinking of treading. And what I mean by that is collecting testimonials, reviews, and case studies from your existing clients, and then using that “social proof”, as it’s called, to persuade other people to pick your MSP.

You’ll be perceived as a safer choice by business owners and managers if they see that other business owners and managers have already picked you and are happy to endorse you.

Now, you’ve probably heard this before, but maybe there’s been something that’s been holding you back from collecting lots of social proof. Maybe it’s just been you simply haven’t had enough time, too many things to do, right? Or maybe you felt a little awkward asking your clients to give you a review or a testimonial. I mean, they’re already paying you money every month, surely you can’t ask them for something else, can you? Well, as a side note, yes you can. In fact, your best clients are often the most delighted to give you a testimonial or review because they want to see you succeed so that they can continue to enjoy your service.

Whatever the reason you don’t have enough social proof yet, let me tell you the perfect moment to go asking for it. You’re looking for the point at which your client is at their happiest, and we can actually predict when this will be. There are two, maybe three times that they’re most likely to be at their happiest, and the first will be about 90 days after they very first joined you. So that first month is always a little bit manic, isn’t it? As you are onboarding them and you are migrating any services away from their previous MSP. And then the second and third months are where you work your magic and where the really good stuff happens. So they see little problems that never got sorted with the previous MSP get fixed by you. And you probably over service them a little in that first month or so, so everyone is very happy with you, they’re all glad that they switched over to you. And can you see why that would be an exceptionally good time to ask them for a review or a testimonial?

Also, after 90 days, they feel as though they’ve sampled enough of your service to endorse you, and they wouldn’t do that in the first week or so. Another great time to ask them for social proof is after you’ve completed a big project for them, especially if it’s perhaps a massive, complex project with lots of moving parts. The relief from them that the project has been completed and the pleasure of the benefits that that project brings them are both things that you can leverage when you are asking for some social proof at this stage. Now, with both of these two examples I’ve just given you, can you see how you can systemise asking for social proof into the process of onboarding or completing a project? You can actually set a reminder for 90 days into a new relationship with a new client or at the point that the project has been successfully delivered, you can build it in and add it as a to-do, as a task to contact your client and ask them for social proof.

And there is actually one more ideal opportunity, a great place to ask them for a testimonial or a review. And that’s when you have completed a major fix or a rescue for your clients. Now, let’s say they’ve had some kind of massive breakdown in something that was out of your control, you didn’t know and couldn’t have predicted it would’ve gone wrong, but you had to jump in and fix it. Maybe they’ve been compromised in some way and you’ve swept in, you’ve done your magic and you’ve rescued them, and now everything is fantastic again. This is the perfect moment to ask for social proof because even though technology has been a nightmare for them for the last few days, maybe even weeks, you’ve rescued them like a knight in shining armour. And you can’t systemise a moment like this because you don’t know when it’s going to happen. But can you see how really this is no different to the previous two examples, you are asking your clients for social proof at the exact moment they are emotionally overwhelmed with gratitude for you.

Great social proof comes from the heart and not from the brain. You want people to be talking about how they feel about you and your team, not the logical fact about working with you. Good social proof persuades people to pick you at an emotional level. And the only way you can do this is to get emotional content from your existing clients to put in front of your leads and your prospects. So let me ask you, which of these three moments are you going to use to collect more social proof from your clients? you. But a project is the most obvious small thing to sell people.

If you only had 10 minutes a day to market your MSP, there’s one single place where I would recommend you invested all of that time. It’s the single most important place for MSPs to go marketing in 2025. And if you’re not there building it up every single day, you really are missing a massive marketing opportunity.

Let me tell you what it is, how to leverage it, and a way to make it seem so easy that it feels like you’re doing almost no work every day yet across a year, you are going to see huge results.

I made a big decision with my MSP Marketing Edge product development team at the backend of last year, and we’ve launched an exciting new project, which is now helping our members reach more decision makers on LinkedIn. And better influence them there as well. But why my obsession with LinkedIn? Well, that’s kind of easy. It is the most powerful social network for MSPs. Every prospect you could ever want is there and you can easily reach them.

Do you know what kind of businesses you’d most like to work with? Well start by looking for them on LinkedIn.

You want to connect with the decision makers and the influencers. And there are a few ways to do this. You could make a list of business names and run a LinkedIn search, or you could decide on several verticals you like and search for, let’s say lawyers in your town, accountants in your town, etc etc. You can also repeat this search on Google, adding the word LinkedIn of course for a shortcut. Find someone in your town who’s already connected to the people you want to reach. Connect to them and then connect to their connections. And by the way, there is a setting in LinkedIn that hides your connections to stop someone doing this to you.

Every weekday I recommend you attempt to connect to 10 new people, and yes, you may need a paid LinkedIn subscription to do this. Also maybe only two of them will accept your connection request, which doesn’t sound a lot until you look at the big picture figures. Two connections a day, times five days, times 50 weeks equals 500 new connections a year, every year. And suddenly the power of a marketing system strikes again. This is why you want to turn this activity into a regular, probably even daily task. It’s 10, maybe 15 minutes of work every day, which is nothing but over a year in the grand scheme of things, it compounds and all of those tiny actions turn into something impressive.

If you want to be really smart with this, then you’ll personally not do this work yourself. Go and find a virtual assistant or a member of your team to make these connection requests every day for you. All you need to do is brief this person on the kind of connections that you want to make and then give them access to your personal LinkedIn. You do it all in your LinkedIn. Now, I know that that might make you feel funny having someone else sat there in your LinkedIn, but so long as you find an assistant or a member of your team that you can trust and you put in place some checks, it will be okay. In fact, I’ve been operating this way for years on LinkedIn. If you and I have ever chatted on LinkedIn, well, if it was a very simple conversation that we had, it was probably not me, it was probably my virtual assistant Christelle. Or if it was a more complex conversation than it would’ve been me jumping in, but you wouldn’t have known. It does mean that christelle is doing 80% of the work on building up my LinkedIn and having basic conversations, and I just have to swoop in and do the 20% of stuff that really only I can do.

Now, that’s a really smart way of doing any marketing, and it’s a great way of protecting your personal time while getting more solid marketing done. So let’s summarise that… building a simple system that attempts new connections every day and getting someone else to do this for you. This is very, very smart marketing that over time will give you a great big base of people to start talking to a whole ton of leads that you can start working and generating prospects from.

Featured guest: Dan Grech is a Pulitzer Prize-winning former NPR and PBS journalist turned entrepreneur and educator. He’s the Founder and CEO of BizHack Academy, which is on a mission to train 1 million businesses how to use AI-powered marketing and business storytelling to grow 10x faster so their communities can thrive.

Dan has worked as the head of digital marketing at two software startups and the nation’s largest Hispanic-owned energy company and has participated in accelerator programs through Entrepreneurs Organization, the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Business Program, and Knight Foundation.

Dan is a graduate of Princeton University and has a Masters degree in storytelling from FIU and in journalism from Universidad Torcuato di Tella in Argentina. He lives with his wife and two children in Denver, CO.

Heads up, here’s someone who’s there in the trenches marketing an MSP day in day out. There’s no better way for you to find the right ideas to market your business than listening to other people who have shovels in their hand and are doing it right now. Let’s explore what he’s done over the last three years and which great ideas you can take away and implement quickly.

Hi, I’m Dan Grech. I’m the founder and CEO of Biz Hack Academy, and we are a marketing training and consulting company, and we provide fractional CMO services to MSPs around the world.

And thank you so much for joining me on the podcast, Dan. You’ve got an amazing to tell about an MSP that you’ve been working with for three years, and you’ve taken them from literally zero marketing to a nice complex marketing machine that’s really delivering results for them. So we’re going to look at what you’ve done that’s worked well, what you’ve tried that didn’t work, and then let’s have a look at what you’re thinking of doing with them for the next three years. Before we tell that story, let’s find out a little bit about you. What’s your background? How did you get into this wonderful world of marketing MSPs?

Absolutely. Well, thank you so much for being here and I’m really excited to tell you about this story of one MSP. We work with many different MSPs, but the story of this particular MSP, we’re not going to mention their name, is I think really illustrative of the opportunity and the challenges of marketing your MSP online – it’s a very crowded space. MSPs tend to be “me too” businesses, in other words there’s a lot of competition that looks very similar on the surface, and we’ve developed some really good lessons and best practices that we hope that all of your MSPs who are listening can share.

My background actually is as a journalist, I spent 15 years in the United States working for NPR and PBS and the Miami Herald and the Washington Post, and I was a storyteller basically. I even got my master’s degree in storytelling. And then about 10 years ago, like so many other journalists, I lost my job. I had to reinvent. I reinvented myself first as a digital marketer, then as a trainer of digital marketing. I love to train people in what I want to learn. I love to learn by teaching, if you will. And then finally, as a business owner, starting my own training and consulting company, which I’ve been running now for almost 10 years – Biz Hack Academy.

And one of the services that we provide is fractional CMO services. This is a part-time outsourced head of marketing. Basically providing thought partnership to the CEO and helping oversee and lead a team of marketers and agencies in support of accomplishing the CEO’s vision. Most MSP heads are technical people. They’re very operationally focused, and generally speaking they’re terrible at marketing. And so it’s really important that most MSPs that are looking to grow have someone in that seat, that head of marketing role, who can help them filter all their good ideas and then make sure that the team is executing against the best ones.

Over the course of these three years, we’ve learned a lot of lessons about what works and what doesn’t. And I’m excited to share that journey. And we’re just right now as we plan for next year, we’re recording this in December, right before the new year 2025, we’re now actually creating our next three year strategy because we have had so much success over these three years building a great foundation.

What kind of situation was the MSP in when you first started working with them? They must have had a website, they must have had a LinkedIn presence, but was that it? Were they doing any marketing at all?

First of all, this MSP has three divisions, and I think this is really important because in one sense, I would almost say that this MSP didn’t follow necessarily marketing best practices because they had such a large Chinese menu of services. So the first service they offer is security and access control, these are cameras, access control for garages and doors like physical installations. Second, they offered unified communications, so this is like VoIP. And then third, they offer IT managed services, which includes things like cyber security, it’s a massive field.

One of the biggest challenges that we faced early on was you have these three divisions and most of the products, the services, the vendors that they work with weren’t even listed on their website. I described internally, I would say it’s like you guys are a Chinese food restaurant where you don’t even list everything on your menu. So that was one big issue. As far as the website itself, this was the worst website situation I’d ever seen. They were using some old platform, I don’t even remember the name, that wasn’t indexed or indexable by Google – they were literally invisible on the internet. So though they had a 35 year history, in this case, they were invisible online.

In terms of the marketing that they were doing at the time, they had one individual who was sort of like their social media video person. And then they had a couple of divisional salespeople for each of the three divisions who also oversaw marketing communications. And so the very first thing that we did with them is we ran all three of them as well as the CEO through a training program. And this served a couple of really important functions. Number one is it gave them a shared language for marketing. At Biz Hack Academy we call it the lead building system. I think it’s worth just quickly talking about what is the lead building system because it’s a really simplified form of marketing that’s very relevant to MSPs.

The foundation of a lead building system is your business story. This is the founder’s reason for starting the company and the purpose of the company in the world… why you do what you do and why it matters.

I’d love to dig into that a little bit and how defining the owner’s business story was an unlocking mechanism for growth for this company. That’s the foundation, ultimately, people only do business with people they like and trust, but if you’re actually looking to generate leads, there are six pillars. You need to identify what is the campaign objective? How are we going to measure success? Are you looking to get them to watch a video, click on it, click on a link, open an email, etc. Then you need to really narrowly identify your target audience and give them an irresistible offer.

For most MSPs, you’re really offering them knowledge in exchange for their contact information. So you’re establishing yourself as an expert and then ultimately, ideally collecting their contact information, email and phone number so you can follow up with them. That’s the core of strategy. Who’s your audience and what are you giving them of value in exchange for their contact info? Next is thumb stopping visuals and compelling messaging. That’s the essence of tactical marketing – images, videos, audio, text, and obviously leveraging AI to the hilt to do that. Those are pillars four and five. And then pillar six is the customer journey, the buyer’s journey. How do they go from never having heard of you to a sale? And each campaign takes them on a next step in their customer journey. And so it’s an iterative process. You run an ad that leads them to click on a button and takes them to a landing page – so the objective to the ad is clicks. Then on the landing page, they fill out a form – so the objective of the landing page is form fills. And it’s iterative like that. And then now they’ve given you their email address -the objective of them is to open the email and book a call and so forth. And so you do this iterative process and this is how you market.

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. And it’s obviously taken you three years and I can see why it’s taken you three years, there’s a lot of stuff in there. You’ve built an entire marketing platform. So in terms of results, go back three years when they had an unindexable website, which I’ve never heard of in 2025, that’s nuts. But where were they getting their leads from? Was it just word of mouth? Was it just doing some networking locally? And then today, what kind of a difference is there? Is it a reliable amount of leads coming in? Do they have a reliable amount of discovery calls booked? What’s the difference from before to after?

They’d been in business for 35 years, and so they were getting the business and they still get most of their business in ways that are going to be familiar to any MSP, through personal networking and referrals. The problem was they were losing a lot of business that would get referred to them. They would check out their online presence, they’d say this isn’t a serious company – too small, not a good risk to take. I mean, one of the things about MSPs is MSPs are basically CYAs, right? The head of IT for a company, the chief information officer of a company is looking to hire a partner for an MSP that’s going to make them not look bad, that’s going to keep things working, that’s going to largely be invisible, and then when things go wrong, we’ll be immediately accessible and available to them. So it’s a very heavy on risk vendor relationship. And if you aren’t really on point with your digital presence, they’re going to disqualify you. So this is an invisible cost to a poor digital presence. You need a good functioning website, a decently active presence on social media, good blogs, ideally some really good educational content. It’s not going to necessarily close you the business, but it won’t lose you the business.

The first thing was building up that platform so that they weren’t losing the business that was already coming to them. It was all manual, it was all about them going networking. They were in three different markets, they had three different divisions, they had a pretty large sales team. It was very much of a sales driven company, and marketing was at best just kind of trickling out some email and social media.

So now fast forward three years, I’m actually looking at their data right now. They have dramatically increased. They have more than 1200 back links, which are different links from other organisations sending to their site. We’re on the track now to make that 20,000 back links over the next three years. They have an authority score from nothing to 16, we’re going to have that up to 40 over the next three years. And their organic traffic, which was literally in the dozens when we first met, is now breaking 5,000 per month, on its way to 50,000 and beyond. We’re right now in the early stages of the L curve, the hockey stick of growth. Because SEO in particular is very much a long-term additive strategy.

Our goal over the first three years, which we hit, was to build out a thousand articles and landing pages. We have a landing page now for every item on that Chinese menu. In other words, every product or service that they have, every vendor they work with will have pages and often multiple pages, and there’ll be localised versions of each of those pages for the geographies that they serve. Because as you know, a lot of search is best communications or best VoIP provider in Chicago. So need those geographically specific landing pages. And so this is a massive undertaking to get everything on their website listed with accuracy and length. And so a big part of those three years was just getting that Chinese menu with geographically localised pages onto the website.

And then we also did a ton with email acquiring lists, generating lists through our content. And then finally, social media has primarily been just kind of showing that the company’s alive. We have the technicians sending photos before and after as part of the due diligence process, and then we post those photos and they do shockingly well. People love seeing messy cords turned into clean cords. So the before and afters do really well for us. So that’s kind of the social media.

And then of course, PPC paid advertising, and that’s a challenge. It’s expensive, but it’s the primary driver to date of new business.

Yeah, no, absolutely. And obviously all that work you’ve done over the last three years putting in place the basics, the solid basics is going to contribute, well, I’m sure that’s going to contribute more in the next 3, 4, 5 years ahead. Two very quick final questions for you, Dan. First of one, you mentioned earlier on about the business owner story. I just wanted to pick up on that and just close that loop if we could. And secondly, just give us a sneak preview of some of the ideas that you’re thinking about doing with this MSP over the next three years.

Absolutely. So if I could give one takeaway to your MSPs, this is the single marketing tip that will make the biggest difference in the speed of your growth. And it’s almost counterintuitive, which is talk more about yourself. Everything in marketing is, it’s all about them. It’s all about solving the customer’s pain points. But you have to remember if they’re the hero, if they’re the Luke Skywalker, you as the business owner are the Jedi knight who is going to help them become the hero they’re meant to be. They don’t just hire anybody off the street. They hire someone that they like and they trust, and how do you build liking and trusting? It’s through a personal story. And so identifying why you do what you do, why you are personally committed and dedicated to being an MSP, to providing these services, to helping solve the technology challenges of your clients, while you have that sort of servant mentality describing where that came from, who taught you to value service, how you started your career, the startup story of your company, and then who you serve and why you serve them and why you love to serve them. Those are all things that will take a boutique MSP and help them stand out from the crowd because it’s a very crowded and undifferentiated space. And if you do not speak to who the owner is and why he or she does what she does, you will lose business. So that is my number one growth tip.

Now in terms of what we’re going to do over the next three years, so first of all, aligned with that is we’re going to position the CEO as a thought leader in his industry. We’re going to get very noisy about that online. We’re running webinars and webinar series. We’re then cutting them up to create social video. We’re partnering with vendors. We actually, the company bought a cyber truck, and we’re actually partnering with vendors and doing cyber truck demo videos using the vendors. So we’re doing all sorts of creative campaigns like that.

