Welcome to Episode 334 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge.

The one marketing habit every MSP should obsess over

If there’s one marketing habit that I wish every MSP would build into their regular rhythm, it’s this. Collect social proof. And not casually, I mean obsessively because nothing builds trust faster than a client telling the world that they’re genuinely happy with you. You can talk about your service all day long, but the moment someone else says, “These people are amazing,” the whole dynamic changes. So let’s talk about why social proof works, the three types that every MSP should be collecting and how to do it in a way that never ever feels awkward or forced.

To understand why social proof is so powerful, you need to look at a bit of basic human psychology. Back when humans were still figuring out fire and trying not to get eaten by dinosaurs, survival depended on sticking with the group. If the herd ran, you ran. And that instinct is still baked very deep within our brains and our gut reactions. Even though we like to think of ourselves as rational, independent, modern decision makers…

People are still heavily influenced at an emotional level by what other people are doing. That’s why testimonials, reviews and case studies work so well.

They quietly say, “Hey, people just like you trust a business like this and that feels safe.” So as I said, there are three types of social proof that every MSP should be collecting, and the first is reviews.

Reviews are the most powerful form of social proof because they live on third party platforms that you don’t control. So places like Google. They’re public, they’re credible, and that makes them so much harder to fake. And that’s also why if you have to prioritise, I’d always prioritise reviews over collecting testimonials. A simple and very effective tactic is to ask a client to leave you a Google review and then reuse that review in your own marketing. So you get it on the third party platform, but you use it in your own website. So you could screenshot it and include it in proposals or as I say, your site or social posts or even better than screenshotting it. Get your website designer or any designer to recreate the review so that it looks consistent across different screen sizes while keeping the exact wording that you’d see on Google Reviews.

And there are, just out of interest, three great moments when you should ask for a review. During the first 90 days of working together, when everything still feels fresh and positive, just after you’ve completed a big project successfully or right after you’ve saved them from something serious. The only real rule for this is don’t ask for reviews if you’re in the middle of any kind of difficult conversation with your client, which sounds obvious, but you’d be surprised how many people forget or they don’t realise that there’s a bit of conflict going off at the same time, we’ve sent them an email asking for a Google review. So that’s reviews.

The second type of social proof is testimonials. And testimonials are like a review except you have control over them. That’s what makes them different. So they come directly to you. And that might be as a quote or a video clip or an email that you’ve asked permission to reuse. And because you control them, they’re easy to polish and deploy across all of your marketing. And yes, they do work, but they don’t carry the same weight as a public review because everyone knows that you could have edited them. That said, one strong video testimonial, especially from a well-known local business or a business that’s well known in your vertical, that can be absolute gold.

And then the third and final type of social proof is case studies. So if reviews are the match, case studies are the bonfire. A simple case study is simply a story that wraps social proof into a narrative and our brains love stories because they feel more real, they’re more believable and more memorable. The structure that makes case studies work is simple. First, you demonstrate relevance by showing that this client looks just like your ideal prospect. Then you describe the problem from the client’s point of view and not a technical one at all. Then you poke the pain a little by explaining what that problem costs them or how it felt. You introduce the solution by explaining what you did. Again, don’t drown it in tech. And then finally, you show the happy ending by demonstrating how the client was able to move forward successfully because of your help. And you can see why video works brilliantly here. Even a quick Teams recording can be enough, although it would be better to hire a proper videographer to film your client in real life. 20 to 30 minutes of footage gives you tons of videos that you can use across multiple platforms.

And once you’ve got that, you can repurpose it into written content, LinkedIn clips, and website copy. One good case study can fuel your marketing for years, because of course, most ordinary business owners and managers are only looking for an MSP once every five years or so. So they’re simply not seeing your case study more than once. And if you were to collect a new case study every couple of months, you can see why I say this should be a habit because you genuinely cannot have too much social proof.

So here’s a simple challenge for you this week. Go and get one new piece of social proof, just one. Ask one client for a review or record a 60-second testimonial over Teams, or even write up your first proper case study using that structure. You’ve already done the hard work of delighting your clients. Now, let those clients help you prove it and attract even more of the right ones.

Why every MSP needs a dispatcher

At some point, every MSP reaches a stage where the biggest challenge is no longer technology. It’s actually customer experience. Tickets are getting logged, work’s getting done, but clients and the users working for the clients, they don’t always feel heard or acknowledged, or there’s a risk that they don’t feel looked after.

And that’s usually the moment that an MSP realises they don’t just have a service desk problem. They actually have a customer service gap. And that’s why I believe every MSP needs to hire a dispatcher. And yes, a dispatcher brings operational benefits and we’ll talk about those in a second but the real magic of this role, I believe, is what it does for the client experience.

A dispatcher’s primary job is not fixing issues. It’s making sure that every single person who reaches out feels seen, heard, and acknowledged.

They want to feel that someone’s taken responsibility that they’re not just shouting into the void. Imagine that you’re one of your clients or one

of the people that work for your clients, and you submit a ticket and it’s a kind of annoying problem. It’s not a major problem, but it’s something you’d really hope to get fixed in a few hours or so because it’s just annoying you. And in most MSPs, you submit that request and you might get an auto response, but then you might not hear anything for a few hours, or you might get a bit of a message back, but it’s just like a random update. It doesn’t really tell you anything.

Whereas when you’ve got a dispatcher in that exact same scenario, every single ticket that gets submitted, the dispatcher phones that person. They literally pick up the phone and they call them and they acknowledge the problem, they perhaps ask a couple of follow-up questions if necessary, and they empathise with the user. They’ll say to them, they could use these exact words, “This is a really annoying problem, isn’t it? So what I’m going to do, I’m going to get one of our senior technicians onto this straightaway and I hope to have an update for you in the next hour or so.” And what the dispatcher has actually just done is they’ve bought your technicians some time to really look into that problem while also keeping the customer happy. This is great, right?

From a customer’s point of view, that matters far more than whether or not the ticket is resolved in five minutes or 55 minutes. When users know that there’s a calm, organised, pleasant human being at the other end who understands what’s going on, their anxiety just drops immediately. And you know, reassurance is a massive part of good IT support, isn’t it? You must have learned that so many times over your career. So let’s take a moment to just make sure that you and I understand exactly what I mean by a dispatcher.

A dispatcher is the person who sits between the clients and the technicians, and their job is to make sure that every user feels heard and nothing ever gets lost, while ensuring that the technicians always know exactly what to work on next. So from an internal point of view, a dispatcher typically works alongside the service desk manager, and they’re not replacing that role at all. They’re very much supporting it. They help to route tickets efficiently, making sure the right work goes to the right technician and that priorities are set properly instead of emotionally.

Now that alone massively improves flow and maximises technician time, because instead of technicians constantly checking queues and answering phones and responding to interruptions or trying to decide what do I work on next, what’s the priority. They can just focus on actually resolving things. And here’s the important commercial point. A dispatcher usually costs significantly less than a technician. So by hiring a dispatcher, often you’ll free up enough technician capacity that you can delay or maybe even completely avoid having to hire another tech, which is another big win. But again, the real benefit shows up in how your clients feel. Every user gets acknowledged quickly and they know what’s happening next. They’re kept informed if there’s an unexpected delay and they’re never left wondering whether anyone has even seen their tech support request. Over time, that builds trust and patience and dramatically reduces their frustration even when things go wrong.

One of the biggest mistakes MSPs make is assuming that the dispatcher has to be technical. They do not. In fact, some of the best dispatchers come from outside IT altogether. Just think about people who already thrive in fast-paced customer facing environments, perhaps someone who’s run a local coffee shop or a hotel receptionist or someone who’s fronting a car service department. These are people who are really good at juggling priorities and managing expectations and staying calm under pressure. Oh, and communicating clearly and smiling while they do it. They know how to deal with people when they’re stressed, impatient, or frustrated. Well, that’s IT support, right? You can teach basic IT and systems people. You can teach processes, but it’s almost impossible to teach someone empathy, organisation, and great communication skills. I know these things can be developed, but it’s easier to bring someone in who’s got all of those things and teach them a bit of IT.

And a great dispatcher brings all of those things to your MSP. Empathy, organisation, great communication skills. Wouldn’t it be cool to have someone who is the friendly, consistent face of your service desk, someone that clients recognise and trust… everything gets easier. Technicians are protected, workflows better, and the clients feel better looked after. And do you know what? As a side effect of this, your MSP starts to feel more professional, more controlled, and more scalable, both to you, your technicians, and your clients. I genuinely believe that a dispatcher is not just overhead, they’re leverage. When you get this role right and you get the person right that’s in that role, the improvement in customer service alone more than justifies the decision.

How to get vendors to pay for your marketing

Featured guest: Laura Johns has spent the last 20 years promoting some of the most impactful technology solutions across the globe. Today, she lead The Business Growers, a fast-growing marketing firm focused on building predictable revenue engines for MSPs, IT service providers, and telecommunications companies.

The Business Growers provide full-service, done-for-you marketing support to clients in more than 20 states, bringing deep industry expertise and a clear focus on results. They help MSPs and IT leaders increase monthly recurring revenue, improve retention, and win more long-term managed contracts.

Could you imagine getting vendors to pay for your MSP’s marketing? Well, you don’t need to imagine it. It’s real, and it happens every day to MSPs across the world. There’s hundreds of millions of dollars available in something called MDF, marketing development funds, and yet very few MSPs are using it to subsidise their marketing.

My special guest today runs a fast growing MSP marketing agency, and she knows the good, the bad, and the ugly about MDF. So if you want to subsidise your marketing, here right now, are the answers.

Hi I’m Laura Johns, founder and CEO of the Business Growers, a marketing operations and lead generation company that serves managed services providers.

It’s so cool to have you on the podcast finally, Laura. You and I met in real life for the first time at ScaleCon in New Orleans last year, which you’ve just told me that you only live a couple of hours away from. And we were on the naughty table with Nate Freedman and Cassie from TechProMarket. Marketing was there as well. And I remember Nate kept whooping and hollering and throwing comments out. It was such fun, such fun. I hope it happens again this year.

So it was lovely to meet you and what I want to get you on the show talking about today is I know is one of your specialist subjects, which is MDF, marketing development funds. And it’s something we haven’t actually mentioned in the podcast for a number of years, which is crazy because I know that there are tens, if not hundreds of millions of dollars sat in vendor’s bank accounts, which should actually be in MSP’s bank accounts.

So before we talk about that, do you want to just tell us a little bit about you? So what’s your kind of journey within the MSP world and how did you get to where you are now?

Sure, yes. I think that I can officially say I’m the only tech focused marketing agency in the state of Mississippi. Although we do have a lot of budding tech companies that have come up in the last decade or so, we are not necessarily known for our technology, so I’m really proud of that. I’m from the deep south, I’ve always been in technology, started my career working for a telecommunications company that was embedding cellular technology inside of an electric metre. So monitoring electricity through cellular, which was really progressive. That was my first job out of college, did graduate school, continued to work there for 10 years, which this day and age I hear is unheard of when you start a new career to stay somewhere for 10 years, but I loved it. And it was that startup and that culture of startup was really, really a cool experience for me.

And then that company actually sold for a $100 million in 2014. And once they sold, I went to work for the parent company that was a metre manufacturing company in Washington. Then after that, went to work for a managed services provider, so stayed kind of in the industry and led marketing for them. And really this MDF was a big part of my story even then. So at the time, the company I worked for was an AT&T reseller. They were reselling connectivity and other things through AT&T. And they were starting a program for partners that allowed them to get upwards of 10 to $15,000 a quarter based off of how much they were selling. And we were a very small, at the time, lean managed services provider business. And so that was my marketing budget, essentially. I was having to figure out how to maximise those dollars so that I could accomplish my own goals in the business.

So from there though, I went on to start my own marketing agency where after I saw a lot of problems that I was experiencing leading marketing there, tried to find a need for, which was coming around the whole managed services provider business with kind of a turnkey marketing offer so that they could focus on operating the business and then let somebody else handle these long sales cycles and staying on top of opportunities and things like that. So it’s been kind of a journey, but all in telecom and all from the state of Mississippi, which has been kind of fun.

That’s amazing. That’s such a great story. So let’s assume everyone who’s listening to this or watching this on YouTube, let’s assume no prior knowledge. So just give us the 101 on MDF. So what exactly is it, and what isn’t it? I think that’s probably a good place to start.

Yeah, so marketing development funds, it looks different with different vendors. I think that that’s the first thing to know is that it’s not cut and dry. It’s going to depend on their own systems. I do think that some are much better than others. I feel like sometimes it can be a catchphrase that brings people in to the vendor, but also gets really complicated in how to use it. I think the statistic, now, I don’t know, so nobody go look this up, but I believe that it’s less than 10% utilisation for this industry typically of the MDF that’s available. I will get that statistic though if it’s true or not.

Should we make it real? Let’s just declare it now as a real stat.

We know for a fact based on all of our clients that are using it, that they come to us and they say, “I know I have MDF with X, Y, and Z vendor, and I’ve never used it.” So then we start digging in and we realise, I think the reason that it’s really underutilised is because it’s complicated and it’s different for every vendor.

MDF is based on what you’re selling in volume for that vendor, and you achieve milestones that allow you to have cash in the bank for promoting their services.

That’s kind of a big part of it too, is if you’re selling a lot of different things, you have to be really careful in your messaging and your marketing and not making sure that you are service forward, here’s this phone or this particular vendor that you’re using, because then that can complicate the message a little bit. So I think that a lot of businesses, depending on their size, don’t really want to lead with that brand, they want to lead with their brand. And that’s where I think, again, it gets tricky, but getting compensation on a regular basis for selling more of that product and the really good programs are doing it well, and it can be very motivating if you have somebody who manages it, which is kind of become our specialty in supporting our clients and doing that.

Got it. So you seek MDF funding and then manage the relationship with the vendors on behalf of the MSPs. That’s one of the things you do, right?

Yes, that’s right. Usually when they come in, we’re not going to go through the effort to find new MDF. One of the first things we do in onboarding is get a really good understanding of their services and their vendors. And then at that point, we have a good idea of what’s worth going after and what’s not. And then I would say probably two out of ten times they’re already using it to some capacity, but may not be maximising it. But yes, we will look at their kind of vendor list. We will start making contacts as their agency, if they will allow us, if not, sometimes in some cases, which is understandable, the company has to be the one doing the outreach and making the connection. But for the most part, they’re really good at kind of handing the reins over to us as their agency and we’re connecting with those marketing teams that are providing the communication and the guidelines around the MDF. And then our account managers are all trained on how to use it in strategy. It is strategic, you have to be very strategic because if you’ve got four vendors that all give you MDF, you have to be making sure that you’re qualifying for getting the money back in your bank account, right?

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. So you said earlier that vendors that run a good MDF program, which obviously implies there are vendors that run a bad MDF program. So I’m going to ask you just to make my life easy, don’t mention the ones that do a bad program but you can name names if they do a good program. So again, from the point of view of the MSP, what does a good program look like and what does a bad program look like?

Yeah. I think just like a sales compensation, especially in this industry, it has to be simple. And if you confuse the person that’s doing your sales, then you’re not motivating them. And so I think that the good programs understand that if it’s complicated and if it requires four steps and three days and multiple submissions and requirement of certain assets back and forth, that becomes complicated. Also, the bad programs are the ones that give a very, very small amount on the dollar. And I believe the ones that work best, and I am going to say one in particular, and if you look me up, you know that I’m a AT&T ecosystem partner, so our company is an approved marketing partner, which means 100% of the MDF that they give to their resellers is reimbursable with me because I’m an approved partner, but their program works well because they have two buckets.

Essentially, if you sell up to this much, you get $10,000 every quarter. If you sell up to this threshold, you get $15,000 a quarter. It’s not pennies for a dollar, it’s not confusing. And if you sell these two thresholds, the next quarter, you get the money. And so we have been able to build marketing activity around these budgets and then also give the feedback back to the vendor, “Hey, here’s what happened with your dollars this year.” Which that’s what creates really good relationships that I think the vendors appreciate, to be quite honest.

Yeah. And that’s such a simple scheme, isn’t it? If you sell more, we’ll give you more, and that’s it. And I can see the simplicity of that. I can also understand how big corporations would overcomplicate things.  Let’s say it, Microsoft, right? And I’m not going to ask you a direct experience, but let’s be honest. And I’m not the greatest fan of Microsoft products, but even for me, obviously I have 365. Even for me as a 365 end user, just getting my invoice every month is so complicated, you have to log into a thing, you have to click at this, it seems to generate the invoice and take 60 seconds to do it. And it’s like, oh my goodness. I know MSPs struggle with it.

And I think to speak to that too, you said it, I didn’t, but that is one of the ones that is just too much trouble. But what I have seen in these programs or these vendors that work really well is even if they’re mega, AT&T obviously they’re a very big organisation, and a lot of people associate in their minds with AT&T complicated, however, they have a dedicated team just to partner resellers and they have kind of two different divisions – one’s a commission-based, one’s a top line revenue based – but they have these segments that serve a very particular customer with very particular outcomes and goals, and they understand what works for that customer. And I think if you try to take a big company, just for example, like Microsoft, and you try to blanket a reseller program where we know that every MSP is different and has different techniques and different systems in the way they sell, then I think that if you’re not willing to take the time and invest the resources in finding what they need the most and having a support team around that, then you’re not going to really be able to understand their needs and be the voice and be able to provide a program that makes it worth their time.

Yeah. No, that makes perfect sense. So I’ve got two final questions for you. The second question I’m going to ask and second is, as an MSP, how would you get started with this? Before I ask that question, we talked earlier about how these vendors come up with MDF funds, they put the money aside ultimately to sell product. And we all understand that and no one’s got an issue with that, but where that is an issue, as you correctly identified earlier, is where they want you to push a particular kind of router, say, and you and I as marketers know that the end business owner or manager that we’re trying to sell to doesn’t care about the brand of the router, but if we say to the vendor, “Hey, we’re going to spend your advertising dollar or your marketing dollars, and we’re going to do a really cool campaign, which is going to bring on some new clients, and then we’re going to standardize, we’re going to put your routers in all of their offices, but we’re not going to mention your name.” And there’s going to be one vice president of sales that rubs their hands and goes, “Great.” And then there’ll be a vice president of marketing who says, “But that doesn’t meet my quarterly quota for brand mentions on Reddit” or whatever. So is that a case of just working with vendors that get it and just finding that, I guess, 10, 20% or is there another way of doing that?

I think so. I think again, and I should have mentioned this earlier, but those successful programs are the ones that understand, “Hey, my logo doesn’t have to be bigger than your logo. I can be a very small part of your overall plan.” And if we’re doing marketing well as a managed services provider business, we are talking all about outcomes and we’re talking all about our customer’s pain points and their frustrations. And you’re right, they don’t care about the product. I feel like just in general for another podcast perhaps we talk about the fact that nobody cares about what you’re selling they just want you to solve their problems, that’s another topic, I’m sure you talked about that plenty. But I think that again, these programs that get it, they also understand that you have a bigger objective that you’re trying to meet. And so for example, going back to that AT&T, if you put their partner badge on there, which is small and they want it a third of the size of yours or they don’t want it, they want you to be at the top, they want them to be at the bottom, those types of things.

Some MDF programs are fine with even just, like for example, you’re doing an email campaign that powered by this particular vendor or we’re offering a two for one, if you buy connectivity, you get 10 phones free or whatever, but being able to bundle products that are not both the vendor’s product and be open to the fact that, “Hey, if they can sell on outcomes and my product gets sold, maybe it’s a small mention, but also if I’m their vendor of choice, hopefully I trust the MSP enough to know that they’re going to sell more.” And again, kind of going back to that, how can this MDF serve them best so that they’re going to be more motivated to sell my product? If you do it well, like a salesperson incentivise them well, then the nuanced things, I get we need to put a logo on there, but let’s not require it to be the whole message because if we’re going to be wasting time on sending emails about routers, then it’s worthless in my opinion anyway.

That makes perfect sense. Final question then, which is where do you get started? So obviously, an agency like yours will do this as part of your client management, but not every MSP can work with you. So is it as simple as you talk to all of your account managers, you just ask the question?

I would suggest spending a day dedicated or a couple of appointments during the week, you’re going to be talking to your account manager anyway, go ahead and let them know that on our next call or let’s schedule a call if you don’t have a regular routine depending on how substantial of a part of your business that product or vendor is, let them know you want to talk if they have MDF funds. Again, I would say you’re going to find that a lot of them do.

A good way to practice, in my opinion, and of course I’m always working smarter, not harder, is if they’ve got a good program they can send you the guidelines and the breakdown of what you get for what, and go ahead and put that into your AI tool of choice and compare those programs yourself, do some prompts about what might bring you the most value at this stage of your business with this many employees and this much revenue.

Start to do some of that research and data yourself, save yourself some time and look at what they’re actually offering to see, is this a pennies on the dollar or is this a lump sum based on my sales growth and what’s going to work best for my business? And then figure those out. A lot of times, again, if it’s not worth your time, it’s not a good program, it’s not worth your time, but there are some that are going to be good and substantial. And if you’re not taking advantage of it, you’re missing opportunities to influx some cash because you think you don’t have a marketing budget, but you might. You might actually have a marketing budget, you just don’t know.

I love that. Thank you, Laura. Tell us finally just a little bit about your business, what you do with MSPs, and what’s the best way to get in touch with you?

You can always find me on LinkedIn, I’m very active sharing lots of opinions, some you may like, some you may not. And then also, you can look us up at thebusinessgrowers.com. We are marketing operations, doing foundational marketing, getting you digitally visible to your target customers and ideal customers. And then secondarily, we’re doing lead generation for you as well once that good foundation is built. And I teach about it all the time. We’ve got YouTube, of course. If you go to The Business Growers on YouTube, you’ll find us as well and you can learn lots of things there.

Useful Links

• This podcast is in conjunction with the MSP Marketing Edge, the world’s leading white label content marketing and growth training subscription.
• Join me in MSP Marketing Facebook group.
• Connect with me on LinkedIn.
• Connect with my guest, Laura Johns, on LinkedIn. And visit The Business Growers website.
• Got a question about your MSP’s marketing? Let me know.

Welcome to Episode 333 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge.

How to market your MSP to manufacturers

Do you want more manufacturer clients for your MSP? Manufacturers are one of those love it or hate it verticals in the channel. Some MSPs absolutely thrive working with manufacturers. Others hear the word and breakout in a cold sweat. And honestly, both reactions are completely valid. So right now, I want to do a proper, balanced, deep dive into how to market your MSP to manufacturers, starting with whether this vertical is even right for you, and then looking at what manufacturers actually care about when they choose an MSP.

So let’s start with the reality. If you enjoy complexity, manufacturers can be a fantastic fit. They often have expensive production machines, specialist software, bespoke setups, and critical systems that simply cannot go down. And yes, somewhere in most factories, there’s usually a machine still running on an old XP box that hasn’t been rebooted for 10 years because if it stops, the whole place stops. That’s the joke I always make, but it’s funny because it’s true.

The upside of this is obvious. There are lots of large, complicated, high revenue projects. There’s specialist work that you can charge properly for. There’s a real value in what you do because downtime costs manufacturers serious money. When production stops, it’s not a few annoyed users. It’s lost output, missed deadlines, idle staff, and very stressed owners. That makes manufacturers willing to invest when the risk is clearly explained.

But let’s be honest about the downside. Manufacturers rarely have standard setups. There’s very little cookie cutter IT. Every environment is different. Every site has its own quirks. And that means that often you need your most senior technical people involved a lot more often than you would in a nice tidy professional services business. If your MSP is built around highly standardised stacks, minimum variation, and keeping senior techs away from day-to-day firefighting, then manufacturers will feel like chaos to you.

Before you even think about marketing to manufacturers, you need to answer a simple question internally… do you enjoy this kind of work?

Assuming you do want to go after manufacturers, the next mistake MSPs make is marketing to them like they’re any other business, because they are not. Manufacturers think differently. Their world revolves around production, reliability, safety and efficiency. They don’t care about shiny tools or buzzwords. They care about one thing above all else – keeping the production line running. From their point of view, the best MSP is not the most innovative or the most cutting edge, it’s the one that feels the safest. The one that understands their environment, the one that won’t casually suggest upgrades that risk stopping production.

So when you market to manufacturers, your messaging needs to shift. You’re not selling IT support, you’re selling risk reduction. You’re selling uptime, stability, you’re selling calm. Manufacturers choose MSPs who demonstrate that they understand the consequences of failure. Talk about downtime in terms they understand… lost output, missed delivery slots, idle machines, wasted labour. Show that you respect legacy systems, even if you don’t love them and that you know how to work around them safely.

One of the most powerful things you can do in your marketing is to talk about how you approach change. Manufacturers are often change averse for very good reasons. So explain how you test, how you plan, how you schedule work outside production hours, and how you build rollback plans. That builds trust fast. Case studies are especially important here. Manufacturers want proof, real examples. Stories of similar environments, similar risks, and similar complexity. So even if you only have one manufacturing client, that case study will do more heavy lifting than 10 general testimonials.

You should also lean into onsite presence a lot more than you might in other verticals. Manufacturers value MSPs who show up and walk the floor and understand the physical environment as well as the digital one. So talking about site visits, audits, and physical awareness during your marketing and your sales process immediately differentiates you from MSPs who just kind of want to be very much remote based.

And finally, remember that manufacturers don’t choose MSPs emotionally in the same way say as creative or professional services businesses do. Their decision is grounded in risk, responsibility, and consequence. So your marketing should reflect that tone. Be calm, be reassuring, be very competent. There’s no hype needed. There’s no drama. You need to show that you understand their world, you respect their constraints, and you can keep the machines running safely. If you can do this, you will stand out very quickly. Marketing to manufacturers, you know, it’s not about being flashy. It’s all about being credible. And for the right MSP, that can be an extremely profitable place to be.

Good, better, best pricing for MSPs: Why it works

Why is good, better, best pricing so controversial for MSPs? I hear MSPs say things like it’s too complex or it adds noise to an already long sales process, or maybe even just prospects will get confused. And I think that focuses far too much on a small number of perceived downsides while completely missing the much bigger upside. Because when good, better, best pricing, also known as three-tier pricing, when it’s done properly, it doesn’t complicate the sale at all. It actually guides it and helps prospects to make a decision. And it shifts the conversation away from whether they should buy from you and towards which option that you offer is right for them. Does that make sense?

So let’s break this down properly. First, what do we actually mean by good, better, best? Well, at its simplest, you already have a bundle of services that you sell. With three-tier pricing, you still have that bundle. You just offer it in three different flavours. So the good package is the essentials. What they genuinely need to keep things running. The better package builds on that with perhaps more protection, more resilience, more support, and the best package is exactly that. It’s everything you offer at the highest level for the businesses that are more risk averse, more regulated, or just want the most comprehensive offering that they can get.

Now, if it helps you to visualise this, you might label them something like bronze, silver, and gold. Bronze being essential protection, silver the business grade resilience and of course the most popular choice, that’s what you want it to be, more on that in a second, and gold being the premium protection plus strategy for businesses that want that highest, highest level. And that most popular label I just mentioned in the middle, that’s not an accident. In fact, a common and very effective approach is to place the package that you most want to sell in the middle. And that way, prospects can compare it.

They can see something cheaper that offers less and something more expensive that offers more. And this allows them to feel like they are choosing the option that fits them best rather than being pushed into something. And that feeling, that sense of control is a critical part of buyer psychology. You’ll know you’ve got good, better, best pricing, broadly right when around about three quarters of your new sales, your new clients land in the middle package. Now, let’s talk about why this works from a psychological point of view, but without getting academic.

A huge amount of buying behaviour is driven by how we feel, not just what makes logical sense on paper.

And there are three psychological principles quietly doing a lot of heavy lifting here. The first is something called price anchoring. The top package sets a reference point, which makes the other options feel more affordable by comparison. The second is the compromise effect. Most people naturally avoid extremes, so when presented with three options they tend to gravitate towards the middle one because that feels safer and it feels more reasonable, especially when it’s labeled as the most popular choice. And the third is something called choice architecture, which sounds like it’s out of the matrix.

But actually, instead of asking prospects to design a solution from scratch, which is stressful and overwhelming for them, you’re giving them a small number of clearly defined options that align with different risk tolerances and different budgets. And the combined effect of putting these three together, that is so powerful. Price sensitive buyers are no longer scared off because there’s a sensible entry level option. Buyers who want more protection or faster response have a clear upgrade path. And crucially, the sales conversation becomes about which package to choose, not deciding whether or not to buy from you. That is a very different conversation to be in.

Now, when it comes to structuring the three tiers themselves, and these are not prescriptions, they’re just starting points. Every MSP’s tech stack and service model is, of course, highly different. But as a general guide, a good or bronze package might include things like remote help desk during business hours, monitoring and patching, a baseline AV or EDR, basic backups such as Microsoft 365, and of course a standard response SLA, or maybe even no SLA at all.

The better or silver package would include everything I’ve just talked about in bronze, plus you might throw in onsite visits or maybe out of hours support. You might throw in full server and workstation backup with tested recovery. There might be email security, phishing defence in there, maybe even priority response, definitely an annual strategic review, because that’s a great long-term retention tool.

And then the best or the gold package would include everything we just talked about in bronze and silver, plus 24/7 response, advanced security monitoring such as SOC or MDR, virtual CIO, definitely strategic planning with roadmaps and budgeting, and of course, if they need it, compliance reporting that’s relevant to your client’s sector.

So when it’s all structured this way, three-tier pricing isn’t about confusing prospects or padding invoices. It’s all about clarity. It’s about guiding decisions and it’s about meeting buyers where they are in terms of risk, responsibility, and expectation. When you do it right, good, better, best pricing makes it easier for them to buy. And that’s why it works so well for lots of MSPs.

How this 40 technician strong MSP wins clients

Featured guest: Dorota Ulkowska draws on her extensive Managed Services background—including leadership roles at Shing Digital—to guide her work as Director of Client Success at Accurate Network Services. She blends process improvement with genuine client care, ensuring technology drives growth rather than creating friction. Dorota believes IT should be approachable and practical, helping organisations adapt to change with confidence. With a people-first style, she focuses on aligning solutions with business goals, building trust, and making technology an empowering force for clients.

MSPs, we are rolling up our sleeves right now to get into the specific marketing that one of the fastest growing MSPs in Canada is using today. I’ve managed to persuade their director of client services to tell me what they’re doing to win new clients, turn prospects into sales appointments and sell more to their existing clients.

Now, they’ve got 40 technicians and they’ve been going for 19 years. So this is a solid business and you’re about to hear some very solid marketing strategies and tactics from my special guest.

My name is Dorota Ulkowska. I am the director of client services for Accurate Networks.

And thank you so much for joining us on the show. I am delighted to have you here because you are there in the trenches. You’re leading the marketing for your MSP, I know you’re doing lots of marketing. You’re very good at the strategy and implementing the tactics for your specific MSP. In the next 10, 15 minutes or so, we’re going to get right into what exactly is working for you guys right now and also what’s some of the stuff that you’ve tried that doesn’t work. And I know this is going to be one of those, roll your sleeves up. Let’s actually get our hands dirty episodes, which we absolutely love here on the podcast.

So before we go any further on this, just give us some context. So tell us a little bit about Accurate Networks, whereabouts you are, give us an idea of how big you are and how long have you been with the business?

So Accurate Networks has been around for about 19 years and the head office is in Edmonton, we also have an office in Calgary and I actually have not been with Accurate for very long. I’ve been here for only five months and I’m just loving the environment, I’m loving the direction and just learning absolutely a ton. Our organisation is a managed services provider, which a lot of the people listening are in that group, but MSP is all we do. So if an organisation just wants to do an individual small project, we’re probably not a fit. We will be a fit if you’re also looking for a managed services provider. We do it all, but we really focus on managing our clients overall. And the reason why I bring this up is it is one of the differentiators from a lot of organisations because we actually do say no to potential clients when they are not a fit, which in my personal experience is quite unique.

Oh, I agree. Just to give us some context, how many technicians do you have in the business? That gives us an idea of size.

Yeah, we have over 40 technicians.

Okay. So worldwide, regardless of your currency, I think it’s a good way of indicating how big you are. And I agree actually, I think the smaller MSPs, so we’re talking from anything from the one person bands up to you and two or three technicians, even up to that stage, a lot of MSPs find it really hard to say no to any work that comes in through the door. I guess there’s sometimes a minimum user count that people put in. But yeah, especially when you’re trying to grow the business, it feels right to take any work, but you and I know that it is not right to take any work at all.

Let’s delve into that. I mean, obviously with 40 technicians, you’re going to have a lot of accounts people, sales people, obviously yourself, other marketing professionals. So that’s a lot of money to pay out every month, that’s a lot of resource. Obviously you’ll have huge amounts of monthly recurring revenue coming in. How do you as a business handle saying no to clients or to prospects in a way that doesn’t offend them?

We are very clear upfront what we do well. During initial meetings we interview the client just as much as they interview us.

And we set that up, set that expectation up by saying, “Look, we want you to have the right fit for your needs, but also we need to make sure that the clients we work with have the bare minimum of what they need to have in place or are willing to have in place in order for us to support them in the best way possible.” So our process is such that as we onboard clients, we provide them with an outline of the bare minimum critical risks that need to be addressed. And we need to work with clients who are open and willing to jump on those critical risks so that first of all, they’re functioning properly and securely, and we can manage them in a proactive, secure way in order for this relationship to go further.

Any clients who are going, “Well, no, I’m going to do my own research, or I’m not going to commit to that, or just take what I have and do with it what you need.” You’re not then the right fit. And the way we approach that is just by being very much upfront, just like in dating you have an initial meeting, you exchange information and sometimes it’s not a fit and that’s okay because there are so many MSPs in the marketplace. There are so many fantastic MSPs in the marketplace and there are many that are going to be a fantastic fit for you and we can make introductions. I gathered some information, I can pass this on to some of our partners, our contacts, and make the introduction for you so that you can move forward. But unfortunately, we are not the right fit for you. And it never goes poorly. People actually appreciate not going down a path where then they’re going to be pressured for change that they’re not willing to make.

I love that. Thank you so much. I think the three areas that we are going to focus on in the rest of the interview, and they’re the areas that I think most MSPs would be interested in. The first is how you guys generate leads. And I’m interested in what you do that works and I appreciate you’ve only been there a few months, but what you’ve tried in the past that hasn’t worked. So that’s the first area. Second area is turning leads into initial discovery calls, turning leads into meetings. And the third area is upselling your existing clients. So let’s delve into the first one, lead generation. It’s the number one problem for MSPs. “I don’t have enough leads. Where do I get leads from? My referrals have dried up.” So without giving away any secret source, what do you guys do that works well for you? And what do you keep doing for your lead generation?

So you mentioned something which is a huge source for us, referrals. So a lot of organisations say our referrals have dried up. Referrals is a system that we as an organisation have been relying on actually very, very heavily. The majority of our business growth has been due to referrals. However, in order to get referrals, we need to make sure that we are actually supporting our clients in an exceptional way. And if we’re not, those referrals are going to dry up over time and we are continuously asking for referrals. So not to be shy to ask for those introductions. As we are providing exceptional service and as we’re having the conversations with the clients to ask for those introductions to other organisations. And those things go up and down, most of the time our clients are not going to say, “Oh yes, I have a list for you here.” Obviously that’s not going to happen, but that will be top of mind and introductions are continuously made. So that is wonderful.

However, you can only rely on that so much. Even though our growth for the last, I would say 18 years has been very heavy on referrals, and I’m going to go as far as to say it’s been solely based on referrals, we are now doing many more events that are client and prospect facing. So again, how do we bring value to our clients without necessarily cold calling and asking for meetings for the business? And the way we do this is think of the type of information that our clients would benefit from and divide it up between in-person events as well as webinars. The more of a value we can bring to the market, the more known we’re going to be and the more people are going to reach out to us for particular expertise. So that is a mix of existing clients.

And again, prospects or our clients are bringing their contacts, and that’s how we generate definitely more attention as well. And the third area is our visibility in the marketplace. So outside of the basics of the website and the blogs and social media, as we have people reaching out, doing the cold calls and reaching out to organisations, our own visibility online needs to be strong. So once we do actually get a hold of somebody, they need to see that we have the credibility to stand behind. And sales, I think most people listening to this will know this very well inside and out. Sales is a question of being persistent, skill level, and luck. So you have to reach out, you have to make the effort and have luck at your back in order to actually get those initial meetings. So I would say it’s a trifecta for us with regards to growth.

Okay, that’s great. Thank you. I have two follow-up questions and I’m just looking for short answers if that’s okay. So the first of them is you ask for referrals, which is great. How do you ask for referrals? Because there are lots of ways to do it and many ways they don’t get the response that you want. In fact, it can almost come across as a bit slimy or as a bit creepy or is a bit desperate. So how do you guys do it? What’s your system?

We first check in on their satisfaction level with our service, right? So we always focus on that first. And if the feedback is OK we do not ask for referrals. If the feedback is fantastic, then at the end of that, we ask, “Look, this is how we grow through referrals. If you know of any organisations that are in alignment with your size, your situation, we would love to have an introduction.” That’s it. So just put in a note in the back of their brains that this is what we’re looking for.

So to summarise that, when you’ve got delighted clients, just remind them that you’re open for business and you want more people like them. As simple as that.

Exactly.

And the second follow-up question is, I love the idea of the events, of webinars, lunch and learns. I’m a big fan, especially real life stuff. Nothing beats being in a room with people and it’s surprising how often you end up doing business with them down the line in some way. So my follow-up question, and again, I’m looking for a brief answer, is how do you fill those events? How do you get people on your webinars and how do you get people into the room?

Have relevant topics. Find out from your clients what information are they interested in. So as an example, AI is such a huge, huge topic. Everybody’s talking about AI, but what about AI? What are clients having an actual issue with? Some of our clients are literally having an issue with the basics of AI. What do I do? So the meat and potatoes of AI. Others are focused on, “Okay, I’m at a point where I want to create agents. How do I go about that? Show me exactly how to do that.” Fantastic, we’ll have an event focused on that. So listening to your clients.

Second of all, how do we fill the seats? In-person events, it’s easier, I would say, than webinars because we always centre the event around something wonderful, like a nice lunch and drinks, so we wine and dine them, and we keep it at a smaller event. So about 30 to 40 people at the very, very most. Purpose behind that is we have a short presentation, we want to give information, this is why they have come. But then the rest of the time, as they’re sitting at their tables, the discussions are continuing around that topic. And this is where you get a lot of the value. So they come for the networking, for the information, for the food. And it’s amazing how when you spread the word out to your clients and your prospects, especially if it’s a relevant topic, it just fills up.

I love that. And I think a massive success factor for you there, which I know will be intentional rather than accidental, is mixing prospects with clients because prospects ask clients that the client will go, “Oh, well, actually we’ve been with these guys for three years.” And the prospect will say, “Oh, really, how’s that working for you? ” And that the existing client will sell your business better than you ever can. Not the details of it, not how it works. Yeah, it’s a very smart thing.

Actually Paul, let me add to that because also clients with one another, not just prospects, do the same thing where if you are trying to work with one client to lead them down a particular path because it’s obviously beneficial for them and they’re hesitating for any reason, and then you have another client who has gone through that journey, they get that information from another source where that has worked out and therefore your sales path is that much easier.

Amazing. Thank you. Let’s move on to the second area. And I think you’ve given us the hint of where you’re going with this. You can have thousands of leads, hundreds of prospects at any one time but how do you turn them into a sales meeting? So you mentioned earlier that the third of your trifecta was having people on the phone, making outbound calls. Is that how you book most of your meetings or do you have other tactics and strategies that you use?

So it’s a mix. Again, for our organisation we have been very lucky to have a lot of referrals. When you get a referral it’s that much easier because it’s a warm introduction. And whether it is a cold call, whether it is a referral, whether it is just an introduction and it’s not quite a referral, where we start out is by looking at that introductory meeting to exchange information to see whether there’s a fit. If it is a referral, it’s quite obvious somebody is looking. If it is a cold call, you obviously need to catch their attention enough to identify whether there’s even an opportunity. And the opportunity in our particular segment is not to take business away from other MSPs. Because we’re dealing mostly with smaller to mid-size organisations, we are looking for organisations where they have a generalist or they have somebody who doesn’t really know that much about IT but it’s on their plate and it’s becoming too much. So that pain point is going to come up relatively quickly when you get a hold of somebody during a cold call.

The first step is that meeting and the non-threatening approach is “Let us meet to exchange information and see whether we are a fit for one another.” And to loop back to your first question, we are looking for our right clients just as much as you are looking for the right company to support you. And unless we exchange that initial information to learn a little bit about one another, we do not know whether we are a fit. So we portray that we’re not just hunting for any business, we’re interviewing you just as much as you’re interviewing us. And I have to tell you, that provides a little bit of intrigue.

I bet it does because most people go into a sales meeting just wanting the business regardless of whether it’s fit or not, as we were talking about earlier. I’m getting a real pattern here, this is a sizable business and as much as you have relied and continue to rely on referrals, which as we know that’s your business to lose, a referral comes to you, wanting to work with you. I’m hearing high quality, I’m hearing slow, I’m hearing authentic conversations. So I’m hearing a very, very rich, deep sales environment where, and it wouldn’t surprise me that your first, second, third clients from 19 years ago are still with you today. If they haven’t been sold or gone bust. And I suspect that when you onboard a client, you expect them to stay for 10, 15 plus years, which is really interesting.

And there’s a real lesson here. I think the fact that if any MSP of any size should be doing exactly the same in terms of how the authenticity and the speed of those conversations. You said a word earlier, persistence. And the persistence does not mean desperation. Persistence means making sure that if they’re going to move from one MSP to another, or if they’re going to move from their generalist over to a specialist outfit such as yourselves, that you just keep making sure you’re pushing it along, testing the waters and never giving up on them. Or I had a sales guy speak to me a couple of weeks ago selling me, it doesn’t matter what. And he said, “Well, have a think about it and give me a call.” And that’s the first time I’ve thought about it in two weeks. Whereas actually what he should have done was booked a meeting or said, “When do you want me to call you?” or something so that we all understand what the next step in the process is?

I love this. Let’s move on very briefly to the final part, and the piece I wanted to talk about was selling more to existing clients. So do you have account managers? And if you do, are they customer service focused account managers or are they technical focused or are they straight out and out sales people?

No. So I do have account managers, absolutely. I have a fantastic team and they actually all come from a technical background, but the focus is customer focused with regards to a strategic proactive approach. So the way we approach our business is, as I mentioned when we onboard a client we take a look at the minimum things that need to be done in order to get them to a level where we can actually securely support them. But from there on, through our internal processes, we do an assessment on an annual basis to evaluate not only where the client is at, but also what their plans are for the future.

A lot of IT is reactive, especially in this market of small to medium-sized organisations. And those organisations are relying on us to help them plan out and budget for their future. Certain things are going to be reactive because things do happen, but we try to minimise that as much as possible. So the account managers work very closely with their clients to identify their future. They do that through assessments, through roadmaps, and have discussions like this is what we’re seeing as your organisation supporting you. “You have told us, Mr. Client, that fill in the blank… you’re growing, you’re moving, whatever it may be. And based on your infrastructure today, these are the steps that need to happen in order to support your business goals and your wins.” And then there is a discussion. What is your priority? Now we are building this together versus us trying to convince them of buying a new server or migrating it. So when you approach a business from that perspective, we now know two years down the road, what’s coming for each client.

So yet again, slow, quality, authentic. And that’s true partnership. I’ve said this before on the podcast, the word partner is the most abused word in the channel. You join a vendor, you meet them at 9am, you sign up with them at 9:05 and they call you a partner. That’s not a partner. A true partner is exactly what you’ve just discussed there where you and your client partner together slowly over time by having a solid plan for how are we going to make sure the technology helps you to grow the business and never hold you back. And that’s a true partnership.

Exactly. I absolutely love that. But there’s a dark side to this though, Paul, because based on this, there will be clients who say, “Yes, this is what we want. This is exactly what we’re looking for.” But you get onto this journey and there is pushback. There is continuous pushback of, “No, I don’t want to plan. I don’t have time to plan. I don’t have a budget. And oh, by the way, I’m moving next week. Please come and do my cables.” So an organisation following this process has to be in a position to have those open conversations with our clients to say, “Are we still a fit? Let’s have a check-in because we want to support you. We do want to be your partner, but are we a fit?” Because if you’re looking for an organisation to be reactive and to look only after the basics, then we’re not your people. And again, having those open conversations, which can be quite difficult, either evolve the relationship to the next level or you clean house and you have to be willing to do that.

Yeah. But of course, connecting this right back to the beginning when you were talking about fit and turning away people who aren’t right, and this applies to any MSP. Once you understand what makes a good client and what makes a client that behaves in the way we’ve just described, you look for that right at the beginning. So the further down your journey you go as an MSP, the fewer wrong clients you take on board because you learn to spot them. People give away their behaviours, don’t they? They red flag themselves in the things they say and the way they say it, and they don’t know that they’re doing it, which is absolutely fascinating.

Sadly, we are out of time because I could talk to you for this. Oh no. I know. The next 40 or 50 minutes or so. Thank you so much. You’ve been so generous. We are definitely getting you back on the show. We’ll get you back in 2027. Just for those MSPs who are listening, who either are based near you and would like to just make sure they’re on your radar for the clients that don’t fit you, but might fit them. But also for other MSPs around the world who just love what you’ve been saying and perhaps just want to connect with you and just say hi. What’s the best way to get in touch with you?

Two ways. There is LinkedIn, of course, last name is spelled ULKOWSKA, look for me there. Or through our website, which is accuratenetworks.ca, not .com or you’re going to go to another organisation in the US. So both ways are good ways to get hold of me. And Paul, thank you so much for this opportunity. I had so much fun.

Members’ update

If you’re a member of the MSP Marketing Edge B2B membership, just check in that you’ve rolled out our ultimate lead gen campaign, which is available to you right now in the portal. It’s our most used campaign and no wonder. It starts with a four page physical sales letter, full of your client’s reviews and testimonials. You send that out to the hottest prospects in your area. And then you follow it up with an email campaign and an outbound phone call. And of course, we’ve got a script for your caller as well.

There’s comprehensive support from me and my team as you get it prepared and as you implement it. And it’s one of those things that you can just do the work once and then you send it out to 20, 30, maybe 50 prospects every single week for the rest of this year and next year and the year after.

So you’ll find that in the portal. Just look in the campaign section in the navigation and it’s called the Ultimate Lead Generation Campaign. Oh, and if you’re not yet a member of the MSP Marketing Edge B2B membership, you can see if your area’s available by entering your postcode or your zip code at mspmarketingedge.com/membership.

Useful Links

• This podcast is in conjunction with the MSP Marketing Edge, the world’s leading white label content marketing and growth training subscription.
• Join me in MSP Marketing Facebook group.
• Connect with me on LinkedIn.
• Connect with my guest, Dorota Ulkowska, on LinkedIn. And visit the Accurate Networks website.
• Got a question about your MSP’s marketing? Let me know.

Welcome to Episode 332 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge.

5 ways to delight your existing clients without spending a penny

One of the easiest ways to grow your MSP is also one of the least talked about. And it’s this… delighting the clients you already have. And before your brain jumps to discounts and gifts and free stuff or doing more work for nothing, let me stop you right there.

The best ways to delight your existing clients don’t cost money. They cost attention, they cost intention, and they cost you thinking a little bit differently about how clients experience working with you.

So let me give you five examples…

The first is proactively explaining what’s happening before clients feel the need to ask. So most client frustration isn’t caused by things breaking, it’s caused by uncertainty. To them, silence creates worry and worry creates friction, not good, right? So a simple update that says something like, “Hey, here’s what we’re working on for you right now, or here’s why we’re making this change and what you might notice.” Well, that can completely change how a client feels about you. They stop wondering, stop guessing, and just feel really reassured. And reassurance is hugely underrated in the channel, it really, really is.

The second way to delight clients is to remember what matters to them beyond just their IT and their technology. Clients feel delighted when they feel known, not remembered as just an account number or a contract size, but they’re known as a business and especially as people. So referencing things like previous conversations or remembering a big business priority for them or acknowledging a stressful period that they’ve mentioned. None of that costs you money, but it really builds emotional loyalty between you and them. In fact, you can make clients feel like they’re in a very safe pair of hands.

The third way to delight clients is to remove small annoyances that they’ve quietly learned to tolerate. Delight really comes from removing friction, not adding features. So give them clearer instructions, remove the need for them to ask follow-up questions, do better handovers, send cleaner emails, make the next steps more obvious for them. When something suddenly feels easier, clients really do notice, and they might not send you a thank you email, but if they feel it, then those feelings really add up over time.

The fourth way is to tell your clients what you’ve prevented, not just what you’ve fixed. MSPs are brilliant at quietly stopping bad things from happening, but terrible at talking about it. Clients rarely know what didn’t go wrong because of you. So when you explain the risks that you’ve reduced and the issues that you’ve headed off, the problems that never really became problems, then you reinforce the immense value of what you do. You remind them why they chose you in the first place.

The fifth way to delight clients without spending a penny is to make it safe for them to bring you bad news. This one is bigger than it sounds. Clients are delighted when they’re not judged, lectured, or made to feel stupid. You understand that, right? I do. Absolutely. When they feel psychologically safe and it is all about their feelings, they’re going to come to you earlier and not later. They’re going to be more honest and tell you the stupid things that they’ve done, which is good, right? They’re going to be more collaborative. In fact, they’re going to trust you more deeply. That’s exactly what we want from them. That’s the partnership that you want with your clients.

The common theme across all five of these is that delight doesn’t come from doing more. It comes from being more intentional. The MSPs who retain clients really well and grow accounts and earn referrals are not the ones constantly piling extras on top. They’re the ones who communicate clearly, remove friction, and show that they care. They help their clients to feel safe. And do you know what the best part is, right? You can start doing every single one of these things immediately without spending a single penny.

How to turn your MSP’s success stories into 3 BIG marketing assets

Most MSPs completely underestimate how powerful simple client stories are. You know that your team does great work every single week, fixing problems, preventing issues, and saving clients from themselves. But when do you ever stop to tell the rest of the world about the cool stuff that you achieve every day? Rarely? Well, that’s a huge shame because each one of those stories can be turned into three big marketing assets that will help you to build trust, attract new clients, and help your existing clients feel prouder than ever to work with you. Let me explain why stories sell better than almost any other kind of marketing.

Back a very long time ago, like 10 years ago back in 2016, when I first started helping MSPs with their marketing, I noticed how many of them struggled to stand out. Their websites all said the same things. They said things like, “We’re proactive. We care about security. We’re your trusted partner.” You know that. You’ve seen all of this before, but none of it cuts through. It didn’t back then and it doesn’t today.

So I’d asked the MSP to tell me about a client that they’d recently helped, and that was the point their eyes completely lit up. They’d say things like, “Oh, one of our clients was hit by ransomware, but we had them back up and running the same day.” Or, “We migrated a whole 100 user law firm to the cloud in one weekend.” And those stories were gold because they did what all good marketing should do. They demonstrated proof, not promises.

People trust your stories far more than they trust your claims. So let’s talk about what makes stories powerful.

The magic ingredient isn’t just the result, it’s the emotions created by the result. A great client story answers questions from their point of view, such as: what was at stake, what did it feel like before you fixed it, how much better is your life now. When your prospect can see themselves in that story, you’ve already won half the marketing battle. Their emotions will want you to look after their business, and emotions are pretty good at influencing the brain. I believe there are three assets hiding in every success story. And once you’ve got a great story, here’s how to make the most of it…

Number one, create a written case study. This is the easiest win. A simple one-page story with three sections… the problem your client had, what you did to solve it, and the result and the benefit that they enjoyed. You don’t need marketing fluff, just real details, quotes if possible, and maybe a photo, or if you have to a logo with their permission of course. And this then is perfect for your website, you can put it in proposals and definitely in onboarding packs as well. You need to keep selling in that first 90 days that you’re working with a client.

Number two, create a social media post. Take the most dramatic or emotional part of this story and turn it into a post. It might be something like, “When a ransomware attack hit one of our clients at 6pm on a Friday, they thought their weekend was ruined. Here’s how we had them fully operational again by 9pm that night.” It’s very short, it’s very visual, you can understand that, it’s very relatable. Posts like these build credibility faster than anything else that you can do.

Number three, create a video story. Now, this is the golden ticket. Grab your phone and record yourself or your client if they’re up for it, telling the story in their own words. It doesn’t need to be highly polished. For this kind of video, authenticity beats high production value every single time. And then you can reuse that clip on your website, on LinkedIn, in email newsletters, even in your proposals.

So here’s your challenge… go and find one story, just one. Ask your team, what’s something amazing that we’ve done for a client recently? Ask your clients, what have we done in the last few months that’s impressed you the most? And ask yourself, what was the biggest scare you had recently, but the resolution was a lot easier than you thought. Then write it up, post it, or record it. You’ve already done the hard tech work. Now made that hard work, work hard for you.

What if you sold your MSP to your employees?

Featured guest: Eric Brotman is Chairman of the Board and Chief Growth Officer of BFG Financial Advisors and Managing Principal of Brotman Consulting Group, LLC. He started in the financial planning industry in 1994 and launched a start-up in 2003 which has grown to over 20 employees and $900,000,000 in assets under management.

Eric is the author of three books including the award-winning “Don’t Retire…Graduate!” and hosts a podcast by that same name.

You might think this is the craziest idea that you’ve ever heard, but what if you sold your MSP to your employees really slowly over a number of years? In fact, what if that was your exit plan? So instead of selling out to one of the big consolidators or a local competitor or a venture capitalist group, instead you pass it over to your employees, but you do it really slowly.

You get the key people to buy into the business and you lock them into your business long before you’re ready to go. Maybe you think that’s a sensible idea, maybe you think it’s a crazy idea, but it’s something that my special guest today is doing. And I’m delighted to welcome him onto the podcast to explain to you why it’s something you should consider.

Hi, I’m Eric Brotman. I’m the chairman and chief growth officer of BFG Financial Advisors. And I’m here to educate MSPs on how to get money out of your business and into your personal pockets and do it in a tax-friendly way.

Oh, I love that. I mean, that in itself, we could just spend the whole podcast talking about how to get more money out of your business. And just as a heads up, because we do have listeners and viewers all around the world, we’re not going to be talking about specific US or UK tax laws, and no one wants to hear about specific tax regulations. We’re doing big picture items here of how you can get money out.

Do you know what, Eric, I think would be cool as well is if we can start to look towards the end of an MSP’s career. And I don’t mean their business, something horrible happening to it. I mean retirement, that happy day when you sell the business, you dance off into the sunset, go and buy a yacht, whatever it is that people do. I think it’d be really cool to talk about how us as business owners, because we’re all business owners here, how can we maximise our business while we’ve got it and how can we maximise our retirement. That’d be really cool to talk about.

So thank you for joining us on the show today. Just give us a sort of a brief overview of you. I mean, what is it that makes a man wake up in the morning and think, “Hmm, I want to be a financial advisor.”

It was a complete accident. I got into this business over 30 years ago. I was planning to go to law school, I enjoyed estate planning and wealth transfer and thought that was my path and I fell in love with the financial business and the rest is history. So now I’m building an organisation. We’re teaching individuals, business owners, families about financial literacy. I’m writing books and podcasting and doing as much as I can to get the word out that financial independence is attainable and that it’s mostly based on behaviour, not circumstance. So we’re just trying to change the narrative. And for business owners that there are a lot of particulars that we can take advantage of. It’s worth doing.

Yeah, no, I completely agree with you. So this year is my 20th anniversary, no 21st anniversary actually as a business owner. And I completely agree with you. I think, and I have a little bit of wealth that I’ve built over those years. I completely agree with you, it’s based on behaviour more than anything else. What are some of the things that you see business owners doing that a) hold themselves back financially, and b) actually promote themselves and build their wealth?

Well, the things that hold business owners back a lot of times it’s a scarcity mindset, instead of an abundance mindset. It begins with attitude, and it begins with recognising that even competitors in your space can teach you something. And that we don’t have to necessarily be afraid of other providers or other folks in our space. I also think that there’s a tendency for business owners to reinvest so much in their business that they don’t actually extract assets or wealth from the business and get it into their personal world, which means you’re constantly risking almost every penny to your name on the business being successful in an ongoing way. And businesses come and go, and industries come and go. So it’s really important, just like any corporate executive who owns stock in ABC company, whatever it is, just like they need to diversify away from their own stock, so do business owners.

So we have to take some of the fruit of our labour. And of course you’re going to reinvest in the business, you’re going to grow the business, you’re going to market the business, all those things, and that’s important. But you also have to get some money out of the business and into your family’s net worth, or you’re taking an enormous amount of very focused risk. So I would say those are the two big downsides. One is attitude and the other is the behaviour of reinvesting everything and not diversifying.

The biggest determinant to creating a business that’s going to monetise and change your life to make you financially independent, is beginning your succession planning very early.

And I know that sounds strange because a lot of business owners in our 30s and 40s aren’t thinking about that. I started selling stock in my own company in my 30s. People thought I was nuts, Paul. But now there are eight other owners here. We have a large roster of folks who can’t wait to buy me out. Not that they want me gone, but that they realise that this business will go on beyond my lifetime. And that’s exciting. That’s a legacy. So that feels good emotionally, but it’s also financially, it’s a really smart move at the end of the day because I can sell gradually and that’s good for tax planning. You don’t have to take a huge lump sum and get clobbered no matter what country you’re in. And at the same time, you can set your own course, set your own pace. I don’t feel like I’ll ever be forced out. I have the opportunity to decide how much I want to do, how much do I want to work?

I don’t believe in retirement. I know that sounds crazy because I do financial planning. I think retirement’s brutal and no one should do it because I think a lot of people look at retirement as the end of something, but not the beginning of something. I think you’re retired if you’re financially independent enough that you’re working for fun. And that you’re doing something you love that brings you purpose and brings you joy. And yes, it might still make you money, but at the point where you don’t need it to make you money, you’re retired even if you’re busy and even if you’re still labouring in some capacity.

Yeah. So much to unpack from everything that you said there. I agree with everything you said. I love the idea of selling little parts of your business as you go through your career. And I own a hundred percent of my business, the MSP Marketing Edge, and I enjoy the power and the control that goes with that because I can do what I want to do. But I’m only 51, so I’m nowhere near finished yet, but I can completely see the power of bringing on people and selling small parts of the business because actually that gives that business new, renewed energy from people who care about it. They’ve got as much skin in the game as you have.

It was interesting you talking about business owners going through their lives, not taking money out. I once, and I’m not going to name the type of business, but before I worked with MSPs, I worked with some other kind of businesses. And there was this one particular business owner that I used to meet on a monthly basis, and I always used to think they weren’t doing very well. They were a bit dowdy, always looked a bit scruffy. The kind of person you’d look at and you think, “Oh, those clothes are due going to the thrift store, charity shop, as we call them here.” And then one day they dropped a little bombshell to me that they’d never really taken any money out of the business. They had a million pounds in the bank, which is about 1.3 million US dollars. And the whole room was just stunned and just stared at this person and couldn’t believe it. And this person had spent 30 years just doing business every day, taking out the minimum amount. They were driven by fear and what their CPA, their accountant had said, take as little as you can. And of course, by the time you’re in your 60s with a million pounds in the bank, which has built up over 30 years, well, you and I know that that million pounds in the bank in the business, which is doing nothing, could have been two to three to four million pounds of their own personal assets by that point.