We’re leveraging social media like IMGUR is a platform, Reddit, Quora. So all of those platforms we’re expanding into in these first three years. We just didn’t have the resources to do that, now we have the bandwidth to do that, and we are doubling down on SEO, accelerating the content creation, doing it in the niches and the keywords that we know are winnable through our research. And then really focusing our paid on the security division, which we know is the most winnable, the least competitive, and the one that when they come in for the security division, they tend to get upsold into the IT services and the unified communications. So being really smart about where we’re spending our advertising dollars to maximise. We also are finding incredible results from Bing ads, which is a much cheaper and less competitive marketplace. And it’s all really on a foundation of content creation, being an expert, creating videos and blog posts that answer the specific questions that IT professionals have. The analogy is just like people go to YouTube to learn techniques, to fix their sink or do some home improvement. MSP clients are doing similar things except with their more advanced technologies. And so if you can be that person that they see giving that expert advice, you’re positioned to win that sale.

We are getting you back on this show in 2028, so we can hear what’s happened at the end of the six years. Maybe we should just get you on every three years. Dan, just for those MSPs that want to have a chat with you, see if maybe your fractional CMO services is something that would sit well with them, what’s the best way to get in touch?

Yeah, thank you. So go to BizHack.com, and they’ll see at the top that one of our services is fractional CMO services, and they should book a call with me, and I’m happy to talk to them. We have more than 80 fractional CMOs. We work with dozens of MSPs around the country. We have a deep expertise in exactly what they need and how to approach it, and we will help you grow faster.

Patrick is in Newcastle with his MSP in the northeast of England, and he has two questions in relation to his website. Firstly, What is a vanity URL? And secondly, Do I need one?

There’s a quick and easy answer to this one. A vanity URL is used to hide a real URL for a promotion. It’s typically used in offline media where someone has to type something in. So for example, you might have an advert in a magazine or a billboard (which side note, it isn’t something I’d recommend, but let’s just go with the example), and let’s say the call to action on the magazine advert is to go to a special landing page at yourwebsite.com/landingpage. And the reason you’re sending them to that special page is to measure how much traffic you get from the advert. It’s really important that there’s no other way that they can get to that URL, it’s not in your website navigation or anything like that. You don’t advertise it elsewhere. It just shows you all the traffic that’s come to this page must have come from the magazine advert.

The risk is as they’re typing it in that they get to the.com and they stop. That’s natural human behaviour, but that means they’ll be visiting your homepage and not the special landing page. So that skews your results. It’ll completely screw your stats up, and you’d think that the advert generated no traffic. In fact, then you’d be crying and the advertising people will be crying as well, and it would all just get horribly messy. So instead, you buy a vanity URL such as getbetterIT.com, and then you divert it to the actual URL, that one that had the slash, and that way the people responding to the advert cannot get it wrong. There’s no slashes, there’s no extensions, it’s just the base URL, and you get to know exactly what response you get. Another way of doing this, of course, would be to have a QR code, and personally, I would actually do both of these in a magazine advert, which as I said, I don’t really recommend you do anyway. But if you do, now you know how to judge whether or not you’ll get any response from it.

Welcome to Episode 275 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

What is it with people like you and me running on fumes? If you’re running an MSP, I know what it’s like right now. That boost you had from time off over Christmas, all that recharging festive fuel, that was months ago. It’s all long gone. And yet we keep pushing, don’t we mile after mile after mile, hoping we can keep the business going, hoping we can keep it growing. But is this actually the best way to run an MSP? Stick around to be reminded why we do this, how to keep your energy levels up and the unexpected benefit to your life and lifestyle in the long-term.

So this is my 20th year as a business owner and my goodness that has gone so quickly. I kid you not, I was 30 when I started my first business and I was young and cool and now I’m this old man, I’m age 50, I’ve got the creaky back, I’ve got a dodgy knee. And if you’re in your twenties or thirties right now, do not get cocky kid. This is going to happen to you as well. Although by the time that you reach the age the I am now, I’ll be in a nursing home, anyway.

One of the constants of being a business owner is that it is hard work. I have a great business now with a great team at the MSP Marketing Edge and we do great work for MSPs all over the world with our service. But I still have weeks where I’m working more hours than someone with a job would. If I worked for someone else in a job, I would never do those 50, 60 week hours, rarely anyway. And if I look back over the last 20 years, there have been many of those periods of time where you throw yourself into projects or problems or whatever it is. I’m sure you do exactly the same.

The truth is only business owners can understand this…

Running a business that you own is more than just something you do. It’s more than just a job. It’s very much a way of life.

It has a unique way of sucking every single last ounce of energy and every last second of time out of you. And do you know, as I hear myself saying that, I realise that I’m not really painting it in a very good light for someone who’s actually thinking of starting their own MSP. So sorry if that’s you. But I think actually before anyone starts their own business, really they need to understand the downsides as well as the upsides. It is an all consuming thing and especially so with an MSP because running an MSP is surely running one of the most difficult kinds of businesses in the world.

There are so many details you need to be across, there’s so much that changes. And of course you have to be both proactive and reactive at the same time. You have to be proactive stopping things from going wrong, but then reactive fixing stuff that does go wrong. It’s exhausting. You have my full admiration for doing it. Sometimes I see MSPs are really struggling with this burden. I see posts in places like the tech tribe or my own free MSP marketing Facebook group and people are really struggling with the constant burden of running an MSP. And I think it’s at times like that you have to remind yourself why you are doing this. So let me ask you why you started your business in the first place. Was it to increase your personal income? Was it to take control of the work that you do and who you do it for and the way that it’s done? Was it to build a better lifestyle for you and for your family or was it just because you wanted to prove that you could do it? That you could stand on your own two feet? I mean the chances are it’s many or even all of those things.

Starting a business isn’t like taking a job. It’s something we create, something we shape ourselves, it’s our baby. And do you know, after the difficult first couple of years, you can build something amazing that thrives whether you personally are there or not. In fact, the thing that keeps many business owners going not just through 20 years but 30 years, 40 years or more, is the lifestyle that they can build out of owning a business. And by lifestyle I don’t mean a bigger house or a bigger car. And if those are things that motivate you, then great. But when I’m talking about lifestyle, what I’m really talking about is you doing the things you want to do with the people you most want to do them with.

Let me give you an example. So you may know I’m a sole parent, I have a 14-year-old, Hi Samm, that’s my child and that’s my most important job. So I am always a parent first and a business owner second, and all my other roles come after that. But there’s going to come a point in the next few years where my beloved child leaves to go to university or whatever. Actually she wants to go to drama school to be a musical theater actor, which is cool. And at that point, I’m just not going to be needed as much as I am today. I guess I’ll have to just send money all the time obviously, but I won’t need to be taxi driver, I won’t need to be organiser, chef, all of those kinds of things that you do as a parent. And at that point I want to travel.

I have a plan to travel to 50 countries in my fifties and so far I’ve only ticked off one item off that list, one country off that list, which was a visit to the US last year and I’m going to be 51 in just a few months time, so I need to get on this. But all joking aside, that goal has been a very big presence in my mind for perhaps five, maybe even 10 years or so. And I knew it was going to be some time before I could do and travel to the really cool places, the kind of places that teenagers just don’t want to go to. Places like Japan, that’s the kind of place I want to go. So as I’ve been building up my business over the years, it’s very much been in the back of my mind that whatever I build must feed my lifestyle and not hinder it. My lifestyle requirements in the future demand that I have time to go traveling and enough money to pay for that travel. And also, of course, I can’t be trapped in an office here at home. There’s no way that I could have that lifestyle if I was working for someone else. Well most jobs anyway. But as a business owner, I definitely can because I can go to Japan and I can work in a different time zone and also have some fun.

And that’s the point that I’m trying to make here. The greatest advantage of running your own MSP is that you can work towards the lifestyle you most want to live. And that might be travel, it might be doing more exciting higher strategic tech work through opportunities that are opened up to you by the people that you’re meeting running your MSP. It could be something else you might want to learn to hang glide, I don’t know. But believe me, during the difficult weeks, the ones where you are working 60, 70 hours a week or more, and that’s just to stay afloat. That’s what you’ve got to stay focused on.

Running a business is not a sprint, it’s a marathon. And yet sure, you’ve always got to be aware of the mile that you’re currently running, but you must also keep in mind the ultimate goal to live the life you most want to live doing the things you most want to do with the people you most want to do them with.

If I walked into your MSP’s office today, would my mouth drop open in shock and surprise? Would I be slapping you on the back and congratulating you or would I have my hands on my face in total horror at what I see? Let me tell you how what I’d see in your office can tell me exactly how efficient your MSP is at winning clients and serving them well.

So I’ll admit it’s been a few years since I was inside an MSP’s office, but based on several years of visiting many of them, they do tend to fall into one of two camps. They’re either a pristine, tidy space with zero mess or they’re an untidy space packed with clutter. Old hardware, keyboards, mice, cables everywhere on every shelf in every drawer, in every cupboard. You can’t move for stuff. So which one of those is your office? Personally, I try very hard to maintain a clean and tidy environment. My house is the kind of place where you could drop in on me with no notice and think I’d just been tidying for hours. My home office and video studio is exactly the same apart from one corner where a bunch of unwanted clutter is starting to building up.

Every time I clear out my office or declutter my desk, I feel great. Because your environment sets your context. It directly affects how you feel and how you think.

It’s why a refurbishment in a retail shop typically leads to an immediate boost in sales. It’s also why some people believe a broken window that doesn’t get fixed can ultimately lead to the building being burned down. Side note, this is known as broken windows theory. You can Google it. It’s where small crimes against an empty building tend to escalate. So if some kids break a window and no one notices that the windows have been broken and no one boards them up, the vandals keep returning, and they commit higher and higher levels of crime until eventually someone burns the building down.

And it explains why if you tolerate one technician being late for work twice a week every week, eventually that will spread to more of your staff until many of them are routinely late. Context is everything. So if your environment sets your context, here’s a challenge for you. Have a good look round. You’re working environment right now unless you’re driving of course, but if you’re in the office, have a good look around. What kind of context is it setting for you? Is there clutter everywhere? Are there piles of old computers waiting for… what? Are you waiting for Windows seven to come back into fashion? Could your office do with a deep clean? Are the cobwebs all over the place? What do the walls look like? Would they benefit from a lick of paint?

Another way of looking at it, what could you do in just 30 minutes at the end of work today or tomorrow that could make a dramatic difference to your working environment? Removing the physical clutter from our environment helps us to tackle the mental clutter with less stuff clogging our minds. We can operate with greater clarity and ultimately get more done. Right, I’m going to roll my sleeves up. I’m going to have to tackle my evil clutter corner.

Featured guest: Shawn Lemon is the founder of The Digital Organizer and has spent the last 17 years helping individuals and businesses get better at using their technology. A teacher at heart, Shawn believes the biggest reason people struggle with their tech is because of a lack of understanding of the tools, which isn’t surprising because they’re constantly changing as technology advances.

When not helping businesses operate more efficiently, Shawn loves making pottery, riding motorcycles, and spending time with his wife, Madeline and their 2 year old son, Nico.

Well, who knew? To do their job every good MSP help desk member needs a flashlight and a microscope as well as their mouse and keyboard. Why? Because of the clients submitting endless tickets saying they can’t find this file and they can’t find that file. It’s always urgent, of course, and it can take up a lot of technician time that you could be using to solve real problems. My guest today has an easy way to rescue your profits by improving efficiency and reducing these kind of tickets. Oh and your clients will be delighted and feel like you are proactively helping them.

Hi, I am Shawn Lemon, founder of The Digital Organizer.

And thank you so much for joining me on the show today, Shawn. We are going to explore in the next 10 minutes or so how MSPs can reduce the amount of tickets coming into their business just by getting digitally organised. Now I don’t really understand what that is, and I know you are going to explain it for us, Shawn, and of course loads about MSPs because you have been, in fact, you still are an MSP, aren’t you?

That’s right, yep.

Yeah. So tell us about your background. How did you become an MSP in the first place and how did you move into this sort of different thing of being digitally organised?

Yeah, well, I started working at the Apple Store for seven years teaching people how to use their stuff, and those clients wanted help getting organised beyond what we were able to teach or what the Genius Bar was able to help with, which was only troubleshooting. So I went into that whole field of helping out individuals and then small businesses, basically doing break/fix, then got pulled into MSP just from clients wanting it and started developing all of my SOPs and everything from there while also still running my digital organisation business at the same time.

Oh wow. So you’ve kind of one of those people who’s just good at lots and lots of different things, which is really cool. So explain to us what do you mean by digital organisation? Because when I first heard that phrase when you and I first discussed you coming on the show, I thought, well, is that something as simple as keeping your files in a good order in your computer? Is it as simple as something like that or is there sort of a bigger concept to it?

Well, I’d say there’s a bigger concept in realising that we have three primary things that every business has to do well – communication, file storage and management, and project management. And those three things go hand in hand with each other and we’re constantly flipping back between them. But if we think about communication file storage or just data storage and handling that and task management, there’s a massive amount of overlap in tools, and the lines of demarcation are not drawn because everyone’s trying to get you to use their platform more. And so what we’re trying to do is come in and say, Hey, you’ve got five different places that you’re storing your files. Let’s come up with our one source of truth and we’re still going to need to utilise other platforms to send and receive, but how do we do that? And same thing goes for the communication channels and project management so that everyone knows exactly where to go and there’s minimal amount of organisation that actually needs to happen because we’re cleaning up as we go. So we teach clients how to stay organised as well.

Got it, got it. So for MSPs that take on board that bigger strategy, how does that affect the work that they then do for their clients? So should they, for example, be taking more responsibility for helping their own clients and the end users actually be more organised?

My encouragement to MSPs would be to get into the nitty gritty with the clients to try and help them figure out how they should actually utilise the tools.

What I find is most IT companies are focusing primarily on getting them to the right platform or maybe even consolidating everything. They’re spinning up that SharePoint from a server that they’ve been managing all along and getting them upgraded. But once it gets all pulled into one place, the clients still need a lot of help figuring out how to utilise it properly, whether it’s a familiar tool or something else of figuring out what that flow is.

The encouragement is get in there, and this could be something that you charge a one-time fee for or maybe something ongoing. It doesn’t have to be that you just eat all of this cost to get in and help them organise their data. But if you do and get in, whether it’s build them separately or eat the cost and get them organised, it’s going to come back to you in the form of less tickets because everyone knows where to go and your clients are going to be a lot happier, not just about the tech solution, it’s about the data flow as well.

So I like this. So it’s a very proactive approach, and saying we know that a bulk of tickets are going to come in because of X, Y, Z problems, which are related to, I can’t find this, or this doesn’t seem to work, or where did I put that? so let’s eliminate those. And actually, what if we get the clients to pay us to eliminate those problems before they happen, which I think is beautiful. And you mentioned migration, so something like a migration to SharePoint is an obvious place to do that because it’s something new.

Obviously when you’re taking on board new clients, that would be a good time to do it as well. From a practical point of view. Shawn, how would you actually do that? So if you’re an MSP, let’s take the migration, say you are migrating the client from whatever and they’re going onto to SharePoint. I know most MSPs would just pick up the 10,000 files from the old place and just two days later pop them down in the SharePoint and go, there you go. So all they’ve done is they’ve moved from platform A to platform B practically. How would you organise those 10,000 files, which might be 10 years worth of data?

Well, the first thing that I would do is figure out or discuss with the client a good archiving strategy. Realising that the 80/20 rule applies to our data, but it’s even more skewed than that. The amount of files that we’re actually using daily and that are going to set us up for the future, are very small percentage of the data that we actually own. So we need to create some sort of a deep archive that’s maybe not part of the search function for all of your users, so that we’re not pulling up irrelevant results.

A big part is setting aside a deep archive that we have a few gatekeepers who can go find things, and really have our clients focus primarily on what’s important now, going to set them up for the future, and then what should a new folder structure be. When we’re thinking about sharing internally for different departments or even sharing externally when we’re working with other people. And realising we’ve got departmental SharePoints, maybe even projects and things that we’re working on, and really incorporating that to figure out what should the new folder structure be, that archive strategy and a good naming convention. And I’ve also got a free download, which is our process of how we do organisations. If you want to take that and run your clients through that same process or share that resource with them, go for it. It’ll be extremely helpful.

Cool. We’ll talk about that free download just at the end of the interview, and you’re welcome to give your website address out so MSPs can go and get that. I’ve got to ask, in the age of AI and in the age of all content being indexed, and we’ve got pretty good search tools almost across every platform, do we really need to force companies and force clients into that that structured folder setup and folder structure? Can’t they just rely on search or AI or are those tools just not quite good enough yet?

As of right now, they’re not nearly good enough. I mean, box AI is the one who is talking about being the most advanced, but really when I went in and had them do a demo for me of how it works on their enterprise plan, the whole thing, it was extremely clunky. Google isn’t that great either. I haven’t seen anything really outstanding from OneDrive either. So between all of them, we’re not there yet. But even still, if you think about AI and pulling all of this data together, we need to remove data that isn’t relevant anymore and we don’t want all of this archive stuff showing up in our active files.

I actually think that a separation between active files and archives is going to be even more important, but being able to say what’s in this document that is getting better and better leaps and bounds. So I think it’s going to be less, but because we’re still going to have to store it somewhere, we still need to keep it pretty clean. And a lot of the automation, I think it’s just going to be a while before it’s mature. So personally, I think it’s still really worth the investment of doing it now because who knows when it’s actually going to be good enough.