And let’s look at that because that’s another way of looking at this. I mean, we will have people listening to this podcast and watching this on YouTube who are in all sorts of financial states. So we’ll have those that literally don’t have a dollar to pay the bill that’s coming in tomorrow. And then we’ll have those that have loads of cash in the bank and there’s a scarcity mindset or a fear and everything in between. So you talked about selling little parts of your business as you go along. If you hadn’t taken that strategy, are there other strategies that you would have taken as you grew your business and went through your 30s, 40s, 50s?

The reality is I would have less choice now. If you don’t sell gradually, and it’s not specific to our industry, in general if you don’t sell gradually and find a large group of internal employees, coworkers, colleagues who want to take the financial risk to buy the stock, it’s never given, it’s always sold. But if you don’t do that, then you will have built an asset, if you’ve done well, that’ll be too valuable for anyone in your organisation to be able to afford, which means you are now stuck at the mercy of private equity or of an exit strategy that will eliminate the legacy you wanted to leave behind. You’ll make money, you’ll make money on the backend, maybe you’ll even make more money. Sometimes you walk away from some of the big dollars or pounds if you do it a little too soon, but I think the benefits of doing it gradually outweigh the super paycheck that could come at the end of the rainbow if you sell to that private equity firm.

I don’t want our employees, our clients, our vendors, any of our relationships to suffer because I went for the big check. That to me is, I couldn’t live with myself. I would much rather have people who are aligned. You talked about it as power… power’s not necessarily something that you give up, it’s something that you share. And a lot of times, all of us as entrepreneurs think that we have a monopoly on good ideas. And I’m here to let you know the secret that we don’t, and that sometimes it’s better to cast a wider net and to get ideas from lots of different places. And the other thing is you tend to lose some of your very best employees if they don’t have a vested interest in the success and a possibility of biting the apple of equity. You don’t want to lose your best people. You want to make sure that those folks are on the bus for the long term.

So like you, I’m 54 years old. I got a lot of gas in this tank. I’m never retiring. But I stepped down as CEO of the firm that I started January 1st of 26. This just happened and it was the best thing I ever did. I spent two years helping the new CEO transition in. I still own a large percentage of the company, not a controlling interest because no one has a controlling interest, but a meaningful interest that financially is important to me. And we’ve been able to transition the leadership here to a team that is younger than I am and that’s going to do an incredible job. And I can work as much or as little as I feel like. And if it’s not fun, I tell everybody, if it’s not fun, I’m not doing it anymore.

I absolutely agree with that. And I’m going to sidestep you calling me a power control freak or insinuating that I’m a power control freak. You’re right anyway, I’ll go with that.

So I was a micromanager and here’s the thing, Paul, I don’t know how many employees you have, but I was a horrendous boss. I think I’m a terrific mentor, coach, consultant, ally, advocate… terrible boss. I haven’t managed people in years. I love working with them. I help being a career builder. I love getting people to the next level for themselves professionally. I don’t like supervising humans. So we all have blind spots and that’s one of mine.

Yeah, no, I’m definitely not a micromanager. We’ve got 13 of us here and I don’t like managing either, but my strategy for that is to hire adults, adults with families and we’re all remote and we set clear boundaries and what we’re trying to achieve and goals and I just let them get on with it. And that’s another way. That’s the thing. We’ve all got different ways of achieving the same thing. I was only joking, by the way, when I said you called me a control freak. I am a control freak. I know that, but I’m in remission, so it’s okay.

So I completely agree with you about the big payout. And actually within the channel right now, as you know, there are all these super MSPs going around. This is a great time to sell an MSP. There’s so much corporate money, so much VC money right now, but the downside of that is legacies, the instant death of any legacy to your business. And some people, they just want the money, they want the exit, they want the reward for 20 years hard work, and maybe the extra 3, 4, 500,000 they get, and then they’re not so bothered by the end of their brand, the end of their business, and their staff going somewhere else. But there are others, and I feel this is how I feel, because I’ve sold a business 10 years ago, and that business unfortunately was closed by the new owner six months later, and that hurts. And so if and when I’m done with this business, which I’m years away from that, I’m going to want to make sure this business continues, that it has a legacy, and that to me is more important than the money side of things, which is interesting.

Let’s look at the final sort of part of this before we finish the interview. You mentioned about retirement and you don’t believe in retirement, I don’t really believe in retirement either. In fact, and I can see one of the other advantages of selling your business slowly over 10 years to your colleagues is that you always retain a role, right? You’re always going to be the chairperson or a consultant or something, because even when you’re 89 and they’re wheeling you in and speaking loudly to you, you’ve still got a role within the business because you were the founder of that business. What do you think, and again, bringing this back to all MSP owners, to all business owners, what do you think is the kind of thing that we should be working towards? Should it be something like keeping meaningful work or should we be looking to perhaps do consulting agreements at the end? Or do you see these days many people that want to do what feels like the old fashioned thing of, I’m going to take the check at 65 and I’m going to run off to the beach because that just doesn’t feel like a sensible thing anymore or a real thing anymore.

Well, it exists, but those people aren’t happy for very long. Retirement in the traditional sense, and you guys in the UK, because we don’t speak English on this side of the pond, we speak American, but nonetheless, in the UK, you know as well as I do that to retire is to go to bed. Well, if retirement is the long sleep, that sounds terrible to me, I’ll pass. I think it needs to be a graduation, I think it needs to be to the next level. And I think we have to have a life of purpose. There are secrets of the happiest retirees. And we’ve worked with thousands of families in the US and abroad, many of whom were entrepreneurs, business owners, MSPs, other folks who have done this kind of work that you’re talking about. And the fact remains that the most successful retirees, the happiest retirees have three things in common, Paul.

One, they are debt free. They don’t owe anybody anything, and that is a financially liberating thing that so many never experience even in their lifetimes. And a lot of business owners are constantly updating either equipment or personnel or other things and taking new and new and new business loans. And I know it’s leverage and I know there’s tax benefits in different areas, but to not owe anyone a nickel is especially rewarding.

Second thing is they’re healthy. They’ve taken care of their health and not just their physical health, mental, emotional, spiritual, physical, whatever it is. You don’t wake up one day at 67 and say, “I think I’ll be healthy now.” It really is a lifetime journey.

And the third and most important is you have to have a reason to get out of bed every morning. You have to. It doesn’t necessarily have to be for money, but it has to be more than golf. It has to be more than the beach. I defy anybody listening to this to take a vacation for three months and not be bored out of their minds. Truly, because our sense of purpose, our identity is tied to not just who we are, but what we do and the people we talk to every day. You lose adult communication, you lose a sense of making a difference. And I think that’s a very lonely and sad way to spend what could be half your adult life. I mean, we’re living to a hundred. If you quit at 65, which is an arbitrary number and you live another 30 years, at least 20 plus of which could have been really productive, whether it was profitable or not, is a whole nother animal. But why do that to yourself? I don’t get it.

I completely agree. When I sold my business 10 years ago, I had six weeks off and I was bored after that. And okay, so I was 41, not 51, but oh my goodness, I was so bored and I cannot think of anything worse than doing golf every day. What a terrible waste of your life, right?

Well, and I don’t know about you. I don’t know if you’re a married guy or what, but my wife would not want me puttering around the house with nothing to do. I would drive her insane. It’s like, go find something to keep you busy because I would find projects for a little while and then I would be climbing the walls.

I bet. Eric, thank you so much for jumping onto this podcast and being on this video. Just tell us briefly, what do you actually do to help MSP owners with their financial planning and working towards the future? And tell us how we can get in contact with you as well.

I’m happy to do that. Thanks for allowing me to. We help MSP owners and other business owners as well with monetising their businesses, but also managing their personal and business finances in concert because they’re different balance sheets, they’re different P&L statements, but they are still both important. And especially if you own 100%, they’re completely yours. So it’s important to not only do the right business planning, but also to do the right personal financial planning. And that means the estate planning, the risk management, some of the insurance work, some of the blocking and tackling that we don’t always think about, the debt, the real estate, all the decisions that get made and the family communication as well. We’re easy to find. Website is bfgfa.com. And for those interested in the don’t retire graduate concept, you can go to dontretiregraduate.com or bfguniversity.com. And we have a ton of financial literacy resources, lots of free content, and have a lot of fun doing it.

Members’ update

If you’re a member of the MSP Marketing Edge then maybe you joined me on last week’s live Munch and Learn. This is actually something we do every month. It’s kind of like a lunch and learn, but because I’m doing it for about 22 different time zones, I call it a Munch and Learn. You grab a snack and you join me live on a call to learn about an important subject to grow your MSP.

Now last week we were talking about the perfect MSP website homepage. So we now have a very clear framework of the exact ingredients that you need to make your homepage absolutely perfect. And the next Munch and Learn, which is going to be on April 9th, that’s about tightening up your ICP, your ideal client profile. The thing which tells you exactly the kind of clients that you want to work with, and more importantly, the kind of clients that you don’t want to work with.

All of the recordings for this, for the Munch and Learns last year and this year are available right now in the member portal. Oh, and if you’re not yet a member, it’s only available to one MSP per area. We do this deliberately so that your marketing never clashes with your direct competitors. You can see if your area is available by entering your postcode or zip code at mspmarketingedge.com/membership.

Useful Links

• This podcast is in conjunction with the MSP Marketing Edge, the world’s leading white label content marketing and growth training subscription.
• Join me in MSP Marketing Facebook group.
• Connect with me on LinkedIn.
• Connect with my guest, Eric Brotman, on LinkedIn. And visit his website, BFG Financial Advisors.
• Got a question about your MSP’s marketing? Let me know.

Welcome to Episode 331 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge.

MSPs: How to get help if you’re struggling

Featured guest: Paul Croker is an award-winning Cyber Security person with a rich background in IT that span the years and sectors. In his last corporate role was heading up the IT for a pan-European space company where Paul led the way for the UK entity spanning two sites, managing complex needs of IT for space projects with budgets and an aggressive headcount to take into account too as the business was ramping up. 

Hello and welcome to this special episode of the podcast. This week, we’ve joined together with thousands of other podcasters around the world to take part in something called Podcasthon. We’re giving up this episode to promote a charity of our choice, and you’re going to love the charity that we’ve picked. It’s called 404 Stress Not Found. It’s a new organisation that’s aimed at helping MSPs to cope better. And here’s my special guest to tell you all about it.

Hello, I’m the founder of 404 Stress Not Found. My name is Paul Croker.

And thanks so much for joining me on the podcast, Paul. You and I have known each other for, it must be 9, 10 years something like that, it’s been a long time. And bizarrely, and what has sort of created this special episode today is I bumped into you and your wife, Gemma, at Barcelona Airport like back in autumn/fall last year. Now we had actually both been to MSP Global, so it’s not like we were just randomly flying into Barcelona, but we had a great chat outside the airport. I was very hungover, I remember that. And you were a bit more bright-eyed and bushy-tailed than I was.

I think I just had a coffee as well, which probably helped.

Yes, you had. Which is a dangerous thing at two in the afternoon, but there we go. And we started talking about what you’re doing with 404 Stress Not Found, and I realised this is the perfect thing for this special episode. So let’s start right at the beginning. So just first of all, let’s find out about you. Just give us the brief version of your story in terms of the MSP that you run here in the UK.

Sure, so I started a company called 18iT about five years ago now or thereabouts, off the back of exiting a pan-European space company, which is all very cool. So when we talk about rocket science, I know what that used to look like. And what we do now over here is very different. But I take those lessons and basically curate them for MSPs and people in the tech space.

That’s really cool. And you can actually say it’s not rocket science because that’s what you used to do.

And I do use that quote when I talk on stages. Yes.

So you should, I would. I mean, I couldn’t even get into a rocket facility, let alone be a rocket scientist, but that’s pretty cool. And you founded this thing called 404 Stress Not Found. So how long has that been in your life? And we’ll explore how you created it.

So it’s been a thing rattling around in my head for about a year or so. And actually was born out of an idea I had when I was going around various conferences, obviously I’ve bumped into you at several of those as well, which are great, but they are transactional in terms of ROI, people are talking about tech… we’re not really talking about the squidgy bit, the human element in those conversations and latching onto those things really. So that was the original concept idea was to have something which is focused on the people, getting to know us as individuals, and having a place where we can kind of talk about things.

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. So what have you actually created and how does it benefit MSPs?

Oh crikey when did it start, beginning of 2025, we ran the first event in Bristol, here in the UK, we ran the second one in Birmingham in the UK, then we went to Brighton, London, and we finished up in Newcastle. And over the course of those events what we did was kind of a voyage of discovery. They mutated slightly, but the essence was the same. We were getting MSPs or people working in the tech sector together, both corporate IT and SME IT. They might be business owners or they might be tech leaders or they might be people on the tools, so to speak. We don’t care about the job titles and the roles because mental health doesn’t either, so neither do we. So we’ve morphed those events as we’ve gone through.

My wife came to one in Brighton, which is great to have her there because her background’s in SEND, special education as well and dealing with people with neurodiverse skills at university. She said, Paul, we’ve got these great sessions going on, we’ve got people that are automatically now opening up and kind of bearing a light into some of the challenges that they’ve got. We need to look after those people as well and be able to have them so they’re ready to perform after they leave our event and the following day. So we brought an online platform into play as well. There’s a portal now that people can use for free, the events are free to attend as well because I don’t want barriers to entry with this. And we are running as a not- for-profit organisation with donations and stuff. So we’re looking for companies, organisations that can donate funds to us as well. We’re registered what we call a CIC, a charitable interest company at the moment in the UK, but the plans are to make it into a fully fledged registered charity.

I love that. And do you know what, I think everyone at some point has an idea like this, don’t they? I’ve had an idea for a cause rattling through my head for 20 years, but I’ve never acted on it. So genuinely bravo to you for actually not just taking it the next step, but having a goal and a vision. And I know we have loads of vendors that listen to this podcast and watch our YouTube videos. So those vendors, please hands in your pockets and we’ll tell you where to go and find the details of this shortly. And if you can support that, I think that would help Paul with this mission.

So you’re helping MSPs with their mental health, and as we stand here early 2026, that’s a perfectly acceptable thing for you and me to talk about in public like this. And yet 10 years ago, maybe even five years ago, it was somewhat less acceptable to talk about, especially within the channel. And yet, as you and I know, and most people listening to this or watching this will know, the channel is absolutely the place where we need to be talking about mental health because it’s predominantly male and it’s predominantly lots of men sitting on their own, in rooms on their own and with all of the issues that that causes. So do you feel that this is the time for an initiative like this or do you feel like it’s almost overdue?

It’s definitely overdue. If I’m honest, the people that I’ve spoken to, MSPs, industry experts like yourselves and others have said, Actually, this is really interesting, thank you for starting it and being the tip of the spear. It needs people talking about it.

We need people going on stages at events or just raising their hand up saying, “You know what, I’m struggling at the moment with this stuff.” And that’s okay.

We seem to think that when we ask people how they’re doing, we’ve got to say how busy we are, how good everything is… business is good, it’s booming, it’s going really well. We’ve got all these busy things going on, all the rest of it. Whereas when I step away or turn away or when I get home, I’ve got my head in my hands because I’ve got other things happening potentially outside of work as well, it’s not just inside of work. It could be family, it could be friends, it could be other things that are muddying the waters. And I have to deal with that and it’s how do I deal with that and all the stuff I’ve got going on in work as well.

Yeah, absolutely. And when we talk about mental health and the example you just gave there, if someone that’s perhaps struggling with one area of their life, which maybe not be their work, but obviously it’s going to affect their work because we’re humans and we have feelings and those feelings permeate into everything. Do you see that because we’re talking about it more these days, that people are more likely to say, Oh, actually I’ll go and join something like this. Or conversely, to get involved with something like this and maybe go to one of the events, even though actually things right now for them would be great, but they want to keep things that way and perhaps support other people.

It’s a great point you make there, Paul, actually. And I’ve been talking with people who are struggling themselves, so they come to find ways in which they might not have thought about or to share their experiences and see if they can help others. Because as you know, the channel and the industry is very community minded in lots of these places. People that go to events and conferences want to help others and learn themselves and they’re curious. And I think that last part, the curiosity bit really sort of comes to play here as well, because this isn’t just for people who might be struggling or having challenges. What if you’re a manager or a leader of some description, wouldn’t it be great to spot telltale signs in your colleagues or friends or peers who might be struggling or having a challenge at the moment? So by coming along, being engaged in this new community that we’ve set up, people can share those experiences, share those ideas, but also gain some knowledge and experience.

I mean, I mentioned earlier, we’ve got the online platform, the second tier on from that, which we’re hoping to bring out in the not too distant future, actually has courses on there as well. So we’re looking to pull in industry experts who are subject matter experts in their own rights, in mental health, in the challenges that this presents, where they can advertise their courses and some of that money will come back into running the charity. So it’s almost like an Amazon marketplace for their stuff, but it’s down to the individual people there to say, Oh, I like that course. I like the way it’s set up or that resonates with me. Let’s explore it. But I think those sort of things are important really. And we want to raise the bar and the education level around it as well.

So would you say the challenge for someone who is struggling a little bit, is the challenge kind of recognising that they’re struggling or actually doing something about it? Because we all have up days and down days, don’t we? And that again, is a normal part of being a human. But do you find that sometimes people have down days and down days and down days and they don’t realise that actually that there’s a pattern there and they need to do something about it?

I think there’s probably a bit of all of that present really, and it can impact people differently because we’re all wired up differently, we’re all set up slightly differently and have a different lens on the world and how things are. And that’s okay, but I think you have to be that first point to go, Something’s not right. I’m not myself. Whether that’s you saying that or for my personal experience… I went out with some friends who I’ve known for years and years and years and we hadn’t caught up for a while and they’ve said to me, they took me aside each of them, there’s as four of them in total, over the course of the evening and saying, Hey, what’s going on? Is everything alright? Like, really alright? And they don’t normally do that. So I knew something wasn’t quite right when they were asking that. And for me, that was the start of really uncovering, Do you know what, I’ve got some stuff going on which I need to address. And that was the start of my personal journey. So yes, it really starts with, you need to understand yourself that something’s not quite right. You might not have the answers or might not be really wanting to fully explore it, but just to say, Yeah, I’m not my normal self, is always a good starting point.

Yeah. And I guess, well let me make this a question rather than an assumption, if you are very much alone, and by that I say, I live on my own, but I have my 15-year-old here, and obviously kids especially teenagers, they know when you’re not quite yourself in the same way you know when they’re not quite theirself, but I don’t live with my partner, we live separately, so I kind of rely on my child weirdly to be the mirror, the reflection of she’ll say, “Wow, you’ve been a real grumpy…” I won’t use the exact words she uses because they’re swear words, but You’ve been a real grumpy *person* all week, and that in itself can be a bit of a, “Oh, have I? I hadn’t realised.”

So do you find that people perhaps that don’t live with a partner or don’t have kids or certainly maybe post COVID, six years on, where although perhaps people working for MSPs or within the tech industry who are still working from home and actually going back to the office never happened for whatever reason in their business, and that’s perhaps not been to their detriment because they’re on their own predominantly a lot. I guess it’s this and all of these scenarios, isn’t it?

Yes, absolutely. So again, it’s all relevant. There are cases, unfortunately, of people who didn’t cope well during lockdown, and unfortunately they’re not with us. So that’s what we’re trying to avoid. We want to avoid a place where people feel there is no other option for them, there’s no one listening, there’s no one there that they can talk to or share an idea with. Some people, as you said, work on their own, live on their own, and that’s their life, that’s how they want to be in some cases, but not in all cases. But I think sometimes you do need to have somebody there to talk to or to reach out to. So we’re trying to create that safe place, that inclusive space, where we’re not looking at ROIs, we’re not judging people. We’re just here to listen. We’re not medical experts, so we can’t say to you, Oh yeah, this is the problem and that’s what you need to do and here’s some tablets and some… No, no, no, no. We’re a peer-to-peer buddy-buddy system is the way I describe it. We’re that arm around the shoulder listening to you or helping you if and when you need that.

Sometimes people will just go, Do you know what, I just want to go and hang out for a bit. That’s fine. Come and do that as well, it’s not like you’ve got to come and bear your soul necessarily. People come to these meetups and get something different from it. There’s an entertaining story, I’ll keep it short, give you the highlighted version. We had two people come to the Birmingham meetup and they’ve known each other for over 25 years. They both came out afterwards at the end of the night and they said, “My goodness, I’ve just learned something new that I didn’t know about that person before.” And they both said it to me separately. So for me, that’s part of the golden nuggets in this, is even though you might know the people or we see people at events or conferences, it’s a different type of place because we’re talking and listening for different things.

Yeah, I love this. So I have to ask because we have a very international audience watching our YouTubes and listening to the podcast. Obviously you’re based in the UK, as am I. Do you have plans to expand this out to the US, Canada, other countries around the world?

I’m really glad you asked that, Paul, because yes, we do. It started in the UK. Yes, I’m a crazy Brit, shall we say. We’ve got contacts and friends across the world. I’ve had people reach out to me from the Netherlands. There’s two cities in the Netherlands that want to run this. There’s two cities in Germany. We have multiple places in the US and Canada, Singapore and Australia. So I’ve already got people being lined up who want to run these kind of in- person meetups in their countries. And I’m sure there’s plenty more as well because the people that I’ve spoken with and listened to have said, We haven’t got anything like this.

And we need something like this. So if you’re interested in putting this together in your part of the world, we will give you Paul’s contact details pretty shortly so you can get in contact with him. Paul, let’s finish off with some specific messages to specific people. So let’s start, first of all, because obviously this podcast and the YouTube videos are aimed at the owners and managers of MSPs. So let’s talk to people who have staff, who have people that they’re responsible for, and let’s send a message to them about two different things. So first of all, if they’re struggling, what should they do? And secondly, if they see or suspect that a member of their team is struggling, what should they do?

So if you’re an MSP owner and you’re listening to this podcast and you think that this is interesting or you’ve got challenges or you’ve had challenges before or you think you might have some challenges, it’s a great place to come along. We’d love to hear from you, get you to get involved. Please do come along either to the in- person meetups we’ve got. We’re looking to reach out to conferences as well. So if you’re going to conferences in the UK or in the US or in other countries, look out for the 404 Stress Not Found banners and logos. We’re looking at having a place at international conferences where there’s a quiet room, a breakout room where you can go to and reset if you’re neurodiverse and it’s too much for you. But the best thing to do really is to sign up, follow us on LinkedIn and sign up on our website, which is 404stressnotfound.org.

And for those MSP owners who are looking at their staff and you were saying earlier about some KPIs and tickets and we’re all caught up in delivery and especially MSPs because it’s a stressful job, but for those MSPs that perhaps in the evenings are reflecting on their team and thinking, Oh, Dave’s not quite being himself for a while, what would you recommend that the best thing to do in that situation is?

That’s a great trigger point. So if we listen and hear to our team members and suddenly they sound a bit different, there could very well be something going on there. In fact, more often than not, there probably is. So we want to speak to those MSP owners who have got members of the team who might be having challenges or they’re not sure how to cope or What can I say? What can’t I say? I don’t want to get my head bitten off, or whatever it might look like. Please reach out, speak to us, follow us on our LinkedIn page, connect with us. We’ve got people, we’ve also put in place a board of directors, and the idea behind that is that the fact that we have multiple people, who can provide information and advice as well.

Yeah, I love that. And just a sort of a final targeted message, I guess is for employees who don’t have the responsibility, but also don’t have the control over the work that they do. So I guess it’s kind of the same message, and it’s going to be very similar answer I guess, Paul, if they’re struggling can you give some reassurance that everything you do is confidential and that it’s a safe place to reach out. But also, if they see that the MSP owner or their manager and the boss they’re working with not being themselves, I guess also that would be a similar thing of reaching out and chatting to you guys to see how you can help them.

Absolutely. So let’s try and sort of put some actions on this for people to listen to and pick up on. The best thing to do is to follow our LinkedIn page and then sign up to our free platform, which is off of the 404stressnotfound.org website. It’s free to join. There’s no costs on that at all. It’s safe, it’s secure by default, has to be. I work in cyber security so we care about that as well. And then our in- person meetups when we’re having these meetings, we operate what we call Chatham House Rules. So that’s basically saying that when people are talking about their experience with their information, it’s sensitive, so we need to respect that. And I also say to when we start the meetings in person as well, ask questions, be curious, but be respectful of what people are saying because sometimes people will want to open up. Sometimes they’re not quite sure and it’s going to take them a little while to do that. That’s all okay. But we’re here to provide a safe and inclusive space in everything that we do, whether it’s online or in person.

I love this. Congratulations on starting on this, Paul, I think you’ve done an excellent thing and I appreciate it’s a group effort and you nudged it into existence and this feels like something that will just grow and grow and spread. And we’ll be talking about this in four years time in 2030, which sounds scary that that’s only four years away. And I think I can see that this will become something that just keeps going and keeps going and becomes something huge. So well done. Well done for setting it up. I know you’ve mentioned it like five times already, but just for those people that tend to skip to the end of things, just tell us again the website, the LinkedIn. Oh, and also, what’s the best way to get in touch? So for someone that wants to help or if they’re a vendor with funds or some kind of funding to help you spread this word, what’s the best way to get in touch with you?

So the best way to get in touch with me is via my LinkedIn profile. My LinkedIn profile is Paul Croker UK off the LinkedIn search bar. You’ll find me, I’ve got a bright pink background. Talk about doing IT differently with a cup of tea and some rock and roll, very easy to find. There’s a LinkedIn page off of that as well. So join up and follow that, but please just make the connection on LinkedIn. Let’s have a chat. Let’s have a discussion. Love everybody to be involved in some form or another. It’s only possible by pulling everyone in the community on board with this or as many people as possible because it’s for the community by the community.

Mentioned links

• This podcast is in conjunction with the MSP Marketing Edge, the world’s leading white label content marketing and growth training subscription.
• Join me in MSP Marketing Facebook group.
• Connect with me on LinkedIn.
• Connect with my guest, Paul Croker, on LinkedIn. And visit his website, 404 Stress Not Found.
• In collabortion with Podcasthon: Connect on LinkedIn and Instagram.
• Got a question about your MSP’s marketing? Let me know.

Welcome to Episode 330 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge.

Why prospects price shop MSPs (& how to end it forever)

Have you ever had a prospect say no to you because they believed your MSP was just too expensive? Lots of MSPs think that prospects default to price shopping because they’re cheap, difficult, or just not serious buyers. And it’s so easy to blame the economy or your competition or how the market is right now. But here’s the uncomfortable truth… prospects usually aren’t born price shoppers… they’re trained. And more often than not, they’re trained by the MSP itself through marketing and sales behaviour that’s well-intentioned, but hits in the totally wrong way.

Let me give you some examples so you can see if you are doing this by accident. I believe the problem of price shopping doesn’t start with the prospect, it starts with the MSP. In fact, it starts with the signals that you send through your marketing and your sales process, often without even realising it. Every interaction either trains a prospect to compare or it trains them to trust. And most MSPs accidentally train comparison, price comparison especially. Let me show you how.

One of the biggest ways that MSPs create price shoppers is by leading with services instead of leading with outcomes.

So when you talk about monitoring, patching, backups, antivirus, response times and tickets and stuff like that, you’re just listing features and that makes you look identical to every other MSP. And when things look identical, you’re just making it too difficult for the prospect to differentiate you from all the other MSPs. So the only logical way to choose is price from their point of view. You’ve taught the prospect that MSPs are interchangeable, bad, bad, bad.

Another big one is quoting too early. MSPs do rush in sometimes to give a price because they want to be helpful or they want to keep momentum or they want to avoid awkward conversations. But when you give a big number before establishing value, context, and fit, you’re effectively saying this decision is mostly about cost. So the prospect does exactly what you’d expect a rational human to do… they shop around. And by the way, that’s not a reason to not have a price estimator on your website. A price estimator that gives them a rough price in seconds is good, but jumping straight from initial conversation to quote, that’s bad. You’ve got to give them a specific quote at the very end of the process when you’ve got to know them and what they’re looking for and their outcomes and whether or not you guys are a good fit.

Then there’s the problem of treating every lead the same. If you have the same proposal template, the same pitch, you’re using the same language, it’s the same packages for everyone. If there’s no sense of personalisation, how can it feel relevant to your prospect? There’s no emotional anchor there. And when there’s no emotional anchor, again, price just floats to the top.

MSPs also train price shoppers by apologising for their pricing. People say phrases like, “Oh, I know we’re not the cheapest…” or, “Oh, we might be a bit more expensive, but…” why would you do that? ” In fact, the moment that you say that, you have framed price as the objection, you’ve invited the prospect to challenge it, which is crazy.

Another subtle one is overexplaining and justifying. When you feel the need to defend your price, line by line, then you kind of signal uncertainty and that encourages comparison.

And then there’s websites. So if your website focuses really heavily on your packages, your plans and your prices, but without anchoring value, outcomes or consequences of not doing what you suggest, then again, you’ve just built a comparison tool and not a trust building asset. You’re helping prospects to shop you by price.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth, price shoppers are rarely the problem, they are the symptom. They are the result of marketing and sales processes that remove differentiation and replace it with comparison. And the fix isn’t any kind of clever pricing tactics or discounting or handling objections better or something like that. The fix is training prospects differently from their very first touchpoint with you. That means anchoring outcomes before costs. It means talking about risk, disruption, peace of mind, predictability, and the value of sleeping well at night. It means actually slowing down sales conversations instead of rushing to get a quote out and in front of them. It means qualifying them more, making sure that the fit is right. A good fit is more important than speed. It means positioning yourself as a guide, as a trusted expert, and not a vendor.

When prospects trust you, they don’t shop you. When they believe that you understand their world, they will never compare you line by line. And when they see you as the safe choice, price becomes secondary. The MSPs who struggle the most with price shoppers are usually the ones trying the hardest to be easy to buy from. And ironically, the MSPs who make buying feel more deliberate, more thoughtful, more slower, more selective. They’re the ones who tend to attract better clients and fewer comparisons.

So if prospects are always asking you for price, always shopping around, always disappearing after proposals, don’t ask what’s wrong with them. Ask, “What have I accidentally trained them to do? ” Because once you change the training, the behaviour changes too.

Why MSPs feel overwhelmed even when things are good

Every MSP, in fact, every business owner walks around with a hassle bucket inside their head. And when that bucket overflows, everything suddenly feels harder than it should. Decisions take longer, small problems feel bigger and even tiny extra demands can tip us over the edge. If you felt that recently, you need to hear what I’ve got to say in the next three minutes.

So let me explain what I mean by the hassle bucket, because once you understand this, it does change how you look at work, stress, and leadership. The hassle bucket is simply a measure of how much hassle you can deal with at any one time. And some people seem to have very, very deep buckets. They can take on enormous amounts of pressure before they start to struggle. Other people have shallower buckets and they reach their limit much faster. And here’s the important thing. You’re not born with a fixed bucket. You can deepen it over time. And equally, it can become more shallow sometimes without you even realising. But whenever that bucket overflows, your ability to cope drops dramatically.

As business owners, especially in the channel, we tend to have deep hassle buckets. We learned that in the first few years of running a business. In fact, the depth of your bucket is often what separates people who can run a business for decades from those who burn out early. But here’s the catch. Even if your bucket is deep, it’s usually about 80% full most of the time. Just think about everything you’re juggling right now. Cashflow… which when it’s not right can be mentally destructive, staff… which is a bit like having extra children who all look to you for answers, winning new business, keeping existing clients happy, solving problems, making big decisions, and carrying responsibility. If a completely sane person looked at that list, they’d run a mile. And yet you and I, we don’t run a mile, we take it on willingly because the positives outweigh the negatives by a massive margin.

We get freedom, flexibility, and personal growth, and the opportunity to build something meaningful, the chance to change your family’s future. All of that makes it worth it. But there are points in the year, often around now actually, as we’re sort of a few months past Christmas, when the hassle bucket gets dangerously close to the top. And I know this. And the reason I wanted to talk about this in this video and on this podcast is because my hassle bucket is right near the brim right now, and it’s completely self-inflicted. Right now, I’ve got too many projects on. I’ve done too much travel. And on top of that, there’s the emotional and the time pressure of accompanying my daughter to a whole load of open days and auditions because she’s working towards going to drama school in September.

So normally I’d say my hassle bucket sits at around about 80% full, and I’ve got to be honest right now, it feels like 95% full. So here’s a simple but powerful question for you… how full is your hassle bucket today? In fact, it might be a question that you might ask yourself every single morning because when the bucket overflows, it’s rarely the big things that cause that overflow, it’s the small extra straw that breaks the camel’s back.

The answer is not to try and stop more stuff coming into the bucket, that’s unrealistic, the real answer is to install a relief tap further down the bucket.

Now, I call this the DOA relief tap, and we usually hear that acronym, DOA, on crime shows, where it means “dead on arrival”. Well, that’s not what we want as business owners. For us, DOA means delegate, outsource, automate. It’s about acknowledging that even though you’re capable, even though you’re very good at what you do, and even though part of you believes that no one can do it as well as you, there are still many things you don’t personally need to do anymore. A great mantra to live by is this… 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.

The business owners who thrive for decades are not the ones who try to carry everything themselves. They’re the ones who constantly look at all of the work in front of them and ask, “Who on my team could do this better, quicker, or easier than me? ” Or they ask, “Who could I outsource this to? ” Or they ask, “How can this be automated?” So maybe now is a good time for you to think about your own DOA relief tap. What does it look like? What are the tasks still sitting on your plate that don’t really need to be there anymore? What could you let go of without the business falling apart? Because the goal here is not just to remove hassle, it’s to simplify your life and protect your thinking space.

And here’s the important second part. If freeing up time means you’re just tempted to cram more work in, you’ve missed the point. The real prize is working more on the business and less in it. Take a proper lunch, go for a walk, switch off occasionally, give your brain the space it needs to think clearly. I do this whenever my hassle bucket isn’t overflowing and every time I do, I make better decisions. Because when your mind isn’t focused on desperately scooping things out of the top of the bucket, it can focus on the questions that really matter like, How do I win more clients? How do I get them to buy more? And how do I get them to choose to spend more? As the business owner, that’s where your brain does its best work.

Clever marketing ideas from outside the channel

Featured guest: Kyle Bailey is the founder of Frontburner Marketing, agency offering Local SEO, SEO, AI SEO, sales enablement, and content strategy for Home Service Businesses like Roofers, Remodelers, HVAC, Plumbers, etc… With over 15 years of experience in marketing, sales leadership, and strategic consulting, Kyle has built a reputation for helping businesses transform their online presence into sustainable growth engines.

Kyle goes by the nickname “The Home Service Hammer”, and he and his team focus on building sound websites, driving qualified traffic, improving conversion rates, and aligning digital strategies with real revenue outcomes. Every campaign is rooted in data, guided by strategy, and executed with accountability.

I recently connected with another marketing expert who really knows his stuff. In fact, the only thing he doesn’t know is the MSP world, but that’s okay because you and I are always looking for new ideas, right? And he’s got a ton of really good ideas that are working for other types of businesses, which we’re going to share with you right now. Oh, just a heads up by the way, in this interview I mention a live event that the author, Chris Voss, was due to be doing in London here in the UK. And about two days after I did this interview, that event was canceled.

I’m Kyle Bailey. I own Frontburnermarketing.net, and we specialise in sales training and online marketing for home service businesses.

And just from that very description, you might think, What are you doing on Paul’s podcast, because what’s that got to do with MSPs? And we are trying an experiment today. You see, for the last six and a half years or so, almost every single guest we’ve had on has either been from within the channel or they know the channel really, really well. Now, Kyle, you do know the channel and I know you’ve worked with MSPs in the past, but primarily these days, your focus is outside of the channel. And as you say, you work with home service businesses like HVAC, which is air conditioning for those of us that are British and plumbers and builders and all that kind of stuff. And I know you’ll tell us about that in a second.

The reason I’ve got you here is because you’ve got great marketing knowledge. And just in the 10 minutes you and I have been talking before this interview, you’ve given me some really cool ideas and I know you’re going to do exactly the same on our interview today. So an expert from outside of the channel giving advice to us here inside the channel, welcome to the show. Just tell us a little bit about your marketing career and what kind of stuff you do now for what kind of businesses.

Yeah. So I’ve been in sales and stuff for a long time before 2010. 2010 is when I started my agency. It was right when Facebook began their business page movement. Everybody thought that Facebook was going to replace Google, which has been said many times, and that didn’t happen, but that’s what launched me into the business. And I was almost immediately serving home service businesses. I grew up in the trades. So I always say I’ve been a lumberjack and a framer, but I’ve actually done everything that touches the house. I’ve installed AC, I’ve done roofing, remodeling, the whole nine yards. So I love the trades. And so I love serving them and helping them out.

Yeah, and you help them with their marketing. So that’s the websites. It’s the same problems that MSPs have, right? Which is a really good presence, credibility, authority, traffic, leads, all of those kind of things.

Right. I deal a lot with folks who have a great IRL, as the kids might say, in real life presence. They do great work, they have great reviews, but then when the customer comes to the website, there’s a letdown because that online presence doesn’t match it. So we primarily are pulling people into the 21st century as far as look and feel the website, the execution of the website, and the content piece is really big because those key points of problem solutions that they offer, that needs to be present on the website early and often. And so that’s what we’re doing most of the time for our folks.

I think it’s interesting, you and I, as I’m going to label us, marketing professionals, you and I know that many of the marketing things that MSPs need are exactly the same marketing ingredients that an HVAC firm would need. And obviously there are some differences because they’re a B2C, they’re a business to consumer business, whereas obviously the vast majority of MSPs are B2B. But yeah, you and I know the basic core ingredients are the same for any business. And it is absolutely about engaging with the right people in the right way and influencing them emotionally to pick you as well as giving their brain the right information it needs to make a decision as well.

Let’s talk about the one thing that I think your world and my world has most in common, which is differentiation. So you work with businesses that are up against quite aggressive businesses. And do you see the same problem that I see that MSPs have, which is it’s very hard for one MSP to differentiate from another?

Yeah. And I would say that MSPs have it a little worse for lots of reasons, mainly because if I’m a business owner, I don’t really know what an MSP does, right? HVAC company fixes my AC. I know that, but that in itself becomes a problem because every HVAC company is saying the same thing. So how do you differentiate? That’s always the thing. How do you make yourself stand out? And I’m actually writing a book that’ll be out here within a couple of weeks and it’s going to be called, What’s Your Story? I don’t have the byline for it yet, but the main title is What’s Your Story, Connecting Your Story to Your Ideal Client’s Story.

One of the podcasts I listened to on your channel was really important because he was talking about how questions that he asked uncovered problems that he didn’t know to ask about. 

I think the most important thing for any business and any sales process is to ask questions.

The worst thing you can do going into any type of sales, whether it’s content or an in-person sales presentation, is to go in thinking that you kind of have a handle on everything, and not being curious. Because it’s when you ask that one more question, Tell me more about that. Have you ever heard of Chris Voss, he talks a lot about, sounds like, seems like, feels like. So the two principles he brought to bear for me that just changed my life, even my personal life, because I use it in everything. So sales training, personal life, everything. Sounds like, seems like, feels like. So it sounds like you’re interested in this differentiation thing and you ask it in a curious way, sometimes with an uplift on the back and then mirroring the last three things, the last three to five words they said.

If you use that and then try to work it in even into your content, open up places for curiosity. Are you curious about this? Do you have more questions about this? Those are great places to have engagements on your website and then you want to measure all that so that you’re getting these points of pain being revealed. Pain revelation would be a good way to say it. And so these customers are volunteering this pain that they have. Now you just reverse engineer that and talk about that in the front. Tired of this, tired of not even knowing what your … Do you know what your cap is on your WIFI? That was one of the episodes we were talking about. Did you know you even had one? Did you know that could be killing your business? Things like that, things that like the kind of hook that says I might not know something that’s hurting me is really powerful. And I would think in MSP, there’s a treasure trove of those.

Oh, absolutely. Now I’m going to pause that for two seconds. We are going to come back to that because I have a follow-up question. I must first of all explain who Chris Voss is. So Chris Voss is the former FBI chief negotiator, Hostage Negotiator. He wrote a book, it’s one of the best books. In fact, I’m pretty sure it’s behind me – Never Split the Difference. There we go. For those not watching on YouTube, I’ve just pulled a book off the shelf. Never Split the Difference by Chris Foss. It’s one of the best books on sales you’ll ever read because it’s not about sales. It’s about how to stop hostages getting killed. And actually, I’m going to see Chris in London, I think in like a month’s time, he’s sold out a stadium to do a talk or to do it like a day, which is crazy. So I’m looking forward to that one. It’s amazing. And for all the MSPs watching this, and listening to this, get that book, Never Split the Difference, Chris Voss.

So back to what you were saying. So you’re saying that one of the routes, because obviously there’s always lots of different ways of doing something, but one of the routes for differentiation that you see works well is where you explore someone’s unknown pains. So the example you gave, and I know the interview you’re talking about of one of our previous podcast episodes, and our guest was talking about that the client was frustrated with their WIFI speeds, and they didn’t know that the WIFI speeds were being capped by whatever it was. And then the MSP became the hero by figuring out there’s a cap in the first place and then removing the cap. And so give us a practical example, Kyle, because MSPs are uncovering those kind of things all the time, how do you know which are the ones which will attract other future clients and which are the ones which just a bit too techy and aren’t relevant?

Yeah. I think a strategy session with somebody outside is a great way. Somebody who understands how to ask questions is really, really powerful because it’s the forest for the trees thing, right? You get so close to your business and what you’re doing every day, you don’t realise the difference between this and this. This is the normal thing. This is the one that’s outstanding that will blow the doors open on your business because people don’t know this one as well. And so getting outside counsel, that’s one of those places where it’s really powerful, but getting some kind of breakdown of what you do every day, probably doing this a couple of times a year, just going, “Okay, what are the most common questions we had in the last year?” I would imagine that even MSP is getting hit by the AI questions. Can I just get AI to run my MSP? Will AI do this? Then you start recycling that into producing new content, new interviews, new whatever you’re putting out there, social media post.

So what you’re doing is you’re taking their story because their pains and fears, like what are the top five fears about engaging with the MSP provider? What are the top five horror stories that you already know about? You know this deal well enough, they probably already popped in your head. And so how do you turn that around into content that’s going to be customer facing? And then that encounters them as they’re walking in metaphorically to your business, because they’re going to check you out online first, especially for MSP, right? So what is that welcome map that meets them? Is it just another generic bank of servers? We were talking about people using the same stock photo. Go out there and look at your top 10 competition and what does it look like? How can you be different and still meet their need? You don’t want to put a stuffed animal on the front of your website to be different, right? But you want to find out a way that you’re throwing a curve ball, everybody else is throwing a fastball. That’s kind of where it comes … That’s baseball metaphor. I don’t know if that works.

Yeah, a baseball metaphor works with everything, I think. But yeah, no, I love that. And I think what I like about this approach is it’s so completely different from what most MSPs do. So I’m sure you have the same experience with the industries you serve. In fact, just at the back end of 2025, I did a thing in my MSP marketing Facebook group where I offered a mini website review and I did about 50 of them in a week. And so it was a real reminder for me, just let’s say 47 of those websites were the same. And these are websites of MSPs all over the world and 47 of them very similar. The same tired headline, the same kind of stock images, the same layout, lacking in customer testimonials. There’s no price calculator, which of course you can get from mspriceguide.com, which is one of my services. The call to action was very rarely there… a live calendar, which is best practice for people to book a 15 minute interview. They all felt the same and all looked the same.

And you’ve just given us one completely different approach there to differentiate the business just at the website level, which is actually look at either what are the core problems they have that are holding them back, or a separate approach is what do they fear moving from one MSP to another? Because we know when someone gets onto your website, they’re already in the research phase and they’re thinking of switching MSPs. That’s why something like an IT services buyer’s guide is such a smart thing to have on your website, which you can again, plug, plug, plug, you can get from the mspmarketingedge.com. You’ve got to do it, haven’t you, Karl, right? But someone would only go on your website if they’re thinking of switching to you. So what if your differentiation was right from the get- go of, are you scared of these things? Because we know that people don’t want to leave their MSP. They’re scared of switching. Inertia loyalty keeps them with an MSP they don’t like. So why don’t you address that upfront? I think that’s a really, really smart idea.

Let’s wrap up what we’re talking about here with a quick fire for you. So I think you and I could talk about differentiation for hours, but I want to just throw in some other random ideas. So you work with all of these home service businesses. Throw out for us right now things that you see, whether that be tactics, strategies, small things, big things, paid or organic, paid or free or whatever, stuff you’re seeing right now that’s working. And let’s see if we can just see if any of those would apply to MSPs and could be an idea that we’d perhaps have never thought of.

Yeah. I can think of one right off the top of my head. Local service pages, you were talking about serving different counties and different areas. People search. So I’m 56 and one of the fascinating things to me that I really love to look at is just data of how people search. And so for me, my generation searches . So I’m looking, I live near Cedar Park, Texas. Cedar Park Plumber, Cedar Park HVAC company/AC repairs, what we call it in Texas, because it’s only hot here, it doesn’t really get cold, so we never talk about heaters. So I’m looking for Cedar Park, but what has happened over the last 15 years evidently is that has shifted. Now it’s . That’s how the majority of homeowners search now. And so number one, understand how your market searches. That’s number one. Do not use industry terms and jargon when you’re thinking about keywords. Don’t build your content based on how you think of it. I call it lead a horse to water content. So your concept, you might have some technical concept that’s really important that the customer call it a ASW-1, because if they don’t, then blah, blah, blah, whatever, I’m making stuff up here. But they might call it a water well, right? And they come in on water well, but you lead them over to the idea, actually what you want to call this is an ASW one.

What people fear about, like in Texas, one of the things is this is a no licensed state. And so roofers are big about being scam artists, unfortunately, because I can come to your house, get a check for $7-8,000, throw a couple of guys on your roof, tear off some shingles, “Hey, we’ll be back tomorrow and never come back.” That’s not uncommon whatsoever. So the first fear, my neighbor, Sam over here got ripped off by a roofer the other day, so the first thing I’m thinking when I call you is, Oh, I don’t want that to happen. So I might have content on my website that says, Here’s how you understand a roofing scam. If they ask you for money upfront blah, blah, blah. So what are your top five fears that you’re facing? That’s number one. The other one is the location piece. So like I was talking about before, Cedar Park, roofers or roofers, Cedar Park, you want to build a page with that. And the mistake people make all the time is they put services as the divider. So my mspwebsite.com, and then when I go to list my services, it’s /services. Well, what most people don’t understand is that’s a keyword. Nobody goes online looking for MSP services and searches services. They’re searching for managed service providers. They’re searching for outsourced IT. What are some other common keywords in that space?

So actually a managed service provider is internal jargon. So IT support is what ordinary people call it as a great example. But yeah, you’re right. They might be searching for cyber security, they might be searching for specific problems. Often it’s a problem-based approach, but yeah, that’s a really good example.

So then IT services, Birmingham, I know I’m probably not pronouncing that right.

No, you’re right.

Well, in Texas, we say Birmingham. We spend a lot more time on the Ham in Texas. But yeah, so you want to have that in the actual URL. So my mspwebsite.com /MSP services or IT services, whatever makes the most sense, /IT services Birmingham. That’s how you want to build that page. And that alone will get you traffic. And guess what? Every single person who looks up IT Services Birmingham is interested in buying IT services in Birmingham. But every person who looks up IT services isn’t necessarily a buyer. But once they attach a location name to it, that’s a buyer. And so now your exposure in front of people ready to buy goes way up. Those pages are way easier to rank because you’re not fighting with every .com out there. You’re only fighting with people that are tagged to that page and most people don’t do it. So it’s an easy win.

That’s such great advice. Thank you so much, Kyle. So just for those MSPs that you mentioned sales training a couple of times that you do, and obviously sales training that you would do would be completely applicable to MSPs. So for those MSPs that want to have a chat with you about that, or just reach out to you and connect with you, what’s the best way to get in touch?

My website frontburnermarketing.net, like a front burner on your stove. Just reach out there. LinkedIn and Facebook, I’m the Kyle Bailey. But you can reach me at any of those places. And look for my book here in a couple of weeks, What’s Your Story?

Members’ update

This podcast has been released on the 10th of March, and that means brand new content for the members of my MSP Marketing Edge membership. On the 10th of every month, we release new content. Today, we just dropped it all into the portal, all of the content for April 2026. What we do is we give our members a 3-step marketing system that they can use to generate leads and all of the content they need to implement that system.

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

So if you fancy some of that for your MSP, just be aware that we do only work with one MSP per area. You can check if your area is locked or available by entering your postcode or your zip code at mspmarketingedge.com/membership.

Mentioned links

• This podcast is in conjunction with the MSP Marketing Edge, the world’s leading white label content marketing and growth training subscription.
• Join me in MSP Marketing Facebook group.
• Connect with me on LinkedIn.
• Connect with my guest, Kyle Bailey, on LinkedIn. And visit his website, Front Burner Marketing.
• Mentioned book: Never Split the Difference, Chris Voss.
• Got a question about your MSP’s marketing? Let me know.

Welcome to Episode 329 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge.

Marketing tasks MSP owners should NEVER touch

You’d be mad to do all of your MSPs marketing yourself, and if that sentence annoys you a little, there’s a good chance that you are exactly the person who needs to hear it. Because most MSP owners are drowning in marketing tasks, telling themselves they’re saving money or keeping control, when in reality they’re burning the one resource they can never replace… their time. Right now, I want to talk about which marketing jobs you absolutely should outsource, which ones you must keep ownership of, and how to focus your limited time on the activities that deliver the biggest return.

So let’s talk about time, because for MSP owners and managers, time is the real bottleneck. You don’t have a lack of ideas, you don’t have a lack of tools, you don’t even have a lack of willingness. What you have is too many things competing for your attention. And marketing is often the thing that’s squeezed into the cracks between the tickets, the meetings, and the client fires.

The goal of marketing isn’t for you to do more, it’s for you to do less of the wrong things and more of the right things.

And here’s the core principle that I want you to adopt. You should outsource anything that someone else could be trained to do well, and you should keep ownership of anything that requires judgement, direction and deep understanding of your business. Most MSPs get this completely backwards. They clinging very tightly to low value tasks and then outsource high level thinking, which is absolute madness, right?

Let’s start with what you should almost always outsource. Anything repetitive. Anything admin heavy. Anything that’s process driven, things like loading social media posts, scheduling blogs, uploading videos, formatting newsletters, whether that’s email or print making, LinkedIn connection requests, cleaning lists, basic CRM updates, repurposing content, chasing webinar registrations, creating transcripts and pulling simple reports. None of those tasks that I was just mentioning require you. They just require instructions. They require an SOP. If someone can be trained to do it once, they can be trained to do it again and again and again.

And every hour you spend doing those things is an hour you are not spending on strategy, leadership, relationships or growth. Now let’s talk about what you absolutely should not outsource. You should never outsource ownership of your marketing direction. You should never outsource deciding who you are targeting, what you stand for, what message you want to be known for or what success looks like. You shouldn’t outsource thinking, you shouldn’t outsource high level decision making, and you definitely should not outsource responsibility. Strategy for your marketing lives with you, direction lives with you, and accountability lives with you. Even if you have a marketing agency, a virtual assistant, a marketing assistant, or even if you have a content team, they should be executing your thinking and not replacing it. Because trust me on this, no one else in the entire world understands your MSP, your clients, your ambition, your risk tolerance, the way that you do.

Many MSPs say, Oh, I haven’t got time for marketing, and what they really mean is, I don’t have time to do admin marketing tasks. But the high ROI marketing doesn’t look like admin, it looks like deciding where you want to focus. It means deciding and choosing the story you want to tell. Reviewing performance and adjusting direction. It means recording short videos, writing rough outlines, approving content, shaping campaigns, all of that stuff is founder level work. I’m a founder. I’m not doing the marketing tasks of editing my podcast or my YouTube videos or putting my blogs onto the website or LinkedIn newsletters. I shape all of that content and I do actually still write it myself because I’m a writer at heart, but I don’t do the little tasks of actually loading it. I have a much better member of my team who does that for me so I don’t have to do it. She does a much better job than I would do as well. And all of this doesn’t take hours a day, you just need a little bit of focus to decide what you’re doing and what you are not doing, and then train other people to do the rest of it for you.

Understand this, the smartest MSP owners design their marketing so that they personally spend the smallest amount of time possible on the activities that create the biggest impact. They think, decide, approve and guide and other people build, load, schedule and repeat. If you try to do everything yourself, marketing becomes a burden. If you outsource everything, marketing loses its soul. So the sweet spot is owning the brain and delegating the hands. I like that phrase.

The MSPs who grow consistently aren’t the ones that are trying to do every marketing task themselves. The ones that grow the fastest of the ones who protect their time, take ownership of the thinking, the direction of the decisions, and they let other people handle the mechanics. And that is not laziness and it’s not losing control. That… is leadership.

Many MSPs use AI badly for marketing

AI is changing the way that MSPs do their marketing forever, but not in the way most people think. This isn’t a story about tools, prompts, or automations, it’s about why the rise of AI might actually make being more human your biggest competitive advantage.

Cast your mind back for a moment to the year 2008. That was the year the first Iron Man film came out, which still feels impossible to me, to put that in context, someone who was born that year is now 17 or 18, which is nuts, right? Anyway, imagine if back then I’d said to you, Hey, in the near future there’s going to be some technology that can write your marketing for you. It can generate images, analyse your marketplace, plan campaigns, basically do almost anything you can think of and it’ll cost you about $20 a month. So you’d have thought I was mad or you’d have been bouncing off the walls with excitement, probably both. And of course, that future is now.

There’s an AI tool for almost anything, isn’t there? Writing, images, research, analysis, videos, strategy, ideas… and yes, of course it’s changed the game, but not in the way that most MSPs think it has. Because here’s what I really believe, the start of the AI revolution is also the start of a new content marketing revolution. For years, content marketing was dominated by the people who could produce the most content the old fashioned way, using humans. You either wrote it yourself or you paid someone else to do it. Output was the advantage. But now anyone, regardless of writing ability, can churn out hundreds of blog posts, emails and social posts today at the push of a button. There was already too much content online back then, and now there’s 10 times more, maybe a hundred times more, maybe a thousand times more. And we are barely at day one of our journey with AI.

So does that mean that content marketing is dead? Oh, no. No way at all. Not even close. But I do think there’s a big shift happening because when information becomes infinite, it stops being valuable. When people are overwhelmed with answers, the brain gives up trying to analyse them all and just hands the decision over to the heart. And the heart doesn’t look for more information, it looks for someone it trusts, someone it likes, someone it believes understands them. In other words, as information becomes commoditised, personality becomes the differentiator.

I think people are going to stop seeking information from content and start seeking wisdom from people.

And that’s the real marketing opportunity for you and your MSP, to put your authentic personality at the centre of everything you do. To be more human at exactly the same time that your competitors are flooding the internet with AI generated slop. Because as long as humans are making buying decisions – and in managed services that is going to be for a long time yet – trust, familiarity and personality will matter more than ever.

And this doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t use AI, I think quite the opposite. AI is an incredible amplifier, it’s a great assistant if you use it in the right way. You can train a GPT on you, your knowledge, your experience, your opinions, your tone, your sense of humour. You can ask AI to repurpose your content in your voice as long as you prompt it, well review it properly and correct it. You can ask AI to interview you in depth to pull ideas and insights out of your head. You can even use AI to generate images and visuals that feature you in different situations.

I like to think of this as the Iron Man approach to marketing. If you imagine Iron Man versus the Terminator, the Terminator is an agent, it has a mission and it executes that mission with no further input. It’s efficient, but soulless. Whereas Iron Man on the other hand, is Tony Stark, a very human personality surrounded by AI tools like Jarvis and Friday that enhance him, support him, and make him more effective without replacing who he actually is. Two very different approaches using AI. And I know exactly which one I would back. It’s the Tony Stark one, the Iron Man one.

The MSPs who win over the next few years won’t be the ones who automate themselves out of authenticity. They’ll be the ones who stay human, stay visible, and use AI to amplify what already makes them distinctive.

It costs MSPs 5 FIGURES to win a new client

Featured guest: Shawn Walsh is the Founder and CEO of Encore Strategic and co-author (with Dave Cava) of The Pumpkin Plan for Managed Service Providers. His signature “Profit. Grow. Exit.®” methodology has helped countless MSPs increase profitability and business value.

Known for his practical, no-nonsense approach to business growth, Shawn brings together his law enforcement leadership background, real-world MSP experience, and passion for teaching to deliver actionable insights that drive results. His upcoming book, Profit. Grow. Exit. (April 2026), continues his mission of helping business owners build valuable, exit-ready businesses.

Have you ever actually sat down and worked out how much it really costs your MSP to win a brand new client? Not what you think it costs, but the true figure once you account for time, effort, marketing, sales, and wasted opportunities. Most MSPs massively underestimate this. And my guest today doesn’t guess at this number. He measures it, he sees it across the channel, and he understands exactly what the average MSP is spending to land a single new customer. And I’m going to warn you now, when you hear the real figure it’s going to change how you think about marketing and growth.

Hi, I am Shawn Walsh and I am the CEO of Encore Strategic.

And thanks so much for being here on the podcast, Shawn. You and I met very briefly at ScaleCon at the back end of last year in New Orleans, and we had literally a five minute conversation. I could barely get to your booth. You were surrounded mobbed by MSPs, which was an amazing thing to see at such a great conference. But it’s great to have you on the podcast now. And we are going to talk today about a subject where you and I agree is so difficult for most MSPs to get their heads round. And that is, how much does it actually cost you to win a brand new client? We’re going to explore that today, and I know you’ve got some advice on figuring that out, and of course, trying to adjust that price as well because it is often a scary figure when MSPs figure it out. Let’s first of all just have a look at you. So tell us about you, Shawn. What do you do with MSPs right now and what’s your kind of background?

Yeah, so what we do is we do peer groups for MSP owners. We also do COO and service manager groups, and then we also do direct consulting and coaching with MSPs to help them increase profitability, grow market share, and prepare for exit.

And how did you get into doing this, and how long have you been doing it for?

So I ran an MSP for many years, and I am the stereotypical, started it up in a spare bedroom in the house, grew to the basement and then out to an office. And we grew it to locations in four states in the US and then we were acquired by a $350 million services company and private equity backed and they bought the company. And I just wasn’t good at being retired. So too much stuff going on in my head. And I have always had a passion for teaching. I’ve taught college, I’ve taught high school. I work as a dive instructor, as a scuba instructor, as a side hustle. So I love teaching and I love sharing knowledge.

That’s really cool. I want to do scuba. That’s one of my semi-retirement plans because like you, I never intend to retire. So yeah. Whereabouts are you based in the states?

I am actually here in Aruba right now where we have an office where we run our peer groups out of Aruba occasionally. And it’s a nice, beautiful ocean here. And so anytime you want to come to Aruba and be a guest speaker, we can take you out and get you scuba shirt.