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. I think this is great. I’m one of those tidy people who I’m looking around my office where I’m recording this interview and I’ve got my physical drawers where everything is arranged perfectly. I know where everything is. This folders are the same on my computer. I was chatting today to a friend of mine who has just migrated from PC to Mac, which is what I use, and the spotlight search on the Mac, which he’s really good at finding stuff inside documents, and I don’t use it for that purpose because I know where everything is, but he’s completely lost. He has thousands of files. He is that nightmare client who needs an MSP to come and sort him out.

Well, that’s actually why I started this business in the first place. I saw these people switching from PCs to Mac, and then it’s like no matter where you go, there you are. Their mess just got dumped into a new location, which is the same thing that happens with SharePoint or Google Drive or Dropbox migrations. It just all gets dumped in. Now what do we do with it? And you’ve got a few people who can figure it out, but the majority just get overwhelmed with it and have a hard time functioning. And that’s how this business was created 11 years ago.

Yeah, no, I think it’s wonderful. It’s a great business idea and it’s so unique. Final question for you before we talk about your free download and how we can get in touch. You work with lots of MSPs, have you come across MSPs that are themselves highly disorganised, they haven’t got their own file structure and their own sort of internal information all sorted out?

Yeah, absolutely. It’s something that we see a lot, just because you scale fast and the most successful businesses are usually the ones who put marketing first and operations later. And so you need operations to trail that. And sometimes that trail gets a little bit too big of a gap and you spin up too many tools. So you started a Wiki and Notion, and then you’ve also got your other stuff in Google Drive and it’s spread out all over the place. And really, I mean, my biggest thing is use forms for everything. Forms for all of the clients and then templates for all of onboarding, offboarding, whether it’s your clients or your client’s new employees.

And it just makes common sense, doesn’t it when you say something like that. But as you say, it’s very difficult sometimes for operations to keep up and especially when you’re fast scaling. So Shawn, thank you so much for coming onto the show. Tell us about this free download. Where can we get it and how can MSPs get in touch with you?

Yeah, so you’re going to go to thedigitalorganizer.com/marketing edge. This is the podcast you’re listening to MSP Marketing Edge. So go there and you’re going to get my file organisation guide – the whole process of consolidating, archiving, purging – the whole thing, start to finish. We’ll give you some other emails as well that you’re welcome to share with your clients, about cleaning up email inboxes and how we like to triage things and get stuff under control with as little effort as possible. So yeah, check us out at thedigitalorganizer.com/marketing edge.

Joseph in Houston, Texas, has numerous staff and as a good boss he has asked: How can I keep track of how happy they are?

The very best way to keep track of what’s really happening with your staff is through structured one-to-ones. You can just have a 15 minute meeting with them on a regular basis once a month will be enough, and you structure the meeting around three questions. The first is: What’s going well?, followed by: What’s not going so well?, followed by: What are you going to do differently next time?

You can answer these questions with your team as well as them giving an answer. In fact, that is the ideal way to do a one-to-one. So they get some feedback from you on what they’re doing well and what they’re doing not so well. And you get to see what they believe they’re doing well and not so well. That really is a great format, which can serve you as you manage and develop your team.

However, it’s not wise, nor recommended for you personally to do more than four or five one-to-ones a month, because they’re simply too draining. And while it’s ok for managers who work for you to do one-to-ones on your behalf, you do lose that bigger picture feeling about your team that you get from doing one-to-ones yourself.

Of course there is a software solution. I spoke to an MSP, who’s got around 12 staff, who’s using something called Office Vibe to keep a track on his team’s overall engagement. It asks your team a series of questions and keeps track of how they’re feeling about their work, to give you an overall grip on your team satisfaction. And of course, it’s not a replacement for sitting down talking human to human, but it is a good way of keeping up to date with your team’s feelings without having to do dozens of hours of one-to-ones every month.

So have a look at Office Vibe, it’s a suggestion, not a recommendation. You should probably Google alternatives to it as well to see what else is out there. And if you do try this for yourself, will you drop me an email and let me know how you get on because I’d love to know. To submit your own question just go to mspmarketingedge.com and head to the contact us page.

Welcome to Episode 274 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

If a client tells you they’ve got a Trojan, your heart sinks. But what if there was a kind of Trojan that actually made you happy because it meant that you were going to make some more money and win some new clients. And don’t worry, I’m not suggesting you infect people’s computers, but let’s talk about why this sales Trojan is a good one, how it can boost your sales and ultimately have a powerful positive impact on your MSP.

We all know what a Trojan horse is, and we all know the Greek myth that gave it that name. But of course, we also know its place within cyber security, perhaps a term that was maybe used more in the past than it is today. But I believe you can use a sales Trojan horse. So what is this? It’s where you sell something small to someone to start building a relationship with them ahead of the thing you really want to sell them, which is of course, a managed services contract.

As an example, you would sell them a low level service first, with the knowledge that you’re going to overdeliver, do a great job, totally delight them. And that’s going to help you to sell them a proper monthly recurring revenue managed services contracts down the line, which is always the goal of everything we’re trying to do here. MRR first. There is only MRR, everything else is just establishing the setup of more MRR.

The beauty of a sales Trojan horse is that it’s a lot easier to sell someone something small than it is to ask them for a 12, 24 or 36 month contract.

They might not understand technology at the level you do but they do understand that if and when something goes wrong, their business is completely screwed. So by selling them something small first, it gives you the opportunity to build up a level of trust with them to build a relationship. And this actually has a term within marketing. It’s called front end backend marketing.

Maybe you’ve seen one of these people online selling something, perhaps doing something like a giveaway where they ask you to pay a little bit for postage and packing. So the thing they’re giving away, the book or whatever is free, you just pay the postage and packing. Or maybe you get a huge value item for $20, something like that. And what this person is really trying to get you to do is to buy something and feel satisfied with it, and then you’ll go on and you’ll buy something more expensive from them in the background or what’s known as the backend. They probably don’t make any money from selling you the book or the $20 item or whatever it is, but they will make money from selling you the $500 item in the background. And let’s say one in 10 people goes on to buy that item, no one would ever buy it as the first purchase, but some may buy it as the second purchase. That’s the theory of front end backend, and that works very well depending on your audience and depending on what you’re selling.

From an MSP point of view, the most obvious thing that you would sell to someone in the front end is a project. In fact, I had a thread on this in my MSP marketing Facebook group that any MSP can join. I asked the direct question: Would you sell a project just to start a relationship with a customer so that you could go on to sell them managed services?, which seemed like a very black and white answer where people were either, yes, 100% I would do that, or they were, no, I will not do that, I only want to get recurring revenue. I don’t want to sell projects. And of course, there’s no right or wrong answer. You have to go with whichever is right for you. But a project is the most obvious small thing to sell people. It’s not really a small thing, I mean, a project isn’t cheap, is it? It could be a $10,000 (or pound) project. The point is, it’s a one-off fixed thing. They know what it is they’re buying, they know when it’s been completed, they know when it’s been done successfully. And so that project allows you to build a relationship with this new client. And you and I both know that if you do a project, you’ll uncover other things that need to be addressed. Maybe even some of those things can be fixed during some kind of managed services contract. So I think a project is the ultimate sales Trojan horse.

There are smaller things that you can do, of course. One of our MSP Marketing Edge members is doing very, very well right now selling small amounts of cyber security training to prospects. So he’ll get talking to a prospect and he’ll sell them a session for no more than about £50, which is about $70, $80. And all it is is a lunchtime zoom, almost like a lunch and learn where he’ll get the prospect’s team onto a Zoom and take them through about 30, 40 minutes of cyber security training, really low level stuff. But it works well because he can then do a review with the decision maker after that training and talk them through some areas where they really should invest in their business.

There are other things that you could sell along these lines, maybe such as selling them something like backups, a basic service like this, or even selling an audit. And I know that audits have fallen out of favour as a sales tool, but a solid audit where you are looking at someone’s systems and telling them what they should improve, I still think that’s possibly the ultimate sales Trojan horse. Because it’s low cost to them, high value for you. You get to dive into their systems to have a look and do the audit, and don’t you always find something which really needs to be followed up with them, which creates an opportunity for you. So tell me, do you think this is something that you’d actually use in your MSP?

What if the secret to landing your dream clients was a key you didn’t even know you had? There’s a hidden strategy locked away that could open doors to better clients without LinkedIn, without websites, cold calls or marketing campaigns. And it’s so effective that the MSPs already using it, hope that you will never find it. Right now, let’s discover where to find that key, how to unlock new opportunities and how to transform your business.

In nature there’s a phenomenon called mutualism. Those are two very hard words to say, a phenomenon called mutualism. Now, you would know this better as a symbiotic relationship. Think of little birds called oxpeckers sitting on the back of zebras and rhinos, and those birds eat the parasites off the animal’s body, which is an easy meal for them, but it also helps the zebra to stay healthy. In fact, they’ve even been observed warning short-sighted rhinos of approaching humans. They’ve got a good symbiotic, win-win relationship there. And there’s an opportunity for you to set up a win-win relationship just like this with a local web agency near you. And the good news is there’s no need to eat worms or anything like that.

From the point of view of ordinary business owners and managers, you and a web agency both do the same thing – “computer stuff”.

Now you and I know that websites and managed services are completely different sides of “computer stuff”, but this explains why your clients sometimes ask you whether you build websites. And believe me, they are asking their website agency whether or not they can help when their computers don’t work properly. Can you see the opportunity here? When a client asks about websites or SEO (search engine optimisation), you say, well, we don’t do this, but we work very, very closely with a local web agency. Let me connect them to you. When the web agency’s client asks them about IT support, they say, well, we don’t do this ourselves, but we work very, very closely with a local IT support company. Let me connect you to them.

Long-term, you could build this into your strategic reviews or your quarterly business reviews. You could generate loads of highly qualified leads for your chosen web agency partner and they could do the same for you. But how do you find a web agency partner? You are looking for a proper agency here, not a one man band who designs websites in their spare bedroom. Nothing wrong with that, but you want a bigger business that’s going to send larger prospects your way. One person band web designers tend to attract two to three user businesses. The best agency partner is someone that you already know. Is there a local web agency that you’ve met at networking events, or are highly respected in the local area? If not, and you need to create a relationship from scratch, and this needs to be done slowly.

Pick a few target agencies and reach out to the owners on LinkedIn. Tell them you’ve had a great idea for mutual benefit, and would they like to meet for a coffee to discuss it. If they want to know what it’s about in advance, you can send them this podcast. I’m actually serious because it explains exactly what’s in it for you and for them. And hello web agency owner.

When you do meet them for coffee, don’t just jump straight into, Hey, what do you think about this great idea? Should we do a partnership? Should we pass leads to each other? I would approach this more like a sales call. Start slowly, build a relationship. Ask them open questions about their favourite subject, which is themselves and their business. You can ask them things like, How’s business right now? What’s going well and not so well? What are you struggling with right now? Where are you hoping to go in the next three to five years? And what are your biggest problems and opportunities? Remember, the more you talk about them, the more intriguing you’ll be to them. And it’s weird how that works.

Sadly, this isn’t something that can be rushed. Relationship building takes time, but it is worth it as you have the opportunity here to build a solid referral foundation with a business that has exactly the same clients as you but isn’t in competition with you.

Featured guest: Scott Robertson has 30+ years of public relations and marketing communications experience with a wide range of consumer and business-to-business organisations including: the National Association of Music Merchants (NAMM), the NAMM Foundation and Hewlett Packard.

Prior to founding Robertson Communications (RobertsonComm) in 2012, he most recently held the position of director of marketing & communications/PR for NAMM. During his 10+ years at NAMM, Robertson is credited with restructuring and strengthening the organisation’s branding and member communications. Before NAMM, Robertson led and grew Copithorne & Bellows/Porter Novelli Orange County office, taking it from a handful of staff and less than $500,000 in revenues to 28 staff and more than $4 million annual revenues in less than three years.

Robertson is the author of the book “Just Stop It: Your Survival Guide to Marketing Myths, Mistakes and Misgivings,” a Certified StoryBrand Guide, an accredited, active member of the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) and holds a master of science in corporate communications degree from Lindenwood University as well as a bachelor of journalism degree from the University of Missouri-Columbia School of Journalism. Robertson previously hosted the award-winning podcast “May the Best Brand Win” on Entertalk Media.

This is the worst marketing crime that any MSP can make, and yet I see it on almost every single MSP’s website. It’s so bad that it’s costing you money, it’s making people not want to engage with your MSP. My special guest today will tell you what it is, why it’s so bad, and how to fix it in minutes.

Hi, I am Scott Robertson and I fix bad marketing for MSPs and tech companies all around the world. I’m happy to be here today.

What a fantastic intro. And thank you so much for joining me on the podcast, Scott. And I think you and I have that thing in common, don’t we? That we see so much bad marketing all across the internet from MSPs all over the world, and clearly both of us have the same mission, which is to go and fix that marketing.

I must just comment, obviously most people are going to be listening to this on the podcast and what I’m about to say is a very visual thing, but you have a better blue shirt on than me. For those people watching it on YouTube, they’ll see that your blue shirt is a much better style, that it fits better. I’ve got one of my tatty blue shirts on today, whereas you’ve got a very smart blue shirt. So Paul needs to up his blue shirt game.

In fact, what I’ve just done there is I’ve just committed one of the sins that I know we’re going to talk about in this interview, which is that I’ve been talking about myself and no one cares about me. They care about how they can help their business by listening to this podcast. So we’ll come back onto that in a second. Before we do, let’s find out a little bit about you and establish some credibility. So who are you? What do you do? And give us the brief version of your working life story that’s got you to where you are today.

Yeah, absolutely. That’s easy, it’s kind of like a play, I can summarise it in three acts. In the first act of my career, I worked for PR agencies. I was recruited to do high tech PR in Los Angeles, and I was moved from Missouri out to LA to do that work. The second act of my career, I worked in-house for a large nonprofit organisation who needed a lot of help with branding and marketing in the music industry space. And that was a lot of fun, I’m a musician, so that made it fun for me. And then the last act, which I’m in now, yay, is I run my own business. And I help entrepreneurs and business owners really understand marketing at a higher level.

A lot of my clients don’t like to do marketing. They would rather do anything else but marketing, but the world forces them to do marketing or close the business. So it’s not really a choice. You’ve got to do it and you’ve got to do it in a smart way, and I help them see a better way to do marketing. I think that most marketing, I will tell you, Paul, is terrible, is awful. And I think that our profession miseducates people and I think that we settle for bad marketing all over the place when we don’t have to. We tell the wrong story, we use the wrong stuff, we’re speaking the wrong language. And I think that the marketing industry miseducates at a massive level. We don’t talk about strategy, we don’t educate business owners about why we do what we do and what we’re trying to accomplish. And I think that that is a shame, so I try to be on the side of the line that Seth Godin’s on and Donald Miller’s on and that you’re on, and try to be one of the good ones in an ocean of garbage, an absolute ocean of marketing garbage.

I love the fact that you just put me on with Seth Godin and Donald Miller there, both of whom are fantastic authors. For those people listening and watching read everything Seth Godin has ever written, he’s a prolific writer. He writes a blog a day and a book a year pretty much. And Donald Miller, we haven’t featured Donald himself but we featured StoryBrand, which is his book, on the podcast before. It’s an amazing book to read.

Let’s go back to that example I was just mentioning earlier, and you’ll remember I started talking about me. And obviously that’s completely the wrong approach with marketing. And Scott, you see MSPs doing this all the time don’t you? Talking about themselves rather than talking about the customer, the prospect.

Yeah, and Donald Miller, if he was here, he would say is it’s very simple to see why. MSP wants to build a website, they don’t know anything about marketing, they go to a website design firm, the website design firm asks them, what’s your message? They get in a room and you’ve got the blind leading the blind right there. You’ve got web designers who I wouldn’t trust to write the words, that’s not their skillset, they’re designers. There’s a step that comes before that, and that’s the brand messaging step. I’m a StoryBrand guide. You mentioned my buddy Don Miller, and what’s important about StoryBrand, is it gets the client out of the message. It gets them out of the hero role, which you can’t take anyway, it’s already been cast and you didn’t make the cut. The customer is the hero. And so it puts you in the guide role. And the guide role is so much more important because the guide role has already solved it for the hero. It is really important. 

When I talk about miseducation, people confuse an internal marketing message with an external one. And an internal one is your why, your vision, your values, your about us. And I mean, you should take that out to your next retreat and put on your matching t-shirt and just go off on all of that with your staff. But you don’t ever let that stuff creep into an external marketing message because psychologically speaking, you have eight seconds to make an impression. And if you don’t involve that customer’s brain in a story that solves their problem, their brain will shut off and they will move on from you and you will lose them.

The first goal of marketing is curiosity. How do we make people curious? We make people curious by making marketing about them. It sounds really obvious, but I’ll be damned if I don’t fix that seven times a week.

I wish I was solving different problems, but you have to solve that problem. You don’t solve that problem and the company goes nowhere and everything is a waste from there. So like I said, the biggest problem with marketing is that there’s a fundamental miss on the fact that it’s not about you. Don’t put a picture of yourself on your website, no one cares. If you need that kind of validation from your parents, call them up after when you’re done and have them tell you you were a good son or daughter, whatever you need, that kind of thing. Don’t use marketing for your own self validation and ego trip. Make it about them.