Amazing, right I’m in… my people will talk to your people, we’ll make that happen. That sounds really cool. So one of the things before we get on to talking about the cost of acquisition, the cost of acquiring a client, I would imagine, and I don’t do coaching, I work closely with MSPs but it’s always very much on practical things of improving their marketing and their websites and putting in place a lead generation system. But often conversations, I notice how much, and I’ve been doing this for just 10 years with MSPs, but 20 years overall, so like you, I’ve probably noticed how much MSPs hold themselves back through overthinking things, through emotional things, through worry, through fear. Do you see that? Because you are working with them on all of their business and obviously you’ve been there and you’ve done that and you’ve come through the other side and had the successful exit. Do you see that a lot? And is that a lot of the work that you do working on the mindset and the emotional stuff?

Absolutely. I mean, we’re taking people who are great engineers, but as many of us who come from the engineering background of things, we can sometimes hyper fixate on some of those details and not often the right ones. And looking at the business more holistically is really one of the things, the key things that we kind of focus on in our coaching and consulting and in our peer groups. Making sure that they’re not just working on one leg of the stool to take an old analogy. We have to work on the business holistically and we have to balance out all the aspects of it. And one of the areas is, as you well know, that MSPs suffer in paying attention to the sales and marketing side. And it’s because it’s the one we struggle with the most.

Technology is black and white. It’s easy. You tell a computer to do something, it does exactly what you tell it to do. Sales is not like that. Sales is very fuzzy and sometimes people aren’t comfortable in that. But really you have to get comfortable being uncomfortable because if you’re going to scale your company, you have got to be able to build a sales and marketing team, except for some very rare exceptions, owner led sales is just not going to get you to that big payday when you want to exit.

Yeah, I completely agree and I completely agree as well that it’s the most difficult thing. It’s so far away from the technical skillset, but that’s why I’ve dedicated what is left of my working career. I say that I’m only 51, but I intend to spend the rest of my working career continuing to make marketing easy for MSPs for exactly that reason, because it’s the big difficult missing piece in most MSPs businesses. They’ve got the operations, the customer service, everything is there except they just don’t know how to win clients. And that leads very nicely into our core subject, which is the cost of acquiring clients. So I know that MSPs, the vast majority of MSPs, haven’t a clue. Not a clue. I suspect that you have exactly the same experience. And when you ask MSPs to estimate how much they think they’ve spent to acquire a client, do you often find that they’re coming in way under what they’ve actually spent?

You know what, they’re not even able to come up with a number.

In most cases, MSPs really don’t think about what they’re spending on trying to get sales.

And one of the biggest things MSPs suffer from is what I refer to as random acts of marketing. They go, they spend a bunch of money on one thing, it doesn’t work. They say, oh, the heck with it. They don’t do it anymore for a while, and then they go do something else again. And we need that consistency on the sales and marketing. I mean, it’s a numbers game and it’s about consistent efforts, and they don’t really do that. And then because of the fact they’re not doing it regularly, they’re not really budgeting for things.

But one of the things that we do is we make them break down a budget, a very detailed budget. So now all of a sudden we’re getting to see, Hey, wait a second, there’s a lot of highs and lows here. We need to smooth this out. And then we start calculating it. And in our peer groups, we do a lot of financial accountability. And we finally decided we really needed to not only track the typical financial numbers that most MSPs track, like your service gross margin, your EBITDA, things like that. But we started tracking how many leads are you getting in, what do those leads cost, how many of those leads go to a first meeting, how many first meetings go to proposal, how many proposals go to close. And what about the salaries of the people who are doing that work. What does that cost you? And whatever marketing you’re doing. And we realised it’s a very significant amount of money. And honestly, I hadn’t really given it much thought since I had sold my company, and I saw an article and it had the data and it said that the average cost of an MSP client was $32,000. Yeah, so now one of my questions is how much do you think it costs you to get a new client? I checked the data and it was solid. I think the range I’m seeing right now is about $28,000 to $32,000 to get a new client in and people have no idea that it’s that high.

And take that client to 28 to 32, what kind of lifetime revenue would you expect from a client like that?

Right, and that’s one of the other things we’re calculating now is what’s the lifetime value of a client? And it’s typically three to five years. In some cases, if you’re really good, you might get longer, but that’s the average. Three to five is what you’re going to get. So that’s a pretty heavy cost and especially if you want to be bringing on about two new clients a month, which is what most MSPs are shooting for. So that’s $64,000 a month in client acquisition costs, that’s a salary every month. So you better make sure you’re doing it correctly and you better make sure, just like all the other numbers, we spend so much time monitoring service metrics, and let’s bring down our average time per endpoint. Hey, our average time per endpoint went from 40 minutes to 32 minutes. Yay. But nobody’s going, Hey, we got our client acquisition costs down from $32,000 a client down to $24,000. Yay. So we really need to be monitoring that.

And the thing that I am seeing is that as we’re monitoring this with our coaching clients and our peer groups now, people are taking it a lot more seriously than they did before. Before it was kind of like, oh, sales, that’s not me. I’m going to push that aside. Now they’re like, Hey, wait a second. This is costing me real money and I want to grow my company, so let’s pay attention to this. So that’s a good thing. Obviously people paying more attention to where their money’s going and their efforts, that’s good stuff, but you need to dial that in. One of the things that we did with some of our groups recently is we had everybody read Alex Hormozi’s book, $100M Leads. And I really like that book because he does a great job of breaking this whole concept of client acquisition costs and lifetime value down to some very, very simple metrics. And he breaks the whole process of acquiring leads down into some very simple terms that even non-sales professionals are able to completely understand and embrace. And we had a really good response with the groups on that, and I think we’re already starting to see the benefits of people paying attention to those numbers.

That makes perfect sense. And if you loved that book, then you have to read his newish book, which came out at the back end of last year, it was September or October last year, $100M Money Models, which in my opinion, is the best of the three books he’s written. There’s $100M Leads, $100M Offers, and the money models one is almost about how to make more money out of the clients you get. So it doesn’t solve the problem, well, he’s already solved the problems of how to acquire the clients and how to put the offers together, but the money models book just absolutely blew my mind. And I think he or whoever’s doing his writing with him has matured enough that they’re able to explain very complicated concepts so so simply, they’re great books and everything Alex Hormozi does on YouTube and everything written is absolutely worth looking at.

I was just going to say, I had to laugh when I was first introduced to his stuff and I thought, who’s this gym rat that I’m going to listen to? But check his background, he actually really does have the business chops to back up what he is saying. But you hit it right on the head. I mean, he does a very good job of taking very complex stuff and really boiling it down to its essence.

We had Nate Freedman on the podcast, I forget when it was a few months ago, of Tech Pro Marketing and MSP Sites, and he’s part of Alex Hormozi’s programme, and I can’t remember how much he spent to be part of it, but it was a huge amount of money. And in fact I sat with Nate at ScaleCon, which is where you and I first met last year, and he said, well, he was going to do it again because it puts so much value within his business. So yeah, there we go. That’s the big takeaway from this is Alex Hormozi, I think we talk about him every three weeks on the podcast.

Shawn, let’s wrap this up. So clients acquisition cost of up to $32,000… terrifying. Lifetime value, you’re only going to keep them for 3 to 5 years on average… terrifying. And if you were to look at that and you were a new MSP in the marketplace, you’d almost throw your hands up and say, Oh, what’s the point, I’m on a loser to get started. So what kind of advice now are you giving to the MSPs that you’re working with on either reducing down that client acquisition cost or mitigating the cost by extending the client and making sure and guaranteeing that they stay 7 to 10 years rather than that 3 to 5 years?

Well, two things. Number one, read Alex’s books upfront. Don’t wait for the last thing that you do in your company is to build a sales team like I did. You want to be consistent. You don’t have to go out and do grandiose things in your marketing and your sales, you just have to do a few things consistently. You’re going to get much better results. You’re going to drive down that client acquisition cost and monitor the cost because what gets monitored gets managed. So we want to do that.

The other thing, my self-serving plug here, go out and get my book, The Pumpkin Plan for Managed Service Providers, and use those lessons to make sure that you maximise the value and profit you get from your MSP clients so that you’re not spending a lot of money to get what we like to refer to as a cheap pain-in-the-ass client. And you actually get the client that you’re going to make money with and the one that’s going to stick with you and is going to be aligned with your core values and value what you do.

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. So thank you. So that book, again, The Pumpkin Plan for Managed Service Providers, and in terms of your peer groups and everything else, if we want to hang out with you and Aruba, maybe do some scuba diving on the side, how do we find out about those peer groups and get in touch with you?

Absolutely, shawn@encorestrategic.io. You can also find me on LinkedIn. I am very active on there and on there regularly, so feel free to reach out to me on social media anytime.

Mentioned links

• This podcast is in conjunction with the MSP Marketing Edge, the world’s leading white label content marketing and growth training subscription.
• Join me in MSP Marketing Facebook group.
• Connect with me on LinkedIn.
• Connect with my guest, Shawn Walsh, on LinkedIn. And visit his website, Encore Strategic.
• Mentioned books: $100M Leads, $100M Offers, $100M Money Models all by Alex Hormozi.
• Got a question about your MSP’s marketing? Let me know.

Welcome to Episode 328 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge.

The most common MSP marketing mistake

There’s a basic marketing mistake that the vast majority of MSPs make. In fact, once you know what it is, you’re going to see it everywhere. It’s going to drive you crazy, you’ll see it on your website, on your LinkedIn, on your other marketing channels. But the good news is I can help you to spot it and fix it in the next five minutes.

We are diving into one of the most fundamental principles in all of marketing. People do not buy features, they buy benefits. Now, every MSP has heard this, but very few actually live it in their marketing. And the reason this matters so much is because features and benefits land completely differently in our brains.

A feature is normally processed logically, it engages the analytical part of the mind that loves detail but really doesn’t like to make decisions. Whereas a benefit is processed emotionally and hits the part of our heart and also the brain that drives action, that imagines outcomes, that feels relief, confidence and safety. And here’s the uncomfortable truth…

All buying decisions made by ordinary business owners and managers start emotionally. People only use logic afterwards to justify what they already wanted.

So features live in the logical world. Benefits live in the emotional world. When you talk about features, you are speaking to the wrong part of the brain… you’re speaking to the part of the brain that doesn’t buy. But when you talk about benefits, you’re speaking directly to the part of the brain that says yes. And this is why when MSPs proudly list their features – 24/7 monitoring, remote support, patching, ticket automation, all of that stuff – prospects kind of nod politely, but they’re kind of glazing over and they feel nothing. It’s like listing ingredients instead of actually showing the finished meal, it’s like describing the different parts of the engine rather than describing the feeling of driving the car.

So benefits create pictures in people’s minds and they let the prospect imagine what life will be like when they’re working with you. And you do know that imagination is one of the strongest decision-making tools that humans possess, right? Let’s make this real. When you say “24/7 monitoring”, that’s just a mechanism, it doesn’t actually mean anything to a normal business owner. But if you say to them, Hey, we spot problems early which means fewer business disruptions, then suddenly that becomes something tangible that they can feel.

They can imagine a calmer working day, systems just running and fewer surprises, and that is a benefit. When you say “remote support”, again, that’s just a mechanism. But if you say, Hey, we can fix issues really quickly without downtime and you don’t even need to wait for us to arrive, that becomes a benefit because that sends a message of speed and convenience and continuity. When you say “regular patching and updates”, they’re yawning because you’re naming a process. But if you say, Hey, look, so your security stays strong with zero effort from your team, you guys don’t have to do anything, that’s a benefit and it speaks of safety and ease and peace of mind.

So features describe what something is, whereas benefits describe what something does. That’s the big difference between the two. Features force the prospect to translate what you’ve said in their brain into some kind of emotional meaning, whereas benefits you’ve already done the translation for them. Awesome, right? And that makes all the difference because prospects are not thinking, Oh yes, how does patching work? They don’t think that at all. They’re thinking, Oh, what does this mean? Am I going to get hacked? Are my staff going to be able to just work? Is this going to be a smart financial decision? Will this decision make me look good or will it make me look stupid? Will things just run smoothly? That’s all the stuff they’re thinking, but with benefits, we’re speaking to their emotional outcomes, the things that matter to them.

So here’s the psychological shortcut for this. Features require effort, benefits create clarity. Features are cold, benefits are warm. Features are about you, benefits are about them, and as we know, we are more influenced by what something means to us than by what we think about it. So to help you do this automatically, here’s a simple formula that I want you to burn into your brain. In fact, you can have it tattooed on your hand. Please don’t do that…don’t write in if you do that. Whenever you hear yourself say a feature, just add the words, which means that, So I call this the “which means that” formula obviously, and it forces your brain to move from mechanism to meaning.

• Remote support, which means that issues get fixed quickly without downtime.
• Patching and updates, which means that your security stays tight without your team having to do anything.
• Backups and disaster recovery, which means that even if the worst happens, your business keeps running. MFA, which means that stolen passwords no longer equal compromised accounts.
• Proactive maintenance, which means that things stop breaking all the time and your staff stop moaning about IT.

This beautifully simple phrase, which means that, it turns every feature in your MSP into a compelling benefit that actually influences buying decisions. And the more you practice it, the more natural it becomes.

Is your MSP’s expertise hiding in plain sight?

Are you seen as the true expert by your MSP’s leads and prospects? Or do you secretly worry that from the outside you look just like every other IT company in your town? The thing about perceived expertise is that it isn’t random and it isn’t about who’s the best engineer. It’s something you can build deliberately with a few simple habits. Right now, I’m going to give you a whole stack of practical ways to dramatically increase the authority you project every time someone encounters your business.

Let’s talk about perceived expertise, because in marketing, it is absolutely everything. Prospects very rarely choose the most technically competent MSP. They choose the MSP that feels safest. The one who sounds like they know what they’re talking about, who shows up consistently with ideas and insights and clarity.

Expertise in the mind of the buyer is 90% perception and only 10% reality, and that’s wonderful news for you because it means that you can turn the dial up as much as you want.

Now in a Facebook post that I shared recently in my MSP marketing Facebook group, I shared seven ways that MSPs can grow their perceived expertise, and I want to expand on each of these and then stack a load more on top.

The first was publishing a weekly blog or video and then emailing that to your email list. Weekly is key for this, by the way, because it creates a reliable rhythm. Your prospects start to kind of expect to hear from you, and they build a habit around hearing from you. And the more often you show up with helpful insights, the more they’ll file you mentally under trustworthy expert who knows my world.

Next is posting daily on LinkedIn and doing a weekly LinkedIn newsletter. This isn’t about chasing likes, it’s about being present. When your name pops up in someone’s feed, often every day, maybe in a non-salesy helpful way, you just become familiar to them and familiarity is a huge psychological lever. People trust what becomes familiar.

Third, speak at local business events. Even tiny local events give you a huge authority boost because when you stand on a stage or even just at the front of a room with a microphone or even no microphone, you are instantly perceived as the person who knows what they’re talking about. In fact, this is borrowed authority from the room itself.

Fourth is writing an IT services buyer’s guide. Books, guides, frameworks, white papers… call them what you like, these things elevate you into the position of educator and advisor. And people love buying from someone who literally wrote the guide on how to choose an MSP because it feels safer to do that.

Fifth publishing case studies. Now, these aren’t optional. Case studies are the most important form of social proof. They tell stories, they let prospects imagine themselves getting the same outcomes, so that makes you real.

Sixth, create checklists and create cheat sheets. These tiny assets are incredibly powerful because they signal that you have systems, structure and repeatability.

And seventh, build a knowledge hub on your website. A single destination full of blogs, videos, guides, reports, checklists, FAQs, all of the stuff that we’ve just been talking about. And when prospects land on that page, they instantly think, wow, these people really know their stuff. And no, they’re not going to read it all and they don’t have to read it all, it’s the impact and the perceived expertise that’s most important from a knowledge base like that or a knowledge hub.

Now, let’s expand on this list because perceived expertise is a momentum game. The more you add, the stronger your authority becomes. So host regular webinars, they don’t need to be complicated or perfect, even a simple 20 or 30 minute session once a month positions you as the person who teaches, not the person who chases.

In fact, let’s take that a step further, run lunch and learns. They’re informal, low pressure and brilliant for demonstrating your personality as well as your knowledge.

You could interview other experts. They could be software vendors, accountants/CPAs, cyber professionals, business coaches, could be local marketing people. When you sit opposite another expert and you ask them good questions, you actually inherit some of their credibility. So you could do this on videos for LinkedIn or for your YouTube channel. You could even start a limited edition podcast. Why not?

Next, what about creating some templated tools that your prospects can download. These could be password policies, device checklists, incident response steps, onboarding templates. Tools equals structure, and structure equals competence, and competence of course equals trust.

The other thing you could do is publish your own research or surveys. Even if you only survey your own clients or just some local businesses, the fact that you are presenting data makes you look analytical and authoritative.

Get quoted in local media about cyber security or phishing trends. Journalists love experts who can give simple soundbites and being quoted just once makes you look like the go-to voice in your area.

You could start a podcast and it doesn’t need to be big or go on forever. You don’t need to do it all the time and every week like I have, I’m currently on episode 328, which is a lot of work, but just the act of having a podcast and showing up weekly, even if you did it for just like 10 weeks as a limited edition. Showing up weekly with ideas, that sends a signal that you take communication and leadership seriously. So you could just do that as a limited edition run to put it on your website and think of the podcast as a positioning tool rather than a way of actually reaching people. People are impressed if you are an MSP who’s done a 10 week podcast series, and that works especially well by the way, if you’re in a vertical.

Now, if you do do a podcast or any of this stuff, why not share some behind the scenes processes. When people see that you have documented workflows, that you have onboarding systems, that you’ve got ticket triage, logic, security frameworks, all of that stuff, and you show them you creating that in your team using that stuff, it reassures them that your business is disciplined and predictable.

Now, here’s one that may not be quite for you. How about you surprise people by publishing strong opinions, not controversial stuff, just very firm confident statements. Something simple like, “Every business should have MFA, no exceptions.” Or you could even take that further if your personality fits with that and say, “Any business leader who doesn’t use MFA is unnecessarily putting themselves at risk or putting their staff at risk.” You could even maybe say, this is risky, but you could say, “Any business leader that doesn’t use MFA is an idiot.” As I say, that’s got to fit with your personality. Personally, I wouldn’t call my audience an idiot, but if you wanted to go that far, go that far, and you’re going to get some extreme reactions to that. But people are going to love you or hate you, and that’s a good thing. People love experts with clear positions and clear opinions.

And my final idea for you is just to be consistent. Nothing builds expertise more than just showing up again and again and again, with value. Authority is cumulative. The more you teach, the more expert you seem and the more visible you are, the more trusted you become.

How much is your MSP REALLY worth?

Featured guest: Earl Foote has led Nexus IT with a clear purpose for nearly three decades – building a company where people and partnerships grow stronger together.

What began as a small start-up has become one of the nation’s fastest-growing MSP/MSSPs, recognised by Inc. 5000, CRN, and Utah Fast 50 for its innovation and Integrity.

Earl’s leadership combines operational discipline with a deep commitment to trust, collaboration, and shared success – values that define how Nexus works with both its team and its partners. 

If you’ve ever wondered what your MSP would actually be worth if you decided to sell it, you’re about to get a very clear answer. My special guest today doesn’t just talk about valuations, he buys MSPs for a living. He’s in the market every day analysing real deals, real financials and real operational structures. And he’s going to explain exactly how MSP valuations work, what buyers really look for, and what makes your number go up or down.

Hey everybody, Earl Foote here. I am founder, CEO of Nexus IT.

It’s so cool to have you on the podcast because you and I met for the first time at the backend of last year at ScaleCon. I was actually moderating a panel that you were on, and it was about M&A (mergers and acquisitions) and very much the subject of today’s conversation, which is how much is my MSP worth? And it was so cool to meet you there. And then we bumped into each other at MSP Global, which was in Barcelona a month later. It’s so cool to actually get you on the show, Earl, thank you so much.

And that is the topic that we’re talking about is how much is my MSP worth? And one of the things that struck me about that panel was that you have some very, very clear opinions backed up with evidence of what an MSP is worth and what affects that valuation. And I’m sure it’s the number one question that you get, it’s certainly a question that comes up for me as well. So before we dive into that, let’s just have a little bit about your background. So tell us how you got into this and how you started acquiring MSPs in the first place.

Yeah, so I’m 27 years into my journey of building my MSP Paul. It’s been nearly three decades, quite some time. I started acquiring about 13 years ago. We’ve acquired today eight MSPs that we fully integrated into Nexus IT at this point. We’re one of the very few founder led, founder owned M&A platforms in the United States. In other words, we’re not PE owned, we’re not family office owned, we’re an independent organisation. And the reality is, the first three transactions that came our way were opportunistic. They were local MSPs that either wanted to get out of the business or were moving out of state, and they wanted a good safe landing spot for their people and their clients. And so it wasn’t something I was really planning at the time, just opportunities came to me and we were able to structure deals with those organisations. After we did a few of them, we made it part of the strategy. We were like, okay, this is something we know how to do, we can do it. It’s a way that we can accelerate our growth and create better value for everybody that’s part of this process. The clients, the people, the founder owners. So here we are now having raised a significant quantity of capital, kind of like a mini fund for us to execute and buy three to six MSPs per year right now. That’s kind of the game plan.

But it’s quite a jump to go from buying two or three local competitors to actually raising a ton of cash, which I’m guessing there’s an element of risk, of personal risk and I guess business risk in that as well. And to go on such a very fast and almost aggressive, if you don’t mind me using that word, aggressive acquisition journey. What was the thing that made you say, screw it, I’m going to do it.

Yeah, you’re entirely accurate, Paul. There is definitely risk to this. I have big dreams, big vision, and I believe in myself, I believe in our team, I believe in what we’re building and the value that it brings to our people and to our clients. And I wasn’t really happy or content to have a run of the mill MSP, and I don’t say that in a derogatory manner, but an average MSP of 3 million a year in revenue or 5 million a year in revenue and growing at 10% per year, which is a pretty standard MSP. In fact, a lot of MSPs don’t break a million a year or 2 million a year. I’m more ambitious than that and that’s kind of boring to me. So you’re right, I put a lot on the line here for what we’re doing. I could have taken liquidity events prior or exits prior and hedged my future with that, but I’m looking to build a brighter future for myself and for everybody else involved. Today, including myself, there are 10 total shareholders in the organisation, and of course, beyond creating a world-class experience for our people and our clients, we are focused on creating significant financial outcomes for the shareholders.

Yeah, absolutely. So it’s everyone wins kind of scenario, and I guess if you haven’t got that private equity or that family office, so if there isn’t someone else’s money sat there, then you don’t have the pressures towards that group as well, which makes perfect sense. So there’s a small diversion I want to take in terms of subject before we get onto the main subject. So the main subject is how much is my MSP worth? And that’s coming up in a second. The small diversion I want to take is, let’s say there’s an MSP listening to this podcast or watching this on YouTube and they’re thinking, I’d like to buy a local competitor or I’d like to buy another MSP. And actually I’m sure you have that conversation all the time, because I have that conversation all the time, and mostly those people never actually take action on it for whatever reason. But for someone in that scenario that’s just having that thought, what would you say is a good first step to start to explore it, see if it’s the right thing for them?

Yeah, I think most definitely find advisors or consultants that can really educate you about the process and what’s involved and the things that are going to happen in the business or can happen.

You really do have to be prepared for M&A. It’s not something that you can just do as a random act without preparing and making sure that your business is in a place where you can do this.

So it’s not easy to take your focus off of the day-to-day operations of the business to go look for other MSPs to buy, to work through the process of buying them and then integrating them. And so from the time you start looking for an MSP to the time you contract an MSP to buy it or actually execute the purchase, it’s easily oftentimes 6 to 12 months and then you’re going to take 6 to 12 months for integration as well.

And so you and your team need to be able to take focus off of day-to-day operations. You need to make sure you have the bandwidth, the cycles, you have the team, you have the expertise. Granted, you’re going to learn through the process, but having advisors around you that can really help educate you about the process and how to get your business ready for this is very important because it’s not too uncommon for founders to think that they’re ready to acquire another business to do so and to really cause some significant problems in their business and the business they’re requiring because they’re not ready for it.

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. And I would imagine the first acquisition is the hardest one because it is a complete distraction, especially if you’re buying people as well. We all read about the culture clashes. In fact, you read a very, very big mergers, don’t you, of companies where they can never quite get the two cultures and they end up splitting that out.

Okay, let’s get back onto the main subject then. What are the things that affect the valuation of an MSP? So I’m a business owner, you’re a business owner, to be fair you are much more highly educated in what a business is worth than I am, but we all have an idea of what our business is worth. And I sold my first business back in 2016, and luckily the broker that I picked is very respectable and expensive broker here in the UK, and the first thing they did was downplay my expectations. They said, this is your revenue, this is your profit, your business is worth X. Other brokers who want a bigger fee upfront and less of a fee at the backend will tell you it’s worth this much higher so that you sign up with them. So that was really, and I’m led to believe that’s quite a unique thing that actually brokers are really bad at overvaluing businesses. So when you are looking at an MSP or advising an MSP on what it’s worth and what money they might make, what are the factors that you typically look at?

There’s a lot involved in this really, Paul, and it really does depend on the acquirer, the buyer. So you might have financial buyers, for example, like a PE firm or a family office. You might have a strategic play for example, and they’re going to look at these things a little bit different. And then you’ve got buyers like us, founder owned, founder led, M&A platform. So really we kind of acquire as a strategic buyer.

From a financial buyer standpoint, certainly they’re going to look at your revenue and your EBITDA. They want to look at your growth in recent years. They want to look at things like the quality of the client book, the quality of the talent within your organisation, how long are your contracts, how much of your revenue is recurring revenue versus one-time revenue non-recurring? How profitable are your gross margins across your products and services? And then how that gross margin translates into EBITDA, and are you achieving a world-class EBITDA or a higher end EBITDA?

On the lower side, a buyer probably isn’t really going to entertain a business until they’re about 15% EBITDA, certainly want to look for world-class, more of a 20 to 25. And those that really are excelling are 30% EBITDA in the MSP space, that’s not easy to get to, some I’ve seen as high as 35%. If they really figure out how to fine tune their operations and deliver very specialised models, 30 to 35% sometimes is achievable. Your top line revenue and your EBITDA do play a huge role. A strategic buyer like myself, we do want to look at things like what industries are you serving? Are you specialised? For example, we focus in healthcare and financial services. We want to look at do you have good cyber and compliance capabilities within the organisation and good talent on that front. What’s your client retention rate? Are you retaining 95% of your clients and your existing revenue every year or are you retaining 60%? Because if you’re retaining 60%, that’s a big problem. Are you retaining your talent? That’s another thing for us as strategic buyers. We’re going to look at leadership philosophical ideas around how you manage and what your culture looks like because we want to bring the two organisations together into one team, and we need to make sure that we can mesh those. A financial buyer may not be quite as concerned about that sometimes. So in terms of what the valuation really comes to, it does depend on that top line revenue and on that EBITDA, and then those other kind of considerations can influence, particularly like if you’re growing. Average growth rate of an MSP in United States is about 10%, so if you’re growing at 40%, 50% per year or higher than that, it can help boost your valuation up a bit. An MSP that’s somewhere in the range of 300,000 to maybe 750,000 in EBITDA, depending upon how they’re strategically positioned and the quality of the operations, the quality of the team, the client book, the revenue, it’s probably worth something around two to maybe on the high side, five x EBITDA. Once you’re reaching around a million to 2 million in EBITDA, a million a year EBITDA business on the low sides, probably very lowest, 3 x, but often worth 5 to 6 sometimes even 7 if they’re very well positioned and they’ve got a really good thriving business. A 2 million EBITDA business is going to trade for something more like 4 to 10 x, 10 x on the really high side if they’re really well positioned and have a great operation. And then the multiples start to go up, 5 million, 5 to 10 million, you could be talking about an organisation that’s worth something like 8 to 12 x EBITDA we’re seeing, for example, in recent transactions, and by the way, I’m talking in terms of United States market transactions that are happening here. I don’t pretend to know what the transactions look like in the UK or Australia or places like that, but I expect that they’re similar. Once you start getting to a business that’s something like 10 to 12 million EBITDA or some of those that have traded recently that are more like 15 to 18 million in EBITDA, that business can be worth 12 up to maybe about 18 x. We have in recent years, seen a few trade that were very hyper specialised. We’ve seen a few trade in the 20 to 22 X that were around 20 million in EBITDA. So there’s a wide range here, Paul.

Absolutely. And let me just jump in. There’s so much value there and so many figures there, I was getting a bit lost in like, wow, so much valuation. So that’s the beauty of a podcast and a transcription on our website is if you were listening to Earl there and thinking, I just got lost, you can just go back and look in the transcriptions, look at what your EBITDA is and plug into Earl’s suggestion there. And Earl, I lost track. Did you explain what EBITDA is?

I didn’t – earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation. So it’s essentially kind of a net profit number. So your accountant or if you have a CFO or a controller within your organisation, they should know how to calculate that for you. And yeah, it’s not your net profit, but it’s usually a little bit more than that because you’re adding back in any interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation in that.

The M&A world loves jargon, doesn’t it? Loves its acronyms. I mean, we thought the MSP world was full of acronyms and jargon, but the M&A world is a whole new step up. And EBITDA is what you learn on hour one of day one. That’s really helpful, Earl, and let’s just sort of bring this back for the average listener to this podcast or people who watch my videos who are typically somewhere between thinking of starting up and around about that 2, 3 million mark. Obviously we have all sorts of different people that consume our content, but that’s typically who we are looking at.

So for those people, and obviously you’ve given loads of ideas of where to start, as you said, the most important thing is top line revenue and bottom line, what’s at the top of the sheet and what’s at the bottom of the sheet. That’s going to have the biggest impact. So if you were an MSP and you were thinking, right, I do want out. I’ve had my time, or I’ve built it up, or I’m ill or a partner’s ill or one of the many reasons that people sell their businesses, how far out would you recommend starting to think about that and what would you recommend as an action plan to actually start getting that business into shape to start having conversations with people like yourself or the other buyers out there?

I would say start preparing three to five years before your planned exit because there’s a lot you want to do to be able to position your business so that it’s very marketable when you take it to market to sell it. To start, I would make sure either you build a leadership team that has been through this before, maybe it’s not in managed services, but in something similar tech enabled services of some type or some sort of tech services. And put together a game plan. Study what really influences the EBITDA multiple in your type or category of MSP or MSSP, and then strategically work on building your business towards those valuation triggers that optimise your exit. Some of those things might be things like industry focus. Focus on a specific industry vertical where you can really solve specific problems.

Focus on growing, organic growth rate, focus on client retention, focus on your operational metrics, focus on employee retention and not just client retention, but client satisfaction. NPS scores, focus on getting your gross margins into a really good place. Say, well, performing MSPs are usually going to have gross margins on their managed services of around 45 to maybe on the high end, 55% if you’re talking about cyber services, 50 to maybe 60 or 65% in cyber and compliance services. Those are pretty common call investing class gross margins there on the types of services that we all sell. And so if you’re not there, which is really common in a build stage MSP, you might be more like 25, 30, 35% gross margins, and you’re going to want to move your business towards delivering more effectively financially for your clients while not sacrificing the service. So the real thing is either find advisors or build a team that knows what you’re doing and then have a specific game plan and execute that game plan so that you can optimise the valuation of your business when it’s time to sell.

Yeah. Okay. Earl, we could talk about this for hours and in fact, having sat on stage with you, I know you could definitely talk about this for hours and you give so much value with every answer, so thank you for that. Let’s get you back on the show, it’s going to be next year, it sounds crazy at this stage of 2026 to be talking about 2027, but let’s get you back on the show in the future and we’ll explore this in more detail. For now, just tell us very briefly what exactly is Nexus IT looking for? So for MSPs listening to this or watching who are thinking, it might be worth me having a conversation with this guy. Give us an idea of what kind of MSP looks good for you and what’s the best way to get in touch with you?

Best way to get in touch, just hit me up on LinkedIn or Instagram, Earl Foote or Bass Slappin’ CEO. You can look me up by that too. Let’s see. What was the second part of that question? I totally just drew blank.

What kind of MSP are you looking for? What’s the ideal acquisition for you? Who do you want to talk to?

We’re usually looking for an MSP that’s somewhere in the range of 2 to about 8 million in revenue right now. Usually 1 million to maybe three or 4 million in EBITDA. We are looking for those that are strategically positioned in cyber and compliance, generally working in regulated industry like we do, like healthcare and finance, and certainly that have built a well-respected, well operating organisation. That’s the profile of what we’re looking for throughout the United States right now, we don’t have plans to try to go global in any way whatsoever, but throughout the United States, we’re looking for awesome MSPs and founders that either want to join and build with us, or they’re looking to transition their organisation onto somebody else and want to find a good home for their clients and their people. Once again, I am Earl Foote. Find me on LinkedIn or Instagram or Bass Slappin’ CEO.

Mentioned links

• This podcast is in conjunction with the MSP Marketing Edge, the world’s leading white label content marketing and growth training subscription.
• Join me in MSP Marketing Facebook group.
• Connect with me on LinkedIn.
• Connect with my guest, Earl Foote, on LinkedIn, and visit his Nexus IT website.
• Got a question about your MSP’s marketing? Let me know.

Welcome to Episode 327 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge.

No vertical for your MSP? That’s a mistake

One of the smartest marketing decisions you can make for your MSP, is choosing to break into a new vertical. Because marketing to a vertical is easier, more effective, and ultimately more profitable. A lot more profitable. And a lot of MSPs want this, but they don’t know where to get started. So let’s talk right now about how to enter any vertical you like and get traction quickly and easily.

Choosing to work in a vertical is like switching from a megaphone over to a sniper rifle. Most MSPs marketing sends a pretty generic message, something like, We help businesses of all sizes, any kind of business, with their IT, which is very lovely and friendly but also utterly forgettable. Vertical focus marketing says, We help dental practices eliminate downtime, secure patient records, and keep imaging systems running smoothly, and suddenly with a message like that you are relevant, you are specific, and you sound like someone who understands that exact person that you are talking to. The thing is that humans, we respond to familiarity. Prospects respond to relevance. Marketing responds to focus.

When you pick a vertical, your story becomes sharper, your audience becomes easier to find, your content becomes dramatically better, your conversion rates jump, and you instantly differentiate from every generalist MSP around you.

This is especially true in professions like accountants, lawyers, dentists (like I was just saying), medical clinics and manufacturers. These groups all share similar software compliance concerns, workflows, frustrations, and even buying psychology. This is marketing heaven, but how do you actually break into one? Let’s get into the practical stuff. There are three phases to entering a vertical. First, understand the vertical. Next, build the assets and the messaging. And then thirdly, build the audience.

So let’s do phase one, understanding the vertical. This is kind of like the homework phase and it’s also where most MSPs skip straight ahead to the marketing and you kind of miss out on all the prep work. So please do do this bit. To break into a new vertical, you must first understand the software that they use, the regulations that they’re bound by and maybe even that they fear, and the workflows that frustrate them. You’ve got to understand the downtime disasters that could ruin their day, the KPIs that they care about, the conferences they attend, the associations that they belong to, the influencers they listen to and the language they use. If you talk their language, even just 70% of it, you instantly feel to them like your one of them. And no, you don’t need decades of experience in their vertical. You just need curiosity, a bit of research, a handful of conversations, and the ability to turn what you’ve learned, your insight, into content for them and to adapt your conversations to take all of it into account.

Once you understand their world, you are ready for phase two, which is building up your assets and your messaging. And the question I always get from MSPs on this is, Paul, should I have a page on my website or should I have a whole separate website? Well, my recommendation for this is to start simple. So yes, you begin with a single vertical specific page on your main website. Don’t go building 17 new websites before you even know whether or not the vertical is going to respond to you. So your vertical page on your existing site should include a really clear headline which says something simple like, IT support for dentists in or in , but make sure you reflect the pains they feel, the outcomes they want, the software that you support, and you can name it specifically if there’s like three or four big software pieces, packages that they use, they name the two or three of them that you know can work with.

There should also be some case studies if you have them, or if you don’t have them perhaps some testimonials from other clients. Ideally it should be clients within that vertical. That’s something just to kind of go back and fill in when you start working with somebody in that sector. And then what you can do, regardless of whether you yet got vertical clients or not, is a short video of you talking directly to that vertical, and of course a very strong call to action. The call to action that works best right now is for them to book a 15 minute call with you in your live calendar. So this page becomes your home base. A separate website is the next thing that you do, but you only do that when the vertical responds, when you’re getting some traction, when you’ve got at least a couple of clients in it, because a separate website will give you the illusion of exclusivity, but of course it’s a ton of work and you don’t want to waste months and months when you could be dipping your toe into the water and seeing if that vertical is interested in what you have to offer.

Now, when you are starting out, should you have a separate LinkedIn profile? Well, probably yes. I mean, I know that LinkedIn hates duplicate profiles and it’s hard to build up a whole new LinkedIn profile from the get-go, but if you’ve got your general LinkedIn profile now, it makes sense to start a second profile that’s aimed directly at the vertical that you really want to speak to and make sure that’s got positioning content in there that talks directly to that vertical. Right down to your headline in your profile saying that you’re doing IT for dentists in , something like that. Keep it very clean, keep it very authentic. And I wouldn’t do any other social channels, maybe down the line again perhaps once you’ve set up a separate website, but just to get started you can just do a page on your existing site and a separate LinkedIn profile. Or if they’re not using LinkedIn for their own marketing, you’d use whatever social media platform they use. For example, to reach restaurant owners, hotel owners, they don’t use LinkedIn, but they use Instagram for their own marketing. So you would set up an Instagram page to go and get those people, just as an example.

Now, what you absolutely should build early on is an audience. And this is where vertical marketing becomes magic because vertical audiences are easy to find, easy to target, and super easy to warm up. So you start by building a vertical specific prospect list. You can use Google of course, obviously LinkedIn if it’s a thing that they use, if they’re a B2B company. Then you’ve got other sites like Apollo and Lusher, those will sell you data or provide you with data. You can use professional associations, often you can find lists of members, which is kind of crazy, but why wouldn’t you use that? There are online directories, there’s all sorts of places to find people. It’s really, really, really easy to find audiences and list of audiences within a specific vertical. And then you build content that speaks only to these people.

Create a vertical specific lead magnet, which is something where people give their email address to opt into your database, to your CRM. Something that has the word dentists and your area, your town or your region in it. Then you’d build out a vertical specific email sequence, a vertical newsletter, checklists that are just of interest to that vertical, mistakes to avoid, you know what mistakes they want to be avoiding because of their fears and the things they’re scared of, the regulation and the things that could go wrong for them. You could do software comparisons between the different software they use. You could do videos, you could tell funny stories that only someone in that vertical would get. When your content feels like it could only have been written for them, they’re really going to lean in. And that allows you to start to build relationships the slow and powerful way.

Pick 20 people in the vertical and start commenting on their posts. Reply to their content, send helpful for resources, ask them short questions, share insights with them. Just check in with them occasionally, you can email them, you can message them on social media, you can just be in touch with them and you start to build up a profile in their world. You’re not selling, you’re just becoming familiar to them because familiarity is the gateway to trust, and trust is the currency of high value clients.

Now let’s just go a little bit deeper into practicalities. I suggest you create what I call a vertical starter kit. So this would include a landing page, a downloadable lead magnet, a simple three email nurture sequence, a short video intro, a list of a couple of hundred to 500 prospects, a quarterly webinar topic, a few articles to go onto your website and a case study even if you have to repurpose a vendor’s case study within that specific vertical.

And then you can run a 90 day marketing sprint. And the goal of this sprint is to build awareness, generate some repeated impressions, to launch some tailored content, and create your first wins, replies, comments, conversations, all of that kind of stuff. You’re looking for engagement on email, that’s people hitting reply. You’re looking for engagement on LinkedIn or the social media platform we’re using, which can be as simple as likes or replies or comments. You’re looking for webinar signups and you’re looking for time spent by people on your vertical page or your micro website if you’ve built one. Ultimately, you’ll know from that whether you’re starting to get some traction from your vertical, starting to generate yourself some leads, some appointments, and maybe even at this stage being close to signing your first client.

And as soon as you get your first client in that vertical, go get some social proof, interview that client, interview them over a video call or better still in real person with a camera. Because once you’ve got a video interview, you can then repurpose that down into a written case study a testimonial. You can ask them permission to use it as a review, but always start with a video testimonial. You can use that in a number of different ways to help prove your credibility to other people like them. That’s the beauty of a case study, a video case study within your chosen vertical.

And finally, I recommend that you make a mental commitment to stay in that vertical long enough. So a lot of MSPs, they kind of try out a vertical and give up after three months, which is nuts, right? Because vertical marketing works, but it takes time. I mean, how long does it take you to win a new client anyway? You might meet someone today that doesn’t sign up with you for like a year or two years. So how can you judge whether or not a vertical works for you in just three months? You can’t do that. Give it six months to get traction, 12 months to get a reputation, maybe even 24 to 36 months to become the MSP for that vertical.

Most MSPs don’t fail at vertical marketing, they fail at sticking with the vertical marketing. So you need focus, relevance, patience, consistency and of course content that makes people feel understood. When you get this right, something amazing happens. You stop chasing leads and the leads start finding you. Breaking into a vertical isn’t hard, it’s just deliberate. So pick a vertical, build relevance, build assets, build an audience, and stick with it long enough to see the magic happen.

Why MSPs are terrified of guarantees

Do you guarantee what your MSP does, or is the very idea of that just crazy to you? In the last 10 years, I’ve only come across a tiny handful of MSPs who offer a guarantee, but interestingly, they seem to win clients faster and easier because they’ve de-risked it for them. Let me tell you why I believe you should guarantee your work, show you a specific guarantee that a real life MSP is using right now, and give you an easy way to get started with this. Most MSPs don’t guarantee anything, nothing at all. And I kind of get why.

There’s this fear that if you offer a guarantee, clients will abuse it or you’ll end up giving away loads of free work or you’ll somehow be on the hook for things outside of your control.

But that fear is almost always irrational because here’s the truth, a good guarantee isn’t about operational risk, it’s about psychological power. All buying decisions are emotional first and logical second. And when a prospect considers switching MSPs, their biggest barrier isn’t cost, it’s fear. Fear of downtime, fear of disruption, fear of picking the wrong partner, and fear of making a bad decision that embarrasses them. A guarantee removes all of that fear. It says, Hey, don’t worry, I’m taking the risk off your shoulders and putting it onto mine. And when you do that, something magical happens. More people say yes.

Guarantees work because they trigger three very persuasive psychological effects:

• First = risk reversal. You’re taking away the possibility of loss, which makes the decision feel safer.
• Second = credibility. You look like someone who’s confident in their service, confident enough to back it. And confidence displayed well is incredibly persuasive.
• Third = trust. A guarantee signals that you do the right thing by default. You’re not hiding behind terms and conditions. You’re stepping forward and saying, if we don’t deliver, you don’t pay.

Let me give you a practical example from an MSP that I know well. They offer a very clever set of guarantees on their website. One of them is a straight, simple happiness guarantee – If the client isn’t happy in the first 90 days, they can walk away. No drama, no penalties. Another is a response time guarantee – If they don’t answer the phone in a certain timeframe, then that month’s support bill is reduced. And they even guarantee the onboarding schedule – If they miss an agreed deadline, again, the client gets compensated.

Now you’re probably a bit scared by all of that. So here’s the part I want you to really absorb. The MSP offering those guarantees will almost never have to honour them. Great MSPs don’t miss deadlines very often. They don’t leave clients unhappy and they don’t ignore ringing phones. But the existence of those guarantees, just the words on the page, do an enormous amount of heavy lifting in the sales process. They reassure, they calm, they de-risk. Ultimately, they’re helping the prospects to feel like they’re not stepping into the unknown. And that MSP looks safer than their competitors, even if the actual service seems identical to the ordinary business owner or manager.

That is the power of psychological reassurance. And here’s the clever twist – Your guarantee doesn’t need to be dramatic, it just needs to be real. You could guarantee onboarding timelines or specific response times or guarantee customer satisfaction in the first, 30, 60, 90, 180 days. You could guarantee that switching to you won’t disrupt their business. And in almost all of these cases, you are already doing these things anyway. You’re just not saying them out loud.

When you turn your high standards into guarantees prospects perceive you differently, because you stop sounding like all the other MSPs and you start sounding like a safe decision. That’s how guarantees work. They make you look more trustworthy, more confident, and more accountable. And they may cost you a little bit down the line when you have one nightmare idiot client that claims on the guarantee, but it’s going to be someone you didn’t want to work with who was going to cost you money anyway. Think about all the other clients that you win with these guarantees.

So if you don’t have a guarantee right now, just have a think about what you already do reliably every single day that you could just formalise into a guarantee. To ordinary business owners and managers all MSPs look and sound the same, so a guarantee might be your easiest way to stand out and make more people say yes.

The huge AI revenue opportunity for MSPs

Featured guest: Alex Bacon is the founder of BrightKeel.AI and host of the Scaling with AI podcast. He helps Business Leaders cut through the noise of AI and automation by combining real commercial leadership experience with practical, business first implementation.

Alex has spent more than 15 years in the MSP world, including helping grow a Microsoft MSP from £4m to £38m as part of the leadership team. He has also supported the launch of a legal tech company that went on to generate £22m and has led marketing and commercial functions across multiple scale-ups.

He now works with MSPs to run AI and automation workshops for their customers. These sessions help MSPs create opportunity inside their existing accounts and give them a clear route to sell more AI services in a practical, outcome focused way.

Helping businesses with AI is a massive revenue opportunity for your MSP. Of course, it’s the thing that everyone’s talking about every day, but when it comes to actually using it, the ordinary business owners and managers that you service are a little uncertain.

They might be using it as a personal productivity tool, but how do they best roll it out in a way that benefits their entire business? My special guest right now has some answers about this, and how you can help people in a way that drives growth for your MSP.

So I’m Alex Bacon and I’m the founder of BrightKeel.AI.

And it’s so cool to have you on the show, Alex. We are going to be looking today at how do you scale your MSP with AI. And as you’re about to tell us in a second, you have a really, really good marketing background within MSPs, but it’s so good that you’re now taking your brain and looking at everything that an MSP can do to make themselves more efficient and grow faster using the AI tools that we are all coming to love and trust.

So tell us a little bit about your background. You’re based in the UK like myself. In fact, I’m surprised you and I have never run into each other before. I know we’ve both been, well, I’ve been in the channel 10 years and I think you’ve been around a little bit longer. So give us the brief version of your story. Where were you and what have you achieved there?

So I’ve worked in marketing for 20 odd years, most of that in MSPs. I was in one MSP for quite a long time and then that went through a merger and acquisition. And then more recently I was the marketing director at Cloud Direct. So I joined there as the only marketer quite a few years ago. I think I was there about eight years in total. And when I joined there are about 4 million of revenue and I left that earlier this year when they’re doing around 38 million. So quite a big growth journey there both in terms of the marketing and the business as a whole.

Yeah, I bet. And I bet you went from being the only person sitting at the marketing desk to then, it must have been weird the day you got another marketing person joining you and maybe even weirder when one day you got own office or your own section of the office. When you take an MSP from, I mean four millions in itself is pretty impressive, but to take it up to that kind of size, how does the marketing change and how do the decisions change as you’re on that journey?

It’s a really interesting question and a lot to cover. So I’ll try and touch on it fairly briefly, but when I look at that journey, the first year coincided with a couple of acquisitions. So we acquired a couple of smaller MSPs. So one of the first jobs there was integrating those into the business. And of course you’ve then got your upsell and your cross-sell opportunity and looking at more of that going into the existing customer base. And I know you talk a lot around the white space mapping. And so that was one of the things that we did at that point. And then as we scaled, it was really looking at having multiple channels of our lead generation. So what I mean by that was looking at partnerships and Microsoft was a big partner of ours, but also other partnerships and looking at that as one channel, looking into the customer base as another channel and then looking into new leads and new opportunities as the other channel.

And then as we scaled and I built out a team, we were able to do more and more and look beyond just doing point campaigns where initially we might say, okay, well we’ll run an event, but actually tying all those all together into holistic multi-touch campaigns. And that’s really what helped us scale and the success of those campaigns compound ultimately, and they’re amplified through partners, they’re amplified through our existing clients and getting them involved in the campaign, so getting them to help create the content, getting them to help to speak at events, for example. And also looking at trade bodies or marketing partners as well. So that’s a really good angle to go into. A particular industry is partner with someone who already knows that industry and someone who’s already in that industry and who already has the captured attention of the audience. And they’re typically then talking the language of that customer and they’re talking at the business level so you can then go in and support from a technology side of things. And a lot of that was through SMB. And then as we grew, we went into bigger and larger customers.

I can imagine. And I guess as you become a bigger entity and there’s a lot more revenue and a lot more resources, you have that luxury of being able to look at these bigger ideas, the partnerships, the events, and multi-touch point campaigns. And there’ll be thousands of MSPs listening to this on the podcast or watching this on YouTube who are thinking, well, I’d love to be there, I’d love to be doing all of that stuff. My advice is always actually start small, get the basics right first, put in place a marketing machine first, and then as you grow and as you get bigger and you have more resources, you can start to look at those things and as you said, you actually unlock bigger and more impressive clients as you’re doing that kind of stuff. So let’s stop looking backwards, let’s start looking forwards, so at some point last year you exited that business, you’re now here doing your own thing. Obviously AI play is a smart move for anyone starting a business last year or this year. What is it exactly that you’re now doing because you are not just working with MSPs on their marketing now?

No, so I’m still doing marketing consultancy and fractional CMO work, but BrightKeel.AI is all around adoption of AI for businesses. So we’re working with businesses to really help look at how they can start using AI, and that really looks at some workshops, which I’ll touch on in a minute because that’s  where we look to partner with MSPs, but audits and assessments to look at the opportunities for using AI and automation. And I use those terms interchangeably because actually a lot of it is automation rather than AI for their processes, and ultimately how businesses can scale without necessarily always adding on headcount to scale. And so that model that we engage with really has three areas. It’s that assessment and audit that I mentioned that helps create a roadmap. We then look at enablement, which looks at the workshops and the training side of things, and then we look at implementation and that’s where we partner with businesses to actually do the technology delivery.

That makes sense. And what are we like three, three something years, maybe a little bit more since ChatGPT went mainstream. Obviously it’s been there for many years, but most people weren’t aware of it. That was the point that AI became a thing, and obviously we know it’s got so much better, it’s got incrementally better almost monthly since then, and there’s been the explosion of all the other tools. Do you see still the marketplace out there, so the ordinary business owners and managers that MSPs want to reach, do you see that they are still dipping their toe or are they separated into a small percentage of power users and other people who are scared of it? Or actually is there a more widespread adoption? What are you kind of seeing at the moment?

Yeah, I mean it is a real mixture, obviously, whoever you speak to. What I’m tending to find is a lot of people are using it quite often in their personal life more than their business life. So they are familiar with the technology and you can’t get away from it in the news. So again, they’re aware of it and you tend to get maybe one or two who are heavy individual users. But as a business, a lot of them have not really embedded it, especially the SMBs I’m talking to. They haven’t really identified quite the role that it’s going to play. They haven’t necessarily got the confidence to use it day to day.

And again, I use that term kind of AI and automation interchangeably because that whilst it has been around for a long time, has kind of come to the forefront off the back of the AI conversation that businesses are now really looking at saying, well, we can’t just keep growing by adding more and more headcount, actually we need to look at the efficiencies that we’ve got. Have we got the right processes? Are they the most efficient way? But also those people that you have got, making sure that they’re doing the valuable work. So making sure they’re doing things like strategy and speaking to customers instead of doing the heavy lifting of admin tasks that we know can be automated now.

And for the MSPs that are looking after these people, what are the biggest opportunities for them right now? So what are you advising them? Is it consultative or is it literally pulling your sleeves up and getting in and actually building things and showing them how to use AI to automate processes and grow without more people?

I think there’s huge opportunity here for MSPs. I mean, the thing that excites me about this, is it’s a technology that your customers are actually interested in, and it’s probably the biggest opportunity that MSPs have got to merge those conversations between technology and business. And so the end customers are looking at this and saying, how is this going to transform my business? How do I operate my business? How does this align to my business goals, objective, strategy? They’re not looking at it necessarily from a technology angle, but it is a technology that they’re thinking about, and I think that is absolutely transformative. We’ve seen the wave of cloud, for example, but that was still a technology conversation that wasn’t really something that was being discussed particularly in the boardrooms or in terms of business strategy. And this is, so there’s a real opportunity here to combine those two things.

And really that’s what I’m doing is going in and having those consultative conversations, looking at talking about AI, but for non-techie people, aligning it to business strategy, aligning it to opportunities, and then there’s an opportunity for the MSPs to actually look at rolling up their sleeves and delivering on some of this. Because the reality is, whilst a lot of AI and automation is painted as being really easy, some of the GenAI stuff absolutely is, but some of the automation stuff and some of the stuff you go into Copilot, for example, the customer’s still never going to really get involved in that. That’s not what they’re in the business of. So there’s still a huge opportunity there for MSPs to come in and to work on that. Not to mention then the opportunities that it creates for other things such as your cyber security that you look around, that your data migrations, the data that you’re feeding into AI, your SharePoint, as well as anything to do with the automation and the agent building.

Yeah, absolutely. I guess we can look at it that the end customer, the business owner or manager, they were never interested in configuring their SharePoint. They just don’t want to do that, they want someone else to do it for them. Why would AI be any different? And even though AI, I guess, is an easier interface, as you say, when you start actually integrating things and putting things together, there are levels of complexity in that.

Alex, this has been absolutely amazing. Thank you so much for being with us. Now, I know that you actually have your own podcast, which is about this very own subject. So do you want to tell us three things? Number one, tell us about your podcast. Number two, tell us what you can do to help MSPs, and then finally, what’s the best way to get in touch with you?

Perfect. Yeah, so the podcast is Scaling with AI, so you can find that on Spotify or Apple Podcast wherever you are. How I can help MSPs is really bridging that gap between customers who are hearing about this in the news, they’re interested, but a bit scared and a bit curious, and the MSPs who have all of this capability to deliver on that. And really, I sit in the middle between helping the customers understand what is possible, get them thinking in the right way, get them starting to feel comfortable with this so that the MSPs can deliver on it. And how to get in touch with me, the website is brightkeel.ai, and I’m very active on LinkedIn, add me on LinkedIn or follow me on LinkedIn, Alex Bacon.

Mentioned links

• This podcast is in conjunction with the MSP Marketing Edge, the world’s leading white label content marketing and growth training subscription.
• Join me in MSP Marketing Facebook group.
• Connect with me on LinkedIn.
• Connect with my guest, Alex Bacon, on LinkedIn, visit his BrightKeel.AI website and check out his Scaling with AI podcast.
• Got a question about your MSP’s marketing? Let me know.

Welcome to Episode 326 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge.

MSPs: Never be ignored on LinkedIn, again

For MSPs, LinkedIn is the number one place to go farming, never hunting, but farming. Slow, steady, reliable relationship building with the exact people that you want to do business with. And that means adding new connections, ideally on a daily basis. Let me give you five super smart LinkedIn connection request messages that you can swipe and use today.

Farming on LinkedIn is about slow, steady, reliable relationship building with the exact people that you want to do business with. And the good news is that LinkedIn makes this incredibly easy, if you approach it the right way. Most MSPs massively underuse it. They log in every now and again, maybe post something, maybe like something, and then they wonder why nothing really changes. They get nothing out of LinkedIn. But the real power of LinkedIn is in building your network, your connections.

Think of every connection as a tiny little seed. The more relevant seeds you plant, the more opportunities grow later.

Your job is simply to show up every day and plant a few more seeds. So how do you do that? Very simply, you search for the people you most want to do business with -business owners, managers, decision makers, in your target verticals and your target geographical areas. If you serve financial firms, go and look for accountants/CPAs, financial planners. If you specialise in manufacturing, look for operations managers, plant managers, supply chain directors. If you are local only and you just want local businesses, search by your town or your region.

And then, here’s the system… you send 10 personalised connection requests every day. Not 50, not 100, just 10. Because consistency beats volume every time. Doing something small every day is always more powerful than doing something big every now and again. So make it part of your daily routine, same time each day, same process, no emotion attached, it’s just a system. In fact, you can get other people to do this for you, maybe a member of your staff or a virtual assistant.

Now let’s talk about the connection request messages, and again, here’s where a lot of MSPs go wrong. They send the same bland, boring copy and paste connection requests that screams, I’m going to pitch you something here. But we’re not pitching remember, we’re farming, we’re starting a relationship. And that’s why you want a set of smart, simple human sounding messages that you can just rotate your way through. Today I’m going to give you five of the best, and these are the same ones that I give to my MSP Marketing Edge members. So let’s go through them.

1. The common ground message. This one is beautifully simple: Hi , it looks like we both, . I want to add you to my professional network. Now, maybe the thing that you insert is that you both live or work in the same area or maybe you’re in the same industry group or maybe you’re both fans of a particular business author or a local sports team or something like that. Humans connect through shared identity, so point out the common ground with them. They’re much more likely to accept your connection requests.

2. The local business owner message. If you target a geographic area, this one is gold: Hi , it looks like we’re both local business owners in . Should we connect to see if there’s anything we can do to help each other? People feel good supporting businesses on their doorstep, so why not use that.

3. The mutual connection message. Now this one creates instant trust: Hi . It looks like we’re both connected to , and then you add a line about how you know that person. Maybe you worked with them, maybe you met them at an event, something like that. And then finish with, I want to add you to my professional network as well. It’s borrowed credibility that makes this one work brilliantly.

4. The content admiration message. Now this one works amazingly well with people who post on LinkedIn often: Hi . I was just reading your post about and thought it was very well written. I want to add you to my professional network. Now this works because people love being recognised for something that they’ve created and it shows that you’re not just spamming them, you’ve actually read their content. And obviously you need to read their content to be able to use that.

5. The vertical joke message. This is the one that gets a smile and you tailor it to your target vertical. So here’s an example for CPAs, for an accountant: Hi , “An accountant is having a hard time sleeping. Have you tried counting sheep, a friend suggests. That’s the problem, I make a mistake and then spend three hours trying to fix it.” Sorry for the appalling joke, I just want to add you to my professional network. Now, of course you’d replace that joke with one relevant to your vertical or your niche. The key is it’s got to be light, fun and memorable because no one sends jokes in LinkedIn connection requests. And that’s a reason to do it because you’re not going to forget the person who made you smile with a LinkedIn connection request.

So those are your five messages. You can just use the same one because remember, everyone only sees them once or you could rotate them, use a different one each day. It doesn’t really matter. Just do what feels best to you. And remember, your job on LinkedIn is not to go out hunting and selling, it’s to farm. And you do that by planting connections, planting relationships and future opportunities. 10 connection requests a day, every day, makes it a system that’s going to grow plenty of future business for your MSP.

How your MSP can excite ANY prospect

To win more new clients for your MSP, you must first understand what motivates your prospects. There’s a little bit about getting inside their heads and a lot more about getting inside their hearts. The more you can connect with their wants, needs and fears, the easier it’s going to be to persuade them that your MSP is the answer to all these things. Here’s exactly how to do that.