Your hero image on your website needs to be about the customer, once you solve their problem. How did you get them from the stress and pain that they’re feeling. I saw a website this week, Paul, where this coach had four pictures on the website, he just did a photo shoot, and he had four photos of himself on the website. And so I said, This is a website where you’re the target customer, right? And he said, No, I’m not the target customer. I said, Why are there four photos of you? I don’t know how we’re supposed to handle that, but it’s not about the customer, so it’s not going to work. So you have a website out there that’s going to be totally ineffective. The customer’s going to say, there’s already a hero in this story and I’m going to move on. And when you talk about MSPs, they solve some really important stuff. Lean into those problems that you solve. I mean, if the technology goes down in a business, the business goes down. If your email is down, you’re out of business. So it’s so important what they do, and they leave that on the table all the time. They talk around it and not add it.

Yeah, I completely agree with you. Well, I agree with 99% of what you just said, and I’m going to just unpack your answer and I’ll tell you what the 1% is I disagree with. You mentioned about being the hero and the guide. And again, for our MSPs, listening and watching that is completely down to StoryBrand, it is a great book. I like to talk to people about it from a Star Wars point of view, which is when you are crafting the story of your MSP, you’re not Luke Skywalker in that story, you’re Yoda. You’re the guide, you are the person who is helping to drive things along, but ultimately the story that’s happening is about your customer, who is Luke Skywalker? So let me just throw that one in.

The one thing I disagree with there is where you say about putting your photo on your website, and I say this as someone who has about 25 photos of himself on his own website, as you were saying, I saw a website this week where there was just four photos of the guy, and I’m thinking, yeah, was that mine? But I recommend to MSPs that they do put photos of themselves on their website. I’ll tell you why, Scott, because let’s say you take any size town and there’s 20 MSPs, and you go and look at all 20 of those MSPs websites, they all look the same, right? They’ve all got stock images of servers or computers or the same sort of geographical images of their town. And if there are photos of people, they’re the stock image technician image where he is always the beautiful looking guy with a beautiful beard, and he’s smiling and he’s got the headset on and they all look exactly the same. And then you come across one MSP that puts a photo on of them, of their staff, of their family. They actually talk about themselves, they name themselves, they’re like, Hey, I’m the owner. And to me, in a world where everyone looks the same, that kind of differentiation is absolutely beautiful.

So let’s turn this into a debate. I never really have debates with the guests on this podcast, so it feels like a good time to start that. I know that there’s no such thing as a right or wrong approach, but tell me what you would do instead of that. What would be a preferable way for  you of handling that situation of trying to differentiate?

Yeah, absolutely. Thank you. And I totally hear what you’re saying. So there is an appropriate time in the story. If Donald Miller was sitting here next to me, he would say, there is an appropriate time in the story to talk about yourself. When you are demonstrating empathy and authority as the guide in the customer’s story and you want to show yourself, then it is appropriate to show yourself at that point. What I was basically saying was sometimes it’s the first image and sometimes it’s the image after that and sometimes the human brain sees that and goes, it looks like this story already has a hero. There’s four photos of this person who looks like the hero, and that’s not me, I can’t relate to that. It looks like somebody that runs an MSP to me, you know what I mean?

You have to make sure that all of your marketing collateral, I say website, but it could be all of your marketing collateral, it has to have a controlling idea that solves the customer’s problem. If it doesn’t, your marketing is an absolute waste of time, psychologically speaking. We’ve studied the human brain for long enough now that we know that human beings have a very short attention span. We’re in the short attention span part of our species’ evolution. And as a marketer, if you don’t know that, then you will fail. You will not understand how to make people curious and build that relationship, which marketing has to do.

And like I said, I think human beings are very interested – we’re biologically wired to be interested in ourselves. And so as a marketer, ethically, we could argue it all day long, the science proves it massively by the way, but as a marketer, you have to know that, and you have to lean into that so that you understand how to speak the language or the brain is going to shut you off. The minute the brain determines that what you’re saying is irrelevant to us, it will try to conserve calories and it will shut down on you, and that’s a marketing fail.

So what you want to do to win at marketing, you have to make sure you’re speaking to the brain in language that the brain wants to hear. And the only language the brain wants to hear, Paul, the only language the brain wants to hear is, how is this relevant to me right now? Go. And you have eight seconds. And the minute you deviate from that, what we say in StoryBrand is, the minute you stop talking about the customer’s problem is the exact minute they stop paying attention to your brand. So it’s very important.

When I go to MSP’s websites, I see the same kind of buzzwords: robust solutions, no downtime, these kind of things. It’s like, show me the pain, make me feel it. What does it feel like when my systems go down? What does that feel like? Show me. Make me feel it with the words that are coming out. And if you make me feel it and you give me that emotion, then you’re actually doing branding, and you’re actually doing branding the right way. Because in the places that people don’t want to talk about Paul, that’s why they’re on the website. There is a problem, a splinter in their mind that is saying, my MSP isn’t getting it done in some way right now, and I have to pull that splinter out of my mind and this and company could be the solution to doing it. So show me. Show me that you understand what it is that you’re really doing and don’t use a bunch of marketing buzzwords that doesn’t speak to the problem.

If I was doing an MSP website, I would say: You’re frustrated, if email is down, you’re down. If you’re down, you’re not making any money. You have payroll, you have other things as an MSP owner, but if your business is down because of technology, it is critical. If you have ransomware and those kind of things, those are mission critical things that just generic bullet points and words don’t really get that done. The same kind of warmed over sounds good marketing copy. Punch into that problem. In StoryBrand we always talk about, give me a problem you can feel. Show me a problem that hits me that I can feel, and now you’ve got my attention. Now you’ve got my attention in the same way movie writers and screenwriters get your attention by having something horrible happen to the character in the first few minutes of the movie. They do that to keep your attention because your brain won’t pay attention otherwise. Simply true.

Yeah, exactly. Like Luke watching his aunt and uncle be killed by storm troopers. That’s exactly it. Scott, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast. Let’s just wrap up very briefly. Just remind us what it is that you do to help MSPs, and what’s the best way to get in touch with you?

Yeah, of course. I’m a resource for MSPs, for entrepreneurs, for anyone struggling with marketing. I’m in Phoenix, Arizona, and you can always find me at my website, which is robertsoncomm.com. You can book a time to talk with me there. I make myself very available to speak with business owners about their marketing problems. I want to be on the side of the line that fixes things in marketing. I don’t think that we’re headed in a good direction with AI, I don’t think that’s the right direction. I think less but better is going to be a superior approach. The world doesn’t need more. We don’t need more emails, we don’t need more videos, we don’t need more social posts. We need better stuff that actually speaks to a problem and actually solves it. That’s the mission that I’m on.

Sean runs his MSP in Colorado, and is feeling quite hassled by his clients.  His question is: how do I stop clients from contacting me directly?

This happens to most MSP owners, and it’s the hardest thing when you used to look after these clients yourself because they feel they have some kind of special bond with you. And so they’ll email you directly, or they’ll call your mobile directly rather than actually speaking to the help desk that you’ve had in place for a few years. And this steals your personal time when you should be working on the business, not in the business doing tech support. And it also reduces your ability to sell more to them during a strategic review or a QBR because you can’t be the technology strategist and the first line support at the same time. Clients’ minds will only let you sit in one of those boxes.

There are a number of different ways to tackle this. You’ll probably put together a couple of these into some kind of blended solution. Let me tell you nine ideas that I’ve got.

Number one: set clear expectations. Now, this is easy with new clients and very hard with longer standing clients. Just remember that you have to educate them constantly. What’s top of mind for you is item 1058 in their minds list of priorities.

Number two: make it easy. Put stickers with the help desk number on every device.

Number three: have a standard operating procedure to roll out each time a client contacts you directly. Make a plan in advance so you don’t have the emotional trauma of wondering how to deal with it.

Number four: play dumb. Tell them you don’t know how to fix that as you focus on strategy these days, but you’ll ask someone on the help desk to call them immediately.

Number five: change your voicemail to say that you are not working today and for any support, please call the help desk on this number. And you can then let client calls go to voicemail every single time. If you want to, follow up with them the next day or when their issue has been resolved, just so they know that you care, but you don’t have to do the work yourself.

Number six: set up an email auto reply. This is the same principle as the voicemail.

Number seven: now this is a sneaky one, but some people quite like this. Fake being your own virtual asistant. When someone emails you, send back a standard reply saying you are your VA. Give yourself a fancy name. The real you is off today and here’s how to get support. And then tell them how to contact the help desk.

Number eight: get a second mobile number. Keep your old number that clients have been calling for years and let it auto forward calls to the help desk. But then get a second private number just for friends, family, and your team. And then finally,

Number nine: just make them wait. If they contact you directly after hours, do not take the call. Do not reply to their email because you’ll just encourage more bad behaviour. And I know that that feels wrong, but I promise you that overservicing clients can be as bad for a working relationship as underservicing them, as it sets unrealistic expectations. Make them wait, explain in a warm way how using the proper channels gets them faster support.

Welcome to Episode 273 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

Have you got a cold, sinking feeling because no matter what marketing you seem to attempt, none of it seems to be working? You’re not alone. Many MSPs get the chills about this. When nothing seems to be working, it’s hard to know where to begin fixing it. But here is the good news. Right now, you are going to discover how to pinpoint what’s holding your marketing back, how to turn it into a system that works, and why this approach could unlock new growth for your business.

One of the most common complaints I hear from MSPs is that their marketing just isn’t working. It doesn’t help that what you’re trying to sell has one of the most complex and longest sales cycles around. Managed services is very difficult to market and sell compared to many other things. For example, if you were running a business that sells widgets, it would be a lot easier for you to get traffic to your site, to get leads, to get inquiries and of course sales and get those widgets out the door. But you don’t. You sell managed services. And by the way, the flip side of this is that you keep your clients longer and they spend a lot more money with you. You have the kind of stats that widget manufacturers would be very, very jealous of. But why does an MSP’s marketing typically not work? And if you feel like you are doing lots of marketing, but you’re seeing little return, where do you start fixing it?

You have to break all of your marketing down into its component parts and examine each one. And ask yourself two very big questions…

The first of those is whether or not you are using the right marketing strategy? Let’s look at strategy. Sometimes I’ll be talking to an MSP who says they’re doing loads of marketing, but what they’re actually doing is creating a lot of disjointed noise. Just because you’re posting regularly on LinkedIn, that has no power unless it’s guided by a marketing strategy. Now my favourite strategy, which I talk about all the time, is very, very simple to communicate. It is just six words, but it’s the most powerful marketing strategy that any MSP can use. In fact, any B2B business, because I use this for my own marketing as well. The strategy is – build audiences, grow relationships, convert relationships. It’s a three step strategy, which you can also use as a three-step marketing system. In fact, we built our entire MSP Marketing Edge service around this. So you build up audiences of people to listen to you, then you grow a relationship with them using content marketing, and then you convert that relationship into them having a sales meeting with you. And that is typically done on the phone.

Let’s say you’re building an audience on LinkedIn, which I do recommend, and then you are growing relationships by posting content on LinkedIn. The difference between doing that with a strategy powering it, versus just doing it for the sake of doing something, is vast. If you know that your goal is to add connections every single day and post content several times a week, with the express goal of building a relationship with them, that makes the work you are doing on LinkedIn suddenly more powerful. Particularly when you remember that for managed services, people only buy when they’re ready to buy.

Also when you know that the strategy dictates that down the line, someone in your office is going to pick up the phone and call these people you are connected to, to talk about their business and see if they’re frustrated enough with their incumbent MSP to have a conversation with you. Does all of this make sense? When you’ve got a strategy, it makes all of the little things that you’re doing, even if they’re the same things you’re doing now, all of the little things you’re doing come together and work together to give you an outcome.

Now, I said earlier on that you need to ask yourself two big questions. The first was, do you have a marketing strategy or are you using the right marketing strategy? The second question to ask yourself is, are you using the right marketing tactics? Because the beauty of that six word strategy I was just telling you about is that you can use an almost unlimited number of tactics to implement it. So I mentioned LinkedIn because today LinkedIn is a very good place for MSPs to go farming for new leads, but that may change. We might be doing this in 2035, hello future Paul, and LinkedIn has gone off the boil because they broke it with some stupid decision somewhere. But if that happens, there’ll be a new place to go looking for leads. A good marketing strategy rarely changes, but the tactics do need to be updated now and again.

So in summary, if you’re doing a lot of marketing activity and it just doesn’t seem to be generating leads who turn into prospects, who turn into clients, then break it down into the component parts. And for everything you’re doing, check that you are A) being driven by the right marketing strategy and B) that you’re using the right marketing tactics. And by the way, I’d be delighted to help you with this. I have a free Facebook group, which is just for MSPs. It’s a vendor free zone, and it’s a place where you can ask me and 2000 other MSPs for help with your marketing. Just go onto Facebook and look for the MSP Marketing Facebook group.

Ready to rip up the rule book? When wanting to make more money for your MSP, they say you can’t take shortcuts. They say shortcuts come with downsides. They say you’ve got to do things properly.

Well, what if they are wrong… what if there are some shortcuts to finding new clients and making more money?

For the next few minutes let’s ignore them as you find out about the marketing shortcut being used right now by thousands of MSPs around the world. You’ll find out how to use this shortcut safely and why it’ll enhance your marketing and not damage it.

There are lots of different ways to get new blog content onto your MSP’s website. Let me give you the answers to the most frequent questions that I get…

Why do I need blog content? Up-to-date blog content on your website shows your MSP is active. It can also be great for demonstrating expertise and authority in technology. Blog content can also sit at the heart of a regular marketing system. For example, you can send out emails and post things on social media driving traffic back to your blogs. Another question is, how often should I post new blog content? And the best cadence for this, I believe is at least once a week, more if you can do it but never less than once a week.

What is syndicated content? This is content written by a business such as my own MSP Marketing Edge where one piece of content is used on many different websites. What you do is the producer, that’s us, we add a little bit of code onto the blog, which tells Google it’s an authorised copy of the original blog, and that means that Google doesn’t penalise you for using duplicate content. The flip side of this is that there’s very little SEO (search engine optimisation) benefit for you, but at least you get regular content going onto your website.

Which is better, syndicated blogs or original content? I see it like this, original content is always better than syndicated content, which is always better than no content.

What’s the best way to get original content written? Write it yourself of course. Or if that’s a distress activity for you, find a writer on Fiverr or Upwork and get them to interview you over Zoom about a specific subject. They can record it, they can suck the knowledge out of your head, and then they can write that for you. And of course, ChatGPT can also do the same thing. It can interview you on a specific subject. Just remember, you do need to double, triple, quadruple check and edit what it outputs before you put it anywhere near your website.

Where do I get content ideas from? The answer to this is simple. It’s your clients and prospects. Listen to the questions that they most frequently ask you and then just write answers to those questions. That’s how I write all the content for my own blog. Anytime an MSP asks me a question, I write it down in a massive file of questions I’ve been asked. And at some point it becomes a new blog article.

Featured guest: Chris Abdey is a seasoned Procrastination Coach, podcast host, and productivity strategist with over 20 years of experience helping individuals and businesses conquer procrastination and achieve their goals.

Based in Canada, Chris combines mindfulness, positive psychology, and actionable strategies to empower clients to break free from limiting beliefs, overcome burnout, and unlock their potential.

As the creator of “Procrastination Station” and host of Procrastinator’s Pitstop, Chris inspires others to transform hesitation into action and dreams into accomplishments.

Don’t you find that tech tasks are a bit like household chores? When we’re at home, why do we sometimes choose to do something else like rewiring a plug or moving a table, something that isn’t urgent, when actually the dishwasher really needs to be unloaded and dinner needs to go on? It’s the same with technicians. When there’s a big project waiting, they can suddenly find they need to focus on checking the backups or other routine tasks, which just don’t need to be done right now, they’re not urgent. Well, my special guest today is a procrastination coach here to explain why we do stuff like that, the surprising way to focus on important tasks and the positive impact on your MSP when you get company-wide procrastination under control.

Hello everybody. I’m Chris Abdey and I’m a procrastination coach.

And I can tell our audience that getting you on the show was the easiest, easiest interview I’ve ever set up because I emailed you and four seconds later you emailed me back, which you would expect from a procrastination coach. I imagine, Chris, that you have to live your life using all the techniques that you’re going to tell us about in this interview and managing your own procrastination. And I suspect we’re about to hear that your story is one of huge procrastination, which is why you’ve become a coach and you’re actually helping other people to overcome that.

Now, I know thousands of MSPs or I’ve spoken to thousands of MSPs and many of them are massive procrastinators. Some of them are aware of it, some of them aren’t. Let’s explore why that is, why people procrastinate, what we can do to stop ourselves procrastinating and the damage it does when we don’t address that problem. Let’s first of all just hear about you. So you are the first person I’ve ever met who’s called themselves a procrastination coach. Let’s hear that story. So what was it that got you to this position of actually helping people to stop procrastinating?

Actually, it’s an interesting story because it leads right into MSPs and MSP owners actually. So when I was in high school, and I’m sure we can all relate on some level to this, I just took it to an extreme. The last two years, we had two years to do 12 art projects. And guess who decided that they could do all 12 art projects in about eight hours the day before they were supposed to be not only due, they were in a mock art exhibition that was open to the public while it was being reviewed. And let me ask you, so it was 8pm on Sunday night, and I was just running around like a chicken with my head cut off in the garage. I was using bottles, I was using cans, I was using caution tape, I was using styrofoam bits that were left over and I just slapped it all together. I even used toilet paper, if you can believe that. I made a little figurine out of it and hung it on a piece of wood too. What do you think was the outcome of that?

Well, either you got a really good mark and that encouraged you to be a procrastinator throughout the rest of your adult life or you completely failed and that’s what set you down this course. So go on. Which was it?

No, you’re absolutely right on the first account. My saving grace was the proctor for the mock art exhibition came from a different school. And what happened was he came in and he said, oh wow, I love how you used all these. I love how you didn’t go over the top with your materials, but you used stuff that was untraditional. And he started explaining what it was, what he thought it was. I’m like, you’re absolutely right. And then he says, it’s very reminiscent of pathetic art. And I said, pathetic art. I’d never heard of it. It was like, okay, quick, let’s Google it… back in 2004, trying on those flip phones. And anyway, I said, you know what? You’re absolutely right. It is exactly that, pathetic art, because it is a commentary on how our society, how everybody’s looking for perfection. So does perfection, therefore become the new mediocrity. And boom A+.

And that actually gave me a better grade than the poor friend of mine who spent two years busting his hump. He had extra help from these famous stained glass artists and all that sort of thing. So fast forward a bit that did give me a little bit of a God complex. I can just leave everything to the last minute and I’ll just pull a rabbit out of my hat at the end. So what happened was, it only works as long as it works. I know that my abilities are good. Here’s a specific example with an MSP… I was working with one provider and we had a bunch of projects that were due and we had a bottleneck, I had only allowed for two weeks. So we hit the bottlenecks, now the first project is two weeks late, the second project is a week late, the third project is five days late. And it just sort of cascaded from there. That’s really why I got into being a procrastination coach.

This is an interview I’m never going to be able to show to my 14-year-old daughter who is at the start of her two year art, what we call GCSE in the UK. It’s a similar thing. And if she thinks she can leave her 10 art projects until the night before and get an A, then I’m doomed. And in fact, that’s setting her up for not such a great life. So what was the point in your adult life, Chris, where you realised that procrastination was actually more damaging and that you needed to address it? And how did you address it?

The point I really realised where it was most damaging was when I was actually at a high point in my career. My procrastination actually led to high functioning alcoholism because I would put things off and I’d get bored, I didn’t think they were important, and therefore to fill the time, I would sometimes drink at work… not a good combination. And it really hit home when I almost had an accident with my daughter because I used to work from home a lot too. And at that point, that’s when I said, okay you know what, I’m going to stop this, I’m going to start doing my projects on time. And when I actually started doing the projects the way they were supposed to be being done, I didn’t have the time to be bored. So that’s really how I dealt with it, which is not how a lot of people deal with it, but that’s how it is.

And we all procrastinate in many different ways. And obviously that’s a fairly extreme form of procrastination there where you’re using alcohol. I have people I know who use TV in a similar way,  they’ll think, oh, I’ve got that important project, but I’m just going to catch up on the latest episode of Superman or whatever. But there’s also, I find, and certainly with MSPs, there is procrastination through doing unimportant tasks. If they’ve got a big project to do and it’s scary, then they will jump on the help desk for an hour or pick up some tickets or just respond, something anyone can do is responding to unimportant emails. So do you find with the MSPs and all the other clients that you work with, that procrastination is a very personal thing, that we all have different ways in which we sort of output or create that procrastination?

Oh, for sure. I mean, everybody’s fairly unique in that sense. There are a few common denominators obviously, you mentioned a couple of them, especially in MSPs. I mean, you’re around technology all day, so you’ve got Instagram scrolling, you’ve got TVs in the background maybe, you’ve got chatting on your phone or like you said, you’re chatting to support desks about things that are more interesting than the project you’re working on. This is especially true when you have very talented team members working for you and you assign them to do very mundane things, which occasionally happens.

One of the ways around that is to, well, one, don’t assign them work that is beneath their level of interest. But the other way to really stay on track, is to get them to incorporate their ideas, ask for their feedback, even if they don’t have any. Just by the simple act of you asking for their feedback, it all of a sudden becomes a little bit more important to them. Let’s say you have to put out an application and this developer is only doing the wireframes, but he’s way above that. And so you’ve already done all this research, you’ve already done everything, but you’re throwing them a bone. You’re saying, oh, how would you do this? And then by them giving the feedback, it’s not necessarily you’re going to implement it, but you’re now giving them sort of so to speak, skin in the game.

And what’s the consequence of giving them that skin in the game?

So when you give them that skin in the game, you automatically raise that importance level. Because a lot of procrastination, especially in MSPs, can definitely come at the junior level, mid to junior level, and sometimes the senior level too, because what happens is they sometimes know a better way of doing it than maybe what production has said they should do. And so they think it’s juvenile or they think that it’s not a good way to do it, or they don’t see the importance in doing it that way, which can lead to a lot of procrastination. I mean, you were just mentioning that they might jump off into support tickets for an hour. It’s because they can see more importance in those support tickets than they can in the task that you assign.

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. But honestly, as the business owner, is it easier for us to procrastinate than our team because no one’s watching what we’re doing? I’ve always said that being a business owner is a double-edged sword in that we don’t get fired, we don’t have bosses. You are a business owner, I’m a business owner, most people listening to this or watching on YouTube are MSP business owners, and no one fires us except the clients. And typically that doesn’t happen because we surround ourselves with people to do the work. So it is very easy to be an ineffectual boss once you get your business up to a certain level and never actually developing something else. Compared to when you worked for someone and you had a boss who was actually watching what you were doing or not doing. Do you find that, do a lot of your clients tend to be those business owners? And as a secondary question, if the business owner procrastinates, do you tend to find that that goes down throughout the organisation as well, because it almost becomes a cultural thing?

Oh, for sure. Definitely. Let me break that down into a couple of parts. So in terms of business owners procrastinating, especially MSPs, it can be fairly easy as well to get lost in some of the more technical aspects. We talk about overwhelm as a big source of procrastination, which is essentially either – what I like to call not my circus, not my monkey, because they tend to try and take on way too much that isn’t even in their wheelhouse. And then there’s a knowledge aspect – they’ve not only taken on all these things, but maybe they don’t necessarily know how to do these things, and so that causes them to procrastinate and they don’t want to look bad. I mean, I’ve been in this position, I didn’t know something and I was telling my team do it. They said, oh, I’ll just do it and then it’s like, oh, well, I don’t know how to do that, and then I’ll just sit there. And rather than admit that, I’ll just sit there and say, yes, I will do that tomorrow. You’ll have that report on those KPIs and those TLSTs and those PIPs tomorrow.

Just using gobbledygook as a form of procrastination. Many of us, not everyone, but many of us have that problem. I certainly have a procrastination problem, and I’ve dealt with it over the years by setting myself deadlines using public accountability. Things like telling my team, I will get this done by Friday, and once that’s out your mouth, you’re very committed to doing it. My favourite technique is to go on a train journey. So I live about 45 minutes from London, and I have many times got on a train to go to London knowing I’ve got 45 minutes to get that job done, and then I’m at the station, then I’ll have lunch and I’ll come back and I’ll do the same thing. So those are just some of my own self-taught methods. But what do you recommend to business owners, to MSP owners? Is the first problem acknowledging that you have a procrastination problem or is that the first step? And then secondly, give us an idea of some of the techniques and strategies that you suggest to MSPs.

First and foremost, you need to understand the why you procrastinate. And you need to understand what drives you.

So from what you just explained to me, you tend to fall into what they call a crisis maker. The crisis maker is where you have those deadlines. It’s sort of not important until it’s important, or you get that extra boost of energy or extra boost of creativity knowing that you have to get it done before that train ride ends. So for crisis makers, yes, having deadlines, having urgency to things, understanding the importance of things.

There’s five different archetypes that we like to talk about: There’s the perfectionist, they need to break time, it needs to be the right place, perfect for release. There’s the worriers. They’re always, like what if…, what if this happens? What if that happens? And then you’ve got the dreamers who are the visionaries, they have these big plans, but they get lost in the details, either because the details aren’t interesting, or they hit that knowledge block again where they don’t know how to do it. And then you have the crisis makers, and then you have the defiers, I mean, that’s actually the easiest one to change because the defier is more about autonomy, about how I don’t like being told what to do. Well, that was the easiest because all you have to do is say, well, no, I don’t have to do this. Only two things in life are not a choice. You can’t choose to be born and well, you really can’t choose not to die. But everything else in the middle is a choice. We just have to live with those consequences. And when you say, instead of saying, I have to do this, I’m choosing to do this because, I’m choosing to do this report because I need it for my taxes, or I need it to do this, I need it for my bottom line. And then that gives it importance, and you’re taking your power back to actually get things done.

So just in case my daughter is watching this or listening to this, there is one third choice which you don’t have, which is doing your art projects… I just want to throw that one in there in there, Chris. Just out of interest before we wrap this up, of those five archetypes, you said that the easiest of to work with are the defiers, which are the hardest to work with?

Definitely the hardest would be a combination between the worriers and the dreamers. Because the dreamers have the compounded effect of worry. They get lost in the details because every step along the way, they worry about, oh, what’s going to be the outcome of that step.

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. So Chris, for those people who are listening to this or watching this and they’re nodding their head and thinking, yes, that’s me. You’ve got me in one of those five archetypes there, and they’re ready to do something about it. Tell us what you do to help MSPs and what’s the best way to get in touch with you?

Well, what I do to help MSPs is I will actually sit down with you and we’ll dig a top level down. Look not only at what’s going on with you, but also what’s going on in your organisation. Because I do also have quite a strong background in business development, project management, PMP, and what it comes down to is either people or processes or a combination of both. What we do is we analyse, is it people, is it on the personal level either with yourself or with your team? Or is it in a process level, either with yourself or with your team? Then from there, we sit down and we work together.

The easiest way to get in touch with me is on LinkedIn. I am the only Chris Abdey on LinkedIn, so that’s the easiest way to get in touch with me. Or you can go to my website, www.procrastinationstation.ca, and there’s actually a tiny quiz at the top. It’s only eight questions takes you five minutes to do, and it’ll tell you which of those five types you might fall into.

Christian from an MSP in New Mexico, says when he is on the road he always notices advertising billboards. So his question is: As an MSP, should I advertise on billboards?

There’s a short version and a long version of this one. The short version is, no, don’t waste your money.

The longer version is that billboards, yeah, they look cool. And your competitors, if they see you on them, they might think that your MSP’s bigger than it actually is. But in reality, they are an expensive, old-fashioned solution to the problem of how do I get my message in front of the right people at exactly the moment they’re thinking of switching MSPs.

There’s a part of our brain called the reticular activating system, and it acts as a filter for all sensory information. It literally decides what you perceive based on whether or not it’s relevant to you. So if you’ve got toothache, then you see and perceive the big poster for emergency dental care. But if you don’t have toothache, your eyes flick over it. You see it, but you don’t perceive it because it’s not relevant to you.

Most people who see your billboard will not perceive it because it’s not relevant to them. The tiny number that do perceive it will think, ah, that’s a good idea. And then they promptly forget about it, unless of course they whip out their phone and visit your website immediately. And this is fine on something like Google where you do pay per click, because if they don’t click, you don’t pay. But the Billboard advertising companies, they want money just to put up your poster.

The other issue is that you can’t tweak your message all day every day like you can with digital stuff. You’re kind of committed to your message for the whole campaign. But if you want to go ahead anyway and you want to do billboards, here’s how to test what tiny response you would actually get from a billboard. Buy a vanity URL for the call to action… something like ITyourtown.com, and then point this URL at a hidden page on your normal website, and you only ever use this URL on billboard adverts. Therefore, you can look at how many people have visited that page to know exactly how many have responded to your advert, and it won’t be many.

Welcome to Episode 272 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

Imagine doing some marketing for your MSP that’s so relevant to the person who sees it, they immediately stop what they’re doing just to listen to you. And yes, it is possible for your marketing to be this powerful. It means you can reach more people and persuade them to talk to you with much less work.

Let me tell you the surprising secret to this kind of marketing and you won’t believe what I’m going to ask you to Google. Now, I should start by admitting that this isn’t really a marketing tactic that you can use for a general audience. It only works when you use it for a vertical. Your MSP doesn’t have to only work in this vertical.

You can have lots of different clients doing lots of different things in lots of different sectors, but this specific marketing idea only works for a vertical audience, and you can’t just reuse it across different verticals. You have to do some research for each vertical that you are using this tactic to target people in. But the payoff is immense because targeting to a vertical is already a beautiful thing to do.

It’s so much easier to send a message that’s highly relevant to an audience within a vertical.

So for example, if you’re targeting lawyers and you use the phrase legal practice, the part of their brain that filters information, which is called the reticular activating system, it decides that what you are saying is relevant to them. So they ignore stuff that’s aimed at general business owners and managers, and they listen to stuff that seems to be targeted at lawyers. And that works across all verticals.

Now, this new marketing idea that I have for you right now is even more specific. Okay, enough teasing. Let me tell you what it is. So you pick a vertical that you want to win more business in, and then you do some Googling. And what you’re looking for on Google is specific regulations regarding cyber security or data retention, or in fact, anything that you touch. Specific regulations that affect that vertical. So for example, let’s say you work with healthcare, there’s going to be tons of regulations or laws specifically aimed at healthcare businesses. Lawyers will have them, CPAs/accountants will definitely have them. Manufacturers will probably have them as well. So go and find that regulation.

In an ideal world, you would then talk to someone who runs a business in that vertical to ask them what pain that regulation causes for them. Because don’t forget, these are not technical people. So some kind of regulation around data retention for example, it’s easy for you to think, oh yeah, I know how I’d fix that, I know how I deal with that. But for them it’s a pain. And that’s what we’re looking for here. We are looking for regulations that create pain and are annoying to specific verticals. Because then you are going to target that pain with your marketing.

Imagine how powerful it would be to send a message to a business owner in a very specific vertical, talking about a specific problem that’s caused by a specific law that only relates to them and exactly how they can fix it. And we’re not trying to use fear marketing here, we’re just educating them about a problem they already have and how you have got some possible solutions. Because you know that almost any technology headache can be made easier or taken away, and that’s what you want to talk about.

So how would you actually use this in practice? Well, it will definitely be content on your website. You might do a report or a guide on it, you might put that on LinkedIn. You might even just send it out to people or people who work in that vertical. You may even turn it into a piece of direct mail. Imagine how powerful it would be reaching out to someone, everyone in the vertical in your area to say, Hey, you know that headache that you’ve got, which is explained here, I know how to solve that headache. Can I send you some information about this in the post? Can I mail it to you? And I know that that sounds very old school, but old school physical stuff works very, very well in our modern digital age.

So some research for you then. What’s the vertical you most want to win new clients in? What’s the regulatory headache that they have that you can solve? And what’s going to stop you taking action on this right away?

With what I’m about to tell you in the next 60 seconds, you might think I’ve lost the plot. But what if there’s a marketing move so daring it could completely reshape your MSP’s future? Let’s talk about the surprising way top MSPs outsmart their competition and the bold strategy that could change how you grow forever.

Anyone who’s ever made a serious attempt to grow their MSP organically knows that it’s an expensive process. It’s not uncommon to find a business that’s winning loads of new clients and at the same time experiencing a cash flow crisis, because of the cash cost of attracting, winning and onboarding those new clients.

Now, typically we learn this as business owners the hard way. Normally at four in the morning lying awake in bed wondering how are we going to make payroll. And this is why when I’m advising MSPs on their growth, I teach them to get their cashflow sorted or any funding in place before they embark on a serious round of new client acquisition. I believe it’s the cost of acquiring new clients that encourages MSP owners to do it on the cheap.

Most people are always looking for ways to reduce their marketing spend, and yet that is completely the wrong approach in my opinion.

Of course, you should always look for value for money, but rather than looking at ways to reduce the amount you spend on acquiring new clients, you should be willing to spend more than your competitors to win the right kind of new clients.

And here’s the secret, don’t be distracted by the short-term costs of getting a new client. Instead, focus on the long-term revenue and profit that they are going to bring you.

Let me ask you some questions about this. When you win a new client, on average, how many users do they have and how much do they pay per user per month? And how long does a client stay with your MSP on average? Now, let’s say your average new client has 10 users, and just to keep the numbers easy, let’s say you charge them a $100 per user per month, and your retention will be excellent because of course it is for most MSPs most of the time. So let’s say you keep a client on average for three years, I realise it’s probably going to be a lot longer than that, but we’ll just go with three years. So 10 users times $100 a month equals a $1,000 a month. A 1,000 times 12 months equals $12,000 a year, and $12,000 times three years equals $36,000. You with me so far. So without doing any projects, without selling any hardware or licenses, that new client that you’ve just signed is going to be worth $36,000 to your business over the next few years – $36,000 of brand new revenue. And if you wanted to get even more excited about that figure, now work out the gross profit of that new client. Let’s say you had a 75% gross profit margin. Well, 75% of $36,000 is $27,000, so that’s 27 grand of gross profit. And you can take this a step further. What’s your net profit margin? Let’s say it’s 15%, so 15% of $27,000, and I know we’re doing lots of figures here, but 15% of $27,000 is $4,050. $4,050, you pay tax on that and that’s your personal money to spend.