Every business owner or manager has two sides to be influenced when making big buying decisions. First, there’s the rational mind, which is the logical Vulcan part that looks at fact and figures. And then there’s the emotional mind, the human side that responds to feelings, fears, and hopes. And we all like to think that we make decisions rationally, but no, we really don’t.

When buying something that we don’t understand, and this of course is how ordinary business owners and managers buy managed services, the emotional mind makes the decision and then it passes that decision onto the rational mind for a stamp of approval. That means around 80% of your marketing needs to speak to their heart and not their head.

Help people feel that they know you, like you and trust you… and then give their brain just a little bit of evidence to prove that you are a safe choice.

So how to do this, well if you truly want to get inside your prospect’s hearts, you must go where they go and consume what they consume. Let’s say your ideal client is Dave, the accountant, a local CPA in your town. Read what Dave reads… his trade magazines, professional websites, his industry newsletters. You might not understand some of it, and in fact, if you’re reading accountancy magazines you may slip into a coma, but you’ll soon start spotting patterns – law changes, new tech or other pressures that matter to Dave.

And then go where Dave goes… maybe he attends networking events or professional meetups. Don’t go there to pitch though, go there to talk and listen. Notice what other accountants worry about. Is it deadlines, compliance changes, losing clients to cheaper firms, recruitment headaches, offshoring? These are all emotional hooks that really, really matter to these people. The more you immerse yourself in Dave’s world, the more you’ll understand what really drives him. And then you can weave all of that into your messaging and content.

Let’s take compliance changes, which are an easy topic for an MSP to leverage. If the fear of not being compliant is a big emotional driver for Dave, then a key part of your messaging must demonstrate that you understand that compliance affects him and you understand why he wants and needs to stay in line. And you know how to use technology to ensure he never makes a mistake. That’s the emotional side of compliance dealt with. And then you could just pull together a guide too, Easy Compliance for CPAs, and maybe get a video case study of an existing CPA client on your website. That then ticks the boxes for the cognitive side of things as well.

When Dave is looking for a new MSP, if he sees all of this in your marketing, this will transcend everything that all the other MSPs are saying, because it seems really, really, really relevant to him. While everyone else is talking about technology, you are talking about eliminating his fear, and you’re talking to his heart and to his brain. And I promise you, if the timing is right for Dave, that will get you a sales meeting.

Great marketing for your MSP isn’t about being clever and it’s definitely not about being technical. It’s about being human and connecting with your prospect’s emotions and giving their brain something to think about as well. So if you want more leads that engage better and convert into more sales meetings, stop focusing on what you want to say and start focusing on what they feel and how they think.

The Disney lesson your MSP mustn’t ignore

Featured guest: Vance Morris is a Former Birth Control Factory Security Guard turned Disney Leader, turned Bankrupt Out of Work Executive, turned Carpet Cleaner, turned Successful Entrepreneur. 

Vance helps business owners get, serve and keep clients for life through creating experiences and response required marketing.

Are there really customer service and operations lessons for your MSP from Walt Disney World? I believe so, and so does my special guest today. You see, Disney has completely systemised an amazing experience every time you visit one of its parks. No detail is left to chance, they have literally thought through everything in advance and then turned it into a system that their staff can implement stress free. Wouldn’t that be an amazing thing to do with your MSP’s customer service. My special guest is going to tell you right now exactly how you do this.

Hey everybody, my name is Vance Morris and I am a customer experience strategist and tactician, working with service-based businesses pretty much in most English speaking countries. So here I am.

Here you are, thank you so much for joining us Vance. And in particular, we want to talk about the things that you learned at a particular part of your career where you worked within Disney. Anyone who has ever spent time in any of the Disney parks, and I’ve spent at least 30 days of my life in Disney parks, in all of them actually, apart from Tokyo, that’s on the list, but we all know that they are a whole stepper, right? You go into a Disney park and the experience, and not just for what they’ve built, but particularly the experience with their people, compared to say a Universal or a SeaWorld or other similar things where they can buy the same rides or similar rides, but the people thing is on a completely different scale. So we want to explore how does Disney achieve that and particularly how can MSPs do that within their business. So I’ve kind of dipped into the start of your career there. Just tell us a little bit more about that career Vance. What have you been doing over the last 20, 30 years or so and how did you end up working with Disney on their leadership?

Certainly, great question. Actually, it was my second job in my lifetime, well second real job after college, and I had a very interesting application process. A buddy of mine from college was a recruiter for Disney, I got tired of living up north, I called him up and said, Hey, do you have anything for me? He said, Yes, come on down. And that was the extent of the interview process. Now I guarantee you they’re not doing that anymore, but I did spend the next 10 years working for “the Mouse” and primarily in hospitality, hotels, resorts, restaurants and things like that.

One of the first things I learned, and it wasn’t how to pick up trash or how to be nice to people or anything like that, it was that Disney runs on systems, processes and systems and they’ve got one for everything. You want to change a tyre on a bus… they got a system for it, you want to carry a tray in a restaurant… they got a system for it. And what I found is that if you follow the systems and you practice the systems, it actually gives you room in your head to do all of the nice things that Disney is known for. So it gives you some freedom so that you’re not focused on your actual job, you do the job by rote, I mean it’s muscle memory, you go through it, and now you have time to take pictures of families and do autographs and all of the little things that Disney is known for.

So I applied that in my businesses – I have three home service businesses here in the States in Maryland – and I took those systems, those customer experience systems, marketing systems, and plugged them into a carpet cleaning business and a mold remediation company, and I figured if it works in a carpet cleaning business it’ll work anywhere. And what it did for me as a business owner, is it gave me freedom from the business. So once I had all that implemented, fast forward to today, I’m spending about 90 minutes a week on those three businesses. I was able to hire general manager, he runs the day to day and I’m able to spend 60 minutes with him, 30 minutes on the banking, kissing babies, eating bon bons, that kind of thing, and away we go. But truly that first thing is systems and you have to systemise your business so that you have consistency in the experiences that you’re providing your customers.

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. So I guess by putting in place systems like that, and let’s just take it back to Disney because that’s obviously something that we’re all or most of us are aware of, so if you go and work for Disney in whatever job you do, and it’s completely systemised, I guess from an employer’s point of view, rather than taking away freedom from you, it actually shows you this is what success looks like. So you gave the example of changing the wheel on the bus, and we all know that changing the wheel on the bus isn’t really about changing the wheel, it’s about communicating to the people on the bus, communicating to the people who are waiting for the bus that isn’t going to arrive. I’m sure Disney doesn’t like breakdowns in its parks, it doesn’t ever want anyone to see behind the scenes. So how does the driver act, how does the mechanic act? It’s all of that kind of stuff. And obviously someone somewhere has thought that through.

I got this from, I read a book years ago, I bet you’ve read it… The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawando, I don’t know if you’ve come across that. It’s a great book and it’s a very similar thing. It’s set within the worlds of medicine and aviation and it talks about how checklists can help incredibly intelligent people – brain surgeons, airline pilots – take away all the small things that they have to think about so that they can actually focus on the things that you can’t plan and you can’t systemise. Like taking photos of families, or in their instances, stopping the plane from hitting the mountain, or saving someone from the brain thing or the heart thing or whatever. And one of the things I think it’s in that book or the E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber, is where one of those authors talks about the fact that most business owners fear systems because we believe it’s going to take away our staff’s ability to think and to be creative. But I think you and I both agree that actually it’s the complete opposite.

Completely opposite. And if you’re not convinced about systems when you go to sell your company, you have anywhere between a one and a half and a two and a half multiple added on to the value of the company if you have documented systems in your business. Marketing systems, experience systems, accounting, whatever. The more documentation and systems you have in your business, the more valuable it is when it comes time to sell. So there’s an added benefit and reason why you want to have systems in the business.

And it doesn’t take away from the employees effectiveness and it doesn’t take away from their ability to ad-lib or work in a particular situation. They have that creativity, they have that freedom as long as the job’s getting done, you can react to the situation how the situation demands, but it’s the consistency. And I think that’s what Disney is also known for, that it consistently delivers an excellent product. And so there’s no swoops, ups and downs and Martha’s having a bad day today so all of Disney is in the toilet. And then oh, Martha’s happy today, it’s her birthday… no, systems equalises and delivers consistent service across the board.

Yeah, absolutely love that. So as you just said, you’ve got three businesses yourself, you run them in 90 minutes just kissing babies, eating bon bons, which sounds a bizarre thing to do as a business owner, but hey, whatever you go with that. So obviously you’ve come at that from having experienced 10 years of systems in Disney, goodness knows how many employees, there must be tens of, if not hundreds of thousands of employees across all those parks. So I can see how someone like you spending a decade in that goes to run a business that you’ve bought or started or however you got those businesses and it’s just a no brainer, Oh, well we’ll just run that on systems.

But you take the average MSP who perhaps has been running 4, 5, 6 years, might be listening to this or watching this on YouTube and where do you start? By the point, you’ve got 3, 4, 5 technicians, you’ve got some clients, there’s always a crisis, there’s always proactive work that’s not being done that should be done, every day there’s more tickets coming in than can be answered. When you are at that kind of point where you’re starting to lose control of the business that you started in the first place to get control. We all start a business to get control over what we do, who do it for and how we do it. And we all know that we gain that control when it’s just us, then we lose that control as we gain staff, that’s typically the experience. So where do you even start in a situation like that?

Yeah, it’s a great question. So it’s not a sexy answer, but what you have to do is map out your entire customer journey. So whatever the first point of contact with your business the customer has, whether it’s a website, a postcard, a phone call, whatever. That’s point number one. And then you map out every other point throughout the customer journey from the customer’s point of view, not from your point of view. So let’s say 0.1 is a phone call, great. And your next step would be to visit their place of business to do an estimate or see what they need to have done.

In between those two steps, the customer is doing something, the customer is waiting, so they’re waiting for you to come, they’re waiting for you to send something. What are you doing in that wait period that is going to help move the sale forward or create some kind of experience? Because let’s say they’re shopping around and they’ve called three MSPs to help them out. The one that does something between phone call and first appointment, 99% chance they are the winner because they’ve achieved what I call moment zero. And it’s that first seven seconds of okay, we’ve made the impact, we’ve got the customer.

And so you do that throughout the entire customer journey and then at each point you look and see, okay, how do we make this better? So say it’s answering the telephone, most places answer the phone, Thank you for calling Dave’s Insurance, how can I help you? It’s boring, it’s bland, it doesn’t stand out. So if you have a way to answer the phone that separates you from everybody else. Quick story… I had a insurance company, again very boring, bland business, but the insurance agent was a rock and roll fanatic, so he had Led Zeppelin and Who posters everywhere and autographed guitars, gold records in his office. He was true rock and roll nut. And so we’re doing the brainstorming on the customer journey with him and we realised that answering the phone was one of the key things. And also they wanted a way to sift, sort and screen out people that would not be a good client for them. So actually the receptionist came up with the way for the company to answer the phone. So as I mentioned, he’s a rock and roll guy, so she says, we’ll answer the phone like this. Thank you for calling Dave’s Insurance the agency that rocks. Now you say it 10 times, it’s a little goofy, but really nobody else owns that, you own that, right? So you can’t copy him. It’s certainly different, so it’s memorable, which is key. And it sifts sorts and screens out people that would otherwise not be a good fit for them.

And so just by answering the phone that way they’ve saved themselves time, they’re attracting the people that they want to do business with. People that are like, oh, okay, this sounds kind of like fun and it’s not the stick in the mud kind of people. And you just do that with every step of the customer journey. How do we make this particular point better? And then maybe six months, 12 months, 18 months later, you might come back to it and say, How do we make it better again?

Walt Disney had a term for this, it’s called “plussing”. He always wanted to plus the show, to make it better.

And so we have plussing teams that get together once every other month, look at areas that could have most bang for their buck, have the most impact on the customer or most impact on profitability and say, Okay, how do we make this better? How do we plus it? So you’re not just resting on, okay, I set the system and now it’s forget it. No, we’ve set the system and then you come back to it and you say, how do we get it going better?

Oh, I love that. And of course the beauty of plussing is, you can’t plus unless you’ve got a system in the first place, because if it’s not written down, answer the phone in this way, then you can’t go back and tweak that in time. I remember speaking to an MSP a couple of years ago, and he hired a dispatcher, and the dispatcher was obviously a non-tech whose job it was to answer the calls and empathise with the client. So whatever they were calling that, even if it was a minor thing like I can’t print, which obviously is the worst thing that anyone can ever say, I can’t print, so boring to hear that, but for that client in that moment, that’s the biggest problem they’ve got in their life. I cannot print and I need this print this afternoon. So whatever that problem was that dispatcher was like, I’m so sorry to hear that. That must be a real pain for you. Good news, we’re going to get you sorted out, regardless of what the problem was, Good news, I’m going to get you sorted out.

And I remember talking to that MSP and how he was going to get that phrase, because there’d be days when the dispatcher wasn’t there and he’s like, I’m going to get that phrase into every mouth. Anyone who ever speaks to a client about a new problem, I want them to say that, That’s so terrible. I’m so sorry. Good news, we’re going to get you sorted out. So it demonstrates empathy, but he didn’t have a system, so he was on a constant battle of trying to get his technicians to say this phrase, which she’d said naturally and it wasn’t. But you can see there, can’t you, if it’s a systemised thing, this is what we say to every new problem, and it doesn’t matter if they hear it from us twice a week for the next 3000 weeks, all they’re going to feel is empathy, they’re not going to hear the same words over and over again. I love that. So I love the concept of plussing, but you need the systems to do the plussing.

When you have a system, you now have something that you can measure your employees against as well. So it’s an employee review tool. So you’re not comparing Fred to Bill because that’s not fair to either one of them. You’re comparing Fred to the standards, you’re comparing Fred to the system and say, Hey, 80% of the time you’re doing it great, 20% of the time these are the points that you need to work on. So you’re no longer comparing employees to each other, you’re comparing employees to the standards in the systems that you’ve implemented.

Yeah, absolutely love that. And I will bet $5 that the single biggest defender in the business for not following the system is the business owner. Is that your experience?

Most of the time they are. They think, Oh, it doesn’t apply to me. And you’ve got to be congruent. I mean, you’ve got to have the ability to not just say, do what I say and not what I do. I mean, you’ll lose employees, you lose credibility, you lose authority. So when the system is in place, you got to do it.

Exactly. Well, those of us with kids know that the kids learn more from watching what you do than listening to what you actually say. And it’s no different at work. If you think of your team as your children in some respect, then that’s true. Vance, this has been fascinating, thank you so much. So tell us, what do you actually do to help MSPs and what’s the best way to get in touch with you?

Sure. So the big thing that I work with is I will help you with the entire customer journey. And the one thing we really didn’t touch on that is extremely important, especially with MSPs, is customer retention. So you have to deliver a great experience in order to have any prayer of having customer retention. If you deliver average or bad service, your customers are not going to stick around. I also do a lot of retention strategies, both online and offline with companies so that they’re always, what have you done for me lately? Trying to stay top of mind. And people are like, Well, we’ve got the contract, we see them once a month or whatever, and I say, that may be true, but at the point they’re ready and somebody asks, Hey, who do you use? if it’s been a month since they’ve seen or heard from you, they may or may not remember you, because it is not your customer’s job to remember you. It’s your job to remind customer that you exist. And I think it’s something that many business owners, they miss that. And then as far as reaching out to me, certainly I’m on LinkedIn, I think I’m the only Vance Morris Disney guy there, and I do have a special hot sheet for everyone. So if you’re not feeling overly creative, I have something called 52 Ways to Wow your Customer without Breaking the Bank. And you can get that at wow52ways.com.

Mentioned links

• This podcast is in conjunction with the MSP Marketing Edge, the world’s leading white label content marketing and growth training subscription.
• Join me in MSP Marketing Facebook group.
• Connect with me on LinkedIn.
• Connect with my guest, Vance Morris, on LinkedIn, and visit his website.
• Mentioned books: The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawando, and The E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber
• Got a question about your MSP’s marketing? Let me know.

Welcome to Episode 325 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge.

MSPs who don’t do this, risk losing clients

Insane retention for your MSP isn’t just about doing a great job for your clients, it’s also about making sure they feel really positive about you. Most MSPs have great retention by default. Sure, you’re looking after people properly, but you must also remember that for ordinary business owners and managers, switching MSPs is a distress activity.

In fact, the perception is that moving to another MSP is difficult and dangerous and that’s what keeps people with you. It’s called inertia loyalty. But relying on it is a really bad strategy. Instead, here’s how to systemise going the extra mile so that your clients don’t just respect what you do. They love it.

We’re really talking here about delighting your clients, but not in a haphazard way. One of the great things about owning your own business is having complete control over the experience of the customers, right? If you and I could clone ourselves, then we’d have the perfect businesses because everyone in our team would behave like us.

But the reality is that no business is like that. We need other humans and other humans behave in different ways. So unless we put in place systems and train our people on the systems and then coach them to follow those systems and thrive within them day in, day out, we get haphazard performance.

I think that customer service is absolutely one of those areas that could and should be systemised in every single MSP.

And by customer service, I mean going the extra mile, the stuff that genuinely makes clients think, wow, these tech people are different. Because when you do that consistently and not just occasionally, you create loyalty, referrals, and a reputation that’s almost impossible for your competitors to touch. So let’s get into 10 simple but practical ways that you can go the extra mile and more importantly, how to turn each one into a repeatable system inside your business.

1. Proactive communication. I don’t just mean the usual emails that say your ticket has been updated, but actually I mean reaching out to someone before something becomes an issue. So like a quick monthly check-in call or a short video from a technician summarising what they’re working on for them. The magic here isn’t the contact, it’s the proactive nature of it. And yes, you can systemise this with a simple CRM task. Every client gets a check-in every 30 days, no exceptions. Now obviously if you’ve dealt with some tickets with them in those 30 days, you can skip that, but if you haven’t really dealt with your clients, you haven’t sorted anything big out for them in the last 30 days, then send them a proactive video just telling them some stuff you’re doing or just checking in to say, Hi, how are you? What’s happening right now within the business? 

2. Personalised micro touches. Things like remembering their birthday. I mean, what if you got the birthday of every user at every client and you just sent them something? Just send them a card or just send them a video message from the team. I know that means a bit of work every week, but it’s a point that it really connects with them. What if you celebrated their business anniversary? What if you found out and congratulated them when they hired someone new? In fact, you are one of the first people to find out when they hire someone new, right? If they remember to tell you, although I realise most of your clients probably tell you the day that person starts and they need that new user account like 12 minutes ago. You can use your PSA to automate reminders like this so it feels spontaneous to the client, but of course it’s been completely engineered by you behind the scenes.

3. Unexpected education. You can send short, helpful, did you know videos or articles. Not generic stuff, but tailor it to what that client thinks about. And this is again, very easy to automate with content libraries, tags and scheduled sends. The goal is for them to feel that you are looking out for them, that you’ve got their back.

4. Project follow-ups. Most MSPs disappear at the moment of project finishes. Instead create a standard two week follow-up call. How’s it bedding in any rough edges, anything that we should tweak. This is such a small thing, it takes five minutes to make this call, but it makes you look like a premium partner.

5. User level support. So not just helping the managers and the decision makers in your company, but helping the end users get better as well. You could do a monthly ask me anything session either on a Zoom or maybe even in their office, or perhaps just do a five minute training tip for them or some quick Loom videos to show them shortcuts on the systems you know that they’re using because you’ve got that information recorded. This just builds huge amounts of goodwill actually across the whole company, not just with the leadership team. And when it comes to contract renewal time, who does the leadership team ask whether or not they should stick with their current IT partner or move on? Yeah, it’s the users. So you should be working on the users, they’re the influencers. Work on them as much as you work on the decision makers.

6. Surprise recovery. When something goes wrong and there’s always something that will go wrong, right? Don’t just fix it, add in a small gesture. That could be a handwritten note or a follow-up call from the technician just to check that everything is now sorted out. You don’t have to do this every time, but if you systemise a menu of goodwill gestures so your team can pick from it without asking you each time and also see what was done last time, then you’re making sure that something happens to create goodwill every time there’s a fix.

7. VIP access. Give your best clients early access to new services, new beta features that you’re putting together or new training sessions. You want to make them feel like they’re insiders and you can systemise this with a simple VIP tier in your CRM or your PSA, and if they’re on the list, they get the perks automatically.

8. Client only perks. Maybe it’s a quarterly webinar just for clients, or a private newsletter, or some checklists and templates that they can use internally. How about a private dinner event once a year that you invite all of your best clients to? It’s kind of like an extreme networking event, but only for the very best people. Anything that says you get special value because you are with us, that would work.

9. Moments of humanity. The tech industry loves automation, but clients love being treated like real people. So you could do a personalised video, a call instead of an email, a quick Hey, I just saw this and I thought of you, send them a link or send them something in the mail. The trick is to systemise prompts rather than the actual actions. Your CRM reminds you to be human with your clients and then you just choose the method of how you’re going to do that.

10. The WOW box. Once a year, send something genuinely surprising to your clients. It doesn’t have to be expensive, just thoughtful. So it could be a low level tech gadget. It could be a book, like I talk about marketing books all the time, what if you picked a book that I recommend to you that you’ve read and you think this is amazing and you send it to all of your clients and say, I read this book. It’s helping me to grow my business. I think it’ll do the same for you. What a great way to make $10 or $15 or $20 really go far. But you could also just send snacks. You could send other stuff that fits in with your brand. I mean, don’t just go with the same USB sticks that all MSPs go with. Just think a little bit outside of the box and again, systemise it. Make it systemized and scheduled so it can be repeated on a regular basis.

Here’s the big idea here… none of these things are hard on their own and you probably wouldn’t do all of them, but you could pick out two or three and put them in place and turn them into a system so your technicians or your service desk manager can run them without you personally having to do them.

The real power here is when they happen consistently and automatically without ever depending on you remembering every detail. That’s how your MSP stands out. That’s how you build fans instead of just clients. And it’s how you create a reputation that makes the price you charge almost irrelevant because people have got such amazing things to say about you.

So your challenge for this week is simple. Pick out one, two or three of those 10 and just build a tiny system for it. One workflow, one reminder, one checklist. Start there. And of course, as I say, if you have an account manager or a service desk manager, get them to do this for you so that they own this process of systemising customer delight. And never forget when you stack these delight systems together, you become the MSP that clients rave about not just once, but forever.

AI prompts for MSPs to win new clients

Do you know exactly what kind of clients you want for your MSP, right down to what kind of business they are, how many staff they have, geographically where they’re based, and what kind of attitude they have towards technology?

We call this an ICP, an Ideal Client Profile. You take all of this information and you write it down so it guides all of your marketing. Well, good news. Here’s how you can use AI to make figuring out your ICP super easy.

Without an ICP, it really is difficult to do the rest of your marketing properly. You can’t create your unique sales proposition, your USP. You can’t get your website and your LinkedIn messaging right. You can’t align all of your marketing and make it super laser focused on exactly the clients you want, if you don’t know exactly who you’re targeting. I mean in that situation, how can you make your marketing relevant to someone if you don’t know who you are targeting?

At the risk of throwing acronyms at you then, do you have an ICP in your MSP? Because if your ICP is any business with up to like 200 staff that needs IT support, then I’m sorry but actually you have a problem. because that’s the marketing equivalent of saying that you’ll go on a date with anyone who has a pulse. And the reality is somewhat different, right? In fact, as someone who was single for a few years and did quite a lot of dating, the more you date, the more you form a clear vision about who you don’t want to date.

Sometimes forming a list of clients that you don’t want to work with is the easiest route to discovering who you do want to work with.

Your ICP needs to be specific, detailed, and hooked into their emotions more than their cognitive thought process. It’s not really just about size or sector. It’s about why these clients buy, what they fear, how they make decisions, and what kind of relationship they want with their technology partner, with you. And this is where your AI tool of choice can become your best brainstorming partner.

I believe that AI is most powerful and valuable when we use it as a research assistant. When we get it to question us on what we really think about things and really drill down into details. Unlike a human assistant, it never gets tired of going over the same thing again and again and again and again or looking at the same points from different angles to try to figure out the right answer.

My belief is that people who use AI for basic search are completely missing a trick. Its real power is augmenting our brains to help us reach unique conclusions that only we could have reached, but faster, and with better levels of detail. So here’s a simple three-step process that you can use to get your AI tool to help you form an ideal client profile.

Step one: Start with what you know, open your AI, and you might choose to put it into deep research mode if you’ve got that available, or maybe even switch on agent mode and give it the parameters that it can operate within. There are pros and cons to each of these, and of course these things change over time, but the best thing to do is to experiment. You want your AI to be able to spend time thinking and figuring out what it thinks is the right answer for you, rather than rushing towards the first answer.

And then you brief it on the kind of business that you run and what you’re trying to achieve. And it may know this already, but it’s always worth just running over it with the AI. So you might say something like, Hey there, I’ve got a challenge for you, (because AI likes it when it’s given a challenge, when it’s given a mission), you are a marketing strategist for a managed service provider that works with small to medium sized businesses. Help me define my ideal client profile. Are you up for that challenge?

And then you’d feed it a few details about your existing clients. So perhaps you’d tell it the ones that you love working with and why you love working with them. You’d tell it the ones that drain you, that suck the energy out of you and why they’re not a good fit. You’d tell it the industries that you have most experience in, any local focus or specialisation. And all of this gives the AI some context. You might even choose to give it actual URLs, website addresses of your favourite and your non favourite clients, and then ask it to go and visit their websites to research them and form a better understanding of who they are and what they do. You’re using it to get patterns. If it can spot patterns in why you like all of these clients and why you don’t like these clients, why you want more of these and what they have in common. Let the AI do the pattern searching for you.

Step two: Let it ask you smart questions. So a good prompt here is, Ask me 15 detailed questions to help define my ideal client profile for my MSP. And here are the kinds of questions you would hope to get. And if your AI isn’t going in the right direction, then feed it this list of sample questions and tell it this is what you want it to ask you:

• What problems do your best clients call you about most often?
• What values or attitudes make your favourite clients easy to work with?
• What kind of technology maturity do your ideal clients already have?
• How do they usually find you? Is it referrals, ads, networking, or something else?
• What kind of relationship do they expect? Is it hands-on support or strategic partnership?

And then you take your time to answer each of these questions properly. Now, personally, I favour ChatGPT. So I’m not quite sure if this exists on other AI tools, but on ChatGPT, you can put it into like a voice mode where you’re just having a two-way conversation with it. And depending on your ability to multitask, this is something you can actually do while you are driving somewhere, although it goes without saying that you should always drive safely.

Step three: Build your ideal client profile. Once you’ve fed your answers back, you can ask your AI tool, So based on my answers, help me create a detailed ICP for my MSP, including demographics, firmographics, psychographics. (I’m going to explain what those are in a second), pain points, buying triggers and the decision process.

So firmographics are like demographics, but for businesses, they describe things like a company’s size, industry, location, how it’s set up, stuff like that. And psychographics, describe what people care about, their interests, values, opinions and lifestyle… what makes them tick. You can then take the output and ask your AI to shape it into something useful for you. Now, for most MSPs, this is something that’s no more than a couple of paragraphs long, but with quite a few bullet points in there, it needs to be very easy to read, something you can just print off and just put it onto your wall. So it’s just there for you to look at anytime you’re doing any kind of marketing and you need to just check, is this being targeted at the people I most want to reach?

So you might ask your AI tool to rewrite it so it can be understood by a 12 year old or something like that. And there’s nothing wrong with that. The easier you make something to understand, the more likely it is to be used by you and your colleagues and everyone within the business. Perhaps even the information contained within a super simple graphic that you can use to educate everyone within your business. Or you might be looking for something more detailed because you do want an in-depth document to debate with your senior leadership team. I mean, that preference is all down to you, but either way, however you do this, it’s an essential start to taking your marketing seriously. Figure out who you want to sell to, and it’s going to be so much easier to go and get them.

This is how MSPs lose revenue

Featured guest: Laith Pahlawan is a technology leader and entrepreneur with over 30 years of experience bridging IT infrastructure, business strategy, and AI innovation. His career spans hands-on systems engineering to founding and scaling technology-driven companies that help organisations operate smarter and faster.

As the CEO and Founder of Bloom, Laith leads the development of an AI-powered business intelligence platform that transforms how organisations access and use their internal knowledge. Bloom connects to systems like email, CRM, accounting, and VoIP to provide instant insights, performance evaluations, and client summaries — effectively serving as a company’s single source of truth. Laith’s work focuses on designing intelligent tools that empower executives to make faster, data-driven decisions.

This feels like a glimpse into the near future, because I’ve found an MSP who’s got an AI at the heart of his business with access to all of its data, helping him to make big decisions. This is the kind of thing we can imagine every business doing in the future, but this guy’s doing it right now in 2026. And yes, of course he’s addressed all of the fears that you currently have in your mind about allowing an AI to access client data, tickets, financial data, and info about your staff. Let’s explore with him how he got started with this, why he does it, and how it’s helping him to accelerate growth in his business.

Hi, my name is Laith Pahlawan. I am an MSP owner in Southern California that is very interested in innovation and expansion.

And it’s so cool to have you on the podcast, Laith. So we are going to talk today about some favourite subjects of MSPs really, which is AI automation and having a more efficient business without having to spend a great deal more money. And I know that’s something that you are particularly passionate about. Now, let’s be honest, we all know all MSPs are constantly trying new things, especially automations. Click, click, click, just automated that brilliant, that’s a job we don’t have to do, and it’s so tempting as well to go in and play with AI. So we thought we’d get you on because I know that you are constantly trying new experiments and looking at ways that you can be more efficient in your business. So I thought it would just be fun just exploring that with you. So first of all, just tell us a bit about your MSP. So you’re based in Southern California. Give us an idea what kind of size you are, how many technicians you’ve got, what kind of clients you work with.

Well, we started this in 2002 and it was just myself and grew slowly and to a point where it started to look like a business, not just a one man shop, and then the economy cracked in 2010. After that, I had to reinvent myself. So I started to look beyond just here, started to look at hiring people abroad to do some of the menial work and some of the purchasing. And that strategy helped, I ended up partnering with a couple of companies and with them we were able to grow a little bit. The partners went away. And then just having clients that grew with me, helped really grow this business to a $2.5 million company. And with that, of course, with the success, with the AI starting to become more popular, I was able to put some money in investment into developing something that would help my business and AI.

That’s such a cool story. And I guess you’ve got to a point now where when you’re doing a roundabout two and a half mil that you are able to be the R&D department of the business. So I guess you’ve got service desk manager and enough competent people to go and look after the clients and grow the business. And are you just having fun now? Just automating everything?

It is fun, definitely fun, but also looking for ways to also serve my clients. So what I’ve developed some kind of a platform. First of all, I just acquired a new company that does global dispatching, so that’s going to help me get more of a global footprint, definitely national, where really most success is in the United States. And on top of all of this, I have that AI solution, which I think will help a lot of my clients, small clients, increase efficiency, and I also think is going to give you the future of how people do business anywhere in the world.

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. So give us an idea of what you’re building then some of the things that you’re putting together and how it’ll help your clients.

Okay, let me tell you how it started. Started. When I first learned about AI, I thought this is amazing. I was like, imagine if my data was all in AI and I could run AI on my stuff. At the same time this happened, I had a person with me after 10 years get pregnant and she left. And when she left, a lot of knowledge went away with her. So that kind of sparked the idea. So I started working with a group of people from the Netherlands to input all my tickets, all my emails, all my phone calls, connect to QuickBooks and connect to my SharePoint, my Teams, and connect everything, put it all into one centralised database, collect some more data on it at some of the AI metadata, like the sentiment and the summaries, and whether it’s marketing, whether it’s operations, and then use that information to look for ways to manage my business and to manage my clients. So I started a draft, but now we’ve been developing now for two years and we have a pretty solid platform right now with a lot of features that is really benefiting our business to be honest with you.

That’s really cool. So I’m going to ask you about those features in a second and some of the things you’ve been able to achieve, but I first of all must address the most obvious elephant in the room, and I know there’ll be thousands of MSPs listening to this or watching it on YouTube at this point, folding their arms going, oh, hang on. So you’ve put all your data inside an AI, what rails have you put up? What are you doing to guard the data and stop that from leaking out, I guess?

Well, obviously we’re not putting it on a server here in the garage. It’s with AWS, which is a SOC 2 compliant. We have all the proper cyber security, so all the proper security implemented on the databases on the connection on two-factor. I mean, that’s just like all your emails on your servers are on the net, now this is going to be another way. Also, the data we’re getting, we’re not necessarily getting the data and inputting it raw. We’re just making it into vectors and processing it, just getting the juice out of it basically. And then we don’t really need all the raw data in there, just what makes sense out of it basically.

So give us some of the wins, some of the things you’ve been able to achieve with this.

Well definitely, I’ll give you an example one, we are a Microsoft Company, all of our clients are Microsoft, usually mostly what we do is Microsoft, and that’s where we put all our focus on. But every once in a while we get a client that’s asking us to do things that are specific to Macs for example, or Linux or something. So I do not have marketing material that is specific to that, but when I go to my Bloom, bloomchat.ai, when I go in there and I look, I create a company profile, emphasise all the work we’ve done with Linux, emphasise all the work we’ve done with MacBooks, it’ll give me a bunch of white papers and gives me all the things that we’ve done in the last, let’s say three months or six months. And that kind of creates a customised package that I can send to the client immediately without having to spend three, four days creating that package. And they get the impression right away that, Hey, these guys can actually work with the Macs. And because of that, I’ve been able to close a few deals because of that. Also, with WIFI, depending on locations.

I can customise my marketing material specifically to a client without having to go through all the creation, it’s all done within one prompt on my PC.

So essentially what you’re doing is you’re taking all the data that’s sitting within the business in every area, and you are putting it all into one place, but obviously the AI is constantly reading it, matching things up, and it’s almost like a human, a very intelligent, never stopping human, but it’s across all of just your company data.

Correct. And the other thing is because the data is being ingested in different times, I can also do comparison. How is the performance of this client today versus three months ago? Have they increased in the tickets? And this is all done because it’s reading the data, also even evaluation of employees. I can ask things like, what is Johnny working on? And it’ll find me all the tickets, all the phone calls he’s done, whatever he’s done in Teams, and give me that result. So I have an idea without having to… this is one of the things that this solved as well, by the way, during COVID when a lot of people started working from home, people are asking us to put monitoring software on each person’s laptop. I don’t know if you’ve been on this other end where the IT guy is, but it is the creepiest thing to do in the world to go and snoop somebody and oh, where are they looking at? Because you have all this access now. So this gives you the ability to know what people are doing and manage them without having to be Peeping Tom basically.

I absolutely love that. So have you created this, is this a completely bespoke solution to your MSP or have you sort of taken something off the shelf and then just adapted it to an MSP’s needs?

No, no. This is all us. We just have a database and we vectorise the data. So when we can search it and use the metadata, of course there’s a lot of technology that goes in there to create queries and pull ingest data and add some intelligence to the data. But this is all done within our platform. Of course, this is not our own AI, we are using Gemini and we can use multiple models to do the reasoning, but it goes through several processes. When you type a prompt, it goes in there and determines the best place to get the data from. It pulls the data and now it takes it and puts it into a more intelligent model, let’s say a GPT 5 or Gemini 2.5 this way to actually do the reasoning from it. And not just this, by the way, we also show you when we get a result, we show you the sources of where everything came from that you can access directly. So you have some kind of validation. And like I said, because it’s timestamp as well, you can do things where you can find out progression of things. So it’s a little bit different way of using AI, not just to look for data, but also look at patterns and progression and evaluations and things like that.

Let’s be honest, since we saw AI really bloom a couple of years ago and start to become the thing that we’ve got today, all of us at one point have thought, wouldn’t it be great if I could have a custom GPT with all of my business data in there, which is essentially what you’ve created but with those guardrails, which is pretty cool. Let me ask you an open question, the next step for you is that about the AI spotting things before you need to think to ask those things. So for example, if it spots that a client’s heading out the door because of certain behaviours or if it spots that a technician, perhaps their efficiency is off, when I say efficiency, I don’t mean, as you say, cracking the whip and making sure everyone’s at a hundred percent, but if an AI will probably notice if someone’s got trouble at home through their work faster than a human would, and wouldn’t you want the heads up on that to be able to go and have a chat with someone and say, Hey, Dave, is everything all right? So is that the next step for you or do you have even bigger plans?

Yeah, well, I’ll give you an example of how this works right now. If I go and say, have we had any interactions with negative sentiment in the last, let’s say 30 days? So it’ll find, of course there are sometimes calls where people are, I’ve called about this four times and I’ve done this seven times. But also the AI will determine and say, Hey, you know what? These guys have had this problem six times in the last 30 days, this is a high risk, you should attend to this. And it gives you an action that you need to do. I’m not saying that I wrote this logic, it is just what’s out of the box, but feeding the data into it and having that timestamp on the data is helping actually determine if something is a high risk or low risk. And even I can tell it to evaluate my relationship with a specific lines or when was the last time we talked to Alex from A, B, C company?

And I’ll say, Hey, you know what? It’s been six months since you had a call with Alex or anybody in the company. This is not, by the way, this is not just my data. This is all the company, the entire tenant, the entire Microsoft tenant. So I know what everybody in the company is doing, and like I said, without having to be a creep kind of thing. And it gives me actual information that I can use to strengthen my relationship and with the clients and with my employees to make sure I don’t miss out. Nothing gets me from left field where I thought everything was great.

Also, the other thing I can do is, for example, there’s one of the things I can do here is create a report. Every day I say, I’m the CEO of Orange Crew, tell me what I should focus on today with personnel, with clients, with problems there. And I have a bit of a management report, Hey, today do this, this, this… you haven’t looked at this email in a few days… and I can actually follow it. If I was disciplined enough, I would follow it.

Yeah, exactly. You still haven’t got enough time to follow up on that. Maybe the next step, of course is the agentic AI that will actually go and do that stuff for you and take half those actions away from you. Well, that’s to be the next step I think. So thank you so much Laith for explaining what you’ve done there. I’m not a tech, I don’t own an MSP, I’m not a technical person, and you’ve explained that brilliantly, and I want that. I want that for my own business. And I’m sure that many MSPs could develop, will go and develop their own thing. I think, let’s be honest, 15 years down the line, all businesses are going to have some kind of AI sat at the heart of it, powering it. But I know one of the reasons you came on the podcast today was you are interested in having some other MSPs test that out, so you can try that in different circumstances. So tell us a little bit about that and what’s the best way to get in touch with you.

Yeah, actually my initial, when I first started this, one of the things I can tell you about MSPs, we have a very hard time getting new income and getting new clients. So one of the things I was thinking, this is something that’s really good for us to use as MSPs, but also a lot of our clients that are small clients, and if you’re a small business owner, you’re a bit of a control freak to be honest with you. So having something like that, that gives you an idea of what’s going on, deploying it at the client space, digital deployment is done within, honestly, guys, you got to be up and running within 20 minutes. All you need is administrative password to email, and you can now look at everybody’s email and have it all ingested into our platform.

So this is something that MSPs can use to manage their clients, but also they can sell to their clients because you’re managing, they’re not just MSP, you’re managing information as well. Managed Information Services, MIS. Okay, this is not like a specific application. This is more like a general generative AI, so it’s going to have the same hallucinations like that. But I can tell you for sure if you want to do something, this will take you 85 to 90% of the way to completion as opposed to starting from scratch. So whatever that took you 10 hours before now will take you maybe an hour and a half or two hours maximum.

So this is where it’s been really useful for us and the couple of people that we’ve tested with. But again, still it’s something that’s been working for us. We are getting a lot of juice out of it. And if we’re looking for people to hopefully adopt the same thing and if they can see the vision and can help towards the vision and deploy it at a few places where we can get more feedback, that would be very beneficial for us. And hopefully it’ll take off.

Cool. So what’s the best way to get in touch with you and sort of stick your hand up and say, I’m going to have a go at this.

Honestly, the best way to go is just bloomchat.ai, and we’d love to talk to you.

The Marketing Minute

Hey there, it’s Jennifer Bleam with MSP Sales Revolution. Today’s quick win… update your LinkedIn or Facebook headline to show that you are AI aware. Businesses are curious about AI and this is your opportunity to position your company as an AI thought leader. Here are a couple of options just to get the ideas flowing:

• Helping business leaders use AI and technology securely.
• AI first, cyber security always.

Why bother? Because when a prospect looks you up, they decide in about three seconds whether or not to reach out to you. Adding AI to your headline signals relevance, authority, and it’s a great differentiator. 60 seconds, one edit, and you position yourself as the go-to AI advisor who understands both security and the future. So go make it happen.

Mentioned links

• This podcast is in conjunction with the MSP Marketing Edge, the world’s leading white label content marketing and growth training subscription.
• Join me in MSP Marketing Facebook group.
• Connect with me on LinkedIn.
• Connect with my guest, Laith Pahlawan, on LinkedIn, and visit the Orange Crew website.
• Connect with my Marketing Minute contributor, Jennifer Bleam, on LinkedIn.
• Got a question about your MSP’s marketing? Let me know.

Welcome to Episode 324 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge.

Why is this so controversial for MSPs?

If you want more hot leads for your MSP, put a price estimator on your website. For some reason, this is one of the most controversial things in the channel, with many MSPs saying it’s impossible to give an idea of pricing before you’ve spoken to a prospect. And yet, prospects don’t want to talk to you in order to get a price. What to do? Well, I’ve got marketing expert and bestselling author, Marcus Sheridan, here right now to give you what I believe is the definitive word on this.

I like to think of myself as a bit of a marketing sponge. I read almost every single business and marketing book that I can get my hands on, actually, I listen to them more these days, but I’m also constantly reviewing different ideas and different ways of doing things to keep my mental model of the best way to market your MSP fully up to date. And there was something that I added to this model years back when I read a book called They Ask You Answer by Marcus Sheridan. Have you read this?

One of the big ideas in the book is the idea of transparent pricing. Marcus in that book talked extensively about radical price transparency, which means that you talk very openly about your price. You explain what drives the cost up and down, you discuss cheap versus expensive options, and you compare yourself to alternatives.

You’re just trying to help people who want to buy from you, who want to switch MSPs, you’re trying to help them to understand value.

And then Marcus released a book called Endless Customers last year, which was a reinvention of They Ask You Answer and kind of updated for the AI age. And he took the idea of radical price transparency and took it even further by suggesting that you put a price estimator onto your website. What’s a price estimator? It’s a tool for someone to get a rough idea of how much it costs to be a client of your MSP.

This to me was so obvious that I actually negotiated a partnership with Marcus Sheridan and his business partner, Steve Auchettl, and we launched MSP Price Guide at the backend of last year. It’s an AI-driven price estimator tool that you can put onto your website and we’ve done all the hard work for you. So we’ve built templates, we’ve added in all the standard managed services, all of that kind of stuff. So you can just start your 30 day free trial and get an estimator onto your website within 10, 20 minutes or so. You can see that at msppriceguide.com.

Anyway, I asked Marcus to pull together something to show you why all of this is so critical and so applicable to MSPs. Take it away, Marcus.

Hello MSP community, Marcus Sheridan here. Let’s have an honest conversation about whether or not you should be considering a pricing estimator for your website. First thing that we have to understand is that 75% of all buyers today say they would prefer to have what’s known as a seller-free sales experience. In other words, we don’t hate salespeople as buyers, we just don’t want to talk to them until we are good and ready. And that was a B2B study by Gartner, by the way. And I think you would agree with that. We don’t want to talk to sales until we’re confident, comfortable, and we feel like we’re not going to make a mistake. The answer to that is give the buyer more control through what is known as self-service.

Self-service are interactive tools mainly on your website that allow a visitor to take an action or get an answer that previously they would have had to have done by speaking with a human. Now, what’s so great about this is it drives a tremendous amount of trust and it also drives a tremendous amount of conversions. We know that the number one question the business has when they’re looking at potentially hiring an MSP, they are saying to themselves, All right, I need to outsource this. We can’t do it anymore in- house. Let’s find a provider for this. Whatever it is, first question, you know what it is – Roughly, how much is this going to cost? Or as they would ask you if you talk to them on the phone – Could you give me a sense as to what we’re looking at here?

This is the fundamental question that everyone has when they start the buyer journey, and it is the gateway to the buyer’s journey. If they can’t get any type of answer for this, oftentimes they’ll stop at that point, but if they do get an answer, they can continue and they’ll vet you further. They’ll stay on your website longer, and then eventually they’ll watch maybe some of those videos and finally fill out that form that says, Hey, I would like to talk to a salesperson. This is how you behave, this is how I behave, and the reality is your customers are no different. So we have to address the gateway question to making a purchase, which is roughly how much does it cost. You will increase on average a 300% lift in conversions on your website if you as an MSP have a pricing estimator on your homepage that says the phrase Get instant estimate, keyword is instant. Get instant estimate.

What you have to understand is what you’re not doing here is you’re not actually giving a quote. There’s a difference between an estimate and a quote. The quote comes after they speak to you and then you give them the quote. I can tell you right now that over 90% of the industry, as you well know, doesn’t address pricing on their website. Many of them sadly have a pricing tab in their navigation bar. And then when you go to that tab, there’s a form that the person can fill out essentially saying call for quote. It’s like someone has walked into the bar, which is your website. They sat down next to you and you immediately said, Would you like to go home with me? I mean, that’s not how it works. That’s not what you should say in that moment. There has to be a process by which you earn their trust and they say, You know what, I think this is the type of company that I would potentially like to do business with.

When someone adds an estimator to their website, they don’t take it off. Did you know the average SaaS product, software as a service, has a churn rate of 30 – 50%. What we have seen with this tool, we have a churn rate of 0.7%. Why is that? Because lo and behold, when someone puts a pricing estimator on their website, they get way more leads and your quality of sales conversations go up. So there isn’t shock at all, there isn’t big surprise when you’re having these conversations. So not only are you having more sales conversations, but they’re better sales conversations, which means you close more deals.

But there’s another benefit to this because long term you’re planting a lot more seeds. So because you’re going to get 300 – 500% more leads, you’re going to build your database. And as you build your database, you can remarket those leads. And as you remarket those leads, even if they’re not ready today, as they continue to experience pain, which we all know because of where technology is going, people are going to experience more and more pain in the future and they’re going to need to outsource these services where they’re going to be thinking about you because you’re going to be front of mind.

And that’s the idea and that’s the circle of life and that’s the power of business. That’s the power too of MSP Price Guide. It is my hope that you say, You know what, just because the industry isn’t doing this, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t. In fact, because they’re not doing it, maybe we should be doing it. That’s my challenge to you. Run in the opposite direction. Give the buyer what the buyer wants. Follow the golden rule. Put a pricing estimator on your website and use it often. Watch what happens with your leads. Test it. Test it. You will immediately see the impact that it has. Obviously, it’s contingent on the traffic that you get, but again, you’re going to see 300 – 500% on average increase in leads. Hopefully that was helpful to you. If you have any questions, reach out, and give the price guide a try today.

Change your life (and MSP) with this daily habit

What if there was a daily habit, which if you adopted it, would change your MSP forever?

It would allow you to do everything you need to do to win new clients, get those clients to buy more from you and get those clients to spend more.

And of course, in changing your business in this way, you change your life.

You could potentially spend more time with the people you love doing the things you enjoy and less time doing work you don’t enjoy. You fancy that?

One of the best business habits I’ve ever adopted is working on my business for 90 minutes every weekday. And I’ve been doing this for about 20 years now.

And I’d say in fact, it’s one of my secret weapons because no matter what happens in my workday, so long as I’ve completed my 90 minutes working on the business, I can guarantee I’ll get things done. Now, when I tell MSPs about this, I’m often hit with a series of common questions. So let me answer them for you right now. The first is…

Why do you do this, Paul? Well, because like you, I’m a busy business owner with big dreams and big goals, and I know how easily your day can be lost to a problem or just life. When I started my first business back in 2005, I spent the first 90 minutes of every weekday working on the business. And apart from a short break over lockdown, six years ago now, I’ve kept that habit going for the last two decades.

Paul, how do you find and protect 90 minutes every day? That’s another question I get. Well, you can take a kind of sci-fi approach to this as you need to find and protect two things, time and space. Time to get this important work done and space or a place to do it. Now, these two have changed a lot for me over the years, but currently I get up at 6am, and I work on the business till 7:30am.

Don’t laugh. I actually do this in bed. My alarm goes off at 6am, I grab my laptop, I adjust my pillows so I can sit upright and I get working. And yes, I know that creates a kind of weird vision for you. In fact, in years gone by, I’ve done it in my home office or I’ve gone out to an external office space. I did that when my daughter was very young and sometimes disruptive. Other places that other MSPs do this are local coffee shops, restaurants or hotels, basically anywhere where you won’t be interrupted. Now this question leads onto another question…

Paul, you get up at 6am every day. Are you mad? Well, maybe. When I first started this habit in 2005, I actually got up at 5 in the morning every single workday and worked for 90 minutes. And the reason I did that was because in my previous employed existence when I had a job, I’d been a radio presenter and I used to get up at 4 every morning to do the breakfast show. That was a 10 year habit for me, so getting up at 5 in the morning kind of felt a bit like a lie in. From a practical point of view, the reason that I now get up at 6 in the morning are numerous…

It’s a time of the day where people don’t normally work. No one’s really expecting to get an email reply from you at 6 in the morning. In fact, they’re not even really expecting to get hold of you on email, on Slack or Teams or on the phone. It’s kind of a dead time. So I’ve turned that dead time into productive time. The payoff for this is by the time my working day starts about 9am, I’ve already done the most important tasks of the day, and that makes me feel great every single weekday.

Now, MSPs do sometimes struggle to do this early in the morning, but then they find they can protect time over lunch or in the afternoon. Or for some, it’s the evenings. In fact, I do know MSPs that do this in the very early hours of the morning. The specific time that you do this doesn’t matter. What’s important is that you pick a time you can repeat every single day. If you’re moving it around the calendar, it’s really hard to make sure you do it. The same time every day works best. Now, this leads on to a question of…

Paul, how do you keep this habit going? And actually, I’ve just given you the answer because it happens at the same time every day. You’ve probably read the same stuff that I have about how you have to repeat something multiple times to turn it into a habit. If you try and move your 90 minutes around the clock, it’s going to be really hard to fix it as a habit. The same time, every day is simple and it’s beautiful and I promise you it works. Now, the next question I get is…

Paul, what kind of work do you do? Well, the answer to that is anything that’s working on the business rather than in the business. So typically these are tasks that fall into one of three categories, things that win new clients, things that get those clients to buy more and things that get those clients to spend more. Almost every other task is working in the business. Now sometimes I then get the question…

Paul, could I just do 60 minutes rather than 90 minutes? And the answer is yes, you could, but you’ll find that you get almost twice the amount of work done in 90 minutes compared to 60 minutes. Why? Because it takes time to kind of build up a bit of momentum to get started and then get going. And I often find that I’m in a full flow of work by the end of the first 60 minutes. So working that extra 30 minutes just gives you a huge boost in output. And because you’re already in the flow, you really do achieve more in that final 30 minutes than you do in the first 60 minutes. I promise you, that’s how it goes most days, which leads onto a question…

Okay, Paul, could I do this as one day a week rather than doing it in small chunks every day? And you could, but I promise you you won’t get anywhere near the results you’ll get by doing a little bit of time every day. On the surface, dedicating a day a week to working on the business kind of seems like a really good idea. But in reality, by the time you get to that day and most people pick Fridays, it’ll be interrupted by all sorts of stuff from all the other days that you haven’t yet got done. The beautiful thing about doing 90 minutes every day is that even if you do have an unusual day where you lose that time, it doesn’t matter. You just get back into the habit the next day. Whereas if you’ve put it all into one day a week, such as Friday and you lose that Friday to a client emergency or something else, you’ve lost the whole week. Next question then…

How do I get started? And how about you commit to just doing this every day starting, I don’t know, like tomorrow, maybe next week, next Monday? Just do it as an experiment. You’re going to try it for a week. If at the end it works, then keep doing it. If it really doesn’t work for you, just dump it. So don’t think of this as something you’ve got to lock in for yourself. Just think of it as a trial. And how about you give yourself a reward every day that you do this? We all respond differently to different rewards. For me, the thought of a Snickers is pretty much enough to get me to do almost anything.

Now, interestingly, I just calculated that in the 20 years of doing this, I’ve worked on my business for 7,200 hours, which is more than 300 days. That’s kind of getting near a year, a year of solid work just working on my business. If I’d known that going into it 20 years ago, maybe it would’ve put me off because that does seem like an enormous amount of time and work. But of course, I’ve done this in tiny little inconsequential 90 minute chunks and the last 20 years has gone really quickly, but I’ve also achieved some pretty cool things along the way, all thanks to those 90 minutes. So are you going to try this?

Why email is the #1 MSP marketing tool

Featured guest: Perry Sheraw is a marketing automation expert with over 20 years of experience turning chaotic email strategies into high-converting customer journeys. A former print journalist turned C-suite executive, Perry launched her first email campaign in 2002 and never looked back. She has since led marketing strategy for both Fortune 500 companies and scaling startups, with deep specialisation in email, SMS, CRM alignment, and marketing tech.

Now the Managing Partner of Duma Marketing, LLC, Perry helps e-commerce and med device brands eliminate communication gaps and unlock consistent revenue through personalised automation. She’s a certified Shopify and Klaviyo Partner, HubSpot Partner, and has worked extensively in highly regulated industries including HIPAA-compliant marketing.

One of the most important marketing channels any MSP can use is email marketing. Even though it’s pretty much the oldest digital channel, email marketing works in 2026. It’s a very reliable way to build an audience, grow a relationship with that audience, and then find out who the most active prospects are. But don’t take my word for it. I’ve lined up a true email marketing expert to tell you how you can make email perform better for your MSP.

Hi, I’m Perry Sheraw. I’m the owner and CEO of Duma Marketing, and I am an email marketing expert. I’ve been working in email marketing since the beginning of the 2000s, and looking forward to talking with you today.

And not as much as I’m looking forward to diving into email, because despite email having been invented in 1876, it is still a very, very valid marketing channel for MSPs today. And on this podcast and in my YouTube videos, I’m always saying to MSPs, Look, you need to work on your LinkedIn, but that’s a borrowed audience, someone else owns that, Microsoft owns that. Your second audience you need to work on is your email list because that’s an owned audience, that data’s always going to be yours and you have to do both those things.

So we’re going to do quite a rapid fire interview today. We’re going to look at how you can build your email list. We’re going to look at email list hygiene, which I know is a massive thing. We’re going to talk about the platforms that you think are hot right now and the ones that MSP should be using. We’ll look at automation as well, and we’ll talk about what you do to help MSPs. That’s a lot to do in 15 minutes, but I know that we can do it. So just give us a potted history of your history as it were. So give us the 10 second overview of how you came to be in this position as one of the leaders in email marketing.

Well, I started years ago with a mergers and acquisitions firm after my early career in print journalism. And so came to it as a writer, ultimately worked my way up into the C-suite of a mergers and acquisitions firm where I managed information technology and marketing. And so I was the executive vice president of those. And I pretty much Frankensteined a CRM that could coordinate with outbound email marketing and started to really delve into database marketing back in the day.

I love it. And of course, the tools today are so much better than the tools were back then. So I’ve been doing email marketing pretty much about 20 years. And I started off with something that was once called Infusionsoft is now called Keap. We migrated away from that last year in 2025, and we migrated over to HubSpot, which I know that you’re a gold partner of HubSpot. And we’ll talk about how beautiful, but expensive HubSpot is later in the interview.

So let’s start at the beginning, which is building an email list. So the average MSP that I speak to, they’ve kind of got a CRM, but they’re not really using it. They’ve kind of got some people in there. It’s a mix of clients and a few leads and prospects. They’re not doing a lot of segmenting and there’s no strategy. There’s no specific focus on building the email list. But where would you recommend, in a situation like that, where it’s a mature business, you’ve been going five plus years, you haven’t really ever got started with it, what would you say is the right way to get started and start to systematically build an email list?

Well, I mean, you definitely need to ensure you have a form on your website. You also, if you’re doing things like attending trade shows, anything that you’re doing where you could possibly be capturing email lists, make sure that you’re capturing them. If you’re doing any kind of advertising and you’re driving them to just an empty page without a form, rethink that and add the form, whether it’s a popup form or just a first name email form on the website. Ideally, you’re going to get a little bit more than that on the form, but starting with first name and email is a great place to begin.

Yeah, absolutely. And as you and I know, as users of HubSpot, when you’re using an advanced tool like HubSpot, you’ve got data enrichment plugins such as the HubSpot one is called Breeze. So we’ve migrated in the last year and found to our delight, we only need a business email address now and Breeze will go and enrich that and discover everything else that’s out there in various databases, which completely changes the game. Because as we all know, the more fields you ask people to fill in, the less likely they are to fill in the form. So we just get an email address now and Breeze, in most situations, it does the rest.

On the subject of getting people to fill in forms, you go back 10 years, it was really easy. You used to offer a PDF guide and people would fill it in and that’s it. And obviously that does work today. It probably works more in consumer marketing than B2B marketing, but it’s very hard. And especially for MSPs, whose subject matter is very technical and ordinary people don’t really care. So outside of PDF guides, what other kind of lead magnets are you seeing that are working well right now? And just to define what a lead magnet is for everyone listening or watching, it’s something that someone wants so they’re willing to fill in the form to get.

Absolutely. And free consultations still seem to rule the day when it comes to B2B form conversion. So you definitely want to continue to offer those, keep the forms short. Remember that you can use Breeze or you can even use just progressive profile building as you work people through the customer journey. One thing to keep in mind is that there are some ways to be helpful with PDF downloads, whether they’re a checklist for a remote worker user setup or some other things that maybe aren’t exactly germane to something that you would provide to your client, but they could help them in the same realm. They’re relevant and helpful. Just stay relevant and helpful and those are the lead magnets that are succeeding.

Yeah, I love that. And in fact, there’s something that we’ve been working on with an MSP just to trial it recently and it was a quiz to build your perfect work from home setup. And they go through like a quiz. We use tally.so, but you could use Typeform for this. And then at the end it generates a personalised PDF, which it’s the same PDF obviously because there is one great at home setup, but that’s getting so much more engagement than just having that download on its own. So I agree with you, being creative with the way that we’re looking at how do we deliver the information is the right way to do it.

So once you’ve got that email list and you start building it, and as you and I know, it’s a never ending job. You can never stop building your email list because people unsubscribe and leave that list almost as fast as you’re adding them. We talked about very briefly earlier about email hygiene. Can you explain what that is and why that’s so important?

Email hygiene is making sure you have a healthy list that wants to receive your emails. Maybe they don’t want to act on your emails every time but they want to receive the types of information that you’re sending to them.

And if they don’t, then ideally they unsubscribe. And a lot of people in email are afraid of unsubscribes. Unsubscribes are just another way to keep things healthy. The other important thing about email hygiene is occasionally running sunset automations, so you can actually remove people who just are non-responsive. I know there are still studies out there that show that even though the longevity of people retaining email addresses is improving, at one point, they were saying that people might create a new email address every six months. Of course, that’s not a business concern for the most part, but people do move businesses and you want to stay with them as long as possible, but you also don’t want those types of unanswered, unengaged email addresses, dragging down your list and sender reputation.

Yeah, I completely agree. And a lot of the MSPs I’ve been working with in the MSP Marketing Edge just recently, I’ve been recommending that they focus on getting more people to reply to those emails. So if they send a broadcast email out from their CRM, it’s like anything to hit reply, let me know you got this, hit reply with your question because obviously every reply that comes in, it’s sending a message, it’s sending a positive signal to the email client, it’s sending it to your CRM. And also it’s great for engagement because let’s be honest, the ultimate goal of emailing is not just engagement and getting in their inbox. We want to find out who’s nearly ready to talk, who’s entering the research phase of switching MSPs. So I love this, this is great advice.

Let’s talk about the tools. So we’ve mentioned HubSpot, we’ve mentioned Keap. Obviously those are the luxury end of the CRM market. I found out today that Salesforce, which has always traditionally been an enterprise solution, is now targeting small businesses. So we can now throw Salesforce in there, they have a small business package. I’m sure they’re going to end up being as expensive as HubSpot. And even for them, that’s going to be cheap, right? Because Salesforce is a $50-60,000 plus a year investment and small businesses won’t spend that. But then at the other end of the market, we’ve got, well, I suppose we’ve got ActiveCampaign in the middle, at the bottom of the market, you’ve got Mailchimp, MailerLite. We can throw HighLevel in there. I mean, there’s probably a thousand other CRMs that we haven’t mentioned. Well, what’s your recommended CRM and what are sort of the big factors to think about when you’re picking a CRM?

Yeah. Over the years, I have leaned toward either HubSpot for folks where it’s the appropriate budget. I was actually a beta user of HubSpot back in 2002 and I’ve grown with it and I really enjoy it. It offers a lot of the great things that Salesforce has always been able to do, but they make it much more intuitive than Salesforce usually. When it comes to kind of smaller budgets, I usually recommend ActiveCampaign. It has served many, many clients well and it’s scaled with them as their budget has grown even. We’ve been able to use their robust automation interface. I mean, at one point, I had a 150 store retail establishment where I was able to build out individual flows for each of the stores and layer in so much complexity there, but take it all the way back down to just trying to maintain communication with prospects and ActiveCampaign or HubSpot have been kind of my go- tos.

Okay. So that is so cool. So you were actually a beta tester on HubSpot and how was that 23 years ago, right? I remember reading a book about HubSpot called, I think it was called Disrupted, and it was one of the early employees, and it was like a warts and all expose of the culture of HubSpot. And if you ever read that, you’d think, “Yeah, this company’s not going anywhere.” And obviously it hasn’t done any damage at all because HubSpot is an amazing company and an amazing tool as well.

So let’s talk finally about automation. A lot of the CRMs we were just talking about do have automation. I know ActiveCampaign is very good for automation at its price level. Obviously HubSpot is insanely good. HighLevel is very good as well. Would you say that you’re kind of hobbling yourself if you don’t get a platform that allows you to do some serious automation, and especially for MSPs who obviously are very good at automating absolutely everything and integrating everything?

Yeah, absolutely. I feel like, especially for MSPs, your audience is expecting you to be cutting edge and they’re expecting you to perform in very many similar ways as they’re receiving from marketing in the consumer space. That is something that study after study has recently shown that B2B marketing has to evolve to mirror more of the consumer type marketing that people are used to receiving because this is just becoming a form of communication, you need to speak the language. And as an MSP, you really I believe, should be providing them the same types of responses to forms, the same types of prospecting communication that they’re used to receiving from other types of companies.

Yeah, I 100% agree. It’s so funny when an MSP says to me, But I want my marketing to be more professional. I want it to be more polished and more business-like. And it’s like, but the business people you’re reaching here are going home and they’re consumers and they’re watching YouTube and watching Netflix and they’re reading consumer emails. And I completely agree. You can be polished and professional, but we all have a very high standard of marketing that we’re used to in our consumer inboxes, as it were, in our social media marketing and the B2B marketing has to catch up with that. Perry, I could talk for literally hours with you about email marketing. Unfortunately, we don’t have the time to do that right now. So just tell us a little bit what you actually do. What do you do to help MSPs with their email and what’s the best way to get in touch with you?

Yeah. What we do is we start out with a discovery. We really try and learn your tone, your voice. As you said, the polished professional kinds of messaging that you might want to send to your audience. And then we dig in. And if you don’t already have a CRM, we help you build that. I usually analyse around 30 different CRMs each year and update based on the functionality that they’ve added on. And of course there’s usually a handful of new ones, so I test those out. And so I’ll help you identify the CRM that works best for you and the email marketing functionality that you require. Then we help develop things like a welcome series, abandon inquiries, try and save some of those folks who have landed on your site through advertising or other means and maybe not taking action. I help you identify ways to keep your list clean and then ultimately your overall sender reputation healthy.

The best way to get in touch with me is to visit my website, Dumacx.com. And you can visit that site and check out the form that’s available there, learn more about our business. There’s also a phone number that you can use on that website to reach out to me.

The Marketing Minute

What’s up everybody, Justin here from the Virtua Consulting Group. When was the last time you took a look at your website? The amount of MSP websites I see that have old information, bad graphics, copyright dates that are way off from what they are today. Seriously, go look at your website today and make sure it looks good because that is the first thing people are going to see and you want to start off on the right foot.

Mentioned links

• This podcast is in conjunction with the MSP Marketing Edge, the world’s leading white label content marketing and growth training subscription.
• Join me in MSP Marketing Facebook group.
• Connect with me on LinkedIn.
• Connect with my guest, Perry Sheraw, on LinkedIn, and visit the Duma website.
• Connect with my Marketing Minute contributor, Justin Esgar, on LinkedIn.
• Mentioned book: They Ask You Answer and Endless Customers, both by Marcus Sheridan.
• Got a question about your MSP’s marketing? Let me know.

Welcome to Episode 323 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge.

How to market your MSP to lawyers

If you want more lawyers as clients for your MSP, here’s everything you need to know. Let’s talk about what lawyers look for in a new MSP, why they would switch, and what kind of marketing is going to grab their attention and convince them to talk to you.

So law firms are a vertical that can be incredibly profitable for MSPs. And I know that sometimes lawyers can be difficult people to deal with, but if you’re confident in your service and you know that you want more professional firms that put technology at the heart of everything they do, let’s get more lawyers. In fact, I believe they’re one of the easiest verticals to market to when you know what they care about. And spoiler alert, it’s not Windows 11 and Copilot.

Law firms buy IT differently from most other businesses. And the reason for this is simple. Everything they do revolves around risk.

Their risk, their client’s risk, the risk of regulators breathing down their necks, and the risk of missing a deadline because Outlook decided today was a fun day not to work properly. So if you want to win lawyers, you don’t sell IT support, you sell risk reduction and professional reputation protection.

Let’s talk about their biggest pain points. So first is compliance and confidentiality. Lawyers live in a world where one email sent to the wrong person can cause a catastrophe. So talk to them about secure communication systems, email encryption, MFA everywhere, data loss prevention, and of course audit trails. Second, billable time. Every minute a lawyer can’t work is literally money disappearing. So your message here is simple. We keep your fee earners earning. And then third, case management and workflow tools. Many firms still use clunky old systems or they haven’t fully adopted cloud tools yet. So show them how better tech can make caseloads smoother, faster, and more profitable.

If you want your MSP to stand out, you need to stop sounding like an IT company and start sounding like someone who understands legal practices. Use their terminology – fee earners, case files, discovery, retainers, compliance obligations, client confidentiality – all words like that. Because when they hear their own world reflected back at them by a potential IT partner, they immediately think, “Ah, yeah, this one understands us.”

You do need some specialised proof. Law firms don’t buy from generalists, they buy from specialists. So create a case study with a local legal firm, a landing page dedicated to IT for law firms with a short guide called something like, The seven biggest cyber risks facing law firms in 2026. And then just get a few testimonial quotes from partners or office managers. You don’t need dozens, one or two strong quotes will carry huge weight.

And here’s a little marketing trick. Law firms love audit. I mean audits is basically their favourite word. So offer them something like a free 20-minute legal IT risk assessment saying something like, Is your firm compliant with your regulators cyber guidance? Find out. And this positions you as a safety first expert rather than just another IT fixer.

Another smart tactic is to pick a sub niche. So don’t just market to all law firms, pick a slice. It could be family law or conveyancers or criminal defence or corporate commercial, maybe personal injury. Each of them has slightly different pressures and workflows, and the more specific you’re messaging, the more magnetic it becomes.

Finally, turn up to where lawyers are already gathering because you want to be in their world. So local law societies, legal breakfasts, CPD events, partner level networking groups, maybe conveyancing or legal tech conferences, lawyer of the year, dinner sponsorships. I mean, you could even do print newsletters for legal practices. We give a great printed newsletter every month to the members of our MSP Marketing Edge, and this is a great usage example for that. Basically, if you show up where they are, you instantly stand out because most MSPs never, ever bother to do this and certainly not within a specific vertical.

Lawyers are one of the most stable, recession-proof, time-sensitive verticals out there. And when you get one lawyer, you’ll get two, three, or four referrals because the legal community is very tightly knit. So remember, talk about risk, talk about reputation, talk about billable hours and position yourself as the specialist who understands the legal world better than any other MSP they’ve ever met. Do this and you won’t just get one law firm, you’ll become the IT provider for legal practices across your area.

MSPs: Why are you working so hard?

MSPs, why are you working so hard? That’s a serious question because I know that you work so many hours and you barely take any vacations or holidays. And I know that you’re not scared of hard work to build your business. But have you remembered why you’re doing this, why you started the business in the first place? That’s the question I want to ask you right now. What’s your why?

But first, let’s return to why are you still working so hard? Why are you working 60 hour weeks to run and grow your MSP? Because you’re not just doing it for fun, right? I know that after about 50 hours of work in a week, it really does stop being fun. And I know that you’re not doing this to make yourself rich because there are very few MSPs motivated by having a yacht. Yeah, it would be nice, but none of us really are motivated by that.

What is it that actually drives you? Why do you do this, week after week? Do you know or are you caught in the trap of working hard just because you’ve always worked hard?

Let me share a little bit of my backstory to see if it’s anything like yours. So I started my first business 21 years ago after finishing a 13 year career as a journalist and a radio presenter. And at first, I didn’t mind the 80 hour weeks to get the business going and I really was working 80 hours a week on average. But as I added staff and as I fought for every little bit of revenue, I began to resent working so hard all the time for so little personal income. Does this sound familiar?

Everything changed with the birth of Samm, my only child. She’s now 15, she’s going to be 16 later this year. But back in 2010 when she was born, I quickly realised that I was trapped in my business and I couldn’t keep working at that pace while also being a present partner and present parent. So I made a decision. I was going to get good at marketing to get the business to give me the lifestyle I wanted. And of course, it didn’t happen overnight. I just found 90 minutes every day to start learning and experimenting.

My goal was an easy system to generate leads, qualify them as prospects, and get them into a sales meeting. My marketing got better and better, and I reinvented the business, turning it from being a struggling PR firm into a successful healthcare marketing agency. And actually I built that up and eventually sold it in 2016, which is when I entered the channel and started working with MSPs.

So back to today. Today I have a great work-life balance, but that’s by design. I work around 30 hours a week, which keeps me challenged, involved in my business, and able to drive growth. But I also spend plenty of time with Samm and with my partner. So my why is to spend plenty of quality time with the people that I love doing the things that we all enjoy doing. And that’s why I work every day. And of course I do it for fun and for the challenge as well. But the real driving factor for me is to give me a specific lifestyle.

I want to make sure that Samm can do all the things that she wants to do as she gets closer to being an adult and entering professional training. I have the time and cash now to do some serious travelling when that happens, when she’s a bit more independent, but I can also continue to be a present partner and a present parent every single day. I mean, that’s really important to me. It’s a core value right inside me. So let me ask you again. Having reflected on all of that, what’s your why?

This is how MSPs lose revenue

Featured guest: Kim Simmonds is a dual-qualified lawyer in the US and UK and the founder of Cloud Contracts 365 and Law 365. With a passion for simplifying legal complexities and driving innovation, Kim has built a career at the intersection of law and technology. Through Cloud Contracts 365, she has developed a cutting-edge SaaS platform that enables technology businesses to manage their contracts effortlessly, offering AI-powered tools for contract creation, risk analysis, and management. At Law 365, Kim leads a team of legal experts dedicated to providing tailored legal services that help businesses grow with confidence.

I wonder if you have the problem of leaky revenue in your MSP. This is the money your business should be earning, but it isn’t because it’s quietly slipping away through avoidable gaps. For an MSP, leaky revenue usually shows up in places like unbilled work, perhaps engineers doing quick favours that never make it onto an invoice, scope creep in fixed fee contracts, under price services that haven’t been reviewed in years, and missed renewals for licenses, support, or security tools.

My special guest today is an expert at spotting everywhere that your business is losing money and making sure you stop every leak.

My name is Kim Simmonds. I’m the CEO and founder of Cloud Contracts 365.

And it’s so lovely to have you on the show, Kim. Now, you are obviously a lawyer based in the UK, but I know that you’re going to give us plenty of advice today that MSPs all over the world can use. So it’s not going to be specific legal advice, but it is going to be talking about how MSPs can stop something called leaky revenue. What is leaky revenue? You and I are going to dive into that in a couple of seconds.

Let’s just, first of all, find out a little bit about you. So have you always worked as a lawyer within tech or is this something you’ve only been in recent years?

Yeah. So for my sins, I have only worked in tech pretty much the longevity of my career as a lawyer. I say that, it’s been an absolute fantastic journey. So I’ve been a lawyer for over 20 years. 15 years has been dedicated to the MSP community, the MSSP community. So I know this community like the back of my hand, safe to say.

That’s awesome. That’s great. In fact, you know this community better than I do because I’ve only ratcheted up nine years. It’s almost like a comparison thing here. Who’s done the most number of years? Maybe it’s kind of like being an MSP jail or something like that. So the kind of work you do with MSPs, it is around this concept, I know you do lots of different things, but a lot of it is around this concept of “leaky revenue”. This was a term that you actually introduced me to, and I thought it was such a cool term. When we talk about leaky revenue, what do you mean by that?

Yeah, it’s such a great question, Paul. So as a lawyer, I’m always looking at the contracts that these MSPs have in place for their customers. And ultimately, as a lawyer, we have to always think about how are we going to protect the business? And when you’re thinking about protecting the businesses, not just looking at things like data protection and liability, these are really important things in a contract, but it’s looking at the everyday issues that MSPs face and how can you mitigate their risk. So looking at that, what are the everyday kind of leaks as I put them in their revenue? And it’s really interesting because when you start to look at it from that side and not just the legal side, but the commercial side, the lawyers actually can do a fantastic job at making sure those contracts are far more watertight than sort of generic templates out there.

So are we talking about loopholes that allow clients to walk away from contracts or can you sort of dive more into where the revenue would leak out through a bad contract?

Yeah, absolutely. So it spans across multiple things. Let’s look at things like the term. A lot of MSPs they come to me and they say, No, we’re used to doing 30 day rolling terms, right? And I’m like, Okay, but how does that coordinate when you’re selling NCE licensing? Because you’re going to have to commit them and you have to provide support with their licensing. So if they can then leave your services, but you have to keep them onto the licensing, how’s that going to reflect in your contracts? But also from a valuation point of view, if you’ve got a 30 day rolling terms, already that’s revenue, sort of that’s valuation out of the business because someone who wants to go and buy or take over the business later on wants to have a more steady income stream. So that’s number one.

Looking at the termination rights, let’s say some MSPs are willing to do the 12 month minimum term with automatic renewals, that’s great, but have you paid attention to when you’re giving them the clients the right to terminate that contract? It shouldn’t be 90 days at any time. It should be 90 days, for example, to terminate at the end of the term or the renewal term.

So it’s looking at terms, it’s looking at termination rights, it’s looking at price increases as well, because this happens all the time, especially on a renewal.

MSPs, firstly, they don’t pay attention to renewals. So our tool actually helps them to pay attention to the renewals. It reminds them when they’re coming up, but on top of that, they can then do a price increase. I have so many MSPs who come to me and say, I’ve had a customer for 10 years who’s never had a price increase. And I’ve just swallowed up the profitability of that. I’ve taken the hit myself. And I’m like, why would you do that? Well, we haven’t bothered to put the right terms in the contracts. I don’t want to rock the boat. You absolutely have to rock the boat.

These are not the customers you need to keep on and your contracts have got to show your way of doing things. So price increases such as RPI or CPI, being able to give third party increases at any point that that third party increases to you, and of course then getting consent if you’re increasing above RPI, but always having that inflationary rate in your contracts, you don’t have to get consent, you just lift up the price every year. So there’s a lot more, by the way Paul, I just don’t want to keep on talking, but I love this subject so much.

No, absolutely. Please keep talking, Kim, because one of the many interesting things that you talked about there was price increases. And you and I, I’m sure both know MSPs, some of whom are on top of price increases and do them every year religiously. But it was really interesting for me to hear about the MSPs that don’t do price increases religiously, and therefore they are losing out on that profitability. So tell us some of the other ways that you can lose revenue out of your MSP without realising it.

Yeah, that’s a great question, Paul, thank you so much. In other senses, price increase is one thing. NCE terms, they neglect to put the right NCE terms, which is committing the client to that 12 monthly term. That’s something that happens quite often, and so there’s no contract right to keep them in. There’s another thing here that’s really important, and it’s a bit of a sensitive one. It’s around the termination suspension of the services right. Here’s why.

Often you’ll get a client who’s missed a payment, or they’re about to miss a payment, or they’ve been bad payers all the way through. And the accounts team kind of know it, but there isn’t really a contract term to support an MSP to say, Hey guys, you know what? This is getting too much now. We need to suspend the services. We need to terminate the services. This is too much for us now. And the problem is this, if it’s found that that particular customer goes insolvent, what the MSP is not understanding is that they are considered in the central supply of services under the Insolvency Act here in the UK, which means they can’t turn them off at the point of insolvency, but they can turn them off before they are aware of the Insolvency Act.

I cannot tell you this past year, how many people have been subjected to insolvent businesses is terrible right now. And this is them having to take the hit of those licenses themselves and have to pay their distributor or Microsoft if they’re going direct because their distributor doesn’t care. They’re committed to 12 months, they have to pay for those licenses. So it’s really things like that. You’ve got to get that right in your contracts, but also in your processes.

I mean, that sounds like a nightmare scenario, having to pay for licenses on the behalf of a customer that isn’t even paying you anymore. But let’s broaden this back out to all MSPs around the world. Do you typically see when you’re working with MSPs that at the point they get serious about contract and getting all the legal terms and all of that right, that’s the point that really rapid growth happens within the business because they’re just sort of taking away the winging it approach, they’re making it up as we go a long approach and they’re getting serious about every aspect of their business. Is that what you see?

Absolutely. When MSPs understand that their operational excellence includes fantastic contracts that protect the business, that’s when they start to see the growth trajectory, 100%. Because they have cottoned on to a few things. Number one, the client base that they have and the type of clients that they need, and that’s really important. And when they start to professionalise like that, when they start to, and I hate to use the word, but grow up a little bit in that sense, they’re realising that the people that they’re now selling into are far more operationally aware of business than what they’re used to. And when their clients are needing that operational excellence from them, having poor contracts to put in front of the customer is like losing one of your three halos.

I call this the halo effect, the losing the halo effect. I don’t know if you know about this, Paul, but typically people have three halos when they start a new relationship with a customer. And if you lose three halos, so three things that you do wrong, that’s when people start to really question whether they’ve got the right supplier in place. Why lose your halo on poor contracts when you probably need to save that halo for poor delivery if something like that happens or a missed P1 ticket? Save it for those things that really matter in your business and get the basics right.

I love that. And no, I hadn’t heard of that three halos concept before, but that’s an idea I’m going to pinch. So thank you very much for that. Kim, you’ve been wonderful to talk to. Thank you so much. Just tell us a little bit about what you do to help MSPs. You mentioned earlier that you have a tool. So tell us about that tool and what’s the best way to get in touch with you.

Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much, Paul. And yeah, that three halo, I absolutely love it. I do a lot of customer journey workshops with my MSPs to kind of teach them how to get the client on board and onboarded really smoothly with great contracts and processes. So it’s a good one to use for sure.

My tool is called Cloud Contracts 365. It’s designed just for MSPs and allows MSPs to go and create those fit for purpose templates. It’s got all the things that I just mentioned, NCE, all the termination rights, everything to protect their business. It’s a lot cheaper than going to a law firm and to lawyers, and they can create it. They can also review contracts. So if they’ve got vendor contracts, they can review. There’s an AI tool in the platform that will basically show them what legal risk there is and what to do about it.

And they can manage the contracts, e-signatures through to automatic renewal reminders. And we have an integration to Halo PSA as well. So really helps them to kind of manage the quotation to contract link as well there. So my address is www.cloudcontracts365.com. And my email is kim.simmonds@cloudcontracts365.com.

The Marketing Minute

Hey, this is Brian Gillette from the FeelGood MSP, and here is my marketing idea. You should go and pull the transcripts or call recordings of your last 10 sales presentations. If you’re using an AI tool this should be very simple. What you’re going to do is you’re going to use the AI tool or your transcript to find every objection that your prospects listed, whatever reasons that they might not want to hire an MSP or concerns about hiring an MSP, whether or not you won that deal.

Make a bulleted list of them and then you’re going to start writing a weekly blog post where the title of the blog post includes that objection, but reversing it. For example, if the objection was, “Well, we’re worried about losing control by outsourcing IT instead of having it in- house.” You might have a blog post that says, “Why having an outsourced IT company will give you way more control than an employee.”

Just go through that list. You can use AI to help you support it, or you can even use those talk tracks from the transcripts of how you handle it in the sales call, and that’s going to make your marketing much more visceral, much more relevant to your audience.

Mentioned links

• This podcast is in conjunction with the MSP Marketing Edge, the world’s leading white label content marketing and growth training subscription.
• Join me in MSP Marketing Facebook group.
• Connect with me on LinkedIn.
• Connect with my guest, Kim Simmonds, on LinkedIn, and visit the Cloud Contracts 365 website.
• Connect with my Marketing Minute contributor, Brian Gillette, on LinkedIn.
• Got a question about your MSP’s marketing? Let me know.

Welcome to Episode 322 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge.

Is FREE a good marketing tactic for MSPs?

Free. It’s a big, shiny word that always draws the attention of MSPs. No matter how much cash you’ve got, free is always an appealing proposition because if something’s free, there’s zero risk, right? So here’s a question, can you use giving away something free as a marketing tactic for your MSP? And more to the point, if you can, should you? Or does it risk devaluing what you do for people?

Giving away something for free is one of the oldest playbooks in marketing. I mean, right back in the 19th century, Coca Cola was giving away free samples to promote itself. In fact, that was one of the ways that that brand became so dominant across the US. Free has always been a magic word, hasn’t it? It grabs attention, it lowers barriers, and it makes people feel like they’re getting something for nothing.

In the world of B2B, and especially for MSPs, is free still a smart tactic? Or does it actually make people value you less?

Before we decide, let’s be clear on something. Free doesn’t automatically mean bad. There are good kinds of free, and there are bad kinds as well. So let’s start with the good ones. When you offer free value, say a helpful guide, a webinar, a checklist, or even a 15 minute consultation, that’s a smart kind of free. It gives potential clients a taste of what you’re like to work with. They see your expertise, your communication style, and the way that you think, and that builds trust. People buy from people they trust, and small, risk-free experiences like that are a great way to earn it.

But then there’s the other kind of free, the kind that feels desperate, like giving away months of support, doing unpaid audits, or fixing little things just to prove yourself. And that’s where free starts to devalue what you do. Because if you make it seem like your time, your skill, and your expertise aren’t worth paying for, why would anyone believe that they are? And here’s the tough truth. Once someone sees you as the free guy, it’s very hard to change that perception later. You’ve anchored your value at zero.

So how do you walk that line? How do you use free strategically without shooting yourself in the foot? Here’s the test that I like to use. If it gives value but doesn’t cost you much time or money, then it’s “good free”. But if it costs you significant effort or replaces something you should be charging for, it’s “bad free”. So a downloadable guide that explains how to protect a business from phishing attacks, great free. But a two-hour deep dive audit of someone’s network, that’s not free, that’s a service. No pay, no play.

Here’s one more thing to keep in mind. In 2026, attention is the new currency. So giving something away for free can be a brilliant marketing exchange as long as it earns you attention or trust. Thank you very much for those. But if it earns you nothing but extra work and frustration, it’s not marketing, it’s martyrdom. So is free still a good marketing tactic for an MSP? Yes, it is, but only when it’s intentional, limited, and built to lead somewhere valuable.

Don’t give your time away, give away your thinking. That’s what positions you as the local IT expert and gets local business owners saying, wow, if this is what this person gives away for free, imagine what I get if I paid for it.

Why you must put your personality in your MSP’s marketing

Have you ever wondered what it’s like being an ordinary business owner or manager searching for a new MSP? The channel has made it much harder than it needs to be for them to research the available providers and pick the right IT support business for them. And that’s because of a massive error that many MSPs are making with their marketing. Let’s explore what that error is, whether or not you’re making it and how you can fix it to give yourself an unfair advantage.

So just for a few moments, put yourself inside the brain of an ordinary business owner or manager in your town. Let’s say you’ve had this MSP that’s looked after you for a number of years, but just lately you’ve kind of had this feeling deep inside that things just aren’t as good as they used to be. The service levels seem to have gone down. Things just seem to take longer to get fixed and the prices have kind of crept up at the same time. And you’re not desperately unhappy, but you do feel as though maybe you’ve outgrown your IT support company or maybe even they’ve outgrown you. And so perhaps it’s time for change at the end of your current contract.

This by the way, is how real business owners and managers feel. It’s not like they wake up one morning and they suddenly decide, right, I’m going to switch over from A MSP to B MSP. It’s kind of a gradual feeling that comes in and often it’s their perception. It can’t always be based on reality or isn’t always based on reality. It is sometimes just a perception and a feeling. You lose the client slowly over a number of years without you realising it. That’s why you have to have regular meetings with your clients.

Anyway, that was a side note. Let’s go back to you being that ordinary business owner or manager. You’ve decided it’s time for a change, and so you enter the research phase and you start to look at who else could help you. Now let’s assume you’re doing this the old fashioned way. So you’re not asking AI to do the research for you, but instead you start by Googling, IT support in your town, and people still do this. Just because you and I are using AI to do the research, a majority of people today are actually still just Googling it. I do think that’s going to shift over time, but let’s just go with this.

So they Google it and the results just bring up, of course, website after website, after website of the same. And as an ordinary business owner or manager, your heart sinks because you don’t know a great deal about IT support. you know roughly what IT support is, roughly what these MSPs do, and you have a vague idea of how they do it, but you don’t really care about the ins and outs of technical stuff.

Your clients just want someone they feel they can trust who’s going to look after their staff, watch their back, and just help their business to grow.

And when you’re looking at all of these websites and they all have very similar images and the words are all very much the same and the branding is all very much the same, it feels really difficult to pick out someone from lots and lots of the same. And then you stumble across a website that’s really different from all the rest. So this MSP doesn’t have those same tired stock images. It doesn’t have the same impersonal text. Its website is packed with personality and specifically it’s the personality of the owner. And as you look through the pages of this MSP’s website, you see photos, you see videos, you see stories about this person, their staff, their family, their clients, and their life. And in fact, what you don’t see is a lot of talk about technology, but you do see their live calendar and you book yourself in a 15 minute video call with that person, with the owner of the business who you’ve just been reading about and watching videos about. And this seems like a really smart move.

Okay, story over… right now as an MSP, as we stand here in early 2026, you have a massive opportunity. Because I see very, very few MSPs put their authentic personality into their marketing. Instead, most just look at what other MSPs are doing. They look at what their competitors are doing and for their own website, they do a version of their competitor’s website. Sometimes it’s not even a conscious choice to do that. You do that because it feels safe. If everyone’s doing this, then you should do this. And that kind of behaviour is built into us. It’s what drives social proof like reviews and testimonials, but it doesn’t work in marketing.

In marketing, you have to do something different to what everyone else is doing. And maybe in the years ahead, that kind of mentality of just copy your competitors will change. But as things stand today, you have a unique opportunity to stand out in your marketplace by being different. And the easiest way to be different is to base your marketing around you. Now, this is what I’ve done with the MSP Marketing Edge, and it’s working very well for me. I’m not a narcissist. I’m not an attention seeker. I’m actually an extroverted introvert. I much prefer being on my own, working on my own, sitting in a quiet room. I don’t get energy from big crowds of people. Big crowds of people suck energy out of me. That’s why I know that I’m an extroverted introvert.

But I understand the power of using your authentic personality as a differentiation tool, because of course the MSP Marketing Edge has competitors, but no one has me. No one else can be me or compete with me. That’s why I’m the face of the business and everything about my business has me at every single touchpoint because no one else can ever touch that. Could you do this? Should you do this? Absolutely you should.

What’s the very first thing for you to do? It’s to look at your website and say, how can I put me into that website? In fact, go and have a look at my site, mspmarketingedge.com. You’ll see photos, you’ll see videos. You go on the About Us page, you’ll see my story. There’s a picture of my dad on there. There’s a picture of my child on there. I tell you about my life and what I do. All of this has been done slowly over time. But the more of me I put into my marketing, the more benefit I get back. The more that MSPs feel like they know me, therefore they can like me, they can trust me.

You can do exactly the same. So look at your website, ask yourself what’s something small that I could get started with. Could you put a photo of you onto your website? Could you have a video of you on your homepage? Could you just do a bit of videoing with you and your staff, maybe even a couple of clients, put that on the website? Could you interview your clients? Could you tell more of your story? Could we see a photo of you with your family, with your team in the local area? All of these things and more can help to put you and your authentic personality onto your website. Which of these things is the right thing for you to get started with?

This MSP grew from $0 to $36m in 12 years

Featured guest: Ephraim Ebstein is not just another cyber security guy, he’s a $30M entrepreneur who built two national companies from the ground up, and now helps business leaders turn tech headaches into growth engines.

Ephraim brings real-world stories, explanations, and tactical advice that’s perfect for business-minded audiences. From stopping multi-million-dollar data breaches to deploying Al employees that actually replace headcount (and boost revenue), he breaks down complex systems in a way listeners can use today.

Tell me, why did you start your MSP? Were you trying to get control over the work you do, who you do it for and how it’s done? Were you just looking for freedom where you could generate lots of time and cash to enjoy a certain lifestyle? Or were you looking to build something massive, a true business that’s going to continue thriving long after you walk away from it? Well, if it’s that one, you’re going to love my special guest today. In just 12 years, he’s built a business, an MSP from nothing up to $36 million in annual revenue. And in this interview, he’s going to reveal what he did, how he did it, and what he would do if he was in your situation today.

Hi, my name is Ephraim Epstein. I’m the CEO of FIT Solutions, and we’re based in San Diego and Chicago.

Amazing, so thank you for joining me on the podcast because we’re going to explore today how you build an MSP from nothing up to seven figures. We’re going to find out all the mistakes you made on the way, all the disasters, all the catastrophes, all the things that went wrong, and in doing so, perhaps we’ll find some of the things that went right as well. So give us a brief overview of your story. How long have you had your MSP and what made you get started in the first place?

Yeah, so we started, or I started with a business partner at the very end of 2012. So it was October 2012 was the first month of business, but I had been working on maybe … I knew I wanted to get this started for about 11 months prior. So for about 11 months, I was working on creating contracts, building pricing, setting up relationships with contractors that I could utilise, all that kind of thing. And then when opportunity finally came, I was ready to strike and quit my job.

But I had been in the MSP space for several years prior to that. I had come from internal IT and then I worked for a company called the IT Pros that was in San Diego. And I was with them from the time they were about two million until the time they grew about five million. And I really loved it. I enjoyed that business. I enjoyed working with the owner and his ethics and integrity, core values, all of that I really enjoyed. I loved the team. They sold in around 2009, 2010. And at that time when they sold, they sold to Konica Minolta All Covered. And I went with that acquisition. I hung around for about two years, and then I had made the decision I wanted to start my own company.

That makes perfect sense. And just to give us an idea of what you’ve done in the last 13, 14 years or so. So give us an idea of what kind of size you are now. And if you don’t want to talk about revenue, then how many staff have you got, which is always a good indication.

Yeah, happy to talk about it. Last year we did 30 million in revenue, and this year we’re almost to the end of the year, we’re on track, I think we’re going to end around 36 to 38 million in revenue. So some growth and as far as team members, we have 116 team members, majority here in the United States, but we do have about 10% or about 15 people in international countries.

That’s pretty cool, so you’ve been productive then. You’ve been busy over the last few years. And just for the sake of our audience listening to this on the podcast or watching this on YouTube, we recorded this at the end of 2025, because obviously this is going out now in early 2026. So if you look back, let’s talk about the fun things first. What are the biggest mistakes you made? And it’s so much easier as a business owner at the successful end of a journey to look back and put your head in your hands and say, wow, did I really do A, B, and C? Because at the time they feel like the worst things ever. But as you look back, what were the biggest mistakes you made and the challenges that you screwed up the biggest?

Oh man, there’s been so many, but fortunately I’ve got more right than I got wrong, but you always remember the ones you got wrong so you can learn from them. I think there was a few things. So one, I think I was a little overly confident going into it and I wanted to pave my own way and do things differently than everybody else. And that led to a little bit overconfidence in doing things the hard way versus looking for mentors that had done it much larger, much more successful than me and trying to just copy them. So I could have shortened the amount of time it took me to get to the same outcome and a lot less pain had I done it that way.

The other thing is I didn’t have good financial literacy. You don’t learn that in school. And so unless you have someone teach you or you actively read books, listen to podcasts about it, you don’t learn it. So it took me a while to become a base level of financial literacy. And so that was another thing. Also, not focusing enough on the revenue and the sales skills that I needed to bring in revenue, that also took a lot of years. So those are some of them. And then there’s cultural things, just how I approach building the business and adding team members.

I used to run the company much more like friends and family, and now I run it like a professional sports team.

And what would you mean by that, you run it like a professional sports team? I mean, with the number of staff you’ve got, I guess you could just about know everyone by their first name, but you wouldn’t know their lives. So does that mean you’re running it like, Hey, we’re all a team here. We’re trying to do something.

I think it’s more of a mindset and looking at KPIs, metrics, numbers, results. And if you look at a sports team, everybody has to practice together. Everybody on the team must perform or you get cut from the team. That’s just the way it is. It’s just tough. Now, you can be friends, you can even make lifelong friends on a sports team, but just because you’re cool and your friend isn’t going to keep you on the team, your performance is going to keep you on the team. And so really changing that versus, oh, they’re a cool guy, but it’s not 100% aligned or there’s difficulties here. It just really comes down to results. And if you change your culture around the result, the outcome, not the hard work, not around the camaraderie, you can have those things, but they have to be absolutely secondary.

All the focus has to be on the metric, the results, the output and the performance, and then all the other things. But you can do that in a positive, in a fun way. It doesn’t have to be overbearing or negative, right? A lot of sports teams have fun while they’re working together, but they never lose sight of what the metrics need to be and what the wins need to be.

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. So you don’t go from scratch to the size of business you are accidentally. Something like that has to be done with intent. Was the intent there from day one? Because I’ve interviewed a lot of successful MSPs on this podcast over the last six or so years, and often the story, not always, but often the story is first few years, they’re going along as any MSP does, growing a little bit, winning clients, going whatsoever. And then often there’s a point where the business owner gets serious and as you say, gets into KPIs, builds a sales team, builds a marketing team, systemises the business. And there’s an intent to take this to 5, 10, 15 million. Is that what happened to you or were you doing that from day one?

So one thing I wanted from day one from the very beginning is I wanted to have a life. And if you’re a small MSP owner, you do not have a life. You don’t go to a restaurant without your laptop. You don’t go on vacation anywhere without checking your email or being on the hook because you’re probably in an engineering position yourself. So you might have help, but you’re basically the star of the show and you have a few support people on your side, but it’s not like a truly mature business. And so one thing is I was like, I don’t want that life. I want to be able to go on vacation. And so I said, if I’m going to build this thing, I have to at least get built as big as the company I had worked for, the IT Pros. And even though I was only on the engineering side, I wasn’t running every aspect of the business, I had that kind of programmed in my mind and I knew I was focused there. I was on autopilot. It was programmed into me. I got to get to 25 headcount, five million, something like that.

I didn’t know it exactly, it was a little bit fuzzy, but I was fully focused on that. So every time we would get more clients, more revenue, I was hiring and adding to the team. I was just stacking those bricks to get there as fast as I could. And once we got there, then it started to change because I realised that, one, I had a lot bigger goals for myself, and if I stayed here I wouldn’t achieve them, but also I couldn’t give my team opportunity to growth. They wouldn’t get to their goals. So part of my mission is to impact lives touched by technology. That’s impacting our clients and their businesses, but it’s also impacting our employees with their personal, professional, financial goals.

I can’t do that if I can’t create opportunity. And the only way for them to get that is to leave the organisation, which is what I don’t want. So I was always forced into growth, and I think every MSP is in that same position. You must grow… People want raises, people want promotions… If you want to be the person to give that to them, you have to grow. It’s literally the only way. So that was a big driver. And then I started getting more clear on the goals where we really want to go over 100,000 in annual revenue. So we got really, really focused on those goals and making annual goals to get us towards there.

Yeah. And if you look back at the first, let’s say the first five years, because I think for the majority of MSPs listening to this or watching this on YouTube, they’re still in that sort of sub three million, that’s kind of where we aim this podcast at. So if you look back at those first couple of years, when you were building yourself up to your first three, four, five million in revenue, what were the big things that made the biggest difference? So was it getting the marketing right? Was it getting the sales process right? Was it having a great product? What were those blocks?

Yeah, so that $3 million mark, it’s a break point and it is where a lot of MSPs just cannot get through that. So that’s a position as the owner that you’re probably starting to make a little bit more money, you’re starting to be a little more comfortable. And if you’re taking that and now you’re trying to grow, you kind of hit this wall where you really have to do a couple things. One, you still need to be frugal and you need to hire more staff and you need to replace yourself. I would say the vast majority of MSP owners that I’ve met come from an engineering background and they’re actively involved in client delivery, client service. And I had to make kind of around that time a very hard decision. It was actually a pivotal moment in our business, but the decision as silly as it sounds, is that I was not going to do any more engineering. A ticket came in, I was not going to work it. There was a fire that was going to arise. One of my other team members had to do it. And unless it was the absolute last resort where we were going to lose a client, I would under no circumstance other than that, touch a ticket. And I had to prepare my team for that and we had to talk that out and I set a date and it was very difficult, but I had to do it because as long as I was engineering, I was a lid to the business. So the business could not outgrow me without me making that conscious decision that I had to raise my lid so that the business could keep growing. That’s a really hard thing. You have to let go of control.

And in doing so and removing that lid, did that explode the growth of the business? Because I know a lot of MSPs are so fearful of letting go. They keep themselves as sort of third line or third plus a bit line. So they’re just keeping an eye on it. And even if there’s a service desk manager and even if there’s an account manager and a handler and all of this, they’re all just lingering there in the background, which is natural, isn’t it? When that’s what you do and that’s why you started the business in the first place. So that must have been hard for you, but did you see the reward that, Oh wow, this business is really taking off and actually I can just focus all of my time on growing this business and not worrying about the clients.

Yeah, that was a really big thing because now I can focus more on revenue and more strategic things that I needed to do. But to be able to let go, there’s a couple things that I learned from mentors that you have to have. So one, you have to have very clear written processes that people are trained on and are expected to follow and you have to have KPIs that you can measure and you need your team to report up to you so you don’t have to micromanage them. So the expectation is that you present me the KPIs every week. I don’t go look for what they are and then come to you and ask questions. If I have to micromanage in that way, you’re not the right person for the job. So that’s a training thing. There has to be processes that they can operate in, and then you can have the information you need as a business owner to have that oversight and make decisions.

So the process really has to come even before you add people. A lot of people, what they do, they think about it this way. They think about, I’m going to add people, then I’m going to build process and then I’m going to be profitable. You have to do it the other way. You have to be profitable first. So you got to figure out how to make your product and process profitable. Then you build process and then you add people. People should be the last thing, not the first thing. So people usually add the people, then build the process and expect profitability and it doesn’t work out. You got to be profitable first, process second, now add the people. So that was really big.

That allowed me to get to the next breakpoint. And the next breakpoint came at that $7 million, $8 million, $9 million mark. And what happened then is I realised financial literacy, financial discipline, and my ability to sell was what was keeping the business going further than that. So then I had to overcome, those were the next things I had to build myself on.

Yeah, I love that. So here’s a question for you… Let’s say you sold your business tomorrow and you woke up the day after and you had this crazy idea that you’d like to start again, and you’d like to start an MSP from scratch, a whole brand new marketplace. You don’t know anyone. And let’s say you’ve decided to do it on minimal budget rather than investing a lot of that cash you’ve just made from selling your business. So what would you do? If you had to give yourself sort of a two, three, four point plan of this is what I’m going to do to get started and dominate a marketplace quickly, what would you do?

What I would do very first thing, build your contract, otherwise obviously get your LLC and all of that. Build your contract. You could probably whip it out with ChatGPT or copy another one, something like that. Figure out the pricing of how many hours will it take me to service and pricing and get your first customer. You don’t have a business until you got your first customer and they’ve transacted money. There’s nothing more important than getting that first customer and then building from there. You don’t need a website, you don’t even need freaking business cards, you don’t even need a cool logo. Everyone puts that stuff first. Yeah, it’s helpful. Get your first customer. Your first customer’s not going to come through your website anyway. They’re going to come through a relationship that you’ve built and networking you’ve done. So get your contract in line so you’re legal and freaking sell and get that first customer.

That’s by far the number one thing you need to do to be able to have revenue as fast as possible. And then deliver and don’t fail on the delivery. Do a high quality, make sure that they’re a raving fan and then you can build off of that. So in fact, what’s funny is I told you that I spent 11 months building the company and I was building contracts, doing pricing, figuring this all out because I had no one to show me. When that first customer came, we didn’t have a website and we didn’t have a logo yet. We hadn’t gotten to it. That’s usually the very first thing everybody does. It’s like, oh, let’s make our website. let’s make our logo, blah, blah, blah. So when the customer came to me, they kind of knew me from the past and they wanted to work with me because I had done right by them in the past.

And so I told them, I said, “Hey, I don’t have a website and I don’t have a logo yet, but I’ve been working on this for some time. I have my contracts. I have my LLC. I have everything in place. I have my team in place. I even have the guys that I’m going to be part of my team to give delivery. We just hadn’t gotten to the marketing piece yet. And they were like, Okay, no problem. I signed them up. And that was my very first contract, $5,000 a month. That was 2012. So that was, for me, a very, very good thing. So I would say you need a customer. Your business is worthless and nothing and just an idea until you get your first customer. Then it’s worth something.

Yeah, I think that’s great advice. And I think I’m a marketing guy, right? So I would absolutely do the website stuff first, but you’re right, get some revenue first, then figure all that out. And I think a lot of MSPs would figure out the tech stack and they would figure out how to do the service and what ticketing and all of the PSA and all of that stuff. And actually you’re right, get the customer first and then figure all of that stuff along the way. What’s cool is when you’ve won the customer, you’ve got to figure that stuff out. So it makes sense to put all of your time and attention into getting the customers and then yeah, everything else sorts itself out.

Yeah. It forces you. I’m a big fan. I’ve done it the other way. I did fortunately the first time I did it right where I sold first, delivered second. And then I’ve also done the mistake when I built my cyber company is I put all this time and money into really building it and then trying to sell it. And it was a losing proposition for many years. It ended up working out at a sheer determination. But could I go back, I could have done it so much better… Not all, doesn’t mean I’m not giving it foresight, but if you’re an ethical moral person, you are going to deliver on what you promise.

So I’m an ethical, moral person. And if I commit to doing something, I’m going to do it. So when somebody signs a contract with me, I will, at my own personal expense and detriment, if I sold it wrong, I’m going to deliver on that contract no matter what it takes because that’s my reputation and my reputation is gold. So if that’s you, there’s no problem. Don’t overanalyse the situation. A lot of people are analysers. You got to sell it and then deliver on it. And I know that sounds kind of crazy to a technical person that’s a high analyser, but you can spend years tinkering and trying to make the perfect product and then you try to go to market and you’re like, why is no one buying it? It’s just not how it works.

Yeah, I love it. Well this has been a fascinating insight into your journey. Thank you. We are out of time. The final thing I want to ask you is, I know that you are interested in acquiring other MSPs for those people that have at the end of their journey and they’re ready to make an exit. So just tell us roughly what would make a good MSP for you and what’s the best way to get in touch with you?

You can get in touch with me, if you Google my name, I’m on LinkedIn, Instagram, our website fitsolutions.biz. I would love to connect on any platform that you want to connect on. And we are looking to scale. We’re not PE or private equity money or VC capital, so just me. And I have been trying to find other business owners that have similarly aligned cultures. And I found two that wanted to exit the business and I brought them on and their people on, and it was a really good experience. And so if there’s someone else out there that aligns with me in some way, I would love to have a conversation. You can find me on my LinkedIn, Ephraim Ebstein or Instagram. I’m also on Facebook and Twitter or X now and the rest of it.

The Marketing Minute

Hi, I’m Nate Freedman from MSP Sites, and here’s a quick way to win more MSP clients. If a prospect doesn’t know you, like you, and trust you, they’re not buying. So that’s where proof points come in. This is the hard evidence that says, yes, we can deliver. And there are four types of proof points you need.

1. The first one is functional. These are impressive stats like a 99% customer satisfaction score or 20 plus years in business.
2. There are social proof points as your community ties, like sponsoring local events or donating to charities.
3. There are economic proof points, things like your measurable impact that you have on your clients. For example, saving a client 10 hours a week or driving big revenue growth.
4. And finally, there are credential proof points. These are awards, partnerships, and recognition that actually means something to a business owner. Pick two to five in each category, put them everywhere prospects see you and watch trust and sales skyrocket.

Mentioned links

• This podcast is in conjunction with the MSP Marketing Edge, the world’s leading white label content marketing and growth training subscription.
• Join me in MSP Marketing Facebook group.
• Connect with me on LinkedIn.
• Connect with my guest, Ephraim Ebstein, on LinkedIn, and visit the FIT Solutions website.
• Connect with my Marketing Minute contributor, Nate Freedman, on LinkedIn.
• Got a question about your MSP’s marketing? Let me know.

Welcome to Episode 321 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge.

Convert relationships

Hello and happy New Year, and welcome to our final special episode of this podcast. We’re finishing a three part series this week. Last year, I released my book, MSP marketing: Start Here, about a 3 step lead generation system, which is trusted by hundreds and hundreds of MSPs around the world.

In the first special, we looked at the first step – build audiences. Last week was the second step – grow relationships, and today, starting 2026, we’re going to do the final step – convert relationships.

Let me paint a picture. You’ve built your audience, you’ve nurtured your relationships, but now what? How do you turn all of that goodwill into actually clients without feeling pushy, desperate, or salesy? Because no MSP wants to be like that. Well, that is where step three comes in – convert relationships.

I like to think of this stage as harvesting, farming. You’ve spent months planting seeds – every post, every email, every conversation – and now it’s time to gently shake the tree and see what’s ready to fall out.

And I say gently because good sales isn’t about pressure, it’s all about timing. Remember, business owners only switch MSPs when they are ready, not when you are ready, or you need more MRR. So your job is to make sure that when that readiness appears, when they finally get fed up with their current incumbent MSP, you are the first person that they think of. And that’s why conversion is as much about staying in touch as it is about asking for the business. There are a few practical ways to do this.

The first is personal outreach, and by that I mean a phone call. But here’s the trick. It shouldn’t come from you. So I’m assuming that you are the business owner and you’ve already got a million other things to do, right? So hire someone, even if that person is part-time, to just make those calls for you. A back to work mom is great for this. Someone working two to three hours a day, two to three days a week, and you want someone warm, friendly, and curious. Their job is not to sell IT support, it’s just to have conversations on your behalf. Things like, Hey, we connected on LinkedIn a while ago, or you connected with my boss on LinkedIn a while ago. How’s business going? Something super simple like that, something human that starts and maintains and builds relationships that can turn into video calls. That’s the thing. Her job is to book a video call with you, a 10 to 15 minute video call, and then you do the hard work of turning the video call into a real sales meeting.

Now, the other way that you can do this is through marketing campaigns. And I’m not talking about the one-off hit and hope campaigns that we all get tempted by or that we get from vendors, and you think, oh, this is brilliant, and you do one piece of activity and then you’re kind of upset that nothing happens from that. I’m talking about systematic outreach marketing campaigns that build on the relationship that you’re building with your prospects. So things like sending a physical letter out to a batch of prospects and then following that up with an email the next day saying, Hey, did you get my letter? And then making a friendly follow-up call later in the week. Now, this stuff is old school, but I promise you it works because most MSPs don’t bother doing this. They rely entirely on digital marketing, and that means that prospects are drowning in digital noise, but they’re not drowning in real life marketing assets. So a well-written letter or a postcard with their name on it that really cuts through. It feels personal, it feels different, and it sparks conversations.

And then there’s one of my favourite tactics, the printed newsletter. Every month you send one to your Dream 100. These are the hundred hottest prospects that you would love to have as clients, and it doesn’t have to be glossy, it just has to be real. Write about what’s happening in your world or share short tech tips. Talk about the humans in your team. The goal isn’t to sell in this, it’s just to stay top of mind, because when they finally reach the point when they’re ready to switch MSPs, they won’t Google it. They’ll just reach for the person they already like and trust, and that should be you. Because the truth is converting relationships isn’t one big moment. It’s a series of small nudges. You build trust through consistency, you create curiosity through human contact, and you stay visible until the timing’s right, and then when the stars align, it feels effortless.

So at this exciting time of the year where it feels like there’s this huge opportunity, the whole of 2026 ahead of us, take a moment to look at your pipeline. Who are the people that already like you, who’s opened your last few emails, who comments on your posts or keeps showing up on your radar? Those are your warmest opportunities, and you don’t need a big sales campaign to move them forward. You just need to have a conversation, send a message, pick up the phone and say, Hey, how’s everything going? Anything you need help with this year? Because that’s it. Sometimes the lightest touch opens the biggest doors, because in the end marketing your MSP is just relationship building at scale, and sales is simply the next step in that relationship.

If you’ve done the first two steps well, if you’ve built your audience and nurtured your relationships, then conversion doesn’t feel awkward, it feels natural, because you’ve earned it. And that’s how you grow an MSP that wins clients every single month without chasing, spamming or shouting. You just stay human, consistent and present. That’s the system, that’s the magic, and that’s your mission for the year ahead. A reminder that if you want to go into more detail in this, it’s all in the book MSP marketing: Start Here. It’s on Amazon as a paperback and a Kindle, and also on Audible.

Mentioned links

• This podcast is in conjunction with the MSP Marketing Edge, the world’s leading white label content marketing and growth training subscription.
• Join me in MSP Marketing Facebook group.
• Connect with me on LinkedIn.
• Recommended book: MSP marketing: Start Here by Paul Green.
• Got a question about your MSP’s marketing? Let me know.

Welcome to Episode 320 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge.

Grow relationships

Hello and welcome to another special episode of the podcast. We are continuing a three-part series this week. Earlier this year I released my book, MSP marketing: Start Here, about a 3 step lead generation system trusted by hundreds and hundreds of MSPs around the world. Last week, we looked at the first step – build audiences. Today it’s the second step – grow relationships.

I want to tell you a secret about marketing that most MSPs miss. It’s not about technology. It’s not about your tools, your stack or your accreditations. It’s about trust. Because nobody’s buying from you until they trust you, and they can’t trust you until they like you, and they can’t like you until they know you. That’s why the second step, growing relationships, matters so much.

Think about your own buying habits. When was the last time you hired someone for your business – a supplier, a consultant, or an agency – where you knew deep down, these are my people, this is my person. That didn’t happen because they cold called you at the right moment, right? It happened because you felt like you already knew them. Maybe you’d seen their content or you’d heard their stories or maybe laughed at their bad jokes, or maybe a friend had talked about them, or maybe you just liked their energy. You trusted them before you ever met with them. And that’s what you’re trying to create for your prospects.

Growing relationships is about showing up regularly with something useful, human, consistent. And the good news is it doesn’t need to be complicated.

You don’t need to become a social media influencer or hire a full-time marketing team. You just need to keep feeding your audiences with what I call edutainment – education and entertainment combined, something that teaches and makes them smile at the same time. Now, that’s your weekly email, that’s your blog on your website, that’s your LinkedIn posts which should go out every day, it’s your videos that you make or that you get in for your business. It’s not about talking tech, it’s about talking people.

Business owners don’t care about patching, monitoring, or endpoint protection. They care about whether their team can get work done without tearing their hair out. They care about productivity, they care about growth, stress, risk. So talk about those things. Show them that you understand what it’s like to run a business because that’s what builds connection. One of my favorite ways to do this is through storytelling. Tell stories about your clients with permission of course, or at the very least, anonymise it. Tell them how a small tech change made someone’s life easier, about mistakes that you made early in your business and what you learned. Because stories stick and if you can make someone feel something – curiosity relief, even a little amusement – they will remember you.

And the magic is that over time, these people start to feel like they know you. They see your face on LinkedIn every week. They read your newsletter over their morning coffee. They might even forward one of your emails to a colleague. They’re building a relationship with you even though you’ve never met. That’s the heart of marketing today. Asynchronous relationships. You build them slowly with every piece of content that you publish. And one day out of nowhere, that quiet relationship becomes real. Someone you’ve never spoken to sends you a message saying, Hey, do you know we’ve been following your stuff for ages, can we talk? And that’s when you know that your system’s working.

The hardest part is patience. When you start, it does feel like you’re shouting into the void. You post, you email, and you get nothing back, it’s really quiet. But consistency wins, because one day you wake up and you realise that you’ve become the IT guy that everyone in your area kind of knows. And not because of ads, not because of SEO or AEO (answer engine optimisation, which is like AI’s search engine optimisation), but because you built a relationship with hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people over time.

So if you want to grow faster next year, here’s my 2026 challenge to you. Keep showing up. Write one email a week, post every day on LinkedIn, record a short video ideally every week or once every month, even when you can’t be bothered and you feel like no one’s watching, someone is. They’re just not ready to talk yet, but they are warming up. And when they finally need a new MSP, you are going to be the only one who doesn’t feel so much like a stranger. That’s the power of growing relationships. It’s slow, but it’s unstoppable. And if you want to go into more detail on this, it’s all in my book. MSP marketing: Start Here. You can get it on Amazon as a paperback and Kindle, and it’s also on Audible.

Mentioned links

• This podcast is in conjunction with the MSP Marketing Edge, the world’s leading white label content marketing and growth training subscription.
• Join me in MSP Marketing Facebook group.
• Connect with me on LinkedIn.
• Recommended book: MSP marketing: Start Here by Paul Green.
• Got a question about your MSP’s marketing? Let me know.

Welcome to Episode 319 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge

Build audiences

Hello and welcome to a special episode of the podcast. We are kicking off a three part series this week. Earlier this year, I released my latest book, it’s called MSP marketing: Start Here, and it’s all about a 3 step lead generation system trusted by hundreds and hundreds of MSPs around the world. It’s super simple and yet incredibly powerful, and that’s by design. So starting this week, we’re doing a deep dive into it. Let me tell you what the 3 step system is, and then this week we’re going to look at the first step.

I see my job as making marketing super simple for you, which is why I’ve pulled together an entire marketing strategy, a whole 3 step system into just six words. Let me tell you what they are – Build audiences. Grow relationships. Convert relationships. Super simple. But as you’re about to hear today and over the next couple of weeks, there’s a lot of detail within these three steps.

This week’s special, we’re just going to focus on how you can build audiences. So let me start with the question. If I asked you right now to name 10 local business owners who would love to hear from you about their IT, could you do that? Most MSPs can’t, and that’s not a criticism, it’s just the reality of how most MSPs build their businesses. They focus on doing great work for the clients they’ve already got, which is great. They rely on word of mouth, referrals, and maybe the occasional inbound lead.

Here’s the truth, if you don’t have an audience to market to, then you don’t really have a marketing engine. You’ve got luck but you haven’t got control.

Building audiences is the foundation of everything else you’ll do in marketing your MSP. And yet, it’s the bit that most MSPs skip because it feels slow, it’s not sexy. You can’t post a selfie about it on LinkedIn and get a dopamine rush of likes. But when you’ve got an audience, a real audience of people who are listening to you, trust me, everything changes. Let me tell you where this hit me the hardest.

Back in my first business, a marketing agency that I built up between 2005 and then sold in 2016. Back in the early days, I was desperate for predictable leads and I tried everything… one-off campaigns, buying data lists, I was spending too much on ads and some things worked a little bit, but most of these things didn’t work. And then one day I realised something painfully simple. I didn’t have an audience. I had a client base, and I had some people on my email list, but I didn’t have a community of people who wanted to hear from me.

And that’s when I stopped chasing leads and started building lists. Lists of people who liked what I had to say. People who might not buy today, but who might remember me when they were ready to buy. And that’s when things really started to change in that previous business. So what does building audiences look like for you as an MSP? It’s not complicated. It’s small, deliberate habits that compound.

You start by finding the right people on LinkedIn. What if you were to attempt 10 new connections every weekday? And here’s the thing, it’s not about the numbers that you build up. It’s about doing this intentionally, because you’re not connecting to just everyone, you’re connecting to the right kind of people, the people you’d like to do business with – the decision makers, the people who run businesses that match your ideal client profile. Because when your connections are right, your content really starts to land in front of the right people. And then you engage with them, you comment thoughtfully on their posts, not just nice post or, yeah I totally agree, but something real, something that adds value to their posts.

So essentially you’re human. You show a bit of your personality, and gradually the algorithm does something magical. It starts to show you in their feeds. In fact, what’s happening here is a bit of a mix of outbound and inbound marketing. By making connection requests to people, which is outbound, and then by commenting on other people’s posts, which is inbound, some of those people will connection request you. And this is really good for telling LinkedIn that you are a popular and in demand person. Outbound, inbound, that’s the start of awareness on LinkedIn.

Now, here’s the clever bit, because you take that LinkedIn list, which is just one audience, and you use it to start building your own email database. Because one of the downsides of LinkedIn is that it’s a borrowed audience. At any point, the algorithm could change or you could even be banned from LinkedIn and lose that audience altogether. So to balance that out, you also build alongside it something called an owned audience. And this is where the data is yours. And the ideal owned audience for an MSP is your email list. You add the connections that you’re making on LinkedIn to your CRM. You find their email address, maybe even their business address so that you can reach them outside social media.