Can you see the power of thinking this way? Because while most of your competitors are thinking about the $1,000 that they get from the client in the first month, you are focused on the revenue, the gross profit, and the net profit that you can collect from your client over the next few years. That $36,000 revenue figure is known as Average Lifetime Value, and it’s the value of the average client over their lifetime with your MSP. When you know this figure inside out, it allows you to make some very, very sensible spending decisions. Spend $50 a day on quality traffic, a $1,000 on a powerful piece of direct mail, $30,000 on a high quality salesperson. These are all costs your competitors will not be willing to spend because they’re not thinking the right way.

One caveat with this, and it goes back to what I was saying right at the start. To make this way of thinking work, you need to make sure you have adequate cashflow or funding in place to spend this money today, and then of course to reap the benefits down the line. Never ever do marketing that puts your business’ cashflow at any risk.

Featured guest: Cam Roberson is Vice President, Channel, at Beachhead Solutions, a provider of cloud-managed PC & mobile device encryption, security, and data access control for MSPs. He has spent 18 years in the MSP cyber security space, after launching his career as a product manager at Apple. He lives in the Bay Area, where Beachhead is headquartered.

Tell me what’s the dirtiest and most disgusting word your MSP knows? For many it’s compliance. However, while most MSP see compliance as a hassle, it could be your ticket to standing out, scaling up, and even buying a new Porsche. So let’s get into it. My special guest today is going to tell you how to turn compliance into a marketing edge, why it’s a gold mine for profit and the key to unlocking its full potential for your MSP’s growth.

Hi, my name is Cam Roberson and I’m vice president of sales and marketing with Beachhead Solutions.

And thank you so much for joining us from the beautiful San Jose, in California. Where for you it’s sunny and light and here in the UK where I’m based, it’s wet, it’s raining, it’s dark, and it’s miserable. And why don’t I live in California?

Anyway, we’re not here to talk about California and the UK. We’re here to talk about growing monthly recurring revenue through compliance. Which is something that many MSPs have looked at and maybe they’ve been put off a little bit because even just the word compliance is a horrible word, but we’re going to talk about how we do that. Before we do Cam, let’s explore your career a little bit because you have quite an impressive track record in using compliance and helping businesses with compliance and particularly helping MSPs to turn that into a profit centre. So give us a brief overview of how you’ve got to where you are today.

Okay. How much time do we have? I’ll make it brief. I started my career with Apple Computer in the early days. We were involved with imaging, so I was in product management developing products for our imaging space. I’ve had just three careers essentially. I started then an ad agency, which I grew to become one of the top agencies in the San Francisco Bay area. One of my clients was Beachhead Solutions. And just about the time I was prepared to sell the business, my colleagues then at Beachhead asked me to come and join the company to run marketing for them. And so we were already doing a lot of the collateral and the positioning and branding and so forth for the company. It was very appealing to me. And of course then coincidence had it that the business was sold successfully and I went to work for Beachhead and I’ve been there ever since.

Amazing. That’s a really great story. And this company, Apple, that you say you worked for, what do they do?

Well then we did computers, personal computers to compete with the monolith, which was IBM at that time. And now of course more known for phones and tablets.

Yeah, I’ll have to Google them later and see what they do. So let’s talk about compliance. I work in marketing, so I’m not a tech person. Obviously I work with MSPs, but marketing is the least regulated space on the planet. And you’ll know this because you used to run an ad agency. So apart from the few basic rules you must stick to, and here in the UK we have the advertising standards authority. So if I put an advert out and I put it on TV and it’s factually incorrect, I’m in trouble. But the reality is there’s so many checks and balances to stop that happening, you wouldn’t do it. But in most other marketing, there’s very few rules, and I’m sure this is exactly the same for you with your ad agency. And I know there’s talk now and again, of what if MSPs become regulated and that fear. Well, some fear that’s unwelcome and that kind of goes around now and again.

But the reality is, compared to real compliance, we as marketers and as MSPs, we don’t have that compliance burden at all. So you can understand why a lot of MSPs would see the word compliance and think, yeah, I’m not going near that, even though there are plenty of software solutions and other ways that we could do it. When you talk to MSPs about turning compliance into a revenue stream and a profit centre, how do you overcome that natural reluctance to get involved in the client’s compliance?

Yeah, that’s a great question. Fortunately, that’s becoming less of an issue over time because it’s coming from the MSP’s clients. They’re getting more and more learning that they are in fact regulated by one mandate or another, or they’re seeing it as evidenced by things like supply chain questionnaires from those that are in their space. Hey, what are you guys doing from a compliance perspective? What are you building your security stack against? Or with insurance questionnaires. Good security is good security and compliance demands good security. And as a result, the insurance companies, they’re not stupid, they’re formulating their requirements based on certain frameworks, certain security standards, much of which mirror exactly these compliance mandates. So it is in fact a fear factor. I know HIPAA was the bellwether years ago, that’s for the medical industry primarily. A lot of them didn’t want to hear about it, we’ll just push this down the road and not think about it because it is daunting. And I think that’s a backward approach.

Instead of looking at compliance as something that’s onerous and going to make it tough on you, instead look at it as an opportunity.

Yeah, I love that. I think that’s the perfect approach. And I guess we all deal with enforced change in different ways, don’t we? Some people embrace it early on, some people have to be pushed into it, but hey, let’s be honest, it’s managed services… it’s not IT support anymore, those days have gone. And so what do you do to help MSPs take that compliance and take it from being a burden to becoming a profit centre?

Well, I think that it’s incumbent upon vendors in the space to provide tools that assist the MSP with providing the service and to be able to demonstrate compliance. And so we are, I don’t mean this to be a plug, and I don’t think we’re like other vendors, but we are providing the mapping from our services, our controls to the control numbers that are required of the various mandates. I think that that is a trend that will continue to see that and provide tools that will assist the MSP with providing compliance and to be able to demonstrate compliance in the event of an audit or a breach or whatever.

So we are recognising that this is something that’s coming. It has come in some respects, but I think more and more, just like anything, it filters from large enterprise and it works its way down such that everybody is going to be held to the similar standards. And so getting ahead of things for us is to help our MSPs, but for the MSP is to start thinking about these things. Understanding where their stack stacks up, pardon the expression there, but where there might be gaps and how we fill those gaps, so that we can provide the service appropriate for the regulated client.

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. And we will come on to just a brief look at the exact services you offer. We’ll do that towards the end of the interview. In terms of we’ve got this compliance, then the clients need to do this compliance, let’s be honest, regulation is not getting less. There’s more and more regulation, so the need is going up. Do you recommend to MSPs to try and get ahead of the curve? To actually get to grips with it, put in place compliance solutions, and then be the one that can proactively go out to their clients and say, Hey, what regulations do you guys have to comply with because we now can help with X, Y, Z? Do you recommend that? And is that the route that most MSPs go down or do they tend to come to you when they’re already a little bit behind the curve because a client has already asked them something they don’t know how to deliver?

Yeah, absolutely. The best case scenario, if your client comes to you, and they will come to you, is for you not to have the answers. Being compliant is not rocket science. It is a bit tedious. It requires research. What tools in my stack address these requirements of the mandate? And I don’t intend to scare MSPs, because most MSPs have a terrific stack. They have tools in place that secure data and prevent compromise. But they’re not exactly sure how those map to the specific numbers. So most will find when they go through this exercise, and my recommendation is to start with a framework 801-171, it’s a NIST publication or CSF cyber security framework. Go through that, map your products to those control numbers and get a start on this whole process. Because once you are able to identify that, you’ll know where you may have holes, you’ll know the answers for the various mandates.

The good news is it’s becoming more formalised. Most are now referring to most compliance mandates and you’re aware of them – CMMC 2.0 which goes into place in several days now, FTC safeguards, HIPAA. They’re more and more referencing frameworks so that instead of having all these different mandates and numbers, they’re sort of focusing on and getting more homogeneous. As I mentioned earlier, good security is good security. Have MFA in place, have encryption in place, have data segmentation and those sorts of things. And then you’re going to be much better prepared to answer that question when the MSP says to you, Hey, I just learned that I’m regulated by the FTC safeguards rule, are we in position yet to…? yes/no, you’ll have those answers. As I said, being embarrassed is the best case scenario, but those clients that are regulated are going to be looking for a more comprehensive service. If you’re not an expert or have no answers, chances are they may go to someone who is.

That makes perfect sense. So actually as the MSP, you can jump in and you can say, Hey, I don’t know about that specific regulation, but I do understand that most are on a framework and we are set up to help with X, Y, Z framework. I must just mention Cam, you just mentioned something which goes live in a few days. We recorded this back in December last year, and obviously we are listening to it on the podcast or seeing it on YouTube today. So whatever that regulation was you mentioned that’s been live for a few months now. But yeah, essentially what you are saying is be prepared. Understand that the regulations tend to sit on top of frameworks and then obviously know where to go to get the solution from that.

Let’s swing that round and finish this interview off by looking at what it is that you and your business specifically does to help MSPs. So let’s take that exact scenario that you’ve got an MSP. They know that their clients are regulated, they perhaps don’t know exactly what it is, what it means. They know it might be a framework. How does your business fit in there? Tell us what you do and how it helps.

Okay. Yeah. So thank you for asking. Beachhead Secure is a platform for MSPs, specifically to provide the controls. We actually provide 150 of the controls necessary of the various mandates. Manage those controls, make sure they’re in place, be able to demonstrate that you are providing those controls for your clients and then be able to document it. And so, I know this is going to air later, by the time this airs we will be able to, within the product, be able to map all those controls that we provide – encryption, MFA,  least access privilege, data sanitization – to the control numbers that are required of the various mandates. So if you have a client that is regulated by HIPAA for instance, you’ll be able to see the controls that are put in place so that you can document it for an audit or under circumstance of a breach or to provide that service to a client and say, look, we have the controls necessary in place for HIPAA in this instance. Here’s proof. Here’s what we’ll need to provide an auditor if and when we are somehow unfortunately audited.

Yeah, yeah, that makes perfect sense. So Cam, thank you for explaining that for us. Thank you for taking us through that. I think we’re almost talking about a mind shift here, aren’t we? About a mind shift from, oh no, the clients are asking for help on something I don’t want to be involved with to hey, it’s inevitable. It’s almost like cyber security 10 years ago, isn’t it? 10 years ago people were starting to ask about what’s this cyber security thing or why has my screen gone red? What can I do about that? And not a single MSP on the planet today would not not touch cyber security. It’s a standard thing. And I think what you are saying, I think reading the subtext, is that compliance is just going to become another one of those things. We don’t want them going anywhere else. We don’t want them forming a relationship with another MSP anywhere. We want them continuing and strengthening the relationship with you, which means you have to take a proactive approach to compliance. And it certainly sounds like you guys have put together a great solution for that. Let’s just finish off then, Cam, just tell us what’s the best way to get in touch with you. So what’s your website? How can we find you on LinkedIn?

We are at www.beachheadsolutions.com There’s two Hs in Beachhead, which often is overlooked. I’m Cam Roberson on LinkedIn. I’ve been around a while, so I’ve got that. Cam Roberson is me and I would be happy to answer any questions. Just one last point, Paul. I think that a lot of our community struggles to distinguish our practice, how to differentiate our offering from the guy in the next county or the large nationwide type guy. This is a great way to distinguish your practice – compliance – as opposed to having the lowest price out there. And unfortunately, many go that direction. I think this is an opportunity for MSPs to differentiate their offering from the competition.

A teamwork issue has been sent to me from SEB in Detroit where his MSP is based. Some of his technicians are bored doing routine work, and his question is: I’ve heard of the concept of gamification. However, how do I gamify work?

Gamification or gamifying something is easy. It’s about making mundane, boring jobs fun. And you see this a lot with vendors and with SaaS apps in particular, they gamify the onboarding to encourage you to finish it. In fact, I once signed up for something called ClickFunnels and completed the onboarding on a Saturday morning just to get my free t-shirt, which they did send to me.

Good gamification is simple to understand and it has a fun reward attached to it. It’s also highly visible what needs to be done and how much there is left to do. And the brain loves to complete tasks that it started where it can see the end in sight. Think how long computer games actually take to finish but you never think of it as a 60 hour challenge. You only think about each level at the time. So in your MSP, consider how you can gamify routine and boring jobs that your team need to do.

For example, you could turn them into a daily contest with a leaderboard. How many tickets can you get completed in a day? Something like that. Think about sales calls. There’s a great way to gamify this, putting paperclips in a glass and every time you pick up the phone to make a call, you move a paperclip into the other glass. Let’s say you want to do 50 calls today. You put 50 paperclips in the first glass. Don’t do that with M&Ms because the M&Ms get eaten. Think how you could do it for big tidy ups. You could set a deadline with a countdown on a massive screen and have cold beer ready as a reward. And think what you can do for completing projects on time. This could be as simple as every time a project is finished and if it happens on time and all the checklist has been ticked off, that there is a very simple reward for everyone who’s worked together on that project. And that reward could be as simple as everyone gets pizza today.

Welcome to Episode 271 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

Have you ever seen someone wrestle with a Rubik’s cube? Well, that’s how most business owners feel about technology. They’re fascinated by what it can do, but frustrated by its complexity. So here’s an exciting thought. If their mind is boggled, that creates a massive opportunity for your MSP to unboggle it. Let’s explore how the smartest MSPs build trust to ease those fears and position themselves as the go-to tech authority in their marketplace. And yes, you can do this too.

Somewhere in one of the hundreds of business and marketing books that I’ve read over the years is one of my favourite phrases, and here it is – To influence what John Smith buys, you must look through John Smith’s eyes. And in this instance, John Smith is the ordinary business owner or manager that you want to reach and influence to buy from you and not one of your competitors.

You have to really understand what it’s like to be John Smith, in order to persuade him that your MSP is the one he should choose.

Let’s do that right now. Let’s imagine John lives in your town and he’s the owner of a small CPA, a small accounting firm. Let’s ignore that old joke that all accountants are dull, although actually we do know this to be the truth, don’t we? But anyway, don’t worry about that. What is day-to-day life like for John running his business?

Well, of course technology is mission critical for an accountancy practice, and yet we can probably guess that John hasn’t invested well over the years. So he and his team, maybe they’re using older technology still – they’re definitely still on Windows 10, might even be a Windows 8 machine clunking away somewhere… maybe an XP machine, that might be pushing it too far. Their internet is okay at best, and cyber security is very much something that they just pay lip service to.

John’s mindset is that he pays Microsoft, maybe an MSP, perhaps a break/fix company somewhere. He pays the money every now and again or every month, so surely all of the security and everything should be all sorted out, right? That’s his kind of accountant’s attitude towards it. And this attitude towards technology probably means that John suffers from lots of downtime or at the very least, interruptions to his productivity. And I bet his staff complain a lot too.

The subtext of this approach to technology is that money is tight for John. And people tend to assume that accountants are great business owners, but actually that’s not the experience that well I’ve certainly had from the accountants that I’ve met. Just like with MSPs, you get some that do very, very well, some that do very badly and the bulk, they just sit in the middle doing okay.

John may have lots of clients, but that also means lots of work. And the margins and accountancy are not what they used to be. Also John doesn’t really understand technology and this is the core kind of heart of the matter that you need to understand. Because he understands that technology is mission critical and that at some point he’s going to need to buy new hardware for his team, but he doesn’t really understand even a fraction of the stuff that’s every day for you. Could he explain the cloud in a sentence that makes sense? Does he actually know what ransomware actually is? Would he know that malware stands for malicious software and what that actually looks like when it’s on the screen? Don’t even get me started on phishing. We all know that phishing is going to mean something completely different to him. The point here is that to win John’s business and to have any possibility of changing his attitude towards his technology and getting him to invest in his business properly will, you must understand all of these motivating factors. All of the stuff we’ve just talked about.

Selling managed services to the average business manager or owner is rarely about the technology. It’s about what they do with the technology and how it helps them win faster, or holds them back. When someone doesn’t understand the thing that’s really, really important to them, your job as the person influencing them is to position yourself as an authority in technology and then reassure that person that they can make brave decisions and they can make these decisions because it will all work out OK. How do you do that? Well, positioning yourself as an authority, that’s an ongoing task. Just look at what authority figures do – they write, they speak, they are published, they are interviewed, they are known for giving advice and answering questions. There’s no shortcut to being seen as an authority figure, you have to do the hard work. Whether that means buying in pre-written content and putting your name on it or actually generating your own content. There’s no other way around it.

Side note, in my MSP Marketing Edge service, we do have a number of different tools that our members can brand as their own, to help them with their positioning as a tech expert. A couple just off the top of my head, we’ve got our 2025 IT Services Buyers Guide, that’s incredibly popular. And there’s a book all about email security, you can put your name on the front of that. Have a look at mspmarketingedge.com for those. But if you want to be perceived as an authority, you certainly need to attend networking meetings, you need to go to events, you need to put on webinars, you need to run seminars, speak at events, get on the stage, all of the stuff like that. And if you do this consistently month after month after month for a number of years, you just assume the position of being an authority in technology. No one tells you you are, you just become one.

This happens a lot faster, of course, if you’re in a very specific vertical, but of course you can always just do it in your general area as well. So build that up, keep going at that, it’s a never ending thing unfortunately, there’s no shortcut to it. But once you have an authority position, how then do you reassure people that they’re doing the right thing? Well, this can only come from understanding where they are, and that can only be done by asking them open questions. Now, unlike closed questions where the response is either yes or no, open questions can have any possible answer. And I believe that open questions are one of the biggest weapons of influence that you could possibly wield in your marketing and your sales because everyone loves answering questions about themselves and their business.