And of course, you can spend money on this and do it quickly by using plugins such as Lusher, Apollo or Hunter.io. And these are plugins which sit in your Chrome and will show people’s email addresses. Or you can just Google, you essentially do a brute force search. You Google to find their email address. Whichever way you use, now you’ve got multiple touchpoints. You have the ability to reach people via the borrowed audience of LinkedIn, which is where they are, and also via your own audience of emailing them. And this is how marketing becomes a system, instead of an event. Every day you add a few names to the pot. Every week, you’ve then got a few more people who know who you are. And every month that pot compounds.

Before you know it, you’ve got hundreds, maybe eventually thousands of people who know your name, they see your face now and again. And some of them will start to think of you as the local IT expert. So you’re not chasing them anymore, you are present in their world within LinkedIn and on their email. And that is the power of building audiences. You are not begging for attention. You are quietly, patiently earning it. Because every future sale starts here, with someone who’s aware you exist and who’s been quietly learning to trust you long before they need you. So when their current MSP messes up, when they wake up one morning thinking, do you know what, we need someone new, you are already in their mind. And that’s how you win before the selling even starts.

So if you do one thing differently in 2026, build audiences. 10 new LinkedIn connections a day, a couple of minutes commenting every day. Make it a habit, not a project. Because your audience is your future pipeline, and the MSP who builds one now will own their market in a few years time. If you want to go into a bit more detail on this, it’s all laid out in my book, MSP marketing: Start Here. You can get it on Amazon as a paperback and a Kindle, and it’s also on Audible.

Mentioned links

• This podcast is in conjunction with the MSP Marketing Edge, the world’s leading white label content marketing and growth training subscription.
• Join me in MSP Marketing Facebook group.
• Connect with me on LinkedIn.
• Recommended book: MSP marketing: Start Here by Paul Green.
• Got a question about your MSP’s marketing? Let me know.

Welcome to this SPECIAL Episode 318 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge.

5 expert predictions for MSPs in 2026

Hello and welcome to the first of four special episodes to take us through Christmas and into 2026. And that’s actually where we’re starting, with predictions for next year.

You’re going to hear predictions about the demand for cyber security, how content marketing might die as a marketing channel, a really cool idea about creating free apps as lead magnets, why you should help your clients reign in the usage of SaaS tools, why you should invest into your leadership and how to beat much bigger MSPs in your marketplace. And as you’d expect, there’s a lot of talk about AI.

Hi there, it’s Jamie Warner, CEO of MSP eNerds and SAS vender, Invarosoft. So what are my predictions for 2026 in the MSP industry? Well, I’ve got a few to tell you. First one is SMB, small to medium businesses, are always going to need an IT partner. I think people have been saying for many years, our relevance won’t be there in the future. As long as you have non-technical people that don’t understand technology, we’ll always have a huge amount of business to chase and a huge amount of opportunity there for outsourced IT services and to be an IT partner for them.

I think the number one trend though will always continue to be cyber security. I’m definitely noticing in my world, in the eNerds world, that new clients are always very cautious and worried about their security posture. So certainly focusing on that and ensuring that you’re following one of the best practice frameworks so that you can articulate how your service delivery will meet those cyber security requirements is going to be important.

Another one, artificial intelligence, obviously it’s a huge buzzword. How do MSPs get engaged? There’s a lot of people out there trying to tell you how you can just do certain things around AI. I think firstly, let’s get the platform right as MSPs, and then of course it’s going to be the Microsoft platform with Copilot. So making sure that you are crystal clear on how Copilot works. One of the things we are doing is running webinars with the big vendors and distributors with their experts around this space. Or you could become your own expert if you like, and making sure that you are being proactive with your advice around how to actually use AI in the Microsoft Suite. It tends to be 90+% of businesses are on the Microsoft platform unless you’re purely a Google shop or the like, but ultimately that’s a really good place to start and make sure that you are best in class around.

The last one that I would say, and it’s that my biggest bug bear if anyone see me talk, is just how we articulate our services when you get a new business lead.

One thing that will not change in 2026 is that when clients are looking for a new IT partner, they’re essentially looking for a step up in service delivery and in the experience they get.

So when you get a new lead, your only job is to convince them that your service delivery methodology is going to be a step up. And so your job is to argue the case of how you are going to deliver a service that will be best in class. So what are you going to talk about?

The big things is actually explaining and visually explaining, for example, your customer experience technology, how visibly you’re going to provide them with a one pane of glass. It could be your technology business reviews actually showing them how you’re going to do a gap analysis, a traffic light report, how you’re going to do your Essential Eight report or whatever the cyber security framework you are using and actually showing them how this looks. What does onboarding look like? How does account management look like? All of these different things are arguments and things that you need to put into your sales process to demonstrate that you are going to be a step up.

I don’t think that’s going to change in 2026 and as an example, my company eNerds, we only target small to medium businesses just like you. It’s the same and last year we grew by a million dollars in revenue and this year we’ll grow by another million dollars in revenue just by signing up a lot of clients and being really efficient at doing our advisory with those clients. Making sure we’re having those relevant conversations and actually squeezing the lemon of getting that deal flow that’s out there that relates to advisory.

These are things they need, not things they don’t need, and just being really efficient around that process. And you’ll find yourself growing by a quarter of a million, half a million, a million each year if you get your new business arguments right, and you sign up more clients and then of course you go and have a chat to them around advisory. So I think those things are going to stay the same in 2026. I wish you continued success and hopefully we all have a absolute cracker of a year next year. Take care.

Here’s Matt Solomon from Channel Program. So my prediction for 2026 is that MSPs are going to battle a very similar challenge that they’ve had over the years, which is differentiation. The reality is that 92% of an MSP’s core stack is the identical stack to their competitors. And so MSPs who will stop selling tools and tickets and really start focusing on business outcomes, I think are going to be the ones who really set themselves apart by aligning services directly to their customer’s bottom line.

MSPs will really need to rethink what efficiency means to their small business customers. It’s no longer about lowering internal labour costs. It’s about driving measurable savings, productivity, and profitability for your clients.

Another major shift is the work on SAS sprawl. In 2026 MSPs will take a far more active role in helping customers reign in all of that chaos, not just from security and compliance standpoint, but also in managing the license utilisation, the renewals and the vendor contracts. The MSPs who can provide visibility and control access to that massive sprawl that they’re experiencing will earn the trust and get the margins that they need. The average SMB is using over 80 SaaS tools and they’re not managing them properly, and it’s only getting worse with AI tools because everybody’s adding them. I think the MSPs that will thrive will be the ones to connect the dots between costs, compliance and customer outcomes.

2026 isn’t about adding more tools. It’s about making every tool, every process and every relationship work smarter for the customer’s bottom line.

Hey, this is Brian Gillette from Feel-Good MSP and the host of the MSP Sales Podcast, and here are my predictions for what will happen to the MSP channel in 2026. My predictions unfortunately are bleak for some, but they’re very optimistic for others. I think that with an increase in marketing resources that are being made available to MSPs, the amount of people who are trying to do marketing as a service or content as a service, and frankly with the exponential increase of AI slop that’s being generated, I think that the traditional content marketing methods for MSPs is going to flatline in its efficacy for the average MSP.

If you’re just doing the same thing that everybody’s doing, you’re going to become even quieter or even less noticeable than you are right now because so many more people are going to be trying to do it the easy way.

So what’s the result going to be? I believe that the MSPs who are traditionally and unfortunately smaller who don’t have their business development and their go-to-market stuff together, I think they’re going to struggle and frankly, I think some of them are going to go out of business. Because it’s getting harder and harder to get attention if you’re phoning it in, and frankly, the average technical acumen of the small business is growing. So if you’re only working with the five to 15 user clients, those people might not think they need you as much as they have in previous years.

The inverse of that is that many of those small MSPs are going to start losing clients because they don’t know how to get their narrative and their value proposition together. Those clients are going to aggregate to the MSPs in your region who have the best go-to-market strategy, not the strongest stack, not the most experienced, the ones who have the cleanest, clearest narrative to the small business community of how that MSP is going to transform their life. So I do think there’s going to be an aggregation in some ways of clients towards the MSPs who have their stuff together.

The second prediction I have that is also related to AI, is I believe that vibe coding is going to unfortunately or fortunately, become much easier, and I foresee that the pioneering the forefront MSPs are going to start using things like vibe coding to put together really functionally specific highly valuable resources that they can use as introductory offers or lead magnets. If you could give a practice manager or an office manager an application that could give her all of her resources in one place that’s HIPAA compliant and that could plug into all the apps that she’s already using, make it easier for her to organise her day, she’s going to use it. If you can come up with any resource like that, that can even help people do some basic helpdesk configuration themself, they’re going to use it.

So I foresee that some MSPs who are jumping on iterative and generative AI in a really thought provoking way, deploying all of their expertise, rather than just trying to make a bunch of stuff as fast as they can, I think they’re going to develop resources that will become powerful lead magnets that will create more conversation and it will be a tractor pull in their entire MQL funnel. So that’s what I think the opportunity is for managed services in the next year, and I think that there is going to be an opportunity cost for anyone who doesn’t have the wherewithal and the gumption and the courage to take advantage of those ideas. Either way, I hope 2026 is an amazing year for you and your MSP. I sincerely wish you nothing but the best.

Hi, this is Karl Palachuk, Owner of Small Biz Thoughts. Thank you Paul for giving me the opportunity to say a few things about what I think is coming in 2026 and how it’s going to affect your go-to-market strategies. I think there are two big trends you’re already aware of them, that you should consciously think about and say, okay, how do I go to market with intention controlling the message and deciding how I want to show up to clients and prospects?

The first one is very easy – artificial intelligence – and the good news is small businesses have overwhelmingly said, wait, wait, wait, we don’t think it’s ready for prime time, we think it’s dangerous, we want to go very slow into it. What that means for you is that instead of pushing them into AI, you can actually make a fair amount of money by saying, hey, let me be your artificial intelligence advisor. I am not going to push you into AI, what I am going to do is help you determine how you might automate things in your business more effectively with or without AI. And how you can evaluate AI enabled pieces of your business that are being pushed by other vendors.

As a technologist, you only have to stay one step ahead of your clients in order to lead them through new technologies. And also know if you are not leading them, somebody else will.

Many people made a lot less money on the cloud because they basically waited until it was a commodity, figured out what other people were doing to make money and became the second tier of people following that business model. And that’s fine if you want to do that with AI, you’ve got some time. But it really is better to say, look, we are a leader in this industry. We lead with new technology for both clients and prospects. It’s good to put yourself out there as a professional investing in the industry and investing in new technology that comes along. You can rely on us for staying on the cutting edge and helping you make good decisions about your technology. That’s a powerful message and the SMB/SME market is absolutely ready to hear it. I think that’s a great go-to-market strategy for 2026.

The other trend that’s happening is the massive mergers and acquisitions. And let me tell you the best way I think to go into market with that is to be a bespoke consultant. Literally say we are going to only automate when it improves service for the client, not because it makes life easy for us. The larger companies get, the more they have to treat their clients as just a number instead of human beings with problems and concerns and running a small business that’s got a thin margin of profit. Double down on client meetings. Make sure that you understand their business. Make sure that they engage you in conversations about what they should be doing going forward. Selling yourself as a hands-on consultant who really takes time to make their business as successful as possible, will really set you apart in a world where everyone else is saying, oh, I got to have 10% growth this quarter, so I need to get a whole bunch of clients and I will promise them anything and deliver very little, especially customer service.

Customer service is the first victim of growing companies, and the larger they get, the harder it is for them to give one-on-one customer service that actually makes clients feel like someone is taking care of them. In other words, the fundamental skillset that got you where you are today is your most powerful tool as you move into 2026 and take on ever growing competition from global and national organisations that really just didn’t exist a few years ago. In either case, go with intention, decide how you want to show up in the market, make sure that you make a conscious decision by that, and do not just follow the trends and be a second tier money maker in 2026. I wish you all the best of everything you do in your company. This is Karl Palachuk, hoping you have a spectacular 2026.

Hey, it’s Ian Luckett from the MSP Growth Hub. Here’s my predictions for 2026 for the MSP landscape and they’re going to be twofold. First things first is all around investing in your people and your leadership. Over the last year, we’ve been working with many high growth MSPs and really highly profitable MSPs. And the ones that are really winning are the ones who are investing in their people. They’re investing in the team that’s going to help you get out of the business and to help you to spend more time strategically rather than getting stuck in the business all of the time. How do we do that? We create our vision, our mission, our values.

We are hearing people that used to poo poo this idea now thinking this is the best thing that’s ever happened. My team are connected, my team are aligned, everybody’s rowing in the same direction.

We are employing people and they’re staying there not leaving after a short period of time. And the reason for that is because they’re in flow with you. They’re aligned with where you want to go with a business. You’ve been a bit of a vulnerable leader, and also we’ve got some amazing future leaders coming up as well. So how do you help your SDMs and your senior account managers and your senior people support you so that you can then lift yourself up? So I’m going to see a big insurgence in people actually spending more time on their leadership and spending more time on their people.

The other one flips. That’s a little bit analog, isn’t it? That’s a little bit old school. The other one is around AI. Now, I know that with AI, you got shiny balls coming in from your left in your right up above an envelope, wherever it might be. But the information that we are hearing right now about AI is yes, it’s moving very, very fast, but you need to be investing in it first. You can’t become an expert if you haven’t experienced some of the growth around AI, how it works, because when you do that, guess what you’re going to do? You’re going to do exactly the same as you did when you learned all those technical skills back in the day with the computers and servers and the WIFI.

Now, we want you to be able to be in a position where you’re investing ahead of the curve on AI in your own business so that you can then go and support your customers in their AI journey. Remember what happened at the pandemic? Whole world shut down in 24 hours, and all of a sudden they’re ringing you up saying, Hey, you need to fix my problems because I need a technical person to help me work from home to help me transfer these large files, to help me do all those other things. This is kind of the same thing, but we haven’t got the emergency situation, but it will be an emergency situation if the large MSPs, and what they’re doing is they’re investing hundreds of thousands of pounds in AI readiness, and if we’re not careful, they’re going to go around and they’re going to swallow up all the little guys who haven’t invested in this.

So it’s really important that you invest in AI properly in your own business. You go out and you talk to your customers about AI and how it can enable their business. Remember, it’s all about that transfer of value. If you are adding value to your customers, they’re going to see you as a valuable partner and a valuable part of their business. But if you are not talking to them about AI, somebody else will be. And then guess what you think’s going to happen to that person? They’re going to be helping them in that next stage like they did in the pandemic, and then they’re going to move themselves over.

So two things for me in 2026. Focus on your people…

Get the right people in the right roles with the right values lined up to your vision, and you’ll be blown away what you will do.

And number two, let’s just get AI ready. Let’s just get ahead of the curve, ahead of the technical curve. Don’t get caught up in the shiny ball syndrome. Fit your own oxygen mask first. Get your ideas in a row and you will have an incredible 2026.

I just want to say thank you to everybody for supporting the MSP Growth Hub in the last year, particularly the podcast, which we’ve got IT Experts Podcast, which is not as good as Paul’s podcast, but you know what, it may be one day. That’s my aspiration. But anyway, great friends like Paul and the Channel, it’s an amazing place to be. We’re grateful for every single one of you. Thanks again and wishing you every success in 2026, and I look forward to catching up and connecting soon. Take care now.

Mentioned links

• This podcast is in conjunction with the MSP Marketing Edge, the world’s leading white label content marketing and growth training subscription.
• Join me in MSP Marketing Facebook group.
• Connect with me on LinkedIn.
• Connect with my guests on LinkedIn: Jamie Warner, Matt Soloman, Brian Gillette, Karl Palachuk, Ian Luckett.
• Got a question about your MSP’s marketing? Let me know.

Welcome to Episode 317 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge.

Does AI recommend your MSP?

The way that prospects are searching for a new MSP is changing dramatically. The old way where people just went onto Google and did their own research is increasingly being replaced by the new way, where someone gets AI to do the research phase for them and then just validates the suggestions made. That means you need to understand what the AI insisted buying journey is and make sure your MSP has all the correct marketing resources in place. You know how for years we’ve all been obsessed with SEO, search engine optimisation. Getting your keywords right, building back links, and just ranking higher on Google. That’s been the game for years.

The game’s changing again, and if you’re not watching what’s happening with AI discovery, you could slowly find your MSP disappearing from view.

Let me explain. So I was recently reading a pretty cool newsletter and it was about a company called, I think it’s pronounced “Docebo”. They’re not in our world, they sell something called a learning management system, goodness knows what that is. But they’ve been quietly killing it frankly, in a new world of what’s got many different names but seems to be being called “answer engine optimisation” or AEO. You may have heard me refer to it before in videos or on the podcast as GEO, but let’s call it AEO, answer engine optimisation, from here on forward.

In simple terms, this is all about being discovered inside AI tools like ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, or Perplexity. That’s where many people now are now going to do their research. So instead of just going onto Google and typing What’s the best MSP for me or IT support near me, they’re asking ChatGPT, What’s the best IT support for a 20 person business that’s a legal practice or something like that. To use the example I was reading in the newsletter, they’re going on to ChatGPT and saying, What’s the best LMS, learning management system, for a 500 person company with a remote workforce? And if you’re not one of the companies that the AI mentions, then you don’t even get a chance.

So that company I was telling you about, Docebo, they noticed this some time ago and they decided to go all in on giving AI the resources it needs to make sure they come up in that AI research. And now nearly 13% of their high intent leads, that’s a bit of a marketing term for people who actually go on to book demos, so for you a high intent lead will be someone who books a 15 minute call into your calendar. For that company, 13% of their high intent leads are now coming from AI discovery that’s gone up 400% in a year. And they’re doing this, because they’re a big business, but it’s all being powered by one person in their marketing team using the right strategy and a bit of clever AI automation.

And here’s what I really found fascinating from reading this newsletter. They realise that the real battle here is no longer about generic keywords or anything like that… it’s actually about brand. So when people are using AI tools, they’ll get a recommendation and then they’ll take the brand and they’ll go onto Google and search for the brand name directly. So this company Docebo, they shifted their focus from trying to rank on Google for best LMS, which is their keyword, to making sure that more people actually knew their name, Docebo, which is a big mindset shift in your marketing. And if you’ve had an SEO driven strategy, you might need a similar big mindset shift.

Because it means that the most important metric isn’t how high are we ranking on Google, it’s how many people are searching for our own brand. In other words, your reputation becomes your SEO. So you run an MSP and you might be thinking, well Paul, this is fascinating, but we are not playing at Docebo level, and of course you’re right. But this shift does affect you too because over the next couple of years, as we go into 2026 and then 2027, your prospects are going to stop Googling IT support this town or near me, and instead they are going to ask their preferred AI tool, Which IT companies in my area have great customer service and specialise in cyber security. And if those AI tools don’t know about you, if they can’t find enough trustworthy, well-structured up-to-date content about your business, then you’ll vanish from the shortlist before it’s even written.

And that’s why now is the time to start building your discoverability. So I’ve got for you three things that you can do…

Number one: Keep your website content fresh, structured and factual. So AI tools, they love data tables, they love clear headings in blogs and they love real case studies. Make sure you’ve got plenty of that on your website.

Number two: Make sure your brand name is mentioned in lots of the right context, so obviously on your websites, but also if you can get other articles written about you elsewhere. Obviously if you can get mentions on review platforms where they actually put the business name in, that would be fantastic if you can get your customers to do that. And you might even try and build up mentions of your MSP in forums like Reddit or Quora. Not because the humans are going to go there to look for you, but because it’s going to help with your AI discoverability.

Number three: Focus your SEO more on who you are and what problems you solve, rather than chasing random keywords that don’t convert. So yes, SEO is still going to be a thing going forward, but I think this is quite exciting because it’s hard if you are one of 50 or 60 MSPs in a town and someone else is already dominating traditional SEO for keywords, this is great, because now you are focusing your SEO on making sure that more people know about your MSP. And this company Docebo’s research and success in fact shows what’s possible. They’re now generating pipeline and leads and clients from AI searches, and they’re doing it right now. And they’ve done it not by gaming the system, but by creating genuinely useful high-trust content that AI can easily understand and find and surface and pass and turn into research for people.

So here’s my opinion, just as we all have to learn SEO as part of our marketing. It’s something we’ve all had to do over the last couple of decades. Now we’ll all need to learn AEO over the next few years, and this really is the start of the next big shift in online visibility. And if your MSP isn’t being mentioned by the machines, it might as well not exist.

This one action KILLS sales for MSPs

There’s something that all MSPs do because it quickly solves a problem for a client, but it’s a disaster if your client watches you do it. It can completely change their relationship with you and actually make it a thousand times harder for you to sell them more strategic services in the future. So what is this thing? You’re going to laugh when I tell you because it’s something so simple, yet it is so dangerous. And I promise you that by eradicating it, you’re going to make more profit from your existing clients.

I subscribe to hundreds of different email newsletters. Anywhere I can see value in learning from someone, well, I’m happy to be on their list and I dedicate just a little bit of time each day to reading email newsletters that top up my brain. Now, recently I got an email from a guy who actually writes good advice about productivity for high achievers, but I did a massive double take when I saw this in his email. So let me read it to you.

It said, Hey Paul, you’ve probably heard the hype. Wake up at 4am and you’ll dominate the day, crush your goals and unlock next level productivity, right? Well, let me tell you what actually matters. This is what he’s writing in his email. He says, I’ve been waking up at 5am since 2013 and recently shifted to 4am when I started driving for Uber in March of this year. And here’s the truth, it’s not about the clock, it’s about what you do with the time once you are up. So that’s the end of his email.

Now, that’s actually really good advice, but just listen to this line once more. I recently shifted to 4am when I started driving for Uber in March of this year. So please don’t think that I’m criticising this guy, and I’m certainly not criticising driving for Uber, that’s not my intention at all. You do what you need to do to survive, right? But this guy, in all of his marketing on his website, he’s positioning himself as someone who offers productivity consulting for high achievers and high achievers do not value advice from someone who gets up at four in the morning to drive an Uber. This is a massive disconnect between audience and message. And it’s no different for MSPs who visit a client site and get their knees dirty, plugging in cables under desks, or they answer the help desk phone for a password reset. Again, this is not a criticism, it’s just an observation.

If a client sees you on the floor plugging in cables or talks to you regularly for low level tasks, frankly they’re very unlikely to ever hire you for strategic technology advice.

You and I know that you can do both levels to a very high standard, but the clients don’t. You’ll make more money and keep clients longer by positioning yourself at a strategic level than you will by being positioned as doing work that anyone can do. So here’s a question for you. If you don’t have the resources to hire someone else to do this work for you right now, what can you do to hide the fact that you still do it yourself?

MSPs: The mistakes you’ll make hiring your first sales person

Featured guest: Robert Gillette founded the MSP Dojo in 2022 after helping a San Francisco based MSP grow from $10mm to $30mm as their lead Account Executive. He also Co-Founded the MSP Growth OS in 2024. Since then he’s helped hundreds of sales professionals raise their sales confidence to have more, better quality sales meetings. At the Growth OS he and his team are leading growth-oriented MSPs on the journey of transitioning from owner-led sales to an organic, predictable, and repeatable Sales Engine.

When I speak to MSPs who’ve been running their own business for 5, 10 years or more, and they’re still doing all the sales in the business, you can understand that one of their goals is to get out of the sales and hire someone else to do it for them. The thing is, when you come to do this, you are going to make a series of very predictable mistakes. My special guest today is going to tell you what those mistakes are, how you can avoid them, and how you can hire the right first salesperson for your MSP, who’s going to make your life easier and generate you more revenue.

Hi, my name is Robert Gillette, co-founder of the MSP Growth OS. I’m the head of content these days.

And it is so cool to have you back on the podcast, Robert, thank you so much for joining us again. You’ve been on the show before and that was under a different business name. You were MSP Dojo back then, and I want to know so much about the MSP Growth OS, we’re going to talk about that towards the end of the interview.

You and I were hanging out just a couple of months ago at ScaleCon 25 in New Orleans. Actually, we were on a big paddle boat thing, which was the VIP night, and we were batting away the insects from the Mississippi river, and we were talking about MSPs hiring their first salesperson, and that’s why we’ve got you back on the show today because that’s a massive, massive subject.

So before we talk about that and all the mistakes that MSPs make when they go and hire their first salesperson, let’s just first of all find out a little bit about you. So tell us who is Robert Gillette?

Yeah, I’m just a dumb sales guy who sold a bunch of revenue for an MSP and then decided that was too much work. And so I now coach MSPs and help them figure out how to get their own growth because sales is really hard for MSPs for very complex reasons.

Oh, it is. And I think that’s a recurring theme on this podcast. We’ve been going, well, we’ve just celebrated six years, and it’s crazy how difficult MSPs find sales. They find it difficult doing their own sales. They find it difficult hiring other people to do their sales. And let’s focus in on that aspect. I think the last time you were on, and we’ll find the episode number that was where you were talking about doing your own sales I believe. In terms of hiring a salesperson, what’s the trigger that makes an MSP think, right, it’s time for me to go and find someone to do this. Is it because they’re sick of doing it themselves or is it because they think someone else is going to do a better job or ramp up the activity? Or is it all of those things?

I think it’s all of those things, but probably the most common one is people that they just hate it. They don’t want to do it. It’s really hard. It’s super discouraging. It’s just incredibly difficult. The activity, the rejection, everything about it is almost the exact opposite of what a traditional IT professional might want to do with their life. And so people start this MSP, and then it grows for a little bit and they get some referrals. And then that comes the point where they’re like, we need more revenue. And then they got to go do sales. And pretty quickly they’re like, I hate this. And so they oftentimes want to hire a salesperson just to abdicate the responsibility to someone else. And that shows up as hiring a salesperson or a marketing company or a cold calling company or someone. It’s just make this your problem and not mine and I’ll give you money. And then that way if it doesn’t work, I can blame you and try with someone else. And that’s probably the most common reason why people outsource this function.

So I completely agree with you there. And actually I think what compounds that and makes it even more of a problem is first of all, when MSPs do hire a sales resource, they actually throw all of marketing and sales at it. So they’re like, oh, great a salesperson. So you can create some audiences, you can do some content, you can generate some leads, you can warm those leads up, you can close those leads, you can account manage them, you can do all of these things. And the other compounding factor that also makes it difficult is the MSP who only does two sales meetings a month, takes on a full-time person and has no other plan to increase the number of sales meetings. What other mistakes do you see apart from those?

Oh yeah. I mean, first of all, two meetings a month would be a miracle for some MSPs I talked to. They’re lucky if they get 10 a year. But I think the other big problem is that they don’t give them any kind of a process or plan to follow. They hire these people that have been really successful in other industries in sales, hopefully. And then what happens is they step into this job and they’re like, okay, well whose example am I following? And they can’t really follow the owner because they’ve never been successful in that role. And so they oftentimes are just shooting in the dark at what may or may not work. And then again, when they’re not successful, the MSP owner has someone to blame that’s not themselves.

Can I suggest something possibly controversial and you can agree or disagree with me on this?

Yeah, please.

You and I have spoken to enough MSPs who even though they don’t do more than let’s say 10 sales meetings a year, they will close six of those or seven of those. And so almost every MSP I’ve spoken to where the owner does the sales, they’ll say to me, if I can get in front of someone, I close loads, I close three out of four or 90%. And someone said to me a few years ago, and it was on this podcast, I can’t remember who it was, but it was another sales expert, there are other sales experts out there, Robert. And they said to me, the reason that they have such a great close rate is because they’re not doing enough sales meetings. So they’re literally getting the most basic number of sales meetings and they’re only meeting with people who are ready to buy, whereas they should be doing 50, 60, 70 of those meetings and getting a 50% close rate. Would you agree with that?

Oh, absolutely. I think the snarky way I frame it is it’s like telling me, oh, every time someone puts a fully cooked steak on my table, oh, I can eat it, it’s so good, I cut it up, eat it. Well, that’s great. Congratulations. You didn’t choke on it. That’s kind of expected. The challenge is what happens when you need to go find people that don’t even know they’re ready to work with you yet they haven’t done all the hard work of identifying the problems, exploring different options, reaching out to their network to find providers that then somehow referred and ended up right on your table. When you have to go do all that other work, that’s what we’re asking, usually a salesperson to go do, is identify companies and create some kind of urgency or need, and then start the conversation, bring them right to your table so you can sign them. And that’s just going to be a lot harder than sitting around and waiting for someone else to do all that hard work, whether it be your prospect or referral partner or a current client or something like that.

Yeah, I completely agree. So alright, you and I have done a pretty effective job of just taking everyone down and making them feel terrible. So let’s lift them back up. Yeah, sorry about that. What would you do, and obviously this is what you do, you help MSPs do exactly this to get their sales right, but what would you do? So you’re an MSP owner, you’re sick to death of sales, you don’t do enough sales activity and you’re ready for someone else to do it. What would you recommend?

Yeah, absolutely. First you got to make sure, can I afford to do this? This is a big one because most people hire a salesperson as their option of last resort. They hire a salesperson and they go, God, I really hope this works out because if they don’t, I’m out of money. And then what happens is the salesperson’s performance is judged off of cashflow and not off of what’s a reasonable expectation for their job. And so that’s the first thing I figure out, can I even afford to do this? And then the second thing is, once I hire this person, how am I going to, for lack of a better term, make it good to work here? There’s an old quote that says, people don’t quit bad jobs, they quit bad managers. And so one of the key distinctions is understanding once you hire your first salesperson, you’ve hired someone who’s probably unlike anyone else at your MSP.

Your MSP was started by you as the first employee and you have a culture, you have a love of technology in a way you think and act in the way you’re motivated. And then because of that charismatic individual, you’ve gathered people like you under you. And so you all kind of feel and think and want to work the same way. And then you hire the salesperson who is by their very definition, very different than you. They want different things, they think different ways, they need different tools, they need to be motivated differently.

And so how are you as a manager because congratulations, you’re now also a sales manager, you don’t just have a salesperson. How are you as a sales manager going to create the kind of culture where they’re going to thrive and give them the kind of tools they need, including mentorship to be good at this thing that you’re barely good at yourself? So that’s the next piece that’s very difficult that I would encourage people if you can answer those two questions, how can you pay for it? And then how are you going to make it good? You’re well on your way to success in this area.

Yeah absolutely. And I think, I’m sure you and I would agree, because recalling our conversation of a couple of months ago on the paddle steamer, that the vast majority of MSPs when faced with those two questions go, Oh do you know what, you’re right, let’s not do this, I’m not going to do it. And as the owner, you get trapped in the business continuing to do the thing you don’t enjoy. But of course the quality of that comes down. Anytime you’re doing something that you’ve done for 10 years and you don’t want to do anymore, you’re not going to do a great job of it. So it’s 2026 a couple of weeks away, and this is our last regular episode of the year. Let’s say that someone’s listening to this over Christmas watching this on YouTube, and they’re just going to hit January ready to go. It’s like, Right, I’m going to answer those questions, Robert, I’m going to do this. What are the steps that you would recommend to get started?

First is I wouldn’t make that decision on your own. I’d find somebody who has done this before and has actual repeatable success in this area that can tell you whether or not you’re right to the answer to those two questions. And this is so funny to me, how many times, even myself and maybe this is a uniquely American problem, I don’t know. We all want to be the first to do a thing. We all just want to be the first guy to invent that product or that process or the thing. We want to be unique in some way. And I don’t know why that is. I’m not going to try ever figure that out in my life probably. But my encouragement would be, you’re not the first person to approach this problem and you’re most certainly not the first person that will be successful at it.

Find someone who’s done the exact thing you want to do and then ask them if your plan is a good one.

Because this is the other kind of weird truth about this. There isn’t only one good way to grow your MSP. When you’re under 5 million, there’s like three or five really great successful proven ways to grow your MSP to 5 million from maybe five to 10 or 20, 30, 50, a hundred. There’s fewer ways, but there are still very plausible paths that have been run before by people that are successful that would be happy to share with you whether or not your plan is going to work based on their experience. So that’d be like, just don’t make decisions on it. You don’t have to reinvent this. Find somebody who can help you figure it out.

Yeah. I love this. And it’s a really nice segue actually into what you do because obviously you’ve had a big transformation in your working life over the last year. So you were the MSP Dojo, which was famously the only place where you could go to actually practice sales. And I still think it’s an amazing concept and you were the first to do that. So talking about someone who wonders why people are first, you were the first to do that both in the channel and I think in any sector that I was aware of certainly. But now you’ve obviously evolved that you’ve moved that on. Tell us about MSP Growth OS. So what is that and how do you help MSPs with these exact problems?

Yeah, so businesses that are approaching that 5 million or above that 5 million, we help them figure out their particular revenue generation model. How do they want to grow to whatever business level they want? And this is really hard. There’s this gap, this black hole around six or 8 million that’ll just suck MSPs in and that’s where all their money goes. And then they just fall back to five and it’s very hard to grow past that. There’s also similar ones at around 18 and around 36. And so the challenge is that I now have partnered with a guy who actually taught me how to do this as a sales professional who organically grew his MSP from one to I think 143 million.

We have coaches now on our team that have grown their MSP to 60 million and 163 million respectively. So we have people that can help MSP owners figure out their journey through the forest as they grow to whatever revenue they’re really looking for. And we can help them set reasonable timeframes and expectations and what they can expect at an organisational level as they try and build that new revenue engine. That’s all we focus on. It’s just new revenue. If you’ve got service delivery problems, you go to talk to somebody else.

This is really, we’re just trying to help them figure out how to get the new client revenue and spin up an engine to provide that kind of growth they’re looking for. We do that through recruiting, peer groups, training, and then one-on-one coaching. So just trying everything that we would need to help them find the right people to help them grow their business. And then kind of, I don’t want to say manage them because we don’t always do that, but it’s mostly coaching and then some kind of accountability groups and knowledge base and all that kind of stuff. So I don’t know if that makes sense.

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. I have to say with those kind of big numbers of the coaches that you work with, the size of the MSPs that they grew to, you shouldn’t have called it MSP Growth OS you should have called it the MSP Overachievers Club. That’s what I think.

Well, it’s a little longer of a URL, but that’s fine.

That’s true, yeah, stick with MSP Growth OS. Robert, thank you so much for being on the show. Let’s get you back on again next year. Let’s not leave it till you and I are sat at ScaleCom 26, which is inevitably bound to happen. We’re bound to sit at some VIP event and sit and have a similar conversation, but for now, let’s just tell us how can we get in touch with you. So what is that website address? How do we find you on LinkedIn?

First of all, thank you for having me, it’s an honour. mspgrowthos.com, or you can look me up on LinkedIn. I’d be happy to respond to you there. But either way, I’d love to talk to you even if you’re not at those sizes. We love helping MSPs hit the revenue growth that they’re looking for because for us, it’s the one thing we know how to do and we just love helping people with that. So thank you so much.

The Marketing Minute

Hi, this is Michelle from The Tech Leader Network, and I’ve been racking my brains on how service desk can contribute to your marketing efforts. Here’s what I came up with. Make sure that your positive and negative feedback survey results has some form of commentary. The negative, you can obviously take that away and do something about it, but the positive, have those feed into a wall of love on the website or something like that.

Mentioned links

• This podcast is in conjunction with the MSP Marketing Edge, the world’s leading white label content marketing and growth training subscription.
• Join me in MSP Marketing Facebook group.
• Connect with me on LinkedIn.
• Connect with my guest, Robert Gillette, on LinkedIn, and visit the MSP Growth OS website.
• Connect with my Marketing Minute contributor, Michelle Coombs, on LinkedIn.
• Got a question about your MSP’s marketing? Let me know.

Welcome to Episode 316 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• MSPs: Do this daily… or fall behind: Find and protect a little bit of time every day to learn something that makes you better. Because if you want your MSP to grow, you have to grow first.
• Turn $1 into THOUSANDS for your MSP: Let me tell you the true value of every dollar of new MRR – monthly recurring revenue – that you generate. And how one small upsell today could still be paying you in 10 years time.
• Why your MSP doesn’t charge higher prices: There are all sorts of psychological and emotional reasons that MSPs don’t put up their prices. My guest is an expert at pricing and positioning, and he’s going to tell you how you can name your price.
• The Marketing Minute: Don’t miss this simple tip to reach your dream clients.

MSPs: Do this daily… or fall behind

The amount of information and ideas is increasing all the time, and it’s so easy as an MSP to feel like you are falling behind. But you don’t have to be a slave to all the digital noise out there. In fact, it’s much more powerful if you block it out and instead find and protect a little bit of time every day to do this core activity. Let me tell you how to ignore the noise, what this activity is and why the world’s most successful MSPs do this every day.

Let’s talk about learning. Now, wait, before you roll your eyes and think, oh Paul, I just don’t have time for training, stick with me for a second because I’m not talking about signing up for an MBA or sitting in a three day marketing seminar with bad coffee and uncomfortable chairs.

I’m talking about setting aside 30 minutes a day to learn something that makes you better… as a business owner, as a leader, as a marketer, as an MSP.

Half an hour, that’s it. I mean, it doesn’t sound much, but over a year, even if you’re just doing it weekdays, that’s well over a hundred hours of focused improvement. Imagine what you could learn, what you could change in that time. And the best part is, learning doesn’t have to be formal. In fact, the best kind of learning often isn’t formal. You could be listening to a business audiobook just while you’re walking the dog – that’s learning. You could be watching a great YouTube channel or listening to or watching a podcast while you’re making lunch – that’s learning too. You could go for a coffee, sit outside and actually read that book that you bought six months ago. You know, the one that’s been sitting on your desk looking at you accusingly gathering dust. All of this counts.

The point isn’t what you are learning or how you are learning it, it’s that you are building a habit, a routine of small daily improvements. Because that’s how the most successful business owners think. They’re constantly upgrading themselves, not in big leaps, but in consistent steps. And as you run an MSP, there is a lot to learn. Marketing, leadership, sales, strategy, systems, time management. I mean even personal stuff like mindset or communication. Every small improvement in all of these areas has a direct effect on your business, which has a direct effect on your personal life and your earning capacity.

Here’s what I recommend. Treat your 30 minutes of learning as non-negotiable. I mean, literally put it in your calendar, protect it like it was a client meeting, because in a way it is one, it’s a meeting of you with your future self. And if you’re not really sure where to start, just pick one thing that’s holding back your business right now. Maybe you struggle with consistency in marketing, or managing your team, or handling sales conversations. So find a book or a podcast or an online course that helps you with that.

And remember, you don’t need to finish it all in one go. Just start. Do a chapter a day, one chapter one episode, one video at a time. And soon you really will find that your thinking has leveled up. You’ll be coming up with new ideas, making better decisions and solving problems faster, all because you made that small daily commitment to get just a little bit better.

So here’s your challenge then get in your calendar right now, schedule 30 minutes every day, every weekday at least for learning. And this could be first thing in the morning, it could be your lunch break or it could be after work. Just get it in the calendar and make it happen. Because if you want your MSP to grow, then you have to grow first.

Turn $1 into THOUSANDS for your MSP

We all know that monthly recurring revenue is key to your success as an MSP, but have you ever sat down to work out just how valuable it actually is? Let me tell you the true value of every dollar of new MRR that you generate. And once I do, you are going to look completely differently at things like quarterly business reviews and client update meetings.

MRR is one of the best things about your MSP business model, but I bet you’ve never thought about it like this…

Imagine you wanted to keep building your MSP for 10 more years and then you’re going to exit, you’re going to sell the business. And today you sell one additional service to one of your clients, and it’s just like $4 per user per month and they have 10 users. So that works out at $40 of new recurring revenue, four users at $4 a month, $40 a month of recurring revenue. You with me so far? That’s $480 a year.

Now if they keep buying that over the next 10 years, that of course adds up to $4,800 of revenue, right? And that’s some lifetime value there in a $4 a month service. But this gets even better. Let’s say that you buy this service for $2 per user per month. So you are making a 50% profit margin and $2,400 of gross profit across the next 10 years, which is so cool. Now, I know you’ve got to keep the business for 10 years to deliver it, but it’s not like you have to do anything. I’m assuming you are buying that in at $2. You are selling it out at $4. We’ve not even talked about price rises here, $2,400 of gross profit over the next 10 years for doing nothing.

And you know what? When you come to sell the business, this puts even more money in your pocket. So let’s assume when you come to sell it, you get one times annual recurring revenue. So you take a whole year’s worth of monthly recurring revenue. And a lot of MSPs when they sell, they sell for one times annual recurring revenue. So that simple upsell is going to add another $480 onto your sales price because if you think about it, that annual of that $4 x 10 users x 12 months is $480. So that’s going to go onto the money that is given to you to buy the business off you.

All of that cash, huge amounts of cash from selling one $4 a month service. So tell me again, why aren’t you selling more monthly recurring revenue services to your clients every single day? If you just think about it that way, that one small upsell today could still be paying you in 10 years time and make your business more valuable when you come to sell it. Compounding doesn’t just work in finance, it works in your MSP too. So a question for you. What could you sell today that your future self will really thank you for?

Why your MSP doesn’t charge higher prices

The Marketing Minute

Hi, this is Brian Hoppe with Brian Hoppe Coaching, and my tip for today is why don’t you put together a list of the top 100 clients that you would love to do business with. These are your perfect clients. These are the clients that in the most ideal world, you would love to be able to do business with them. Just put together a list of a hundred of these. Most people have never done this, but if you purposefully put together a list and then systematically every day, just take five minutes and reach out to one person on your list, see if you can get an introduction. Email them, call them, connect with them on LinkedIn, shoot them a message, send them something in the mail. Do one reach out every single day to somebody on your list and you will start to see really, really great things happen. So that’s my tip for you today. Put together that list of your Dream 100 clients and start reaching out.

Mentioned links

• This podcast is in conjunction with the MSP Marketing Edge, the world’s leading white label content marketing and growth training subscription.
• Join me in MSP Marketing Facebook group.
• Connect with me on LinkedIn.
• Connect with my guest, Justin Neale, on LinkedIn, and visit the Value Alchemists website.
• Connect with my Marketing Minute contributor, Brian Hoppe, on LinkedIn.
• Mentioned book: $100M Money Models by Alex Hormozi
• Got a question about your MSP’s marketing? Let me know.

Welcome to Episode 315 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• Don’t miss out: Hot new MSP sales book: If sales is one of the biggest headaches within your MSP, then heads up, you need good advice and a solid plan… and I’ve got just the solution.
• The worst advice for MSPs: MSP growth strategies should vary dependant on context. Do you know which plan is right for you? Let’s find out…
• How an MSP built £8m of recurring revenue: Let me introduce you to an MSP owner who built his business from nothing to £8m annual recurring revenue. He reveals the marketing that’s worked the best for him and what he would do today if he was growing an MSP from stratch.
• The Marketing Minute: Don’t miss this simple trust building tip that’ll win you more clients.

Don’t miss out: Hot new MSP sales book

If sales is one of the biggest headaches within your MSP, then heads up, you need good advice and a solid plan. And of course, there’s a lot of noise out there with a lot of conflicting advice on how to improve your MSP’s sales.

Let me introduce you to a true expert who has some of the best sales advice out there. How do you plug his knowledge into your MSP? Well, he’s written a brand new book, let me tell you about it, and the difference it’ll make to your MSP sales.

Most MSPs I meet really don’t love selling. But here’s the thing, if you can’t sell your services confidently, you are always going to be a step behind.

Now, a couple of months ago, I was lucky enough to be at ScaleCon ‘25 in New Orleans, which by the way is a fantastic city. Slightly dangerous, but it is a really, really fun city. And the event was packed with about 400 smart MSPs. So we had loads of great conversations. There were so many ideas, I got loads of ideas and I know the MSPs there got loads of ideas about marketing and growing your business. And while I was there, I bumped into a whole bunch of people that I know, some based in the UK and a lot of the people I know in the channel are in the US or Canada or other countries.

So I bumped into someone I’ve only met in real life once before, but I know him really well. He’s been on my podcast a number of times. His name is Brian Gillette. And he handed me a copy of his brand new book. I did actually wonder at the time if I was one of the first people on the planet outside of his team to get hold of this book. So it’s called, and it’s got a swear word in the title and I’m not going to say the swear word but bravo to Brian for being the first person I think in the MSP space to put a swear word in the title of his book, but it’s called How to Sell a Sh*tload of Managed Services (without selling your soul).

I’ve got the book here, let’s have a quick flick through. I mean, this is absolutely packed with information and advice. And Brian is an absolute true genius at MSP sales. He really understands that it’s an emotional thing more than it’s a cognitive thing. He really understands how you can connect with and engage with and influence the ordinary business owners and managers that you are sitting down and having sales meetings with. So let me just flick through, have a look at some of the different things here. Here we go, so this is a good one, this is about pains and outcomes. So for example, if someone says to you, this is their pain – Our files didn’t sync, we almost submitted the wrong one to the IRS (in the UK of course that would be HMRC) – then the outcome, because in this section of the book he’s talking about turning pains into outcomes, he says – Well look, we monitor your backups and we monitor your syncs daily so there are no surprises. So essentially we will automate that problem away.

Here’s another pain – A single broken device slows down the entire team – and he suggests you turn that into an outcome, which is – Well, we fix stuff fast or we swap it out in the same day. And that’s just off one page. There’s 170 odd pages here of absolute gold dust because it talks not just about the theory and how you should be influencing people and the process you should be following, but it gets right down into a whole ton of really practical stuff. So go and get this book. It’s called, again, editing the title, How to Sell a Sh*tload of Managed Services (without selling your soul) by Brian Gillette. You can get it on Amazon. And I really do think you should get this. You should get this if you are doing the selling in your business, and you should definitely get it if you’ve got other people doing the selling in the business, because let’s be honest, we know that MSPs don’t get enough practice selling.

If you’re only doing one proper sales meeting every month or every other month, where do you get to do that practice and where do you get to improve and constantly tweak and change and make your sales process better? You don’t. So something like this, a book like this that helps you to sharpen your skills, even just a tiny bit, making the axe sharper as it goes, that’s very much worth it. Please do go and get that book. And honestly, even if you just take a few ideas from it, I reckon you’ll sell more, close faster, and feel way more confident the next time you’re sitting across from a prospect.

The worst advice for MSPs

There might be 40,000 MSPs in the world, but yours is unique because it’s run by you and it does things in the way that you want them to be done. Every MSP is like this in the same way that all humans are unique. We’re all broadly the same, but each of us is very different in our ways. So if you assume that this is the case, you must agree with me that when it comes to building your MSP’s growth strategy context is everything.

Every week I have discussions with MSP owners around the world and often the conversation naturally moves on to which growth strategy they should use to grow their business. And while I have dozens of different growth strategies tucked away in my head, my job when giving advice is to figure out which is the right strategy for each of the business owners I’m speaking to.

The growth strategy advice that I’d give to an MSP owner is dramatically affected by the context of their business. 

Well, let’s imagine there are two MSP owners, let’s call them MSP owner A and MSP owner B. So MSP owner A is 45 years old and he’s happy to do another 10, 15, maybe even 20 years in the business. He’s making good money, he’s enjoying the work, and he just can’t see himself leaving that business anytime soon. Plus he’s got young children and he wants to spend time with them, but also keep his really expensive car on the drive. He wants the nice house, he wants the regular expensive vacations or holidays with his family. So that is the context of him and his situation and his business. Now, MSP owner B is in a wholly different situation. So this guy is late fifties, so a lot older than the first guy he’s done his 25 years, he’s got one eye on the door and he’s ready to exit that business in two to three years time.

So these two businesses could have exactly the same revenue, they could have the same staffing levels, they could even have the same resource levels, they could be the same businesses next to each other in the same street, in the same town. And yet I’d advise completely different strategies for each of those. So for MSP owner A, that’s the younger guy who wants to stay in the business, there should be some aggressive growth strategies in place, which means going after new clients because of course that business owner has got 10 to 20 years to capitalise on those new clients and take all of their MRR over the years ahead. And it can cost you thousands to acquire a new client. It’s probably a lot higher than you think it is. So that’s the right thing to do if you want to spend years more in the business and collect that money from getting the ROI (return on investment) from actually winning that new client.

And side note here, if you want to figure out the cost of acquiring a new client for your business, take every single penny that you’ve spent on marketing in the last three years, including all of your time, every single hour of your time that you’ve put in, then divide it by the number of new clients you’ve won. And it’s almost guaranteed to be a four, sometimes even a five figure sum.

Side note over, back to MSP owner B. So this is the older guy now he’s planning to get out of the next two to three years. So he’s only got a shorter period of time to recoup his investment in new clients. So in a business like that, I’d be advising him to focus on growing net profits by increasing MRR from existing clients. Because when he comes to put the business up for sale, he’ll get a multiple of his EBITDA, which is basically an accounting term – earnings before interest tax depreciation and amortisation – EBITDA, think of it as a kind of a net profit. He’ll likely get a multiple of that, or he might get a multiple of his annual recurring revenue, which is all of your MRR times 12. So of course he should keep winning new clients where he can because it shows that you are still actively doing sales if you win 3, 4, 5 clients over the year. But if he’s only won a couple of new clients in those three years, he’s working himself out. It’s no big deal really. In fact, it’s less of a deal than if his EBITDA was lower and his monthly recurring revenue was in decline because that shows a business that’s in decline. So as long as his EBITDA is going up and his monthly recurring revenue is going up and he’s winning new clients, even if it’s not as fast as he would like to, then that’s okay.

So with MSP owner B, this older guy, I would focus him on upselling to existing clients using tools like the profit matrix and strategic reviews. And you can learn more about those at my website, mspmarketingedge.com, go to the knowledge hub and just type in profit matrix or type in strategic reviews. We’ve got hundreds and hundreds of articles about tools like those. And of course, MSP owner B should focus on fantastic account management as well to make sure that as few clients as possible leave.

So do you see the difference between each of those situations? Do you understand why you need the context before you can start to look at what would be the plan, the strategy to grow my business? A question for you then. What would you advise in each of these situations?

How an MSP built £8m of recurring revenue

The Marketing Minute

Hi, this is Tim Fitzpatrick with Rialto Marketing. Credibility and trust is so important in the MSP space and I’ve got a quick tip you can do in less than a minute to help with that… ask one of your happy clients for a review. Just send them a short email or a text that says something like, Hey, we really appreciate and value you as a client. Would you mind leaving us a quick review? Here’s the link. Takes less than 60 seconds. And that one review builds trust, credibility, and makes it easier for new prospects to choose you over your competitors. Simple, fast and powerful.

Mentioned links

• This podcast is in conjunction with the MSP Marketing Edge, the world’s leading white label content marketing and growth training subscription.
• Join me in MSP Marketing Facebook group.
• Connect with me on LinkedIn.
• Connect with my guest, Mit Patel, on LinkedIn, and visit the Assurix website.
• Connect with my Marketing Minute contributor, Tim Fitzpatrick, on LinkedIn.
• Mentioned book: How to Sell a Sh*tload of Managed Services by Brian Gillette.
• Got a question about your MSP’s marketing? Let me know.

Welcome to Episode 314 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• Danger! Never assume your MSP’s clients are loyal: It’s hard for MSPs to win a client, but when they do join you, they stay with you for years. But what if that retention leads to a false sense of security?
• The reason your MSP’s marketing is so hard: MSPs often struggle, not just with knowing what marketing to do, but also with implementing it. And yet implementation is the secret sauce.
• Does your MSP spend this much acquiring a new client?: My special guest is a true marketing expert and he’s very good at focusing the MSPs that he works with on two figures – the cost of acquiring a new client and their average lifetime value – and how these figures affect their marketing.
• The Marketing Minute: Don’t miss this game changing CRM marketing tip.

Danger! Never assume your MSP’s clients are loyal

As an MSP, have you been lulled into a false sense of security? It’s hard for you to win a client, but when they do join you, they stay with you for years, right? But what if that retention was not because they’re in love with your service, but because it’s such a mind blowing event for them to think about switching to another MSP, so it just feels easier to stay with you.

If this hasn’t happened to you yet, are you confident that right now a client isn’t secretly looking into leaving? Here’s a simple solution to proactively work on your retention without having to do tons of extra work, and you might even generate some extra revenue along the way.

Most MSPs I meet are rightly proud of how long their clients stay with them. You’ll hear them say things like, Oh yeah, we’ve still got our first ever client from 10 years ago, or, Our retention rate is 98%. And on the surface that’s brilliant, but here’s the uncomfortable truth… a lot of that so-called loyalty isn’t really loyalty at all. It’s just inertia. Your clients aren’t staying because they’re wildly in love with your service, they’re staying because it feels too hard to leave. Think about it, moving to a new MSP is a massive hassle. It’s complicated, it’s risky, and they don’t really understand all of the tech side of it anyway. So even if they’re not a hundred percent happy, it’s easier to just stick with what they’ve got. That’s called inertia loyalty. And the danger is it gives MSPs a false sense of security.

You might think you’re doing a great job keeping clients happy, but the moment one of those loyal clients gets a real reason to look around, they will.

Maybe a competitor reaches out at just the right time. Maybe there’s a big mistake or your main contact leaves. Suddenly that inertia disappears and the client that would never leave is gone. If this hasn’t happened to you yet, I promise it will at some point. It’s horrible. None of us wants to think about it, but it’s also a wake up call. And the way I see it, we can prevent it. So what’s the answer? Well, you can’t just hope that loyalty lasts, you’ve got to work at it. You’ve got to turn those stuck clients into bonded clients, the kind who stay because they genuinely want to. And the good news is this doesn’t take huge gestures. It’s about doing small things regularly that make your clients feel valued, connected and confident that you are on their side.

Here are a few ways to get you started…

Number one: Schedule regular non-tech calls. So not ticket reviews, not project updates, just a short friendly catch up every quarter. Ask them how their business is doing, what’s changed, what they’re focusing on, and just show that you care about them as people and not just devices. I mean, really this is basic account management and you don’t need a separate account manager to do it. You could make one call a week to a different client and achieve this exact effect. Interestingly, some of these calls will act as mini QBRs (quarterly business reviews), although I prefer to call them strategic reviews because quarterly is overkill. And what I mean by that is that when you’re chatting to your clients about their business and their future, some of them will give you opportunities to sell them something else. And when I say sell, I don’t really mean pushing something they don’t really want or need. I mean, giving them an answer to a problem that they already have. There are many more things that your clients would buy from your MSP if only you had more conversations with them and discovered what those opportunities were.

Number two: Share micro wins. When your team prevents downtime or spots a phishing attempt or saves a client from an outage, tell all of your clients. Don’t assume they know how much value you deliver. A quick email saying, Oh, we caught this before it became an issue. And maybe even if you sorted that out for another client and therefore you could stop it being an issue for this client, that would just help to reinforce why they keep paying you.

Number three: Celebrate milestones. Client anniversaries, staff birthdays, major business wins. Take a note of them and send a little message or a card or something like that. It’s simple, it’s human, and it helps you to stand out.

Number four: Ask for feedback and then act on it. Not just surveys, but actual conversations. Hey, how are we doing? Is there anything we could do to make life easier for you? And then follow up when you do something about it because clients really do remember that.

Number five: Keep showing them the future. Don’t let your relationship be about keeping things running. Be that MSP that nudges them forward. Show them new ideas, new tools and new efficiencies. Clients bond with the MSP that helps them progress. So if you do these things regularly, not as one-offs, but as habits, as a system that’s baked into the business, then you’ll build relationships that go way beyond inertia. Because real loyalty isn’t built on contracts or complexity, it’s built on connection, trust, and the feeling that their MSP is always looking out for them.

The reason your MSP’s marketing is so hard

Generating leads and winning new clients for your MSP has nothing to do with coming up with creative marketing ideas. It’s actually much simpler than that. To have better marketing and win new clients, you need one magic ingredient. Let me tell you what that ingredient is and how to bake it into the very core of your MSP.

I’ve been back in the Wild West for a few months now. What’s the wild West? I mean the MSP sub Reddit, I do find it a mostly negative place where great questions are hijacked by angry people, hiding behind anonymity. They very quickly and frankly quite readily fire machine guns at other people just because they have differing opinions. Anyway, I digress. But recently I set up a new alerting system to tell me when anyone talks about MSP marketing on Reddit, and it’s been pinging away two or three times a week.

So I’ve had a good look through months and months of threats for the first time in years. And it struck me once again, just how many MSPs struggle with their marketing. In fact, they struggle not just with knowing what to do, but also they struggle with implementing it. And yet implementation is the secret sauce. It’s the magic ingredient.

I know lots of very smart business owners who don’t achieve anywhere near what they’re capable of because they can’t consistently implement well.

And the opposite is also true. I know of lots of average business owners who are doing very well because they are excellent implementers. And this principle applies not just to your marketing, but to all aspects of your business. I’d rather be a less naturally smart but good at implementing kind of guy than the other way round. In fact, maybe I already am. Now, luckily, implementation is not a fixed natural talent that you are born with. It’s something you develop, you improve, and you grow. And if you are struggling to implement great marketing, please let me help you.

Now that it’s November, most of 2025 has gone. So let me ask you a question. What progress have you made on implementing your marketing so far this year? If the answer is *hangs head in shame and admits*, actually, Paul, nowhere near as much as I’d hoped, then there are two ways that I can help you.

First, let me give you an out and out plug. With my MSP Marketing Edge membership for our 700 plus members around the world, we give them a system for their marketing, we break that system down into easy to follow tasks and we give them all of the marketing content that they need. And for those who struggle to get it done, we have a done for you team so they can get their marketing done for them. So you can see if that’s available in your area or not because we only work with one MSP per area. Go to mspmarketingedge.com. And the idea behind that is if your marketing is implemented by other people – and my team, that’s all they do, they implement MSPs marketing for them – you can see that that’s a powerful way to get it implemented. You essentially just outsource it to someone that you trust. Now, the other way I can help you right now is by giving you three easy ways to make implementation less of a headache in your business.

Easy way number one: Build marketing into your routine. So think of it like going to the gym. If you wait until you feel like it, it’s never going to happen, but if it’s on the calendar, let’s say every weekday at 9am or whatever works for you, then it becomes a habit. Book 90 minutes and protect 90 minutes every working day to work on your marketing. Close your PSA, mute Teams. Treat it like a client project, because it is in fact, it’s the most important client project you’ve got. It’s your own business and working on implementing stuff within your own business.

Easy idea number two: Don’t do it all yourself. You are great at running an MSP, but not necessarily writing blog posts or creating social media graphics. So just get help. You can outsource marketing to experts or delegate parts of it internally. Maybe someone on your team enjoys writing or social media, so give them ownership of it. And if you’re using something like the MSP Marketing Edge, most of the hard work’s already done for you, your job is simply to make sure it’s actually implemented.

Easy idea number three: Keep score, because what gets measured gets done. If you’re serious about consistency, track it. Use a simple spreadsheet or dashboard, list your key marketing actions and tick them off weekly. Sent your weekly email? Tick. Posted a daily post on LinkedIn? Tick. Asked a client for a Google review? Tick. You’ll be amazed how motivating it becomes when you can see visible progress even from small consistent actions.

So that’s it. Make it routine, get help and keep score. And remember, marketing success doesn’t come from doing big one-off marketing campaigns because you just end up doing tiny amounts of activity across the year. Instead, it comes from doing dozens of small actions, doing them consistently and doing them day after day, week after week. The MSPs who win at marketing aren’t necessarily the best marketers. They’re the ones who implement the most.

Does your MSP spend this much acquiring a new client?

The Marketing Minute

Hi, this is Ben Spector of BS Consulting. Here’s a quick fix you can make in your CRM today. Segment your mailing list properly. A lot of MSPs send exactly the same newsletter to everyone – prospects, clients, ex clients, even suppliers – and wonder why engagement’s low. First up, you can start with the lifecycle stage. Send lead nurture content to prospects, upsell or renewal reminders to clients and re-engagement campaigns to past clients. And then think about layering in personas. Are they a business owner who cares about risk and cost or maybe an IT manager who wants technical detail? And lastly, you could segment by industry – schools, accountants, law firms – they all need different messaging. If you’re using something like HubSpot, use active lists to manage this automatically based on contact properties and deal data. If you target your messaging, it makes you look more relevant and it will get you more replies.

Mentioned links

• This podcast is in conjunction with the MSP Marketing Edge, the world’s leading white label content marketing and growth training subscription.
• Join me in MSP Marketing Facebook group.
• Connect with me on LinkedIn.
• Connect with my guest, Nate Freedman, on LinkedIn, and visit Tech Pro Marketing website.
• Connect with my Marketing Minute contributor, Ben Spector, on LinkedIn.
• Mentioned books: $100M Offers, $100M Leads, $100M Money Models all by Alex Hormozi.
• Got a question about your MSP’s marketing? Let me know.

Welcome to Episode 313 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• Why people don’t believe your MSP’s reviews: People trust what other people say about you more than what you say about yourself. But if all your reviews sound the same they lose their power.
• Why your technicians won’t sell (even to help the client): One of the most frustrating things for MSPs is when your technicians won’t recommend a service you offer when talking to clients, for fear of appearing salesy. Here’s what to do…
• How ordinary business owners feel about AI: Let’s talk about AI attitudes of the people that MSPs want to reach. My special guest today is an expert in AI and he’s going to tell you how ordinary business owners and managers feel about it.
• The Marketing Minute: Don’t miss these tips to maximise your hard work in generating new leads.

Why people don’t believe your MSP’s reviews

People are so skeptical these days and when they’re looking at your MSP’s reviews, if they see certain words and phrases they might not believe the reviews are true. I know this sounds crazy because it’s not like you’re selling a product on Amazon and paying for fake reviews, but the reality is not all social proof is equal. You’ve got to make sure that people say the right things about your MSP. Let’s explore how to do that, how to collect social proof that always works, and the best way to guide people on what to say without your reviews ever seeming fake.

Social proof is one of the most powerful tools in your marketing toolkit. People trust what other people say about you more than what you say about yourself. But here’s the catch, if your reviews all sound the same, they lose their power. Think about it, how many times have you seen a review that says great service or would recommend or very professional, and that’s all it says? I mean, there’s nothing wrong with those comments, but when every review looks like that, they stop feeling real.

“Samey” kills sales and it’s the same as social proof, because these sound like copy and paste praise and prospects just ignore them.

That’s what I mean by cliches in social proof. It’s those generic lines that don’t give your potential future clients any real reason to trust you. So what works better? Detailed, story-driven reviews. And I’m going to give you an example. Instead of great IT support five stars, you want something more like, Our server went down late on a Friday afternoon. We thought the whole weekend would be lost, but within 30 minutes the IT team had us back online and they even followed up on Monday morning to make sure everything was stable. That level of care is why we’ll never use anyone else. Do you see the difference between those two reviews?

The second review tells a story. It shows the problem, it shows what you did to save your client and the end result, and that’s what makes it believable and therefore powerful. So how do you actually get this kind of social proof? Well, the trick is to guide your clients. Don’t just say to them, please, can you leave us a review. Instead ask them specific questions and I’m going to give you a few examples that you can use:

Number 1: What was going on in your business before you came to us?

Number 2: What made you decide to reach out to us instead of someone else?

Number 3: Can you tell me about a specific problem that we’ve solved for you?

Number 4: How did that make a difference to your business? How did it make a difference to your stress levels?

Number 5: What’s the biggest benefit you’ve seen since working with us?

Number 6: If a friend asked you why they should work with us, what would you say?

Now, those prompts which you might use in real life, if you are videoing them or interviewing them, or you might just send across to them on email and ask them to answer those questions, they give you reviews that are rich in detail and importantly in emotion. It’s exactly what new prospects want to read. Oh, and one more tip for you, mix up your formats. Written testimonials are great, but video reviews are even stronger because people can see and hear the genuine emotion. A 30 second video clip of a client saying how you saved their bacon is worth 10 generic five star reviews.

So avoid the cliches, go deeper and get your clients to tell their stories. That’s the kind of social proof that stands out and convinces prospects that you are the right MSP for them.

Why your technicians won’t sell (even to help the client)

I know that this is one of the most frustrating things for MSPs. When your technician is talking to a client on the phone and the answer to all of that client’s problems is a specific service that you already sell, but the technician won’t even mention it, let alone tell them the details of it and the benefits of it. Why does this happen? Is it that your technicians don’t care? Are they scared? Could you incentivise them to sell? Well, maybe, but I believe the actual answer here is to look at things not from your point of view, but to look at things from the client’s point of view and especially from the technician’s point of view, here’s how to do that.

So here’s a question which comes up now and again when I’m talking to MSPs, how do we get our technicians to sell? Because they’ve got all of the selling opportunities right there in front of them. They’re sitting there every day speaking to people on the phone and dealing with tickets. And often they’re fixing problems that could be dealt with more proactively if the client bought a higher level of service or a different flavour of an existing solution.

Yet as we know, many technicians just don’t want to sell. I know there’s always the odd one who’s very good at selling and just gets on with it, but how do you motivate the majority who hate selling? How do you motivate them to actually sell? Well, I believe that we coming at this from the wrong point of view. As the owners of the business, we all want more monthly recurring revenue, right? Because this is the lifeblood of any MSP business, and so that becomes the thing that we’re focused on generating when dealing with existing clients.

But from the technician’s point of view, they’re not really interested in helping you to grow your monthly recurring revenue. Many of your staff look at you and the clothes you wear and the car you drive and the house you live in, and they already believe that you rich enough. I know that sounds crazy, but that might be how some of your staff really do think because all they see is the rewards. They don’t see the years of risk, the hard work and all of the sleepless nights. They don’t see the amount of business related debt that you carry and the personal guarantees that you might be burdened with. And they don’t even see that for every pound or dollar that comes into the business, only a small proportion of that actually reaches your pocket.

So you need to stop looking at this from your point of view and instead try to reposition it from one of two other different points of view. The first being your client’s point of view. Most technicians most of the time want to do a good job for clients. Would you agree? They want to stop them from having problems, they want to fix their issues. They want their clients to be happy and to say, thanks so much for that, you did a great job. Because we are driven as people to seek that kind of feedback. If your technician can recommend something to a client that makes their life easier, then they’re much more likely to do this, especially when they can start to understand that unlike consumers, business decision makers don’t have to make all decisions based on cost alone.

You owe it to your technicians to do some kind of weekly training with them. Perhaps just get them together as a group for Pizza Tuesdays to teach them about a specific service that you’re offering and what symptoms to look out for. In fact, if you did this every single Tuesday for the next year, that alone would help your technicians to sell more, because they’ll learn how to spot more symptoms of more problems, and they’ll learn how to understand that there is a solution ready for those problems.

Position it from the Tech’s point of view and answer their question – “what’s in this for me?” Whether we like it or not, people operate in a selfish manner.

It may not seem that way on the outside, but in the inside they’re asking themselves at some kind of level, what’s in this for me? why should I do that for you? So perhaps the right thing to do is to offer your technicians a little slice of the pie, if they can contribute to the business in a way that helps the clients. The client gets help, the business gets extra revenue and they get a top up to their Xbox fund, everyone wins. You could put in place a very simple scheme such as they get 10% of anything that they sell. If it’s a one-off project, they get 10% of the revenue. If it’s a monthly recurring revenue thing, then they get 10% of the first year’s value. And of course, they only get this cash when you’ve received the cash, so there’s no risk to you.

Perhaps the most robust way to do this is a combination of the two – weekly awareness training for your technicians, with a simple reward scheme for those that feel comfortable advising the clients. And in fact, they don’t even have to do the selling, they could just tell the clients about it and then just send you an email saying, Hey, we’ve just told X, Y, Z client about this, could you please give them a call and see if it’s something they want to do? So you do the actual closing, but they’ve done all the hard work of educating and persuading the client.

Tell me, do you think this is something that would work for your technicians?

How ordinary business owners feel about AI

The Marketing Minute

Hi everyone, this is Dave Sutton of Wingman MSP Marketing, and I’ve got a quick tip that you can implement, well two tips potentially, that you could implement in around 60 seconds or less.

The first one is a no brainer. From firsthand experience, we’ve seen recently that many an MSP can fall foul of this, is to answer the phone. We’ve seen so many MSPs miss inbound sales leads that we’ve called them directly ourselves to have conversations with them or on behalf of vendor partners. And you go through the sales line and it either doesn’t get answered or it just rings out, or it goes to a voicemail, or it goes through to a tech that can’t actually ask the right questions and be able to steer the prospect. So I fear many of you are missing out on opportunities by just not considering what happens when you get an inbound sales call.

My second tip, we are seeing email security is running rampant in tightening up on spoofing and all these ransomware attacks and things like that that are coming through via malicious mail, but one of the victims of that is the submissions from your website contact forms. So just go and test your contact form to make sure that you’ve got the SMTP configured correctly so that you can actually receive the submissions that people are filing through your website contact forms.

We’d hate to see all this hard work go into generating new leads that MSPs desperately need, and you fail at the hurdles of being able to answer the phone and handle an inbound inquiry or even receive the contact form submission through your website.

Mentioned links

• This podcast is in conjunction with the MSP Marketing Edge, the world’s leading white label content marketing and growth training subscription.
• Join me in MSP Marketing Facebook group.
• Connect with me on LinkedIn.
• Connect with my guest, John Bambenek, on LinkedIn, buy his book Lies, Damn Lies, and AI, and visit the Bambenek Consulting website.
• Connect with my Marketing Minute contributor, Dave Sutton, on LinkedIn.
• Mentioned books: This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends by Nicole Perlroth.
• Got a question about your MSP’s marketing? Let me know.

Welcome to Episode 312 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• Why being the cheapest MSP is a bad strategy: If your marketing strategy is to be the cheapest MSP around, what you’re actually doing is setting yourself up to attract the worst clients, who create the most noise and generate the least amount of profit.
• The #1 all time secret of epic MSP marketing: The marketing winners aren’t smarter and don’t necessarily work harder than everyone else. They just get more of the right stuff implemented really fast.
• DANGER: Most MSPs have confused messaging: My special guest is an expert at making messaging simple. Your eyes are about to be opened as to how confused messaging is killing your MSP marketing efforts dead.
• The Marketing Minute: Don’t miss this simple email signature marketing idea that can make a big impact.

Why being the cheapest MSP is a bad strategy

If your marketing strategy is to be the cheapest MSP around, then you’re setting yourself up for a world of pain. Lots of MSPs do this because when you’re not very good at marketing, which most MSPs aren’t, it just seems like the easiest thing to do… offer a good service, deliver it at a good price. But what you’re actually doing is setting yourself up to attract the worst clients, who create the most noise and generate the least amount of profit.

If you don’t today, have the confidence to put up your prices, to be the most expensive MSP in your marketplace, let me tell you why you owe it to your existing clients, your future clients, yourself and your family to do this.

On the surface, being the cheapest MSP feels like a good idea because everyone likes a bargain, but being the cheapest is not a winning strategy.

It attracts completely the wrong kind of clients. The ones who are constantly haggling, they’re always looking for shortcuts and they just don’t value what you do for them. In fact, they’ll leave the moment that someone else comes along who’s a pound or a dollar cheaper than you. And that is not really a foundation that you can build a profitable stable MSP on.

So instead, you kind of want to be at the other end of the scale, the most expensive MSP in town. Now, I know that you might maybe have tensed up when I said that and you might be thinking, Me, the most expensive, no way. I don’t want to be that. I don’t want to do that. But listen, just hear me out on this. The MSPs who charge the most are often the ones who are seen as the safest choice. It kind of seems crazy, doesn’t it? But actually, higher prices signal higher value. They signal better service, they signal more stability, more reliability, and guess what? The best clients, the ones who are really serious about their businesses and protecting their businesses and growing them with a proper partner, they want that reassurance. They don’t just want to spend money on a service and spend as little as they can. They want the best quality because they want a genuine partnership from someone that offers a very high quality of service.

So how do you do this? Well, there are two main approaches that you can take overt and covert. So overt is where you’re very upfront about being premium. In fact, you build your whole brand around expertise, trust, and high standards. You’re never apologising for your price, in fact, you’re proud of it. But then the opposite is covert because this is a little bit more subtle. And in this with being covert, you don’t shout about being the most expensive from the rooftops. Instead, you just focus on value.

One very smart way to do this is to use a three-tier pricing, like a good, better, best pricing where your good price, kind of like your entry level price is a very, very keen price. And when they’re comparing you to the other MSPs and you and I know they’re comparing apples to oranges, but when they’re doing that, they can see that you are a very good value price, but ultimately the package that you most want to sell than actually most people will want to buy because it’s the best value, there’s all of the stuff in there, it becomes your better package or your best package. And of course the price for that is a lot higher. So you’re the most expensive without essentially advertising that you are the most expensive.

But what if you’re thinking, Paul, this is all very good, but I just don’t feel comfortable charging more. Well, maybe that’s something called imposter syndrome talking. And we all get that, it’s the little voice in the back of our head that says, You’re not good enough. And sometimes it’s there and it’s loud and we listen to it and we let it dictate us, and we think, well, if we put our prices up, people are going to see that we are in an imposter that we are not worth the money that we want to charge.

But let me tell you something, you are worth that money. You really are. If you’ve been running your MSP for a few years, if you are good at keeping your clients safe, you’re good at not just the reactive stuff, but you’re good at the proactive stuff, you protect them. Sometimes you protect them from themselves and you help them to grow their businesses. If you do all of this and you’ve been doing it for a few years, you are already delivering huge value. You are not just fixing stuff here, you are so far past break/fix. You are safeguarding people’s businesses, you are safeguarding their livelihoods, you’re safeguarding jobs, you’re safeguarding whatever it is that they do for their clients. You are instrumental in this. And if you get it wrong, which you don’t most of the time, but if you get it wrong, it has lots of implications, but you don’t do this. You are a massive part of their success.

So instead of asking yourself, Can I justify charging more? Why don’t you try asking yourself, What do I need to do so that my clients see the value in what we do and are happy to pay more for it? It’s a tiny little shift in thinking, but it can change everything. So here’s my big takeaway for today. Don’t ever play the cheapest game. You’ll always, always lose in some way, either by attracting the wrong clients or just having to deal with the noise and the hassle and the lack of profits that they generate. Instead, play the value game. Position yourself as the MSP worth paying more for. And even if you don’t feel ready to be the most expensive in your marketplace, at least make sure you are never the cheapest.

The #1 all time secret of epic MSP marketing

Would you like me to tell you the greatest secret I’ve ever learned about marketing an MSP? It’s the secret every MSP has been begging me to reveal, and you’ll be surprised to hear that it hasn’t changed over the last decade. What I’m going to say is exactly the same today as I would’ve said to you back when I got into the channel in 2016, and you won’t believe how simple it is, but also what kind of dramatic positive impact it can have on your marketing. So let me reveal the number one all time secret of epic MSP marketing.

A member of my team recently paid me the highest possible compliment. Several months back I took over driving our MSP Marketing Edge development roadmap, mostly out of frustration at how long it was taking to just get things done. And my colleague said to me, it’s a lot more chaotic with you pushing things, but we’re getting so much more done, which is amazing. So obviously I gave him an immediate pay rise. No, I didn’t.

I do pride myself as an epic implementer because everything I’ve achieved in the 20 years now that I’ve been running my own businesses has been accomplished purely by getting things done. So I’m not the smartest guy in the room and I’m never going to be. This is an average brain that I’m carrying here, and I’m certainly not the most driven person. I’ll be honest, I’m comfortable and I prioritise being a present parent and a present partner above driving a sick Lamborghini.  But I’m also the most impatient person you will ever meet, I just hide it really well. And I have a hundred marketing ideas a day, and I want to implement as many of them as I possibly can as quickly as possible. Because this is the only way to find out which ideas work and which suck.

Being able to rapidly implement marketing is a key skill to develop in your MSP. And the good news is that doesn’t mean that you have to do it all personally.

In fact, it’s better that you don’t try to do it all yourself. I can get more implemented by inspiring, guiding and driving my team than I can by trying to do everything myself. Being able to step back and take in the overall picture is valuable and almost impossible to do when you’ve personally worked for hours and hours and hours on something.

So here’s what that means for you. It’s one of two things. Number one, if you want to get more marketing implemented and you have the time and energy to do it yourself, then you must stay focused on implementing only the things that make the biggest difference. So what are those things for you? Well, it’s easy. What will help you generate a new lead? What will help you to turn a lead into a prospect? What will help you to get someone on a 15 minute introduction call? What will help you to sell more monthly recurring revenue to an existing client?

Make a list of all the tasks that come into those things I just said, and then remove the clutter from that list. And then just make sure you review that list daily and be ready to implement any time that you can clear time. Easiest place to do that, 6am every single weekday. That is a great time to get things done. In fact, if you could knock out 90 minutes a day of pure implementation at 6 till 7:30 in the morning when the rest of the world is asleep and isn’t expecting anything from you, you could change your whole business in just 12 months. I promise you, that is so real.

And then the other option number two, if you want to get more marketing implemented but you don’t have the time or energy to spare, just get someone else to do it for you. There are lots of people you could talk to. You could talk to Mark Copeman at Wingman MSP Marketing or Nate Freedman at Tech Pro Marketing and MSP Sites or Paul Charnock at Plexor. Or better still, you could join my MSP Marketing Edge if it’s not locked in your area, and you can ask our Done for You team to implement your MSP Marketing Edge marketing for you. But whatever you do, whichever of those two options you take, just remember this, the winners aren’t smarter and don’t necessarily work harder than everyone else. They just get more of the right stuff implemented really fast.

DANGER: Most MSPs have confused messaging

The Marketing Minute

Rhonda from Naglotech here I’ve got a simple marketing idea that can make a big impact, and that’s email signatures. If you think about it, every single day, you and your team are sending out tons of different emails to prospects, customers, partners, and suppliers, and that’s a huge amount of free marketing space that really does go untapped. An email signature is already built into apps like Outlook, so it can cost nothing, and it’s really easy to update with things like your monthly promotions, special offers, linking people to your social media channels.

You can include a professional photo of yourself because let’s be honest, people are naturally curious and love to put a face to a name. You can add links to your most recent blog post or an event that you’re running, or even a simple call to action like booking a meeting or a demo or downloading your company brochure. And because it’s right there at the bottom of every email, it feels more subtle and not too pushy. So really, it’s a marketing tool that’s free and effective and already at your fingertips. You just have to get around to using it and making the most of it.

Mentioned links

• This podcast is in conjunction with the MSP Marketing Edge, the world’s leading white label content marketing and growth training subscription.
• Join me in MSP Marketing Facebook group.
• Connect with me on LinkedIn.
• Connect with my guest, Jesse Flocken, on LinkedIn, and visit the Clearly Relevant website.
• Connect with my Marketing Minute contributor, Rhonda Baker, on LinkedIn.
• Got a question about your MSP’s marketing? Let me know.

Welcome to Episode 311 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• Is your MSP wasting time on marketing?: Here’s a tactic that all pro marketers use, yet very few MSPs are even aware of. It’s going to save you time and it could even help you find a brand new client.
• 7 MASSIVE mistakes that stop MSPs generating leads: Most MSPs make a series of huge mistakes that hobble their lead generation. Here’s how to change that.
• This old MSP lead gen tactic never fails: Let’s look at an older way of finding clients for your MSP. My guest is going to explain why this still works and how you can beat the other MSPs who don’t even know that this is still a thing.
• The Marketing Minute: Don’t miss these two questions that will add power to your sale pitch.

Is your MSP wasting time on marketing?

If you want nothing more than a new client for your MSP right now, just be careful that you’re not wasting your time in the way that you go about it. Because some MSP’s marketing is a complete waste of time, often because a vital element has been missed out.

Wouldn’t you love to hear about a massive time saver that all pro marketers use, yet very few MSPs are even aware of? You are going to love this because it’s going to save you time and it could even help you find a brand new client.

So what I’m talking about here is repurposing content, and this of course means taking something you’ve already created, let’s say a blog post, and then you turn it into other bits of content so you get more mileage out of it. You’ve already done the hard work once, so why not squeeze every bit of value out of this? And here’s the thing, it’s something that some people frown upon, but trust me as a full-time marketer of 20 years now, it’s an essential thing to do.

The only person who is consuming all of your content across all of your platforms, is you. Different people consume content in different ways.

Some like reading blogs, other scroll LinkedIn, some just glance at Google when they’re looking for a new MSP. So by repurposing content, you can meet people where they already are without having to reinvent the wheel every single time.

Let me give you a few practical examples of how this works. Let’s say you write a blog article about a new ransomware threat. First, you publish it on your website as a blog article, which is great because now Google can find it, it might have some SEO benefits, search engine optimisation etc. But next, you can take that exact same blog article and you can then adapt it into a LinkedIn newsletter. And that way the people who are subscribed to your LinkedIn newsletters get a notification in the feed, they also get an email copy of it as well, and it’s great for authority. You’re seen as the helpful, local, knowledgeable IT expert.

Then you can take that LinkedIn newsletter and you can cut it down into a shorter version and post it on your Google business profile. Now that’s really powerful because when prospects do Google your MSP, they’ll see fresh, helpful content right there on their profile. It’s also really good for your Google Juice. In fact, I suspect that Google sees more of your Google business profile content than humans do, but ultimately, anything that helps you perform better in search results is good, right? And you could also record a short video on this same subject where you just talk through the same advice that you were giving in your blog, in your LinkedIn newsletter, and of course, in your Google business profile. Same content, it’s just repurposed, it’s changed in some way.

You could take that video that you’ve just created, you could put that on LinkedIn, you could put it on YouTube as a short, it doesn’t have to be Hollywood quality. People just want to see you and see the real you. And then finally, you could take that content and you could break it into bite-sized social posts to go on LinkedIn. Now, let’s say you did five pieces of advice within that blog article. Each of those five pieces of advice could go on to be a standalone post. In fact, you could use them as a standalone post, and then you could take those five posts and you could repurpose them into five graphics, or you could repurpose the whole thing into a PDF carousel or just stick with plain text or do a video on each one or do an image and a bit of plain text on each one.

Can you see how this is almost limitless? From one single blog post, from one idea, you’ve suddenly got a whole week’s worth of content to go across multiple platforms, or you could take it even further and you could take that content and you could spread it out across a couple of months. So you have a variety of different types of content across different types of platforms all the time. And all of that can be organised by something called a content calendar, which is literally planning in I’m going to do this on Monday, I’m going to do this two weeks on Tuesday, I’m going to do this 3, 4, 5 weeks on Wednesday. It’s as simple as that. It’s just a plan of how you’re going to use your content.

Now, this is the magic of repurposing content, and the key thing for this is please don’t think that you need to constantly come up with brand new ideas. You’re not a full-time media company or a full-time marketer. You’re running and trying to grow an MSP. So repurposing content saves you time, gets your message seen in more places and positions you as consistent and reliable, and as the local tech authority, which is exactly what clients want from their IT provider.

7 MASSIVE mistakes that stop MSPs generating leads

If you’re pulling out your hair because you just can’t generate leads for your MSP, this could be the reason why. Most MSPs make a series of huge mistakes that just hobble their lead generation. Don’t you do the same?

Let me tell you the seven biggest mistakes that MSPs make that stop them from efficiently generating brand new leads.

Massive mistake number one: You are not 1000% clear on what kind of clients you want. You’ve heard the old joke, haven’t you? The one that says, I’ll work with anyone who has a pulse and a wallet. But actually, do you really want one-person-band businesses running Windows 7 for budget reasons? Will your MSP thrive servicing lawyers? Can you cope with the out of hours demands of hospitality businesses? The most successful MSPs build something called an ideal client profile, an ICP. It includes very specific details about your dream clients, such as their industry, size, pain points, budget, IT maturity, and how they make buying decisions.

Massive mistake number two: You struggle to tell prospects what makes you better than all the other MSPs. Now, I’ve got another acronym alert here, but you should know this one. Do you have a USP, a unique selling proposition? It’s a reason why you ideal client would buy from you. Most MSPs struggle with this because the answer has nothing to do with the service you offer and the way that you deliver it, or the vendors that you work with, or your tech stack. In fact, all of these are internal things that don’t affect the decision-making process of ordinary business owners and managers. They don’t care what services you use, they don’t care which vendors you choose. What they care about is what you can do for them. And this is most easily put across in your USP.

Massive mistake number three: Your marketing messaging is inconsistent. And this mistake happens because of mistakes one and two, if you haven’t figured out your ICP and your USP, the messages you send out will have little consistency, and that makes it hard for you to build up messaging momentum. To be the MSP that your ideal clients keep coming back to in their minds and their hearts when they’re thinking of leaving their current MSP.

Massive mistake number four: You’re not building audiences of people to listen to you. Once you know what you want to say, you need lots of people to say it to. And that means building audiences. For most MSPs just start with your LinkedIn connections and your email list. Building audiences is unsexy and sometimes tedious work. My LinkedIn newsletter has come out every single Thursday for three and a half years. That’s an audience for me. My MSP marketing podcast has come out every single Tuesday for nearly six years. It’s a treadmill, I tell you, but it is worth it as it’s exactly the same work to put content in front of 10,000 people as it is to put it in front of 10 people, only of course, the results are a lot better.

Massive mistake number five: You’re not growing relationships with people. The purpose of collecting all of those people in all of your audiences is to build a relationship with them. Ordinary business owners and managers don’t know what they don’t know about technology, and that means they make buying decisions with their hearts, not their heads. And the heart doesn’t buy on facts, it buys on feelings. They’re picking you, or not, based on how they feel about your MSP. If they’ve spent two years reading a little bit of your content on LinkedIn, a few of your regular emails and some of your blog posts, then in a very, very small way, they’ll feel as though they know you. They’ll certainly be more likely to respect you as a technology authority. This is how you get a place at the sales table.

Massive mistake number six: You don’t have a solid sales process to convert them from first touch to bonded client. The goal is to turn attention into leads, into prospects, into sales meetings, into clients, and then into bonded clients. And these are people who would rather lose a toe than leave your MSP. So that process I was just talking about, is that mapped out for your MSP? Is that being turned into systems and automated processes? Or do you lose sales, like most MSPs, because you don’t have a proper process and it’s all a bit haphazard? If you run your marketing in a way that frankly, you would never run your service delivery, then you have a problem.

Massive mistake number seven: You’re trying to figure it all out on your own. Marketing is massive. So many things to do, lots of different requirements and lots of different skill sets needed. Which means a lot of trial and error, a lot of wasted time and missed opportunities. If you are trying to figure it all out on your own, why would you do this? When you find someone who’s talking sense and you can see that they would help you jump ahead, then grab that person, shake them hard and say, how can you help me? In essence, what I’m saying is that you should go looking for wisdom, not information. There’s plenty of information out there. All the information you want is out there. Your goal is to find wisdom and someone who can help you figure this out for your MSP.

If you think that I’m the person that can help you, I would love to do that. Go and see what I can do to help you and your business at mspmarketingedge.com.

This old MSP lead gen tactic never fails

Hi, this is Jamie Warner, CEO of MSP eNerds and SaaS vendor Invarosoft. And here’s my idea that your MSP can implement in 60 seconds that relates to a marketing improvement. The idea is more related to sales, that is an area that I’m passionate about, and it is including two questions in your sales pitch that you may not be including at the moment.

The first you do at the start of the meeting, and you say to them – What does a 10 out of 10 experience look like once you’ve picked your new IT partner?

And at the end of the meeting, you ask the final and most important question in sales, which is – What is standing in the way of selecting my MSP as your new IT partner?

Once you get the answers to these questions, you’re in a very powerful position to be able to talk about how you are going to deliver on what they’re looking for. And at the end of the meeting, identify what could be standing in the way of them choosing you, so you can do your best to negotiate and get over the sales hurdles that might be getting in the way of you signing up that new client.

Mentioned links

• This podcast is in conjunction with the MSP Marketing Edge, the world’s leading white label content marketing and growth training subscription.
• Join me in MSP Marketing Facebook group.
• Connect with me on LinkedIn.
• Connect with my guest, Eric Smith, on LinkedIn, and visit the Incremental Media website.
• Connect with my Marketing Minute contributor, Jamie Warner, on LinkedIn.
• Got a question about your MSP’s marketing? Let me know.

Welcome to Episode 310 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• MSPs: This simple upsell generates new MRR AND boosts retention: This is something that almost every single client wants but rarely gets from their MSP… a 24/7 at-home support package. And it’s such a simple upsell.
• MSPs who do this win new clients faster: If you want to sell your services you have to move people from being someone you talk to mostly on LinkedIn, YouTube, and email, to being someone you talk to on the phone.
• MSPs: Use marketing AI like Iron Man, not Terminator: Many MSPs actually do damage to the marketing messages they’re putting out because the AI doesn’t really understand what their end goal is. My guest today is an AI marketing expert and he’s going to tell you how to get it right.
• The Marketing Minute: Don’t miss this quick and easy LinkedIn messaging tip.

MSPs: This simple upsell generates new MRR AND boosts retention

Could this be the most valuable upsell any MSP could deploy? It’s something that almost every single client wants but rarely gets from their MSP. And it not only generates new monthly recurring revenue for you but also has a huge and positive effect on retention. Let me tell you what this upsell is and an easy way you can roll it out in the next seven days.

The upsell I’m talking about is an at-home support package. Now think about how most of your clients work these days. They might have an office, they might be completely remote, and of course you are already looking after their office tech, their business tech. But the reality is, as we know, people just work from anywhere these days and they also work at any times – in the evenings, on weekends, sometimes even when they’re on a vacation, on holiday.

And here’s the problem, when they’re working from home out of hours and something goes wrong with their IT, they don’t have anyone to turn to, not unless they wait till Monday morning or something when you and your team are back and we all know that that must be deeply frustrating for them. We also know that you don’t want to do support in the evenings and the weekends for work-life balance. So this is a source of friction for both parties.

You should be doing everything to remove friction between you and your client. This is where your at-home support package comes in… and it’s such a simple upsell.

You could do a setup project perhaps by bundling a couple of things together. You could maybe have a laptop doc, a wireless keyboard, maybe do a WIFI survey for their home and install some boosters, something like that, maybe even a check in on their home security. But the real winner and the monthly recurring revenue is a 24/7 help desk. And the secret sauce to this is that you don’t have to provide that 24/7 help desk yourself. You can outsource it. There are plenty of white label providers out there who will handle those calls in the evening and at weekends for you, often under your brand. So your clients still feel like they’re talking to your MSP.

You might choose to be very clear with your clients that it is an outsourced help desk, but they have access to all of your systems and you train them and you’re constantly working with them and updating them. Because no human expects another human to provide genuine 24 hour service from their local office. I think you’re almost being a bit disingenuous with your clients if you’re not honest with them about how you do this. But if you didn’t want to use a white label provider, you could always team up with an MSP on the other side of the planet, so you can handle each other’s out of hours calls.

However you do this, the important thing is to focus on the impact to your client. Imagine being able to say to them, You know when you’re sat doing some work at like nine on a Sunday evening because you want to get ahead for the week, but there’s something wrong with your IT. And normally you’d have to wait until Monday morning to contact us, and that means you’ve lost productive time. But business no longer works like that anymore, so with this at home support package, you can get help whenever and wherever you’re working. I mean, that’s a very, very compelling pitch, isn’t it? It makes sense for your clients and it creates ongoing monthly recurring revenue for you. So everyone wins. And the best part is you don’t even need every single client to buy it. If just a fraction of your clients take up this package, it becomes a lovely new stream of profit with very little extra effort.

So here’s my suggestion… put together a simple offering, brand it properly, and make it available to all of your clients. Talk about it at every strategic technology review and in all of your marketing. In fact, this could even become a front end USP, a unique selling proposition for you. If you are the only MSP in your area who offers genuine 24/7 support, that’s a fantastic differentiator. In fact, it’s a reason right at the beginning of the relationship that someone would pick you in the first place. So position this as peace of mind because that’s what it really is.

Is this possibly the perfect upsell? Is this something that’s genuinely valuable for your clients, easy for you to deliver because you’re outsourcing it and something that builds monthly recurring revenue for your MSP?

MSPs who do this win new clients faster

There’s no way I could make this any simpler. MSPs who use this marketing strategy win new clients faster. So why isn’t everyone using it because it’s not new, it’s not sexy, and I’ll be honest, it’s not fun to do. It’s something that has to be done to speed up new client acquisition. But look, let’s give you the business case for it to see if it’s something that you want to implement. Let me tell you what it is, why it works, and how the best MSPs implement it.

I love marketing. I mean I literally love it. Marketing has not only paid my mortgage over the years, it paid off a mortgage back in 2016 by letting me build up a business and sell it. It allowed me to acquire rental properties. It allowed me to try my hand at property developing, which actually was a disaster, but we won’t get into that. It’s also allowed me to get involved in a few other people’s business ventures. And I say this not to boast at all because my success is modest by most standards. In fact, I consider my work-life balance and my solid relationship with my 15-year-old child, Sam, I consider that to be my greater marker of personal success than what I’ve actually achieved in terms of bank accounts and businesses and all of that kind of stuff. I’m just trying to show you the sheer life-changing power of marketing.

I want to inspire you to take marketing more seriously in your MSP. When you get marketing right, it allows you to find people who could one day buy your services.

It gets those people to choose to start a conversation with you, join one of your audiences and be educated and entertained by you with your content marketing. But there does come a point where if you want to sell them your services, you have to move them from being someone you talk to mostly on LinkedIn, YouTube, and email, to being someone you talk to offline. And the single most powerful tool to do that is the phone.

In that business that I sold in 2016, which was a healthcare marketing business, we had 12,000 leads, which back then we emailed twice a week, so that’s 24,000 emails a week going out. And we used a CRM to track every single open and every single click from every single person on that list. I then had a team of three telesales people sitting looking at that list, using their brains and figuring out who we haven’t spoken to for a few months and then they just called those people. I mean that was all they did five days a week. And that was how we generated £1 million, which is about $1.3 million a year of revenue in that business. And we did that every year because we could see who the leads were, who was active, and by phoning them, we could find out who was ready to buy. Good marketing puts the right message in front of the right person at the right time and using the phone accelerated that process.

Of course, yes, the phone is inefficient and it’s difficult. More often than not, we couldn’t get hold of the person we were calling… gatekeepers could be very, very effective. But when we did get hold of them, we attempted to have a relationship building conversation. At least once a day or once every other day we would have a very high quality conversation with a lead and we were able to book a sales appointment with them, turning them from a lead into a prospect. Now, if I owned an MSP like yours, I would do exactly the same thing today, yes, even in 2025.

I would build audiences of people who were willing to listen to me. And these audiences will be the decision makers and influences in the businesses I wanted to work with. And then I would educate and entertain those people using good marketing content, building up a light relationship with them and building up my business’s profile as well. But ultimately what would make me money would be having a telephone person looking at all of the marketing activity, picking up the phone and making outbound phone calls to these people.

This is the three step lead generation system my MSP Marketing Edge service is based around. Number one, build audiences. Number two, grow relationships. And number three, convert relationships. I know this is a very hard thing to do within an MSP. You don’t already have this kind of function set up. It really isn’t easy to get started. And telephone people are the hardest people to hire. This certainly isn’t the kind of job that you would want to do yourself, right? Most of us started the business so we didn’t have to do this kind of thing, but I promise you making outbound calls is essential to turn leads into prospects in the same way that sales meetings are essential to turn prospects into clients.

MSPs: Use marketing AI like Iron Man, not Terminator

The Marketing Minute

Hey, this is Ian Luckett from the MSP Growth Hub, and my 60 second tip is stop sending text messages on LinkedIn. Send a video message. Now, you might need to practice this a little bit, but the power of having the connection of someone seeing you personalising their video and giving the message so that they can see that you’re an actual human and that you actually care about what they’re doing and what you’re doing, makes it even more powerful and more chance for them to get back to you. So give it a go. Remember to rehearse it first, and good luck.

Mentioned links

• This podcast is in conjunction with the MSP Marketing Edge, the world’s leading white label content marketing and growth training subscription.
• Join me in MSP Marketing Facebook group.
• Connect with me on LinkedIn.
• Connect with my guest, Mike Montague, on LinkedIn, and visit the Avenue9 website.
• Connect with my Marketing Minute contributor, Ian Luckett, on LinkedIn.
• Got a question about your MSP’s marketing? Let me know.

Welcome to Episode 309 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• Do marketing you can’t automate or scale: In the early days of trying out new marketing, you can’t always jump straight to automation. Manual testing helps to figure out what marketing actually works for your MSP.
• MSPs: Imagine losing 17,000 connections on LinkedIn overnight: You don’t own your connections, your content or your interactions on LinkedIn… they belong to LinkedIn, you just get to borrow them. MSPs should have a combination of borrowed and owned audiences.
• The simple video every MSP needs to increase sales: Explainer videos are a key marketing tool and my special guest will explain how to create one and how to make sure it’s something your hottest prospects are desperate to watch.
• The Marketing Minute: Don’t miss this quick and easy YouTube marketing tip.

Do marketing you can’t automate or scale

In a world where you can automate almost anything so it can be done at any scale, here’s the strangest advice you are going to hear from me. I believe sometimes you should deliberately do marketing that will never scale up and that you can’t automate, even if that means that you personally have to sit and do a whole chunk of work.

Why would I recommend this? Surely one of my jobs is to make your marketing easier. Well, yes, that’s true once you’ve figured out what marketing works, but doing marketing experiments yourself is an important part of figuring out the specific tactics that’ll work for your MSP.

As business owners, you and I love things that are scalable and repeatable, right? We like processes, automation, efficiency, and yes, that’s where you want to end up with your marketing. But in the early days of trying out a new marketing channel, you can’t always jump straight to automation. And here’s why. Not all marketing works for all businesses. What works brilliantly for the MSP down the road from you might flop for you.

The only way to find out what marketing actually works for your business is to test it manually in a way that doesn’t scale.

For example, let’s say you want to try LinkedIn outreach, and sure, there are tools out there that’ll blast out hundreds of automated messages every week. But if you don’t yet know what message resonates with your ideal prospects, then blasting out hundreds of messages just means you’ll annoy more people faster. Instead, you’re better off writing a handful of personal connection requests every day. Try different approaches, test out different messages and see what kind of response you get. Once you know what works, then you can look at scaling or systemising it.

Here’s another example, follow up emails. You might want to eventually build an automated nurture sequence inside your CRM, but before you do that, it’s worth sending a batch of personal follow-ups to prospects one by one to see which subject lines get opened, which wording gets replies. That kind of stuff. Once you know can then plug those learnings into automation and let software do the heavy lifting. And here’s my key point. Marketing is not a one size fits all game. Every market, every town, every vertical is slightly different. So in the early days of trying something new, you’ve got to be willing to roll up your sleeves and do the kind of marketing that just isn’t scalable.

Let me give you three more practical examples:

Number one – handwritten letters to prospects. Everybody has too much email, but nobody gets lots of nice stuff in the post anymore through the mail. So a short handwritten note to a dream prospect stands out a mile. You can even include your business card or a printed case study and sure, yeah, it takes time, but that personal effort is exactly what makes it memorable.

Number two – personally following up after events. Instead of dumping business cards into a CRM and firing off a generic email, pick 5 to 10 people you met at an event and send each of them a tailored follow-up. Mention what you talked about when you met and link to something useful or suggest a quick call. It’s way more effort than an email blast, and those connections tend to stick.

And number three – LinkedIn voice notes instead of typing. Another thanks for connecting message, send them a 20 to 30 second LinkedIn voice note. It’s personal, it’s surprising, and it shows there’s a real human behind the profile. Of course, you can’t outsource this. You can’t really automate it, and that’s exactly why it works.

I guess the way to think about this is it’s R&D, it’s research and development for your marketing. Once you’ve tested and proven what works for your specific MSP, then you can start building processes, automations and systems around it. So don’t be afraid of doing scrappy unscalable marketing in the short term. That’s where the insights come from. It’s how you figure out what works. And once you know what works, then and only then do you scale it up and automate it.

MSPs: Imagine losing 17,000 connections on LinkedIn overnight

MSPs, imagine if you logged onto your LinkedIn one day and instead of those thousands of connections that you’ve slowly built the hard way, you see an error message because you’d broken some rule on LinkedIn that you didn’t even know about, and some algorithm somewhere decided to shut down your account. No warning, no opportunity to put it right, you’re just locked out.

Now, this might sound like fantasy, but it’s real and it’s happened to people that you probably know. Let me tell you about borrowed audiences on platforms like LinkedIn and why owned audiences are always a safer bet.

If you’re old enough to have gone to the movies back in the 1990s, do you remember what the trailers were like? All movie trailers back then were kind of the same. There was a voiceover guy with a really deep voice and he’d talk about the main character, usually Bruce Willis, being the wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time. Well, that was my friend and channel legend, Matt Solomon, on Christmas Eve last year, 2024. I was flicking through Facebook, eating a mince pie actually, when I spotted this post. It said, and this was Matt talking: I’m reaching out with an important request. Remember, he put this on Facebook. He said, my LinkedIn account has been restricted for a post violation. And despite exhausting all standard protocols, 15 emails back and forth, I’ve only encountered copy/paste responses that lead nowhere.

Now, as the voiceover guy would say, Matt was an innocent man locked in a prison for a crime he did not commit. I mean, actually, really, what a nightmare. At the time, Matt had 17,000 plus connections on LinkedIn, and it looks like something that he’d posted had inadvertently tripped a safety algorithm somewhere. His account was automatically suspended. And what’s scary is this could happen to any of us. It could happen to you, it could happen to me at any time. LinkedIn is an amazing platform. I use it every day, and I recommend it as the number one place that MSPs go fishing for business. But its greatest limitation is that it is a borrowed audience.

You don’t own your connections, your content or your interactions on LinkedIn, they belong to LinkedIn.

You just get to borrow them because that benefits you and the platform at the same time. Other borrowed audiences include all other social media platforms, YouTube, online communities that you contribute to, you appearing in someone else’s podcast or in the media or anything like that. The alternative to borrowed audiences is owned audiences. These are safer as you have direct 100% control over what happens with them.

Examples include your email list, visitors to your website, subscribers to your podcast, the list of people who visited your trade show booth. The downside of owned audiences is that it takes a lot more work and cash to build them and get something from them. LinkedIn can make a post go viral with no work needed from you, but your podcast won’t go viral unless you push it and push it and push it for years.

I believe you need a blend of both kinds of audiences. And in fact, Matt Solomon does this. He has a lot of followers across social media, but also has a huge email subscriber list. In the unlikely event his CRM declined to send his emails tomorrow, well, that data is his and he can take it to an alternative CRM. I recommend to my MSP Marketing Edge members that they turn LinkedIn connections into data in their CRM, and we give them a checklist to do this and some specific messages to send out. This allows them to reach the same people through two different channels, but also gives them a safety barrier.

So tell me, what’s the situation in your MSP? If you lost your borrowed audiences tomorrow, could you still reach your leads and prospects? Oh, and PS Just like a 1990 Bruce Willis movie, Matt’s story does have a happy ending. He posted a few days later on Facebook that it had all been resolved and he was no longer in LinkedIn jail.

The simple video every MSP needs to increase sales

The Marketing Minute

Hi, this is Karl Palachuk from Small Biz Thoughts, and I have a super quick tip about how to share your videos effectively. If you post your videos on YouTube, there’s a great disadvantage sometimes because as soon as your video is done and your message has been received, it wants to play another video that is probably completely unrelated to whatever your message was.

Here’s the tip. Put your video into a playlist with other related videos, then share the link to the video inside the playlist. And when it’s complete, YouTube will serve up the next video in your playlist, and you get to keep that audience, at least for the first 30 seconds. Give it a try and let me know how it works.

Mentioned links

• This podcast is in conjunction with the MSP Marketing Edge, the world’s leading white label content marketing and growth training subscription.
• Join me in MSP Marketing Facebook group.
• Connect with me on LinkedIn.
• Connect with my guest, Wil Seabrook, on LinkedIn, and visit the Light Touch website.
• Connect with my Marketing Minute contributor, Karl Palachuk on LinkedIn.
• Got a question about your MSP’s marketing? Let me know.

Welcome to Episode 308 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• The 3 big reasons your best technicians might leave you: Surely one of the greatest fears of any MSP is that of losing one of your key technicians. Let’s explore the three big reasons why they might leave and what you can do to address those.
• How to turn tech newbies into your MSP’s biggest fans: If you confuse your prospects and clients with technology, it’s likely they will disengage and divert their attention elsewhere. Everything needs to be explained in the easiest possible way.
• Control freak? Your MSP may struggle to grow: Business owners are control freaks and often get so caught up in the details that they struggle to grow. My special guest shares how he could help you to improve your business by letting go.
• Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Have you ever considered starting a podcast for your MSP? Here’s a few things you should consider before you dive in…

The 3 big reasons your best technicians might leave you

There are many fears that MSP owners have. One of them is of course being breached, another one is running out of cash. But surely one of the greatest fears is that of losing one of your key technicians. And I’m so sorry to even bring this up, but it’s something that we do need to talk about because there are always very specific reasons why any employee leaves any business.

I want to explore the three big reasons that technicians might leave you so you can address those in your MSP before something terrible happens.

You’ve probably heard that people don’t quit businesses, they quit managers or owners… whoever’s managing them.

Well, this is absolutely true, and in fact, studies have consistently shown that 75% of voluntary exits are due to the boss and not due to the role itself. Another survey that I found on Google show that 57% of employees left their job because of frustrations with their manager or leadership.

So here are the top three specific reasons that a technician might leave your business:

The first is poor management – a lack of support, micromanagement, or even bad communication. Managers who don’t coach, who don’t listen or who don’t trust their people well they drive them away.

The second reason is no meaningful growth or opportunities. High performers crave challenge and progression, and without it they get bored or worse, they leave.

And the third reason is feelings of being undervalued or unrecognised. If your techs aren’t getting feedback, recognition or meaningful rewards, they’ll just look for a place that gives them those things.

But now for the good parts and how to flip the script and keep your top tech talent engaged, motivated, and loyal:

Number one – coach them, train them, invest in them. Make development a habit, not just lip service. Training, whether you do this yourself or whether you pay for them to have training, it boosts retention massively and tailored development plans show that you’re serious about their future. Plus, if you invest in leadership, you won’t end up with accidental managers who drive people away. And of course that’s good because as you can develop managers who work for you, it’s going to be easier for you to hand over the reins for the business at some point when you want to take life a little bit easier. And we do get there, I promise you we do.

Number two – give them room to grow and give them meaningful work to do. Don’t let them get bored because they’re doing meaningless tasks all the time. Instead, provide them with challenging work to do. There’s something called job sculpting where you give them challenges that are designed specifically to their role to push them, to encourage them to grow, to expand their brain and do new things. And if they’re doing that and they can see there’s a clear path upward, that’s a very motivational job for anyone to do.

And number three – recognise and support them. So feedback is so important, especially in an MSP. That means doing regular one-to-ones, just be 5 – 10 minutes just sitting down, chewing the fat. Or you can structure it around what’s going well and what’s not going so well. You should also do public praise wherever you can, even if it’s just in front of the rest of your team. And small rewards go a very long way as well. Just a candy bar, a chocolate bar, a beer, something like that. It doesn’t have to be expensive, but if it’s something that that person really likes, like their favourite chocolate bar, then that’s a huge thing. And I would create a culture of appreciation as well where you appreciate your team and your team are all appreciating each other. It can’t be fake, you have to just do it, you have to show appreciation to your people and you’d be surprised how quickly they will start to show appreciation to each other. And this reduces staff turnover and builds loyalty.

And then of course, the other thing that you need to do is to make sure that your business and everyone’s direct manager, if that’s not always you, offers support and support for absolutely everything, not just what’s happening in their work, but what’s happening in people’s home lives as well. This matters so much.

So let’s just recap that your best techs leave for three big reasons: poor management, lack of growth, or feeling unvalued. Actually it can be all of those things, but by investing in training, offering them opportunity and showing genuine appreciation, you can turn things around and make sure that your best techs would never, ever want to leave.

How to turn tech newbies into your MSP’s biggest fans

Come on, let’s face it. Compared to you, every potential client is a tech noob and you need to impress them. But then again, you don’t want to blind them with science, with technology science. If you go over their head, you’ll put them off and they’ll never buy from you, but do the opposite and they’re much more likely to sign up to come and join you.

So how does someone as knowledgeable about technology as you find that common ground between you and the prospect? Do this right and it could just win you a brand new client.

The things that MSPs routinely deal with every day are often baffling for ordinary owners and managers.

And this hit home for me a few years back when I wrote a book about email security and I gave it to my MSP Marketing Edge members to use. So the idea is they can put their name on the cover and they can give it away on their website or use it in real life as a 48 page business card. The book is called Email Hijack. In fact, we’ve just refreshed it for 2026 for our members, and it tells the fictitious story of a business owner whose email is compromised and £12,000 (or $15,000) is stolen from his business bank account. It shows how easily that can happen.

Now, it took me 5,023 words to explain email security in a way that people who don’t know or frankly don’t care about it will understand it and in a way that they’ll be motivated to protect themselves and their company’s email. And that’s the challenge. When your world and their world collide. You’ve got a fundamental problem to overcome when trying to explain critical concept to ordinary people. Because even in 2025, they don’t care about all of this tech stuff anywhere near as much as you do.

When someone’s a little bit confused by something, they’re much more likely to dismiss it, to ignore it and move on than they are to take the time to understand it. We live in a very busy world, don’t we? And our brains are constantly trying to make sense of that world. So if you confuse someone with technology and acronyms, it’s more likely their brain will disengage and they’ll divert attention elsewhere.

You must see this with your own clients, right? Unless they’ve got a very specific problem that has to be fixed for a very particular reason, they’ll put up with a fudge, won’t they? Or they’ll just make do, because really they don’t understand what the problem is and their brain’s just not interested anyway. This was the challenge with writing that book to explain email security, blended layers of security, how hacks can happen, and how something as simple as one hacker getting into one email account can be disastrous for the entire business, and can see it lose thousands and thousands out of its bank account. And all of this had to be done in a way that non-technical people would understand.

That’s why it took me 5,000 words and I had to lock myself away in a luxury hotel for three nights to write it. True story. This is the personal burden that I carry. So the challenge for you is to break down what you do into the smallest possible, most easily understood chunks whenever you are talking to prospects. And equally as important, clients. The second they don’t get it, they will disengage and you won’t get the sale.

Life’s going to be harder for you. Everything needs to be explained in the easiest possible way. And by the way, this is not in any way about talking down to them, far from it. This is about you dropping down to their level and looking at things as they look at it. There’s a phrase I’ve been using for a few years that explains this concept really well, and I can’t remember which book I’ve stolen it from, but here it is, to influence what John Smith buys, you must look through John Smith’s eyes. Love that phrase. And this is exactly what we’re talking about here. In fact, within your MSP, the challenge is to be constantly interpreting the technical gobbledygook that is your world, into normal, everyday, easily understood concepts for the people that you are serving. And the clearer and more precise your business is, the easier it is for them to understand and the greater the financial rewards will be for you.

Because remember, these ordinary business owners and managers aren’t making decisions on suppliers and spend using their brains. Their brains are just rubber stamping the decisions that their hearts are making. This is why we have to create marketing that’s emotional rather than logical. So this is your heart having a conversation with their heart, with a bit of evidence to reassure their brain to rubber stamp the deal.

Control freak? Your MSP may struggle to grow

Paul’s Personal Peer Group

This week’s question is from Kenny, who’s MSP is based in New York, and he simply asks: Should I start a podcast?

Probably not. Because unless you have a real passion for podcasts and you’ve always itched to do your own, you’ll quickly find that a regular podcast is a total pain. However, the benefits are huge. I’ve found my podcast a key tool to reach people I would never have reached any other way. I’ve been able to set myself up as an authority figure. It opens doors for me to meet influential people through interviews. And of course, I’ve built a brand new audience. So if you do fancy it, these are the main areas to consider:

• First of all, target audience. This is easy if you operate in a specific vertical or a niche, but much harder if you just operate geographically, like in your local town. You have to really ask yourself why someone would listen to your podcasts.
• The next thing is you need a good podcast title. It needs to be a unique one that will catch their attention and also needs to be something that’s not already being done. Remember, ordinary people aren’t as interested in technology as you are. So a podcast just about technology probably won’t cut it, but if you did a podcast about using technology to improve or grow your business, that might be one.
• Next up is regularity. And doing it weekly gets people into the habit of listening. But trust me on this one, it is a treadmill. We work several weeks ahead, so we never miss an episode, that requires a lot of discipline. I say this to you as I’m recording this on Tuesday 12th August. How long ago was that? But we’re so disciplined. We work weeks and weeks and weeks ahead, and we’ve always got lots of podcasts in the bag ready to go. So if something happened to me for a couple of weeks and I couldn’t record podcasts, you would never know.
• The next thing is the format. You’ve got to look at the format because lots of podcasts are really just an interview with a guest, and that’s the easy way to do a podcast. But the downside is if your guest is a bit boring or the listener doesn’t like the guest, they’ll skip the whole podcast. So the other way to do it is to have several segments to the show like we do. So we have the intro where we tease all of the content and those lines I say at the beginning of the podcast are designed to hook you in to tell you what’s coming up in the show. Then you get me talking about something, then you get me talking about something else, a different subject. Then we have a short guest interview. Then this bit where we answer questions, which actually we’re changing next week, tell you about that in a second, and then a tease for what’s coming up next week. So that’s a good format, feel free to copy that format if that’s what works for your podcast. Or you could even just do you talking about something and then a short interview. That in itself would be enough.
• And then you’ve got to ask yourself about what specific content, what exactly are you going to talk about? And it is worth having a content calendar to plan this. So our content calendar stretches months into the future. It’s very flexible, very adaptable. We do move things around all the time, but the quickest way to lose motivation for your podcast is to be scratching around for content ideas.
• The one thing I haven’t talked about there is all the technology, because actually that’s all really simple. You need a good quality USB microphone. If you do your podcast on video, which I don’t recommend you do at the start, start on audio only and add video later, but you must add video because YouTube is used for a lot of podcast consumption. But obviously if you do your podcast on video, you’re going to need a decent camera, you’re going to need lighting, all of that kind of stuff. You can find out all about that on Google or AI. It’s the same with hosting. There are lots of platforms out there that host podcasts. We use one called Castos.

But by the way, if you do start your own podcast, will you drop me an email and let me know because I’m always fascinated to hear and see what MSPs are doing. My email address is hello@mspmarketingedge.com.

Now next week, we’re doing something a bit new with this part of the show. I’ve been asking all of the marketing and business growth experts that I know within the channel to send me a voice note, and I’ve asked them to think up marketing tasks that you can do in a really short space of time. We’re talking like a minute or just a couple of minutes. So over the next few months, I’m going to play their voice notes with their suggestions for you. And that starts in next week’s podcast.

Mentioned links

• This podcast is in conjunction with the MSP Marketing Edge, the world’s leading white label content marketing and growth training subscription.
• Join me in MSP Marketing Facebook group.
• Connect with me on LinkedIn.
• Connect with my guest, Peter Bell, on LinkedIn, and visit the Techno Global Team website.
• Got a question about your MSP’s marketing? Submit one here for Paul’s Personal Peer Group.

Welcome to Episode 307 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• MSPs: Stop using this 2008 marketing tactic: Some MSPs are trying to find new clients using outdated tactics from over 20 years ago. Let’s find out which tactics are working for building your email list and lead gen right now.
• Why ignoring Copilot damages MSPs’ retention: Whether you love it or hate it, AI tools are here to stay and we know that Microsoft is highly committed to baking Copilot into everything. Let me tell you why.
• Can MSPs win clients without embracing video?: The video revolution is happening, and it’s the MSPs who are embracing it who are winning new clients faster. My special guest reveals ways for you to use video easily and also something that he’s calling, the new social SEO.
• Paul’s Personal Peer Group: As an MSP owner, do you struggle to let go and delegate tasks to staff or outsource? Let me tell you why it’s such an important step to growing your business.

MSPs: Stop using this 2008 marketing tactic

You’re not doing MySpace marketing, are you? Some MSPs are trying to find new clients using outdated tactics from over 20 years ago. Building an email list is still one of the most effective things you can do, but are you asking for email addresses in the most modern way? Let’s find out which tactics are working for building your email list and lead gen right now, and which should have died out alongside MySpace.

What I’m talking about here is lead magnets. Have you heard of those? Let’s discuss what they are, why you should care, and why your approach to them might be stuck in the past. First things first, what is a lead magnet? It’s something valuable that you give away for free in exchange for someone’s contact details. And usually that’s their email address, but sometimes it’s also their phone number or other information.

The whole idea is to attract the right prospects and start a relationship with them before you try and sell them anything.

Now, if you think about it, no one wakes up in the morning thinking, oh, I can’t wait to fill in another contact form today. You have to give people a reason to do it, and the lead magnet is that reason. So how would you use one in your MSP? It’s simple. You put it everywhere that you prospects might come across you. So on your website, your LinkedIn, both your profile and your posts, your email signature, anywhere really, and you promote it almost like it’s a service that you offer. In fact, the more valuable it feels, the more people will download or sign up for it. And then you can follow up with useful emails that guide them towards becoming a client, whoop.

Now here’s the thing. For years the go-to lead magnet has been a PDF download, something like top 10 tips for cyber security or a small Business IT checklist. And don’t get me wrong, these can still work, but let’s be honest, PDFs are a bit old hat now, right? People are drowning in files they never open, and the guide that you put hours into creating is probably sitting in someone’s downloads folder and they’ve never opened it. So what’s better these days?

Well, I believe these days, interactive content wins. And one of the best examples is an engagement quiz. The kind of thing that you can build with a platform like ScoreApp. If you’ve never heard of that, go and Google it, it’s a great app. And here’s why quizzes work so well.

• They’re quick – your prospect can answer a few easy questions in minutes.
• They’re personalised – the results are tailored to them, which makes it more relevant and engaging.
• They create curiosity – people want to know their score. It’s human nature.
• And they lead naturally into some kind of sales conversation.

If the quiz shows gaps in their IT set-up, guess who’s perfectly placed to help fix them? You are. So for example, you could create a How secure is your business’s IT? quiz. And the prospect answers seven questions about backups, password updates, that kind of stuff, and at the end they get a score with some tailored recommendations. And if their score isn’t great, well that’s a perfect opening for you to reach out and talk to them about solutions.

So here’s your action step for this week. If your current lead magnet is a dusty PDF that hasn’t had many downloads lately, think about replacing or at least supplementing it with something interactive. Quizzes aren’t just fun for your audience, they give you better leads because the person who completes them is already engaged.