And when these questions are coming from someone that they perceive to be an authority figure, they are doubly keen to take part. In fact, the more you ask them about their business, and the less you talk about you and your MSP, the easier it is to influence them, the easier it is to get the sale. Because not only will you start to really understand the world as they see it and as they perceive it, but you’ll also win their trust without actually doing any hard work. And I know that this is insane. I know that influencing someone just by asking them simple open questions rather than telling them what you know, is bizarre, that that’s an easier way to influence people. But hey, us humans are wired in a very strange way, and that’s what we have to work with.

What I’m talking about here is not a one-off tactic, it’s a strategy. No, actually it’s more than that. It’s a whole way of life. It’s you deciding that you want to be perceived and recognised as an authority in technology, and you want to influence people by being intensely interested in them and their business. You can start doing that today, and I highly recommend that you do.

Did you know your MSP is sitting on a secret gold mine?

Budgets can be tight at this time of year, so right now, you don’t need to spend a fortune to generate leads.

You just need to dig into the resources you already have.

Let’s explore how to strike gold by turning your existing assets into lead generators using simple tactics to attract new clients and unlocking hidden revenue opportunities, all without spending a penny.

On last week’s show, I gave you three bootstrap marketing ideas for your MSP and today I have three more.

First one is to get your local media talking about you. I get it, no one actually reads the local paper anymore, but the local media still has massive credibility. And free publicity is much more valuable than advertising because it has higher levels of perceived credibility. When journalists talk about you, ordinary people think that they’ve sought out the best experts. And actually most journalists these days, they just want easy content that’s put in front of them.

Here’s the easiest way to get some PR, some public relations. You send press releases to local newspapers, local radio, local bloggers, local TV stations if you have them. They should be about things that are huge in your world, but the rest of the public hasn’t really heard about yet. Now, the media coverage itself is unlikely to get you new clients, so instead you use it to enhance your credibility and your authority.  You can put a link to it on your website, don’t just copy it onto your website as there are copyright agencies looking for this, but linking to it is absolutely fine. Share it across your social media, email it out to your prospect database, add it to your About Us page, and make sure you put the logo of the media outlet in the footer of your website, kind of like a as seen in or as heard on. This way you can make one piece of coverage influence your prospects for years to come. Clever stuff that.

Let’s do the second one. This is to create videos every week. The most influential way of communicating with and persuading people in 2025 is through videos. And yes, this includes B2B marketing. Few MSPs create enough videos, which is just crazy as they’re so easy to make. I mean, you could make a video in the next five minutes, just grab your phone and film something. Perhaps it’s you just giving a quick warning about the latest email hack, something which has been all over the tech media, but it’s not widely known for the public. Do a quick video, bang it on LinkedIn, and you’re done.

The video really can be that easy because you’ve seen what’s on LinkedIn, right? You’ve seen what’s on YouTube. People don’t expect Hollywood style production from you. They’re very, very tolerant of 60 seconds of just quick shot video, very tolerant. If you want to invest in kit, then yeah, down the line focus on lighting and sound and image stability and all of that stuff. But right now, you have a perfectly good camera in your phone. Maybe you’d get some lights to make it well lit or just film yourself outside where you are just naturally well lit and maybe you’d get a microphone just to go on your shirt or something just to make the sound spot on. Down the line you can get a tripod or a gimbal to steady the phone, but you don’t need these things now, they make the videos look more professional down the line for a tiny investment. But honestly, trust me, just get started right now, holding your phone, talking to your phone.

And here’s the third one, the third of our bootstrap pretty much low cost or no cost marketing ideas for MSPs, and this third one is to obsessively collect social proof, because most people are sheep. They prefer to do what most other people are doing. And this is a behaviour that’s hardwired into most humans’ brains. It’s part of our survival instincts. So you need to show people that hundreds of other people, just like them, really trust your MSP.

This means asking for testimonials, it means soliciting reviews on Google or other platforms, and it means creating case studies for each service that you want to focus your marketing efforts on. Don’t ever be scared to ask clients for reviews and testimonials or to take part in some filming. Sure, some of them will say no, but the law of reciprocity says many will happily say yes as a thank you for the great service that they’re getting from you. And yes, this still works despite the fact that they have paid for this service. And yes, humans are strange. The key thing here is to systemise this in the business so it becomes a regular monthly task and not just a once a year social proof topper.

Featured guest: Chris Walker has spent over 20 years creating video content and strategies for IT, tech, and SaaS businesses, helping them cut through the noise and connect with their audience.

Currently, Chris is the director of Joe Mule, a B2B animation studio specialising in helping technical businesses simplify their messaging. He’s passionate about making complex ideas clear and compelling so companies can win the customers they deserve.

Crampons and carabiners at the ready. Selling managed services can feel like climbing a mountain, right? It’s steep, it’s exhausting, and every step towards new cash feels like an uphill battle. But what if there was a shortcut, a way to smooth the path, get leads flowing in and help your MSP make more money?

My special guest today is going to tell you how a simple visual tool can attract prospects. Turn your websites into a lead generation machine and make closing sales easier than ever before.

Hi, my name’s Chris Walker and I run Joe Mule Creative and I’m an expert in animated video content.

And thank you so much for joining us on the show, Chris. We were introduced by Christina Hunt, who is an MSP marketer, so thank you, Christina. Animated videos are something I’ve been meaning to talk about on the podcast for some time. And before we delve into your career, Chris, and the kind of videos you produce for MSPs right now, let’s first of all define what you mean by an animated video. Because I’m going to be honest, and this maybe is the elephant in the room, when you talk about animated videos, I see the hand holding the Sharpie that kind of moves across the screen, I think they’re called whiteboard videos, where whatever it is that the voiceover is saying, the hand is writing it on the screen. And those to me feel really, really old school. And that’s not quite what you mean by animated videos, is it?

It isn’t. No. Those things, those whiteboard videos, I’ll be honest, are the bane of my life for people who’ve ever paid money for them, for a number of reasons. That isn’t really what I mean when I say animated videos and I’ll just delve into it very quickly. The trouble with those whiteboard videos are they’re very, very generic for a start, and they’re not great at helping you spread brand awareness because of how generic they look. When I talk about animated videos, I suppose a better term, a broader term would be motion graphics. That’s anything that isn’t live shot footage. So that can include things like iconography and shape and abstract movement and things like that that can help explain what might be a somewhat complex concept or product. And really those visuals are there to help guide a narrative so that people can start to watch a video and get a better sense of what you’re talking about in that video without you having to come on camera and talk about it.

Okay, yeah, that makes perfect sense. And of course, what MSPs sell is a very complicated service anyway. Now, in a second I’m going to ask you whether or not those animated videos are better than having a human on screen. As we know people buy from people, wouldn’t it be better to see the people? But before we get onto that question, just tell us a bit about your background. So how do you get to the stage where you’re running your own company doing these animated motion graphic videos?

So my background primarily is as a designer and an animator, I used to work for a big agency. I used to run their production department as their senior creative, and I did that for about 10 years. I suppose I got a little bit disillusioned with middle management, working for another agency and started freelancing. And then essentially over the course of the last six or seven years, I’ve built a business around that and expanded the team out and decided pre pandemic to focus on things like MSPs, tech and software companies as my target audience for producing videos. And it’s gone pretty well during that time. I feel all those industries are industries that can use help because they’ve all got complex products at the end of the day, and they’re all competing usually in quite a competitive market. So being able to stand out against the competition is also something that’s usually pretty important for those businesses.

Yeah, I can imagine. And I guess half the challenge for you is taking this very complex thing that someone is selling, whoever you are working with, and actually getting your head around it enough yourself that you can then break it down into a very simple, clear to communicate message. Do you have a process to do that?

Yeah, certainly. And that is one of the big challenges really, is us being able to understand it. I suppose the advantage of using an outside agency like ourselves has always been that we feel like if we can understand what a client’s product is, what their business model is, and what their service offering is, then there’s a good chance that we’ll be able to transfer that to their customers. Because quite often you’re not selling into a particularly technical audience.

We look at the top and high level offer that MSPs try to get across. Those are the things that help you open doors and start sales conversations, rather than getting into the real detail.

I always say our kind of mantra is, the more complex a product is, the simpler the video needs to be. Because you need to be looking at what are the core things, what are the two or three things that you want a viewer to take away from watching that video? And the best way to do that is to really strip away all the detail, don’t get stuck in the weeds and concentrate on those kind of the core benefits of what you try to get across in the video.

Yeah, a thousand percent. I think you and I are in completely agreements on that. We are saying the same things, albeit we’re coming at it from different angles. I think with any MSP, and this is one of the things that makes marketing an MSP so hard, is when you are inside and you’re looking at all of the things that an MSP must do, all of the cyber security, all of the systems, the safety, all of the work and the remote working, the flexibility, everything, it’s enormous. And then trying to pull all of that over to people who aren’t technical and who are making decisions with their hearts, and with their feelings, not with their brains. That’s one of the hardest things for any MSP to do when they’re working on their marketing.

So let’s come back to the thing I mentioned earlier about having a human on screen versus having a motion graphic video. My perception is that you’d always be better having a human on screen because as I said earlier, people buy from people and it’s easier for us to relate to seeing people on the screen. Do you find that it’s easier not to have people on screen because you haven’t got to get actors involved, or you haven’t got to try and persuade the client to go on screen?

That’s a couple of really good points actually, because I’m in agreement with you, people do buy from people. I think that the place to make a video really is probably earlier in that kind of sales and marketing funnel though, because if people don’t really understand your product offering or the service that you’re offering, you may not get that opportunity to get in front of them in the first place. And really the power of a kind of animated video is that the visuals are helping to guide and explain the narrative that’s coming across probably in a voiceover or something like that, because it’s a lot easier for people to take that information in because really what they’re taking in is the voiceover and the kind of narrative, and those visuals are there to help make that transition a little bit easier for them, I suppose. The trouble with getting somebody on screen to do that is you are only listening to the narrative and you’re concentrating on that person as opposed to being able to take that information in an individual way. So the animated videos, I suppose, are hitting you from two directions. Visually, you’re able to understand that information, and you’re also taking in the audio as well, as opposed to somebody talking on camera.

The second side to that is actually the length of time it takes somebody to talk about a product or a service. If it’s just somebody talking on camera, that might take you 2, 3, 4 minutes to explain the kind of intricacies of what a product is. By using an animated video, you’re able to strip away a lot of that because the visuals are doing half the work for you, so you’re not having to dig into quite as much detail verbally because the visual elements are doing that for you. So I think I’m a big fan of including onscreen, especially if it’s the company owner, the founder, the CTO or something like that. I think it’s important to be able to get a face behind that product, but I just think that usually comes a little bit further down the line in that kind of sales and marketing funnel.

That makes perfect sense. So if we took an average managed service provider, and what I’m attempting to do with the question I’m about to ask you is to sort of break down what could go in a video. So for those MSPs listening to this or watching this on YouTube who think, oh, I’m going to go off and do my own video, which obviously some will, we are sort of giving them a steer, a direction with which to go. So if you took an average MSP, and let’s just say they’re serving a local audience, so they’re looking after businesses locally, and it is all the standard offerings, is it cyber security, 365, all of that standard stuff. Where would you start with putting together an explainer video for something like that?

Where we usually start is looking at the problems that that client is solving with those kind of products and service offerings and really digging into those. There’s a basic structure for a video, what we call an explainer video, top of the funnel kind of video that’s really going to be a door opener for them to be able to put in front of prospective clients so that they can watch a 60 second video and go, I understand what these guys are offering because those are problems that I’m currently having with my business.

Really focus on painting the picture of what your client is facing in terms of the world that they live in and the business that they operate, some of the headaches that they’re probably experiencing with either their existing services or services that they may not be aware of. Introducing your company and your solution as a way of solving some of those problems. I think the most important thing that a lot of people miss out in those kind of videos is what are the real benefits in terms of the impact that it could have on your business. Not just, oh, we can help you solve A, B and C, but what will that mean for your business in terms of the resources it might save you, the time it might save you, is it going to help your bottom line by making you more efficient and those things.

So there’s a basic structure, that’s how we always approach things – problem, solution, impact. And then obviously if you can back that up with things like social proof and little clips from existing clients that have proven and backup the claims that you’re supposed to be making, that’s usually where we’d start with something like that. And that’s applicable for a lot of businesses, but I think it’s particularly pertinent to MSPs and technical companies because they will find, as we do when we deal with them, a lot of the problems that their clients are facing are the same across a lot of businesses. So you can get into a nice rhythm where you can produce a piece of video content that’s speaking directly to your audience, and they can find it very relatable towards their business.

Yeah, I absolutely love that. Thank you for that framework, that’s exactly what I was looking for. Someone can obviously pick up that framework now and go away and create their own version of a video, which is absolutely spot on. I think you’re right, the key thing here, and this all comes back to what we were saying right at the start about people buying from people. You can use that video, even if they only watch it for 20, 30 seconds and they think – this is it, these people understand, they understand the fear I’ve got – because we know that ordinary business owners and managers, they are picking MSPs with the heart, they’re not doing it with their brain. So I think we’re just using video here as a different medium to talk to their feelings and to almost give them a feeling of reassurance that, oh, these people get it, they understand what it’s like and why I’m worried about that. And there’s an assumption then that if you can communicate that fear to someone, the assumption is that you are a good provider, you’re a provider of substance, which I think is absolutely wonderful.

So Chris, thank you so much for that. It’s been absolutely fascinating. Tell us about your website and how we can connect to you on LinkedIn so we can go and see some of these amazing videos that you’ve been creating.

Oh, great. Yeah, so the website is joemulecreative.com, which is a bit of a mouthful. You can find me on LinkedIn, Chris Walker, I’m pretty active on there most days talking about creating video content, best practices and kind of how-tos and things like that. So yeah, it’d be great to connect with anybody out in the MSP world who wants to know more about creating video.

Elliot and his MSP in Manchester, UK, are in dire need of unblocking writer’s block. He says he has loads of ideas for new content but struggles to get started. His question is: How can I force myself to write these articles?

Well, forcing yourself is actually completely the wrong approach. If you’re sitting in front of a blank document watching that cursor flash and flash, and you just can’t be inspired to get started, then try one of these three things instead.

The first is to dictate it, transcribe it, and edit it. Grab your phone, start audio recording and just talk. And don’t worry too much about the structure of what you’re talking about or how long it is. Just talk. Get what’s in your head out of your head and get it onto an audio recording. Then get it transcribed, which is so easy these days. You’ve got transcription built into 365, or you can use a service like rev.com, which combines automated transcription with a human check, and that dramatically increases accuracy. I’m sure you have a transcription service somewhere that you love. And then the final part of that is to find an editor who can turn your transcript into a proper structured article.

The second technique I have is for you to get yourself interviewed, and this is an easier and ultimately quicker way to get the content out of your head. You get a writer to interview you, so you tell them what the article should be about, and then you get them to interview you over the phone or a video call and make sure they record it so they don’t miss any details. I mean, you could be interviewed about several subjects in one call, which is very efficient, and a writer with journalism experience will deliver the best results. It strikes me that you could also use ChatGPT or your other AI tool of choice to interview you in exactly the same manner. Just don’t forget to get a human to look at whatever it is that gets spat out, because I always think humans should just do the final edit and the final check on any content that’s produced by AI.

And then the final thing I have to suggest for you is to record yourself talking to clients. So the next time you’re chatting with a client, whether it’s remotely or in person, just record the call. And of course, that’s easy on remote, but for an in-person visit, you could just leave an audio recorder running on your phone. And you don’t need their permission to do this as you are only interested in what it is that you have to say. Sometimes you explain concepts to clients in a way that’s really easy for everyone to understand, and you can get that part of your recording transcribed and edited. And boom, you’ve got another article for your website.

Welcome to Episode 270 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

Your MSP’s bank balance might look great and you might be impressed with your other KPIs. But there’s a hidden one that I bet you $5 you never look at. Yet it could flip things completely. Most MSPs have never heard of this key performance indicator, and yet it’s the ultimate quality check for any recurring revenue business.

In just a few minutes, you’ll find out what this secret KPI is, how to calculate it in under 10 minutes and exactly what score proves that you are running a truly outstanding MSP.

One of the things I love about working in the channel is that every day is a school day and you never ever feel like you have finally learned everything. This, in 2025, is my ninth year working with MSPs and honestly, I feel like I learn so much every single day. And as someone who has a passion, and a need in fact, for constant learning, I do find this exciting and not at all tiring.

In fact, just a few months back I was chatting to an MSP and we were talking about how much progress their business has made over the last couple of years. It’s been actually astonishing. And then he said to me how delighted he was with the performance of his NRR, and that’s N, as in N for November, not MRR, which is M for mother. And of course we know what MRR is. It’s monthly recurring revenue.

What is NRR? It stands for Net Revenue Retention – essentially, which clients that we had last year are still here this year.

It’s a quality score. It’s something that is used a lot by SaaS businesses (subscription as a service businesses) and all subscription businesses typically use it, just not normally MSPs.

But if you are looking for more ways to measure how good a job you’re doing, this could be it. So let me tell you how you’d measure this and what good performance looks like. This will be a great time of year to measure it because you could kind of look back to the end of 2023 or the beginning of 2024 and look at the clients you had then and ask how many of those clients do we still have today? What was the value of their monthly recurring revenue a year ago? And has that grown today? That MSP that I was speaking to has an NRRR of 105%, which means that he’s kept all of his clients over the year, which is not unusual for an MSP, but it’s still nice to measure and know for a fact, and it means that he’s also grown their monthly recurring revenue – got the same clients, they’re spending more.

And I would say for an MSP that anything under a score of a hundred percent needs some investigating because you do expect to hang on to all of your clients year to year, don’t you? And you should definitely be growing their MRR and you can do this by increasing prices or selling them extra services. If you do lose a client during the year, it should only really be for natural reasons such as they’ve gone out of business or better still they’ve been acquired. And you may have the odd year where you lose a client for bad reasons. Maybe they’ve fallen out with you or they’ve moved over to another MSP, but those should be exceptions rather than the norm. And the net recurring revenue retention score allows you to measure that. And hey, if you do measure this for your business, will you let me know what score you get because I’d like to kind of figure that out across a whole number of different MSPs. My email address is [email protected].

Stop digging down the back of the couch for spare change to fund your MSP’s growth. January might mean tightening your belt a bit, but that doesn’t have to stop you from finding new clients and driving revenue.

Let me tell you about three clever no cost marketing ideas that any MSP can use to generate leads and unlock hidden opportunities, all without spending a penny.

You’ve heard of bootstrapping a business, right? It’s when a new venture is built up using limited funds and a lot of goodwill, and you hear stories of founders sleeping in their office so they don’t have to waste money renting an apartment. Now, your business is more liquid than that, but there’s still a place for bootstrapping when it comes to marketing.

Marketing doesn’t have to just cost cash. You can invest a different resource into it instead… TIME.

And this doesn’t have to be your personal time. If your staff have a few hours spare every week, you can always invest their time into the business. Everyone benefits when that happens. So here are three low cost or no cost marketing ideas for MSPs…

The first is to do 15 minutes every weekday on LinkedIn. The most robust way to market in 2024 is to build an audience, then grow a relationship with that audience. And at the point they’re ready to switch from one MSP to another, they are dramatically more likely to switch to the MSP that they know. And one way to build this audience is simply to grow your LinkedIn network. For 15 minutes every day, make connection requests to business owners and managers in your town or your vertical (niche). Make 10 connection requests every day and one or two of them will accept. Now, that doesn’t sound a lot until you compound it. Let’s say two connections, times five days a week, times 50 weeks a year, that adds up into 500 new connections every year. How cool is that?

Number two, ask every user this one simple feedback question. The most robust way to grow net profits is to get your existing clients to buy more from you. New clients are nice, yeah, but they’re very expensive. Whereas someone who is already paying you every month contributes a lot more to the bottom line if they go on to buy something else. And this is why businesses like McDonald’s have fully systemised the upsell – Would you like to go large? or Would you like to add fries to that? Of course, we all know how difficult it can be to get technicians to upsell. Even people who are passionate about talking about extra services will sometimes fall back into their comfort zone, which is to go for the easy fix and not mention X, Y, Z new service. So how about you get your team into the habit of asking this one simple question of every person, every user that they speak to. What else could we have done for you today?

Now, most clients will say, oh, nothing thanks because they’re in a hurry to put the phone down and this probably means that you’ve checked that they are happy. All is good. Some will use it as an opportunity to talk about something that they’d meant to bring up, but perhaps they hadn’t felt that they’d had chance to. And this means that you’ve uncovered some money on the table, profit that you would otherwise have lost. And a handful will tell you about a service or a product that they’d like to buy from you, if only you sold it. And this is invaluable market research. With this one, look out for the trends. What are several people asking for? Because if you don’t give it to them, they are just going to go elsewhere to get it.

And then the third and the final one is to run a free to enter prize draw. People love competitions. Yes, even business owners and managers, they never expect to win, but just the act of entering brightens their day for a second. I used to be a radio presenter a very long time ago, and it was weird how many people would phone up just to win like a Backstreet Boys CD, because this was back in the 1990s. And there are two types of prize draw that you can do. Either offer up any old prize that you can find just for the sake of running a competition, and make sure the prize is really attractive. It can be as simple as a laptop that you acquired for a client that they didn’t actually buy for whatever reason, and it’s just sat on a shelf gathering dust. The other way to do it is to give away a sample of something specific that you are promoting. For example, if you are launching a new monthly recurring revenue service to existing clients, then you’d give away a year’s free membership.

If none of those three grabbed your attention, don’t worry. In next week’s podcast, I’ve got another three bootstrap, low cost/no cost marketing ideas for your MSP.

Featured guest: Ori Elraviv is a multicultural turnaround executive with a passion for driving sustainable growth in small to medium-sized businesses. 

Ori spent the majority of his career in leadership positions in a variety of digital media ventures, managing teams and growing businesses in a diverse set of countries and cultures. 

Having relocated multiple times over the past 20 years, Ori is now settled in New Jersey with his wife and 3 children, enjoying some stability in an increasingly chaotic world.

Is your MSP’s story ready for a plot twist? 2025 could be the start of your most exciting chapter yet. Whatever challenges have filled your journey so far, now’s the time to rewrite the narrative and set up your business for real growth. In today’s interview, our special guest, a turnaround expert, will show you how to open the next chapter with clarity, focus, and fresh momentum.

Coming up, you’ll discover how to organise your priorities, craft a winning growth strategy, and create a story for 2025 that’s really worth celebrating.

Hi, I’m Ori Elraviv. I am a business turnaround specialist. Really, I’m helping companies and business owners solve problems with revenue, profit, and product.

I think those are the core problems in any business, aren’t they? We haven’t got enough revenue, what do we say, revenue, profit and products. We haven’t got enough revenue. We definitely don’t have enough profits, but actually often for MSPs, the product is the one thing that’s actually looking pretty sound. So good to have you on the show. Thank you very much for joining us because we are going to be looking ahead at this year and things you can do with your business this year.

I always think this time of year is an amazing time to be a business owner. You can look at what went well and what didn’t go so well last year, and we all do it naturally. Whether you believe in New Year’s resolutions or just the natural energy of a brand new year, we all look ahead at this time and it feels fresh new and we can do all these really cool things.

That’s what we’re going to talk about today. Before we do, let’s just explore your background a little bit. You said you were a business turnaround expert. Let’s assume there’s some people listening to us and watching us right now that don’t know what that is. Could you explain what that is and how you got into it?

Yeah, so I think it’s basically a multicultural turn on executive. What I mean by that is I’m coming to companies that already exist. I’m entrepreneur in spirit, less in practice, so it’s less about me starting my own businesses, but I’m a fascinated person about going to existing businesses. I believe in sustainable growth. I deal specifically with small to medium sized companies, and I’ve been around the industry more about digital and stuff for over 20 years. I’ve worked in places like China and India and Belgrade and Latin America. So I’m really a very multicultural person and I’d like to think that every business is very simplistic and has very basic things inside of it, and my approach to it is really on the fundamentals.

Got it. So when you do a business turnaround, what exactly do you do? Let’s assume that it’s a business that’s in some kind of distress, do you go in and you look at that business and you kind of take that, it’s a cliche, but that helicopter view and you look at the big things that are going right, or do you get your sleeves dirty and jump in and start to fix all the problems that have been mounting up?

Well, I’m absolutely a sleeves dirty type of person, which is why I like small businesses. Big businesses have a very different type of problems, in small businesses it’s pretty much always the fundamentals. I like going into the financials and P and Ls. I like to understand everything around the business. And I think part of the qualities that I have is very quickly understanding the landscape. And I would go into the business models, I would go into the financials, I would go into the people and the operations. I would talk to the owners. And I think that would be the first steps is just to get, alright, this is just a holistic view of what’s going on, where do we stand? And then we go and hit the next phase of it.

And from your experience, for the small businesses that you’ve worked with, and most of the people listening to this and watching this, they own their business. They own their MSP. We typically aim this podcast at smaller businesses that’s sort of up to 25, 30 staff, which I think is the vast majority of MSPs anyway. In your experience, where do most small businesses go wrong? Are there trends or does it tend to be a unique problem for each business that you look at?

I do think there are unique problems, but I think they stem from fairly common problems.

I think most small business owners of MSPs tend to just fall into the day-to-day. We get used to our own problems and our own way of doing and seeing things, and then we get a little bit trapped.

So sometimes it’s a business problem where the business model just doesn’t make sense and there’s something around it that doesn’t make sense. Sometimes it’s the people, for example, people is an interesting thing. People are critical to any business as everyone will agree to it. But I think sometimes the cultures don’t mesh or we just want to give people another chance or we just can’t get outside of it. There is something with regards to how a business model connects to the people and whether they are inspired and back, is something that is critical. So yeah, it is quite unique to a business, but I think they all stem from fundamental kind of problems.

Yeah, I’m smiling inside because when I first started my first business back in 2005, an early mentor of mine said, anytime there’s a problem in the business and it’s a big problem, regardless of what it is, go home, go into your bathroom, look in the mirror, and there’s the cause of the problem. Which was absolutely correct, of course, I think as business owners we are kind of the biggest asset and the biggest liability to the business. We are the thing that drives it forward, and especially for MSPs, they’re often the greatest technical resource in the business. But I know I’m the greatest liability in my business because I’ve surrounded myself with staff whose job it is to stop me from doing stupid things or meddling in stuff that works, and they keep me out of the day to day because that’s just best for everyone. It really is. So I can focus on the big picture stuff.

Okay, let’s start looking forwards then. So here we are, January, we’ve got a whole brand new shiny year. It’s an exciting one. It ends in a five. I think if it ends at a five or a zero, it’s a big year. What kind of thinking do you think business owners, MSP owners, should be doing at this time of year? Should they be thinking just about the next quarter or should they be thinking about the year? Is this time to start thinking longer than that?

I like to think of a businesses like a book. I’m a very big believer that in businesses, there’s chapters, every year is a chapter, so I look at it as chapters. I would be hoping that companies start a little bit earlier, but let’s just say I would like to plan my year in advance, the year’s goals and objectives. And I know sometimes it sounds frightening, but I want to bring it back to earth. It doesn’t have to be a big thing. It is really, really important that you would identify what would be your priorities for the year. The priorities for the year would stem from what happened last year and the years before. How do you evaluate what happened last year? How do you even categorise, how do you name? Last year, I really like naming a year as is a name. That was the year that I was having a breakthrough. That was the year that something happened. There is a certain kind of headline to each year.

You would go through that and then you would try to understand what happened not only for you as a business, but outside in the market. Where do things stand? This will give you enough guideline kind of points to say what should be the priorities inside of your business. And maybe it’s because of things that you want to work on, maybe it has to do with opportunities. It can’t be more than three, three to four. That is the priorities. From there, you set the goals. Obviously have revenue goals, set revenue goals that you are committed to. A goal is supposed to be something that you’re doing, not something that you’re hoping to happen. Don’t just throw numbers out there that you’re going to have 50% of it.

There’s goals in it that you would want to achieve and focus not only on the revenue, focus on actually the things that drive the revenue. Then I would, at the beginning of the year, I would go to the Q1, a Q1 will have the similar kind of breakdown of objectives and goals and they will all stem from the same thing of the year. So that’s the Q1. What are the things that we want to be able to have and see and achieve in this quarter that will drive us, that will be part of that yearly thing. Now, of course, businesses may have a three to five year plan or they want to dream something a little bit ahead of it, which is fine. I think it’s something definitely to do. I personally find it really hard to do too long. It’s just hard for me to imagine. And I think sometimes business owners find themselves in the same kind of place. So I would not be afraid to just stick to the year. But I would definitely evaluate where I am versus the year before. That would be a Q1. And then as you move through the year, you would go to your Q2, do your Q3, do Q4, and you would do that by looking back at what happened.

Yeah, no, I love that. And I’m going to paraphrase something you said halfway through your answer there, which was about a goal being something you actually want to achieve, which means you have to take action towards it. So a goal isn’t just something you think, oh, it’d be nice to double revenue this year, because without any action, without any change, obviously that’s not going to happen.

Now it’s interesting you talk about Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4, because to me that feels like a very corporate thing. And I had a corporate career, I was a journalist and a radio presenter from the age of 19, oh no, 18 I think, to 30, 31, and that was a big corporate environment. So even though I worked in a small radio station, it was part of a big corporate. And increasingly what was fun at the beginning became more corporate at the end of my media career, and it was one of the reasons I left. Because it was all about quarterly targets and quarterly this and quarterly that. Do you think real small business owners like you and me and the MSPs listening to this and watching this, do you think we think in terms of quarters, because often it’s quite hard for us to say, here’s some activity that’s going to happen in this quarter. If there’s just you and like three staff, it’s a case of here’s what we hope we’re going to get done, but we can’t guarantee it. Is that your experience?

You know what, that’s a good thing. The last thing I want is for me or for MSPs and business owners to think of this as a corporate. That’s one of those things, I hate it every time people about processes, there’s something jittery about me that rejects even the name of a process. Even though the things that we do are really processes in their own right. The idea is not to do something that will now get you nervous or will now take you too much time. The quarterly way to look at it, you got to be able to break it down to quarters. The reason for that is if you don’t break it down, then you are very likely going to end up at the end of the year looking back into it. And I was like, oh my God, you might not even remember what you even started.

So it’s not about making you good or bad. You’re not in front of a judge, you’re not in front of jury. There’s no one out there that is going to scream at you or anything. Honestly, it’s you. And if you have someone else inside of your team that you trust, I highly recommend doing it with more than one person, it gives you more perspective. So go out there and, first of all, distinguish between priorities and goals. Priorities are the areas inside of the company that is important for us to keep in mind, these are the areas. Goals are the actions that we want to do, that are stepping stones, that is what we need to be able to do.

Focus on stuff that you can or focus on progress and focus on things that you can do, and don’t worry about it if it’s not big enough, maybe it’s part of something that you would want to do. At the end of the day, if you want to be able to achieve something, there is a path to get there, there are actions to be taken, and there is going to be, I guess the success rate. It’s part of the business. I want to be able to reach that, and it’s like, okay, but how are we going to be able to reach it? What is the path to it? It’s exactly that. It’s drawing yourself with a path. It’s a yellow brick road. It’s not a straight line, and nothing will happen if you’re going to have to stray away in the meantime. But I believe that instead of feeling corporate, you’ll actually feel good.

Yeah, I mean, I guess the only advantage of thinking corporate is if you underperform in a corporate environment, you get fired. And it was interesting you said earlier that you’re not responsible to anyone as the business owner, which again, I think is one of the double-edged sword things of being the business owner. You don’t get fired for poor performance. You promise yourself that this year, 2025, we’re going to do this thing, whatever this thing is, this growth thing. And then you get to December and you’re like, oh, yeah, we never got round to that. You don’t get fired, which I guess is good. It means you can keep going and the marathon just keeps going year after year. The downside is the fact that you can’t take your kids to Disney or you can’t buy a new house or a better car. Because you haven’t put the growth in, you haven’t generated more profits to allow you to increase your personal income. That’s the only downside of it. But there we go.

Paul, think of it as something of a reminder. It’s almost like a quarterly reminder of what is it that we wanted to do and what we thought was the right way to take it. And we may decide to change a thing, maybe our thinking was not right. It’s a reminder. It’s a constant reminder of what is important. And probably if it’s not one of those 1, 2, 3, this is not important. You know how many times we’re dealing with stuff that is unrelated to our success, but we’re still saying for some reason we’re still prioritising it. In my book, if it’s not part of those priorities and kind of goals, it doesn’t really matter.

Which is the perfect thing to end on, because I think you’re absolutely right with that. And reminding yourself constantly of the things that you should be doing is a massive thing, especially for MSPs whose very job, of course is to be distracted by the people that they’re supporting and all those thousand other things. Yeah, they’re important, but they’re not important in terms of growing the business. So thank you, thank you very much for that insight. Let’s just finish off by telling us how can we get in touch with you? What’s the best way to find you on LinkedIn, and what do you do to help people? How do you make money?

First of all, I’m an executive, like others, so I also do the things that I preach. It’s what I do. But I love helping businesses. I’m fascinated by businesses. I’m fascinated by MSPs. Anyone can reach me on LinkedIn, and I’m going to be very happy to be there to support exactly that kind of path and be that sounding board to it. And sometimes it’s that bell that reminds us what it is important, what is not, and just helping us settle down. Let’s just settle down, let’s relax, let’s put our path together. I would love to be a person that helps MSPs succeed and business owners to just keep the path, keep the path that they’re set off to and have their confidence in it and feel good about it.

Ryan from an MSP in San Diego is quite new to the podcast. He’s been going through past episodes and would like some clarity on some advice that he’s heard to do with his website. His question is: Why is it so important to get my website fixed first and quickly?

Decision makers don’t pick an MSP logically i.e. with their brain. The brain just rubber stamps what the heart has already decided. And this happens at every stage of the sales process, especially in that early research phase when they’re Googling around finding IT support companies that might be worth speaking to.

Here’s how it works… they’ll enquire because they like you, or not enquire because they don’t like you. Their decision on whether they like you or not will be made a hundred percent on the packaging of your business. And the packaging of your business is your website. The saying says, don’t judge a book by its cover, but we do, don’t we? And product companies have known for decades that the look and feel of the packaging, directly affects sales. Why is this so? Because our judgments of what’s inside are formed by what’s on the outside.

Before someone can actually sample the service you have on offer as a client. The only way they have to judge you is your packaging. So let me put this in the most no nonsense way I can. If your website is old, looks awful and is hard to use, you’ll struggle to get new clients. It will scare off any decent prospects that you generate. It really is as simple as that. So fix your website.