Why ignoring Copilot damages MSPs’ retention

How much does your MSP talk to its clients about Copilot? Is it something you embrace or just something you kind of sidestep? Whether you love it or hate it, AI tools are here to stay and we know that Microsoft is highly committed to baking Copilot into everything. So let me tell you why.

I believe you must tell your clients how to get the most out of Copilot or risk them listening to another MSP.

I’m a sole parent to 15-year-old Sam, and that means the usual quiet of my home office is broken now and then by the three main demands of any teenager – food, internet, transport. Actually, joking aside, Sam has really thrown herself lately into revising for her big scary exams, even though she’s not doing them until spring next year. I think this is a really good thing, right? And what’s cool is watching how she’s leveraging AI tools. Because you and I remember a time before ChatGPT and Copilot and all of the others, but for her AI tools have always been there.

Now here’s what she was doing recently. She was taking photos of her textbook pages, these are the books that we buy with all the information in the stuff she’s got to learn that’s on the syllabus. She’s copying the photos that she’s taken of the text pages into ChatGPT, and then she’s asking it to read them and summarise the content into a revision guide. Then this is the cool bit, she’s copying the revision guide out by hand because she has learned somewhere, and she’s right, that writing helps the brain to retain information better than just reading it. But essentially the AI tool is speeding up the revision for her. And yes, she’s checking that the AI that ChatGPT isn’t hallucinating.

Now, I don’t know if this is what the teachers are showing them what to do or if the kids have just cooked this up by themselves, but it got me thinking about Copilot and your clients. And I know lots of MSPs have really embraced AI tools, but I also know there are others who don’t really like Copilot and they try not to mention it to their clients. But we do see AI everywhere now, don’t we? Especially Copilot if you’re in the Microsoft ecosystem. And we can see that Microsoft is very, very committed to making it an embedded part of Windows and 365 going forward.

So here’s a question for you. Are you proactively telling your existing clients about ways they can use Copilot or other AI tools to make their lives easier? And I don’t mean in big flashy ways. I mean with small smart productivity hacks, like using it to summarise a meeting or turn a Word document into PowerPoint slides. I think there’s a terrible perception of generative AI out there from ordinary people who heard about ChatGPT, they tried it once and then they abandoned it. But they don’t realise how fast the tools are developing and how people are using them to save time and get things done of course. Do you know, I’d love to know some of the ways that you are recommending your clients use Copilot.

Can MSPs win clients without embracing video?

Paul’s Personal Peer Group

Steven, from an MSP in Kansas, is trying to wrestle time back from working in the business to work on the business. His question is: Why am I struggling to let go of doing things myself or outsourcing stuff?

It’s because you are a control freak, but don’t worry. So am I, and so is everyone else listening to this podcast. All business owners are control freaks. Why do we start the business in the first place? Yeah, partly it’s for money, partly it’s flexibility, but for most it’s about control. Control over what you do, how you do it, and when and where you do it. And what makes the control freakery even worse is when you discover in the early days that no one can do stuff in the business as well as you can. So you use your business owning superpowers to hang onto as many jobs as you can, even if you don’t realise you’re doing this, you are.

The ability to exert this level of control is what stops far too many MSP owners becoming proper business owners. They spend their entire careers as owner operators, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But after 10 to 15 years of it, you really need to grow, let go and transition into being just the owner, where the business is being run for you by people, other people who together can actually do a better job than you could on your own. And yes, this is painful and it can lead to an identity crisis, but the reward is you get paid very well to go and do lots of other things that you really like doing. Like volunteering or walking the dog, anything like that. But at the same time, you retain full ownership of the business.

To get anywhere near this goal, there does come a point where you have to truly start to let go and accept that once you start involving other people, sometimes they will only ever do something 80% as well as you could do it, but that’s okay. In fact, it’s more than okay, as it means in the short term, you can focus your valuable time and energy on things that make a bigger impact on you, your family, your staff, and your clients. And in the long term, you can create a business that thrives without you personally needing to be there.

Imagine you had this phone call tomorrow. Someone says, Hey, it’s your biggest client here. I’m really annoyed that you can’t restore that file I lost because our backup stopped eight days ago and you didn’t fix it. And you have to say, I’m really sorry about that. I was so busy answering the phone and so busy changing passwords and scheduling social media and logging tickets and editing our newsletter, and also had to clean the kitchen and check the invoices and fix the automation links and tweak the PSA and set up new users. I’m so busy doing all of that. I just didn’t get round to checking that your backup was working.

Obviously, your most important client is going to be pretty mad at that. All business owners go through something like this. Letting go is a rite of passage. You do it slowly over a number of years until one day you just don’t go to work for a few weeks and the business does better without you. Here’s something to get you started. Read a book. It’s called the E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber. It’s also available on Audible if you don’t want the paper copy, but it is a great book to help you understand how you are feeling about this and what you can do to get started on that journey.

Mentioned links

• This podcast is in conjunction with the MSP Marketing Edge, the world’s leading white label content marketing and growth training subscription.
• Join me in MSP Marketing Facebook group.
• Connect with me on LinkedIn.
• Connect with my guest, Jacob Tlapek, on LinkedIn, and visit the Finch website.
• Recommended book: E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber.
• Got a question about your MSP’s marketing? Submit one here for Paul’s Personal Peer Group.

Welcome to Episode 306 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• Your MSP should AVOID these AI tools: If you want to be more productive, do better marketing and ultimately grow your MSP, there are AI tools you’ll definitely want to avoid. Instead, here are five AI tools that you should be using right now.
• Why your MSP doesn’t stand out (and how to fix that): There are thousands of MSPs to choose from, so why would people choose you? Let me share a couple of good ideas with you and see if I can give you some inspiration.
• All successful MSPs have this in common: The easiest way to grow your MSP is to ask someone who’s already done it. My special guest has been growing MSPs for 20 years and has some ideas waiting for you to use.
• Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Find out what “relevance increases results” actually means and how can it help with your MSP’s marketing.

Your MSP should AVOID these AI tools

It’s one thing being overwhelmed by your business and not having enough time to find new clients for your MSP, but it’s another thing being overwhelmed with the choices of AI tools that are supposed to save you time and reduce overwhelm in the first place. Have you found the options and variations of AI tools so completely bamboozling? Well, if so, you’re not on your own.

If you want to be more productive, do better marketing and ultimately grow your MSP, here are five AI tools that you should be using right now. And let’s be honest, there is a lot of noise about AI and a lot of it is hype. I follow a lot of AI newsletters very carefully to keep up to date with what’s happening, which of course is a never ending and somewhat overwhelming task in itself. Now while there is a lot of talk of people trying to do amazing things, often when you dive into the amazing things that all of these new tools should be able to do, they just don’t work that way. Well, they kind of work that way, but they’re never really good enough for you to rely on them. But saying that…

There are some very real and very useful tools that MSPs are already using to save time, create better marketing, and just get more done.

So let me give you a shortlist of what I think are the best AI tools you should know about right now:

Let’s start with the most obvious one, ChatGPT or Copilot or Perplexity or whatever your preferred tool is. And yeah, I know it’s obvious but hear me out because the trick with getting the best output from your general AI tool is giving it good input. So let’s look at content creation for example. The worst thing you could do is just say, Hey, ChatGPT, write me a blog post about backups because it’s just going to generate boring AI slop that isn’t going to bring any benefit to your MSP. So a better way to use it is to shape content that you’re already getting from trusted content providers and get the AI tool to customise it to your specific audience.

Let me give you an example. We create tons of content for our MSP Marketing Edge members and increasingly a number of them are using AI tools to tailor that content to their specific audience. So for example, some have created custom GPTs, which are then trained on their ICP, sorry to use two acronyms in a row there, but as you might already know, an ICP is an ideal client profile. So they’ve essentially taught the AI exactly what their ideal client looks like and then they put our content into that custom GPT and the AI tweaks and adjusts the content so it’s completely relevant to the ideal client. And you do this because relevance increases results. Can you see the power of doing that? You’re taking very well-written content that’s been put together by humans and then you are optimising it for the very specific audience that you want to reach.

The other big thing that I found recently with ChatGPT especially is that just giving it a prompt and expecting it to do a great job is rarely the answer. Instead, you’ve kind of got to challenge it to do something, give it a mission, perhaps get it to interview you, make it a two-way street. If you use ChatGPT like an assistant that you’re having a discussion with rather than a contractor you’re just giving a very short brief to and expecting it to get on, that’s where you get the best results – two way conversations.

My suggestion number two is OpusClip. If you’re making any video content, even just filming yourself giving tech tips, then this tool is magic. You upload one long video and OpusClip automatically chops it into short clips with captions, jump cuts and highlights. It’s perfect for LinkedIn or YouTube shorts and I’ve seen a few MSPs use this to turn a 5 – 10 minute video into a whole month of content.

Suggestion number three is Descript. And this is a game changer for editing audio and video because instead of fiddling around with timelines, you edit the transcript like a Word document and then Descript cuts the video to match. And you can remove filler words automatically. It even has a voice cloning feature, so if you say something wrong and you want to fix it without re-recording, it just kind of makes up your voice for you. Very clever.

Number four, Firefly.ai or Fathom or one of the other AI meeting assistants. And as you probably know, they jump on your Zoom or Teams calls, they take notes and then they summarise the key action points. And MSPs are using them for client meetings, initial discovery calls, and even internal strategy sessions because you get searchable transcripts. So if someone says, Can we talk about cyber insurance again next quarter? it’s right there and some of them will pull out those action points as well.

What’s funny these days is when you join a Zoom or Teams call with lots of people, you get almost as many note takers as you do actual humans joining the call. But like I was saying earlier about ChatGPT, just using something to automatically record and transcribe and summarise every meeting, there’s little real value to you because when do you ever read back those summaries? You don’t because you were in the meeting. But they can be great if you take those summaries and you use them as an aide memoir in the future. Anything that stops you having to go back and ask someone, What was it we were talking about? just saves everyone time, which is great.

I find it quite useful to take summaries and put them into another AI like ChatGPT and ask it to pull out the actions that you should have been doing or to summarise something that you might’ve missed. I know it’s kind of weird to use two AIs together, but sometimes one AI will spot something the other AI hasn’t.

And then suggestion number five, let me tell you about a productivity tool I’ve been using that has completely changed the way I work. It’s called Wispr Flow. Now this is a dictation tool, but you use the same tool across all of your devices and it learns about you and how you talk and what you like and what your preferences are over time. Now, I was kind of dubious when I started their free two week trial. I use dictation on my Mac and on my iPhone all the time, and that’s been a big part of how I work for a couple of years. So why did I need another dictation tool? But actually Wispr Flow is very smart.

It adapts to the platform that it’s being used in. So for example, it’ll be a lot less formal in a WhatsApp or an SMS conversation than it would in an email or if you’re writing a LinkedIn post. It also handles all of the formatting and the presentation of the content for you. The real power of Wispr flow is you just talk to it naturally rather than the stilted conversation that you have with normal dictation tools. So when I’m just dictating something on my iPhone, I’m saying something like, And I will get back to you open bracket when I can close bracket full stop smiley emoji. And it’s not a natural flow.

When I’m using Wispr Flow, I can just say, So I’ll get back to you when I’m ready and if there’s anything else that I can help with, will you just let me know? Thanks Paul. And it automatically arranges it into sentences and leaves gaps and puts emojis in and all of that kind of stuff because it’s learned I like emojis in my texts. I mean even just something like leaving a pause as I’m thinking about something, it acknowledges that that’s the end of a paragraph and it starts a new paragraph. Or it can sometimes go back if I change my mind about something. So if I say, Can you get back to me about the cheese? Oh sorry, the cheese and the beef and the ham. Then all I see in the text is Can you get back to me about the cheese and the beef and the ham? Whereas most other tools that you use like this, you end up seeing cheese, cheese, beef, and ham. Does that make sense?

It will also pick up the way that you spell certain words and you can program certain things in. So if I go in and edit some texts that it’s just dictated for me, which is transcribed for me, then if I’ve changed the spelling, it will automatically add that to the dictionary and use that spelling again in the future. And I can tell it things right from the get go. For example, I have a colleague called Ami, but she spells it with an I on the end, not a Y on the end. And I say the word Ami quite a lot as I’m dictating messages to her. So I only had to tell it once that it’s Ami with an I and now it gets it right every single time on all of my devices. That’s the point. You do this on one device and it automatically updates on all of your devices. It’s very good.

I remember a few years back when I discovered a tool called Text Expander. That’s not an AI tool, but it was a tool that completely changed my productivity because instead of having to copy and paste repeat text, I just set up all the things I often type with short codes and I still use that today. Well, Text Expander and Wispr Flow together has had a similarly huge effect on me, and I find myself using Wispr Flow every single day, not just for work, but for personal stuff too. So tell me, which AI tools would you recommend to me right now?

Why your MSP doesn’t stand out (and how to fix that)

It’s as simple as this… there are thousands of MSPs they could choose from, so why would they choose you? Most MSPs simply cannot answer this question, and yet it’s the most important marketing question to answer. What’s your USP? What’s the reason you stand out? Figuring out the answer to this isn’t easy. So let me share a couple of good ideas with you and see if I can give you some inspiration.

So I’ve got this friend, let’s call her Debbie, and she’s not in our world, she works in a different sector and sadly she was just made redundant a few months ago, which is not fun, especially after nearly a decade in the same business. It’s kind of left her at a crossroads. She was already thinking of changing careers, but of course we like to be in control of when we do these things, don’t we? I was chatting to her the other day and said, if you could wave a magic wand and do any job, what would it be? And her eyes completely lit up and she smiled and she said, I’d love to work with animals. In fact, she said, I’ve just applied for a receptionist role at my local veterinarians, and then the smile faded, but they told me they’ve had hundreds of applications, I’ve got no chance.

Well, now it was my turn to get excited. I said, No, wait, standing out is a marketing challenge and that’s my superpower. Five minutes later I devised a brilliant plan for her.

Number one, she was going to bake a really big delicious cake and she is a great baker.

Number two, she was going to print her CV, her resume on high quality paper.

Number three, she was going to hand write a covering letter to accompany it, saying something like, I know that hundreds of people have applied for this role and I wanted to make sure you saw my application. You’ll be jumping for joy if you give me this role because… and then list three benefits that the owner of this veterinarian practice will enjoy by hiring her. Maybe add a humorous fourth one about an endless stream of fresh cakes.

Number four, put all of that in a brightly coloured box to keep it together.

Then number five, hand deliver the box to the veterinary clinic, like now, no delay in that, it’s got to be done urgently.

So if she’d done all of this just doing that wouldn’t have got Debbie the job, but it would’ve got her an interview, you can almost guarantee that, can’t you? Because as an employer, wouldn’t you be intrigued by a candidate who went to this much effort? I know I would. Well, I saw Debbie a week or so after we had this conversation, and of course I said to her, how did you interview go? And she admitted to me a bit sheepishly, oh, I didn’t do the cake thing. I didn’t want to stand out for the wrong reasons, which to me is just flipping crazy. Although I do understand how much fear she must have felt at the thought of pushing that much outside of her comfort zone. But here’s the thing, for many job roles and especially those that don’t require specialist skills, employers are spoiled for choice.

To get people’s attention you have to do things that other people won’t. And marketing your MSP is exactly the same.

The ordinary business owners and managers that you want to reach have hundreds if not thousands of other MSPs that they can pick from. In theory, they could hire an MSP anywhere in the world, so you must stand out to them. And one of the tactics I recommend to do this is something called an impact box, which is similar to what I recommended that Debbie did, but systemisable.

Here’s what could go inside your impact box: You should do a handwritten short intro note, handwritten stands out because it shows that you’ve taken the time and put in the effort. And if your handwriting is terrible, you get someone else in the office to do that. You’d also put in your proposal, or if you’re only at the meeting stage you’d put a confirmation of the meeting or the confirmation of the follow-up meeting, depends where you are in the sales process when you send this impact box. You’d put in there your buyer’s guide, and if you don’t have one, we give one to our MSP Marketing Edge members, in fact we’ve just refreshed it for 2026.

You’d put in there a selection of printed case studies and now that’s a third piece of printed material but all of these play a different part in influencing people. In fact, one idea is to put a video case study in there on a USB because obviously your prospects would never plug a USB from a stranger into their laptop, would they? You’d also throw in there some edible stuff like chocolates, biscuits, sweets, candy, something like that. And then some merch, some merchandise, a mouse mat, pen, a mug, whatever really. Just make sure the box looks really nice inside, use sheets of that crumpled tissue paper, and on the outside you could have some stickers printed with your logo or something like that.

You deliver that box to the right prospect at the right point in their sales cycle and it will completely blow them away. Doesn’t guarantee that you get the sale, but it guarantees you a place at the table. Now, what else do you think you could do to make your MSP stand out to prospects?

All successful MSPs have this in common

The best piece of advice in business is this… if you want to achieve something big like growing your MSP, the easiest way to do that is to ask someone who’s already done it. What would you ask them? Would you ask them what they did, what worked the best and what was a waste of time? Well, you are in luck because my special guest right now has been growing MSPs their entire life. So just for you, here comes some ideas waiting for you to use.

Hi, I’m Nicola Moss. I am the owner of The Fractional Marketeer and I’ve been running this business for the last few months, having had a 20 year exciting career marketing within some of the smallest and largest of MSPs.

That’s brilliant, and thank you so much for joining us on this podcast, Nicola. Obviously you’ve got this exciting new business going forward where I know you are already working with some MSPs and you have some gaps, some vacancies to work with others. Let’s see if we can fill those gaps for you. So we’ll talk about that and what you do later on towards the end of the interview. First of all, I want to look back at the last 20 years because someone who has been there in the trenches actually physically doing marketing for MSPs for 20 years has an immense amount of value. We all know that if you’ve been there and you’ve done it, the chances of you figuring out what to do and how to do it, it just gets easier and easier and easier. So give us a brief rundown of your career. How did you get into marketing MSPs in the first place and what kind of MSPs have you worked at?

So that’s a really good question. When I left university, I managed to get my first marketing role in oil and gas actually, and thought that might be a sector that was quite fun and exciting, decided that it wasn’t. And I relocated, and with that location came a new job and that job happened to be born out of an engineering company but turned itself into telecoms. I joined there when it was very small, 30 odd people, very tiny company, and I was given the best opportunity of my career and I took it and I ran with it and did everything that I possibly could and stayed there for 10 years. I loved it. And then decided that the time was right to widen my experiences a little bit and join other MSPs. And I’ve been in MSPs ever since, really pretty much.

I think once you’re in the channel, it’s really hard to get out to the channel, isn’t it? It’s fun. And there’s so much change, you can’t ever get bored, let’s be honest. It’s not like being a dentist or something where you are waiting 20 years for a new drill to come in or something like that. I couldn’t imagine anything worse. So you started marketing MSPs around 20 years ago, so around about 2005. And obviously the world was different in 2005, nevermind the technology, nevermind marketing. What are the sort of the big shifts that you’ve seen that have made either been the biggest challenges or have made the biggest difference to MSPs over those last couple of decades?

So it’s an interesting question that actually, and I’ve been reflecting on that over the last couple of days, and I think there’s positives and negatives of this. I think some of the biggest shifts that I’ve seen are 20 years ago we were in analog marketing, so we had telemarketing, events and direct mail and pretty much that was all that we had, especially in small MSPs where budgets were limited. And I was in a small MSP. So 20 years ago you had to be really creative with marketing and you had to know where to spend the money to get the best bang for your buck. And I think I spent quite a long time perfecting that. I think they call it gorilla marketing now.

I did run some really, really high profile branding initiatives for Opal Telecom while I was there. It’s now Talk Talk Business. And they were fun and exciting and I guess in that day as well, what equally didn’t happen, I guess, which is different to today, is that we weren’t measured on things. There weren’t so many KPIs. We didn’t really look at return on investment in the way that it’s looked at now. And the measure was are we growing as a business and the measure was we actually doubled our turnover year on year, phenomenally, phenomenally quick, and it was hard to keep up.

So I guess those are the two sort of different challenges. I think now we’re in a much more digital world. We have been probably for the last 10 years or so, maybe slightly more digital and social. And my sort of thought process I guess for the future, I know you haven’t asked this question, is what are we going to do next? And are we about to change and are we about to flip? And I actually think that the answer is yes to that.

People have digital fatigue and I think there’s going to be changes in marketing ahead, but we don’t know quite what they will be yet.

Well, let’s go with that question, because you’re right, that was going to be my next question, which is if you’ve been doing something for 20 years and you’ve seen the evolution of that, what’s next? We are fully digital, and I recommend to my MSP Marketing Edge members that they occasionally do some analog stuff because analog stuff stands out. We give them a printed newsletter every month, and I say, print 50 to 100 copies, send that out to your hottest prospects to your Dream 100, the concept of your hottest small bunch of prospects. And the reason we do that is because 20 years ago, loads of printed newsletters landed in doors and today no one does that. So it gives you huge standoutability. So let’s look at that then the next couple of years you think there’s going to be a flip? Is that going to be based around AI or something else?

I think AI is going to play a role, it’s certainly going to play a role within SEO marketing anyway, and I don’t don’t know yet how that landscape is going to change, but when people are searching Google now, it presents the whole AI spiel before you even get to the number one. So fighting for that number one has become even harder, and we don’t really know how that landscape is going to evolve, I think. And you’re right in terms of that, so we talked a bit about digital fatigue and I think people are open to face-to-face communications, they’re open to that more personal touch, they’re open to that different side of marketing that was perhaps from back in the day. And perhaps we just need to evolve from back in the day and bring it into today’s kind of marketing. But I definitely think that there’s going to be a change.

Yeah. Well, you’re preempting all of my questions. Oh, by the way, I should clarify, we don’t pre-plan these interviews, so I never provide lists of questions or anything, these interviews are always just go with the flow. It’s clearly Nicola and I are thinking the same way, which is really cool. So we’ve looked at the past, we’ve looked at the future. Let’s talk about what’s working now. So you have, as you said earlier, a few months ago you came out of actually doing marketing for an MSP and now you’re working with a number of them. So obviously we have no idea really do we, what’s going to happen. And you and I as marketers are following trends, are reading and consuming and researching just as much as anyone else because I think we’re all just sort of finding our way into the future. But in terms of right now, so as this interview goes out late summer 2025, what’s working for MSPs now to generate leads and turn those leads into initial sales meetings?

That’s a really tough question, and I think with the MSPs that I’ve been speaking to, I actually think that there’s an area where, I mean, we could probably say that actually it’s quite tough right now for MSPs and certainly marketing is equally quite tough. And I think there’s challenges with who they’re marketing to. Budgets are tightened. I think IT projects are being undertaken, but they’re being selective about which projects they want to undertake and when. So I think that there’s certainly a lot of challenges for an MSP. And of course if you are selling managed services, there’s only really ever 3% in market, so to speak, that’s able to buy. Most MSPs actually do say that they retain kind of like 95, 97% of their customer base. So the market is sort of very small anyway, and they’re equally being quite cautious about who they’re engaging with and how.

What’s working with MSPs right now, I think they’re still using the more interruptive forms of marketing that there are, the telemarketing, the email side of marketing. I think the way that MSPs are and the way that marketing is measured, I think people want to try and see the return. And that’s where people can see the return and it’s measurable and you can send out a hundred emails and you get one response and you can figure out whether that’s a channel that’s worth investing in or not. I think what the smaller MSPs particularly, and I totally get it, what they’re perhaps not embracing so much is the brand side of things. So it’s all very much tactically lead driven activities. But what happens, you’ve got your 3% that’s in market and you’re doing a marketing campaign that lasts three months, what happens for the rest of the nine month period?

And that’s where I think the strategic marketing really should come into play. You really probably need to be looking at the peer review sites for example, a lot of the buyers, 70% of buyers Gartner say, actually do their buying before they even arrive on a company’s website. So unless you’re sort of present in those areas, it’s going to be very difficult for you. You are sort of battling uphill all of the time. And whilst the uphill battle, I think the MSPs are doing okay at, you’re going to become fatigued really quickly before you get to the top of that. And I think what we need to do is try and get MSPs to turn themselves around a bit and look more into that bigger picture, the branding side of things and things which are actually really quite difficult to measure, but that are so important in terms of turning a business from that sort of outbound interruptive marketing into that sort of inbound, Hey, I’ve just had 10 leads land in my inbox and I don’t know where they’ve come from, sort of MSP, but actually it’s around all of the periphery marketing activities that happen.

I agree. So there’s a couple of really positive things that come out of that. The first is, as you said, 97% of clients stay with their MSP. So it’s tough to win a client, but when you win them, you keep them forever. They don’t go anywhere until they go bust or they’re acquired or there’s some catastrophe which separates that relationship. So hard to win, but easy to keep is the first positive. I think the other positive is Nicola, is that everyone is in the same boat. And if you’ve got 20, 30, 40 direct competitors in your market, let alone the thousands of others you’re in competition with, because any MSP can service any client anywhere more or less, until they’ve got to get physically boots on the ground. Everyone’s got the same problems and everyone’s battling through it. And I’m sure you see this, the MSPs who win are the ones that keep going and keep investing in marketing. And even if it’s small amounts of money and small amounts of time, it’s always better to do little bits of marketing regularly. And I mean every weekday to be doing something every weekday than to do a campaign here and stop and do nothing for six months and do something and stop and do something for a few months and it’s just keeping going is such an important thing.

Yeah, absolutely. And well, like we say, there’s so many different channels now that are available to marketeers. And again, the challenge for marketing is we kind of really need to be present in all of these channels, but we’re sometimes very dictated by budgets. And it’s about trying to figure out which of those channels are going to provide the better ROI for that MSP. And that’s a learning curve, and there isn’t a marketing blueprint for that. Every organisation is different yet facing very similar challenges. And I think it’s the role of marketing is to go in and figure out and navigate how we can create that niche for that MSP and start to tell the narrative and tell the story and build the brand on an ongoing basis so that it’s not just that ad hoc campaign here, an ad hoc campaign there, but it actually starts to build a narrative around that MSP and why that MSP is unique and why that MSP is credible and why somebody should actually choose that MSP as their provider.

Yeah, exactly that. And you get that momentum from doing that and keeping that going. Nicola, let’s stop there. Thank you so much for your time. So you’ve come out of working for an MSP, you are now a fractional marketer, which let’s put that in slightly different terms. Most MSPs listening to this or watching this on YouTube will have heard of the VCIO virtual chief information officer. I would look at Nicola as a VCMO a virtual chief marketing officer. Tell us briefly, what do you actually do to help MSPs? Are you helping with strategy? Are you helping with implementation? And then finally, what’s the best way to get in touch with you?

Oh, brilliant, thank you. It’s a bit of both actually. So it depends on the MSP and what they’ve sort of got existing at the moment. Some MSPs that I’m working with, they already have a marketing function of sorts, and that marketing function can be sort of part of the commercial team or part of the sales team, and perhaps it’s sort of reached the limit of what the sales or commercial person knows about marketing and they’re wanting somebody to come in and help drive that strategy. Or it could be an MSP that kind of needs support and help and guidance in understanding actually what is their niche, what is their USP, what is their ICP, and how do we go about creating the messaging framework in order to be able to sell into them? And I can help along with those things as well. And very tactically, just some MSPs don’t have any marketing at all. So equally very happy to roll my sleeves up and get stuck in to. The best way to get in touch with me is via my website. It’s thefractionalmarketeer.co.uk. Or you can check me out on LinkedIn, search for Nicola Moss, and hopefully that will bring you to me and love to connect and see how I can help.

Paul’s Personal Peer Group

Lucas, from an MSP based in Denver, would like to know what is meant by the term “relevance increases results”?

“Relevance increases results” means that any piece of marketing needs to be as relevant as it can be to the person who’s reading it or watching it. Because the more relevant they perceive it is to them, the more likely they are to take action on it.

So for example, if you had a piece of content about laptop encryption, you’d say to your leads and your prospects: This is what a good IT partner does without having to be asked. When you’re looking for a new partner, book a 15 minute zoom with me.

With clients you’d say: Hey, laptop encryption. We do this automatically to protect you and your data. It’s why you need to tell us if ever you get a device elsewhere and start using it in the business. If you do, just call the help desk so we can check the encryption and other cyber security safety factors for you.

And then this is what you’d say to stubborn break/fixers who will not switch to managed services. You’d say to them: Do you want us to check all of your laptops and make them safe for you? There’s this thing called encryption, which you may not have switched on in your laptop. Why don’t we just check that it’s an easy thing to do and not expensive?

And of course, any kind of interaction like that with a stubborn break/fixer is a start of a conversation to talk about why they really should move over to being a managed services client of yours.

Mentioned links

• This podcast is in conjunction with the MSP Marketing Edge, the world’s leading white label content marketing and growth training subscription.
• Join me in MSP Marketing Facebook group.
• Connect with me on LinkedIn.
• Connect with my guest, Nicola Moss, on LinkedIn, and visit The Fractional Marketeer website.
• Got a question about your MSP’s marketing? Submit one here for Paul’s Personal Peer Group.

Welcome to Episode 305 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• Is on-site support a competitive advantage?: Does your MSP still provide on-site support or are you thinking that maybe you should? Your decision could affect how successful your MSP is.
• How to find your MSP’s next 5 clients: Let me introduce you to the concept of the Dream 100 and how it could completely change your idea of marketing forever.
• Is this the only way MSPs should increase profits?: When profits are down should you reduce costs or focus your time on increasing sales? My special guest is an expert at operations and she’s got a unique spin on this exact problem that you are going to want to hear.
• Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Do you have a live chat or instant messaging option on your MSP’s website? There’s so many options it’s hard to know the right one to choose. But I have the answer for you.

Is on-site support a competitive advantage?

Some MSPs do do it, some MSPs make a point of saying, no way. We’re talking about providing on-site support. Obviously back in the day it went without saying, you just did it. But in our modern, remote first world, the need for in-person on-site support has completely changed. So are you still providing it or are you thinking that maybe you should or that you never ever will again, Your decision could affect how successful your MSP is. So let’s explore your options right now.

Let’s be honest, a few years ago having engineers who could turn up at a client’s office and fix something kind of felt like a major selling point, but here we are in 2025 and most businesses now are hybrid or remote, that happened very quickly.

Almost everything can be fixed remotely, so is on-site support still something worth shouting about in your marketing or is it yesterday’s news?

Let’s look at both sides of this.

The case for on-site support being a competitive advantage, first of all. It starts with the fact that some clients love knowing that someone will actually physically come out if needed. You think about clients with manufacturing equipment, specialist hardware, or those who just feel reassured by a human coming into the office. For them, we’ll be there in person if you need us, that’s a big comfort factor. And as we know, comfort sells. And not every MSP is offering this anymore, of course, so if most of your competitors have gone fully remote you’ll be standing out as we’re local, we’re personal, we’ll come on-site. That could be a differentiator in your marketing. It’s a trust builder. It says, we are not just faceless techs in the cloud, we are real people here for you.

Now let’s look on the other side, the case against on-site support being a competitive advantage. Because on the flip side, as we know, most day-to-day issues don’t need it. Clients are used to remote support now, in fact they expect you to fix things fast online, over the internet. And for many, the idea of waiting for someone to drive over and come into an office kind of feels old fashioned, it’s not special anymore. And then of course there’s the cost. Offering on-site support means travel time, scheduling headaches, and of course engineers are less productive if they’re on-site. They’re not doing three things at once like they are if they’re in the office or working from home. So if your competitors are leaner because they don’t offer it, that could make your prices look higher for something the client doesn’t even value.

It’s tricky this isn’t it, so what’s the answer? Honestly, I don’t think there is a specific answer, it all depends on your target market. If you are serving local businesses who appreciate a personal touch, then absolutely keep on-site support and promote it as part of your premium service or offer it as a bolt-on as like an upgrade. But if your clients are mostly remote friendly and they care more about speed than a handshake, on-site support might not be the advantage that it once was.

The key here I think, is to know your audience and don’t just assume that on-site support is a magic selling point. Test the message. Ask your best clients what matters most to them? And whatever you decide, make sure your marketing highlights the things your clients actually care about in 2025 and not just what MSPs cared about 20 years ago.

How to find your MSP’s next 5 clients

Don’t click send on your next bulk email campaign until you’ve heard this. Don’t click post on that social media advert. Don’t do any of the normal things you do to find new clients for your MSP, until you’ve heard this. All of those specific tactics can work, but they need to be part of the right cohesive strategy. Let’s introduce you to the concept of the Dream 100 and how it could completely change your idea of marketing forever.

There’s a book you really should listen to on Audible, it’s called The Ultimate Sales Machine by Chet Holmes. Now, it’s not about MSPs, but it could be because the concepts inside are gold dust. They’re totally relevant to help you find great leads, nurture them, and turn them into sales appointments. And one of the most exciting concepts in the book is that of the Dream 100.

Rather than spray and pray marketing where you try and reach everyone, identify the top 100 prospects who would make the biggest impact on your MSP if they became clients.

That might be because of their size or the number of staff, the number of endpoints they have. It could be because of their reputation in your marketplace, you know servicing a famous local business is like having a celebrity client. It could be about their MRR budget, their monthly recurring revenue budget, or the opportunity for big profitable projects. Or it could also be about their positive attitude to technology. Now, don’t get too hung up on the number. It might not be a hundred to you. It might be 58 of the hottest prospects.

The point is that you relentlessly pursue this small group of targets. You go above and beyond to cut through the noise and stand out to them again and again. They are your number one most important marketing focus every day, and you are aiming to grow your relationship with them to build familiarity and trust, so that the day that they wake up ready to switch MSPs, whenever that is, they immediately think about you.

What can you do to target these people? Well, there’s an endless pot of ideas. So here are 10 from me and heads up, there’s a lot of real life physical stuff in this list because it’s a smart way to cut through the noise. The key thing with all of these ideas is that the more relevant the recipient perceives it to be, the greater impact it’s going to have.

• Idea 1: Target them with an integrated marketing campaign. So for example, a piece of direct mail, follow up emails and a follow up phone call. Actually every month we supply a new marketing campaign for exactly this purpose to our MSP Marketing Edge members.
• Idea 2: Print off a relevant blog article or LinkedIn post. It could be one of yours, but it doesn’t have to be. Write a few words on a post-it note such as I saw this and thought you’d find it interesting. And then send it to them and enclose your business card in the envelope.
• Idea 3: Build a small case study about one of your clients. Get it professionally designed and printed and mail it to them. Add a note that says, we’d love to help you create a transformation story like this.
• Idea 4: Send them a printed newsletter every month or every other month. And yes, this is another asset that we create for our MSP Marketing Edge members, because it works. It’s really powerful. Printed stuff stands out like you wouldn’t believe.
• Idea 5: Record a personalised video on Vidyard or Bonjoro. Make it about a tech subject that’s relevant to them, such as right now, the urgency of Windows 10 end of life. That will be a great subject for the next couple of weeks or so. I know it feels very late in the day for that, but it isn’t.
• Idea 6: Put on a short webinar or better still a real life lunch and learn and invite your Dream 100 to attend. 30 minutes talking to a human in real life can have the same impact as a hundred digital interactions.
• Idea 7: Send a gift. It’s more important that it’s thoughtful rather than expensive. Here’s a cheap idea that’s really impactful. Call their reception, find out what the decision-maker’s regular coffee order is, like black two sugars, and then get that printed on a mug with their name. Pop your logo and website address on the other side and just send it to them with some decent coffee beans. Hassle factor = high, impact = off the scale.
• Idea 8: Follow up that mug with a phone call to check that you got their order right and then just ask if you can pop in for 15 minutes to have a coffee with them. If you do that, take in your own matching mug with your own coffee order printed on the side.
• Idea 9: Offer a free or low cost paid tech audit. This is an old marketing tool that’s fallen out of favour in recent years, but it ticks every box in terms of engagement, interaction and finding opportunities to sell something to a prospect.
• Idea 10: Target them with retargeting ads that follow them around the web. Send them to a page of case studies on your website. You want them feeling in their core that these guys are everywhere. This is very, very powerful.

So tell me, what do you think of the Dream 100 concept and what other targeting ideas do you have?

Is this the only way MSPs should increase profits?

You can see your profits are down and as the business owner, that’s starting to affect how much money you can take home. So what’s the most effective way to deal with this problem? Should you reduce costs or should you focus your time on increasing sales? My special guest today is an expert at operations and she’s got a unique spin on this exact problem that you are going to want to hear.

Hi, I’m Monica Ozaruk, owner of Mozaruk Consulting and I love helping MSPs with their operations.

And thanks for joining me on the show, Monica, because we are going to answer a massive question today. If your profits are under pressure, should you reduce operating costs or should you increase sales? And the flippant answer to that is, do both. But as we know, any business owner has a finite amount of time and energy and effort. So in that situation where their own personal income is going down as the profits are going down – cut costs or increase sales? Now you and I are going to gently debate that I think on the show today. I suspect we will come at that from different sides. But before we do, let’s find out a little bit about you. So what do you do in the channel? How long have you been here? And tell us some cool stuff about you.

Yeah, absolutely. I’ve been consulting MSPs for the last five years. I come from a process improvement operations background, so I actually did a post-grad in procurement and supply chain management. Not usually something that we talk about here in the MSP world, but I’m trying to bring some of those best practices here. And I do think we are going to have a little bit of a debate. I think I know which side I’m leaning towards and I think I know which side you might be leaning towards, but I’m really just here to make sure that people know where they can cut costs and where they can improve their operations and what that looks like on the other side.

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. So we’ve pretty much given our sides away haven’t we? You’re the cutting cost person, and me, I see that growth is the answer to everything, although I’m going to caveat my own answer with, I know that MSPs find it hard to grow and to get new clients, although I’ll caveat that answer with actually, there’s always plenty of revenue to be made from existing clients. But let’s get back onto that scenario, I talk to MSPs all the time, my MSP Marketing Edge members and I talk to other MSPs I’m not yet working with. And you do often hear that revenue has been flat, especially this year.

And let’s not get political but things happened early this year in the US and we’ve got conflicts all over the world, and the last few years has just been tough going. This year has been, I think, tougher than it has been for a couple of years, and lots of MSPs benefiting from the fact they keep the clients forever, but also sometimes they’ve had clients go bust, they’ve had clients that have been swallowed up by bigger businesses that have got an internal support team, and there’s just a lot of pressure. So what do you see as the priorities for an MSP in that situation where actually profits are down, which obviously affects their own personal income, but their own personal costs are going up at the same time?

Well, I’m going to caveat my answer too, you always need sales. You do need sales in the beginning to grow, however, sales are not something that you can forecast with 100% accuracy. You do not know what your sales are going to look like and we have had a tumultuous year. It has been a lot. There’s been a lot of surprises. People are feeling that pinch.

If you continually chase sales in this economy, it’s difficult and it’s not going to be the same playbook that you’ve used in the past.

Also, sales are great to a point, but then your business is going to get to a certain level and all of a sudden you have all these employees, roles might be undefined, people might have overlapping jobs. You’ve started to develop waste in your operations. And what I mean by that are two people pulling almost the exact same report and looking at it in two different rooms, pulling two different sets of analysis when they could be talking to each other or they could be working together. When I talk about improving operations it’s the focus of, we feel like we’re underwater, we feel like we’re not getting new customers. Maybe let’s look internally and look at our quote to cash process and see if there’s anything that we can do to improve that process internally to define responsibilities and to save costs.

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. And I agree with you about bloat and waste. I grew a business between 2005 and 2016, which I sold, it was a marketing agency. And then in this business, which I started in 2016, in the channel, we’ve been through a couple of things of realising we were bloated and it happened so easily, it happened so quickly. Because you fix a problem, you put a fire out, and then you get a year down the line and you’re like, hang on a second. Why do we do that? Or why is that still a manual process? Or what was the thing we were trying to fix with that? And I think that’s easy to look at when you think about software, especially these days where software does evolve quickly, AI and automations and Zapier and all of this can help to just make things easier. The area where I think most MSPs emotionally struggle is when you are looking at, I’ve got too many people. And do you find that the MSPs you’re working with are quite happy to slash a bit of software or move PSAs, but in terms of losing people, that’s a step too far?

Always. And I don’t know if I’m a bad person, but I always recommend firing, which I don’t do lightly. I think there are a lot of instances where MSPs grew organically, they maybe hired friends, maybe there were really loose job descriptions when people were hired or someone said, Hey, I can do that or I can do that, and all of a sudden it snowballed into a role where they got promoted or they’ve been elevated. The best tech goes into the service manager role but did they get training? Did we really define that role before we did it? And so it’s not necessarily always firing someone, but it is better defining their own role and responsibilities. I do think that everyone has enough people. I think we always need to hire as we grow, but at this point, it’s about right sizing. It’s about leveraging those automations, those tools, those AIs to be able to keep who you have today, but continue to scale without everyone feeling the pinch and feeling so frustrated. I don’t know about you, my MSPs are stressed out right now. Everyone feels really overworked.

Oh, I think MSPs are always stressed out, even in the nine years I’ve been in the channel, every MSP I’ve ever spoken to has been stressed out. It’s the nature of the job, isn’t it?

Yeah, but I don’t think it necessarily has to be that way. I think it’s making the job descriptions a little bit clearer. It’s slow down to speed up. And I don’t know how many MSPs feel that they have the space to be able to do that. I am very empathetic to that, and that’s why it’s helpful to have someone externally come in with a playbook and say, here’s some things that we can do to make it a little bit easier, faster so that we take something off your plate.

Yeah, absolutely. And I agree with you as well, that unless you win a massive contract, you’ve probably got enough people. I think it was Jason Kemsley, who was one of our guests, I mean, we must be talking nine months ago and maybe if I can find the podcast, we’ll link to it. And he was telling us how many technicians he needs per client or per user. I think they’d actually worked a formula out and it was a lot more users than you can expect. So obviously a first line technician can handle a lot of users per day, whereas a third line technician, I think maybe it was tickets, I can’t remember, but they worked out the average number of tickets per client or per user. And then from that, they were able to work out exactly when and forecast when they were going to need new technicians.

So I was going to say they were squeezing the most out every technician, but that’s not what they do. What they were doing is making sure they weren’t overstaffed, but they were ramping up the staff when the work ramped up. And it is so easy, especially when you’re a smaller business, to look at your two people that are doing your technical work and think, oh, but I don’t want to make them too much busier, we’ll get someone else on, and before you know it you’re in a situation where you’ve got way more resource than the work, which is always the chicken and egg thing anyway, especially when you’re very early in the business the first three, four years.

Okay, final question for you, Monica. If you had a 60 second consult with an MSP, which is the person who’s listening to this on the podcast or watching this on YouTube right now and they’ve just said to you, oh my goodness, profits down – we’ve kept our customers but the profits are down – and you haven’t got time to ask all the intelligent questions that I know you would ask, what are some of the main areas that you would suggest that they looked at to review their costs and make sure that they’re not overspending on things they’re not using?

I think it really comes down to quote to cash process. And for me, it’s all about bottlenecks. So I would do a quick high level exercise and I would say in your quote to cash process, what’s the one department, one thing that is the most frustrating that everyone complains about, that everyone in your organisation has a problem with? And they’ll say, it’s invoicing or it’s whatever it is. And we say, okay, here are three things that we can do to define that role, the three metrics that I would track on a monthly basis to make sure that role is doing what they need to do, and here’s a job description on how they’re supposed to do it.

Nice and simple. That’s brilliant. Thank you very much. So tell us a little bit more about the work that you do. What kind of MSPs do you work with and what’s the best way to get in touch with you?

Yeah, absolutely. I have a YouTube channel. So I started in a ConnectWise PSA environment, and I have a YouTube channel which my own parents say is too boring to watch, but it’s because I am very detailed and I really go through and walk through in the weeds about what you’re doing in your PSA environment. I would say YouTube’s a great place to follow me and as well on LinkedIn, Monica Ozaruk or my website. In terms of what I do, there’s three levels. So I do project-based consulting. If you have a project similar to what we were talking about, one bottleneck, one problem, we can do an hourly one. I have two accelerator programs, one for project management, one for procurement, and then I’m looking at a VCOO, but that’s invite only at this point. So please check out my website, it’s Mozaruk Consulting, mozarukconsulting.com.

Paul’s Personal Peer Group

George, an MSP owner from Liverpool has asked:  Should I use live chat on my website? And what about WhatsApp, Messenger, text message and other ways of getting in touch with me?

So here’s the thing, buyers in 2025 expect instant answers. If they have to fill in a form and wait days, they might move on. A live chat or messaging option can feel more personal and quicker, but only if you actually respond fast. So if you’ve got the capacity to reply quickly, yes, it can absolutely win you more leads. But you need to use the channels that your leads and prospects prefer to use, and that’s going to depend market to market. So for example, where I live here in the UK, pretty much the whole country uses WhatsApp, and chatting to a business via WhatsApp is a lot easier than using a live chat functionality on their website.

So in your market, that might be a bit different. For example, if you’re in the US, where surprisingly WhatsApp isn’t as popular as it is in some other countries, then you might do that through text message, through SMS. But really you should only stick to the channels that you can manage well. If you want to offer live chat and you want to do it from like 7 in the morning till 10 at night, it’s probably something you’re going to have to do off your own phone. Or of course, you find a service to do it for you.

Mentioned links

• This podcast is in conjunction with the MSP Marketing Edge, the world’s leading white label content marketing and growth training subscription.
• Join me in MSP Marketing Facebook group.
• Connect with me on LinkedIn.
• Mentioned book: The Ultimate Sales Machine by Chet Holmes.
• Connect with my guest, Monica Ozaruk on LinkedIn, and visit her website.
• Got a question about your MSP’s marketing? Submit one here for Paul’s Personal Peer Group.

Welcome to Episode 304 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• 3 big pricing mistakes that kill MSPs’ sales: MSPs inadvertently make these blunders with the way they price up their offering and it often kills sales. Here’s what to do about it.
• This video MUST be on every MSP website: Videos on your website are really important. And a testimonial is the single most important type of video that could help a prospect decide to sign a contract with you.
• The truth about SMS marketing for MSPs: Every single business owner has a mobile phone and yet not many MSPs are using that to their advantage. My guest is an SMS marketing expert and is going to tell us whether SMS text messaging is a viable marketing tool for MSPs.
• Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Do you have trust badges on your website? Find out how to use them to get the most credibility for your MSP.

3 big pricing mistakes that kill MSPs’ sales

Getting new clients for your MSP is hard enough, so you should do everything you can to avoid making mistakes, right? Often I see MSPs inadvertently making blunders with the way they price up their offering. It’s a complicated subject with many traps you can get caught in. So let’s look at three common price mistakes that MSPs make that are killing sales.

Let’s talk about something that makes a lot of MSPs uncomfortable… pricing. It’s not the most exciting topic, but wow, it can make or break your sales. I’ve seen so many great MSPs – really solid, technical, brilliant businesses run by brilliant people – struggling to grow simply because they’re just making the wrong moves with their pricing. So let’s fix that.

These are the three big pricing mistakes that can kill your sales, and of course, how to avoid them.

Mistake number one: charging too little because you’re scared of losing the deal, and this is so common. Have you done it? You’re sat in a sales meeting, the prospect starts questioning your price and suddenly you’re talking yourself down. You say that you think you can find a way to shave some money off the price by reducing the package, or maybe you can find them a discount. But by doing this, you’re kind of leaving money on the table just because you want the client to say yes. Here’s the thing though, when you undercharge, you actually scare off the best clients. They kind of think, why is this MSP so cheap? What corners are they cutting? Plus, you’re setting yourself up to resent the work later on when the numbers just don’t add up. So here’s what you should do instead… price confidently, know your value. If you’re delivering 24/7 monitoring, a great help desk and really strong security, don’t price it like you’re just fixing printers on an ad hoc basis. That’s crazy.

Mistake number two: making pricing complicated. I’ve seen some MSP proposals that are like three entire pages of line items. So here’s your base support, this bit’s extra, this is going to cost you this, we forgot to include this. It’s just so confusing. And the problem is that confused people don’t buy. So what you do instead is you bundle things, you create clear packages. You could call that bronze, silver, gold. You could call it something else, it doesn’t really matter what you name it. But the point is that when it’s all put together and prospects can look at it and go, Oh, right, yeah, I see. So we’ve got this or we’ve got this, which is a bit more, or we’ve got this, which is even more, do you know what, we’re going to go for the middle package for us. They’ve got to feel confident. They’ve got to be able to make decisions faster without overthinking it, but going on that gut feel. And packaging everything together, bundling it up and taking out a lot of the detail that they’re not really interested in anyway, that’s the right way to do this.

Mistake number three: hiding your price completely. Some MSPs think they’re being really clever by refusing to talk numbers until the very last moment. Perhaps you’re in a sales meeting, you’ve presented your proposal, and the only thing to discuss now is the price. But the reality is, that just creates friction. Buyers today like to know roughly what they’re in for before they even commit to a meeting. If they can’t get any sense of cost at all, they might never engage with you at all. So here’s what you do instead. You don’t have to plaster exact numbers on your homepage, but you do need to give people a rough estimate. You need to say something like, Our typical clients invest between X and Y per person per month. Or better still embed a price calculator on your website. Just a heads up, I’m going to be talking about price calculators a lot more in the weeks ahead. I’ve got a little announcement for you on that soon. Either way, you’re setting expectations early, and by doing that, you’re attracting people who are a good fit. And by the way, giving pricing at the point that people are doing research into which MSP they might even want to talk to, that is absolutely a competitive advantage right now.

So let me give you a quick summary of those three things to do. Number one, stop undercharging out of fear. Number two, keep your pricing simple and clear. And number three, don’t hide your price at all, be upfront enough to build trust. Get those three things right and you will close more sales with better clients without ever having to fight on price.

This video MUST be on every MSP website

If your competitors have videos on their website and you don’t, there’s every chance that they’ll win sales and you won’t. Yes, videos really are that important. However, are all videos equal? Well, no, not really. The single most important type of video that could help a prospect decide to sign a contract with you, is a video testimonial. But if the idea of trying to create a video with your happiest most satisfied client fills you with dread, this is how you make it a walk in the park.

Collecting lots of social proof is one of the most important things that you can do to persuade someone to pick your MSP. Social proof in the form of reviews, testimonials and case studies influences people at a very deep psychological level. In fact, it talks to us at caveman level, right at the core of what drives our behaviour. Let me explain that.

A hundred thousand years ago, we were not at the top of the food chain. There were big scary monsters with huge jaws and jagged teeth that could and did eat us. And so the cavemen and women who survived to breed and essentially lead on to us today, they were the ones who were better than the others at not being eaten. So we know this today as survival of the fittest and how it drives evolution, but one of the most powerful tools to avoid being eaten is to watch what everyone else is doing and do the same.

It’s a kind of a herd mentality that you still see today in animals at the bottom of the food chain. If one sheep runs all the other sheep in the flock do the same. Now, importantly, they don’t think about this. They just feel very strongly compelled to act and copy. It just feels safer that way. So that’s what cavemen did back then, and 4,000 generations later, it’s what decision makers still do today.

Most of the time people prefer to do what most other people are doing, and that in a single sentence explains why social proof is so powerful.

When we see other people and we perceive that they’re like us and they clearly trust a business, it feels safer for us to do exactly the same. And just a side note, by the way, if you, you’re one of the tiny, tiny minority who proudly claims, oh, social proof has zero influence on me, then look out for the Saber-Tooth Tigers because they are watching you closely and they are licking their lips. Now, the most powerful form of social proof is a video testimonial. You get a happy client on camera telling your prospects why they trust your MSP, and you want that, right?

I’ll be honest, there’s a fair amount of work to get it, and of course you can throw money at the problem to outsource it. There’s a couple of services, one I found is remote videotestimonials.com. That’s not a recommendation by the way, that’s just a suggestion. Or you could use a platform that prompts your clients like storyprompt.com, which I think is risky for an MSP as it’s so easy for your clients to ignore a platform like that, and let’s be honest, you only have dozens of clients to ask, not thousands. Or you can follow my step-by-step instructions and do it yourself. So I’ve pulled together 10 steps. In fact, I did this a few weeks ago while personally interviewing 16 of my MSP Marketing Edge members about their experience with us. And it was such fun. In fact, we’ve compiled a series of video testimonials that are now on our website. You can actually see those at mspmarketingedge.com/reviews. But here is how to get your own testimonial video made.

Step one, be very clear what you want to achieve. So the perfect video testimonial is about 30 to 60 seconds long. It tells a story about how someone went from A to B with your help, and it makes the viewer feel happy that they could achieve the same result working with you. Now, never forget that someone hires your MSP because they want a specific outcome. They want ease of growth, extra profit, increase productivity, less staff moaning, all of that kind of stuff. That’s the transformation story that you want to tell. The format for your testimonial video should be, first of all to set the context. So say something like, this is a problem that many business owners face. Then you need to demonstrate relevance, One in four small business owners will have this IT problem. Then lay out the problem, tell them what it is. Then poke the pain, you take whatever it is that’s annoying that business owner or annoyed them in the past and you literally poke it and show what a pain it was to them. And then you present the answer and the answer is always something that only an IT professional like you can do. Then of course, you show a happy outcome. So we’ve shown in that whole testimonial video a transformation story.

Step two, decide who to ask. For this, you just ask your happy clients. Just be a hundred percent sure they are happy with the service before you ask, because nothing aggravates an unhappy client more than a mistimed testimonial request. Assume around one in five will say yes, and in the next step, we’ll make it easy for them to say no without feeling awkward. By the way, if your personal idea of hell is appearing in someone’s video, don’t assume that everyone feels that way. Some people like me love being in videos and are excited to be asked. Being filmed can be showbiz to some.

Step three, phone them or send them an email. Now you know your clients best. Some respond best to a chat on the phone. Others prefer information in a written form that they can digest before acting. So here’s an actual email that you can swipe and use. The subject line should be, Can I ask a favour, please? And then in the body you say, Hi name. Can I ask you a favour please? We’re always looking for more clients like you. (That’s a critical line) I’m going to launch a new marketing campaign soon, and at the heart of it, I’d like my favourite existing clients to tell my future clients why they should join us. How would you feel about telling us how well we’ve looked after you? Interested? Here’s my live calendar.

Step four, choose a video platform. And please don’t do these interviews on Teams or Zoom because those platforms prioritise the live call at the expense of the recording. You want a platform that works the other way around, it prioritises the recording at the expense of the live call. Personally, I use SquadCast for these kinds of interviews and I actually use that for my podcast interviews as well. An alternative is Riverside. Both of these record the video in quality on each person’s computer and automatically upload it to the cloud. Now, I highly recommend you record the video twice. And what I mean by that is, while using the platform, you might remote in to run a screen recorder on your client’s computer, with their permission of course. And that way, if the cloud recording fails, you can retrieve the backup. And trust me, your client’s patients will not extend to doing the same interview twice.

Step five, use this format to make your client feel great. So you know the purpose of the interview is to get the video testimonial, but it’s also a great chance to strengthen your bond with your client. So follow this format, banter, interview banter. And the banter either side of the interview is actually really important. Your client will probably come onto the call with something that they want to talk about, so you give them that time so they can see that you are prioritising their needs and wants. And remember that the interview itself is kind of unusual and maybe even exciting for them. If they ask lots of questions about it, share with them how you’ve done it. In fact, feel free to steal my advice here and pass it off as your own, I’m quite happy with that.

Step six, ask these questions. The key to any good interview is to ask open questions and not closed ones. Closed questions have a finite number of answers, and they produce boring yes, no answers. Did you have breakfast this morning? It’s yes or no, right? Open questions have an infinite number of answers, and they produce exciting answers. What was the best thing about your breakfast this morning? Here are some actual questions that can get you started, and don’t be a slave to them, just use them as guidance to help you get the story out of your clients, but make sure to listen to their answers and ask relevant follow-up questions. Some of these, by the way, use the technique of asking multiple questions in one go, and that might seem weird, but it actually sets boundaries of what you want your client to talk about. You are guiding them to give relevant answers, and you’re also asking questions in a way that encourages them to give self-contained answers. Self-contained answers are answers that make sense without needing to hear the question that was asked, and those make editing the video really easy. My final piece of guidance on questioning is to use silence as a tool. When your client has finished their answer, just stay silent for a few seconds. Some people fill the silence by continuing to talk, often their second answer is better than their first answer so don’t you be the person to fill the silence, let them fill the silence. Here are the example questions I suggest:

Give us the 30 second story about your business. What do you do? How long have you been going? What kind of clients do you work with? (Remember how I said you’ve got multiple questions in one question there it sets a context of what you want them to talk about). Next question…

How important is technology to your business? If your technology didn’t work properly, what chaos would that cause? Before you started working with us, what kind of problems did you have with your technology? And how did those problems affect you? And another question…

And now those problems have been removed by us, what kind of difference has that made to you and your staff? This is a good one…

What was your biggest fear when considering using us? Did it come true? And if not, what happened instead? And here’s another one…

What’s your favourite part of your experience with our service? Tell us why. Then really my favorite, and the final question to suggest to you…

If your best friend owned a business and was looking for a new technology partner and you would recommend us, what would you say?

Step seven, is to find an editor. Once you’ve got good footage, you’ve done the hard work, now it’s onto the editing where the magic happens, and you’ll be tempted to edit this yourself to save yourself a little money. So please rethink that as a) it’s another job you’ll not get round to doing for weeks, and b) someone who edits for a living is going to do a much better job than you. Good editing is not about the technical aspects of cutting and splicing, it’s about the art of telling a story. There are thousands of editors out there, you’re looking for one who understands and has edited testimonials before. So look on Upwork or Fiverr and make sure to hire someone with testimonials in their show reel. You can make their life and your life easy by sending them an example of what you’d like your finished video to look like. An hour spent Googling and watching other businesses testimonial videos will save you hours in the long run. And remember, you could just send them a copy of my testimonial video at mspmarketingedge.com/reviews. And by the way, a smart way to find a great editor is to give the same editing gig to three different people. And this way you can compare all of the videos to see which one you prefer.

Step eight, what videos to output and where to put them. In an ideal world, you’d have at least three individual client testimonials, which you can then turn into four videos. So the first video you do is a mashup of all three videos, like a 60-90 second summary of how a number of clients feel about your MSP. But again, don’t forget to tell a story. Your editor will know how to do that by pulling out clips that take the viewer on a journey. And this video goes on your homepage as high up as you can. The higher up something is on a page, the more likely someone is to see it. This video will influence prospects more than anything else on that page. And then those three individual case studies, they go lower down the page. You’d also take those videos and put them on other important pages, especially your About Us page, your pricing page, and your contact page. And if you have other written testimonials, reviews, and case studies, consider gathering them all together into a new page called What Clients Say. Now no one’s going to sit and read all of your social proof, but gathering like 30, 40 things together in one place sends a very powerful message to prospects.

Step nine, maxing your testimonial videos. Once you have those videos, you can make them work hard for you for years to come. Here are some ideas… Share them on LinkedIn – you can pull out new clips from the raw footage to create new content to share, and you could easily use each clip every two to three months because content on LinkedIn is kind of disposable. You could send your testimonials page to prospects before a meeting. In fact, in his original book, They Ask You Answer, author Marcus Sheridan suggests that you don’t take any sales meeting unless the prospect has watched your social proof video first. By the way, Marcus’s latest book, Endless Customers, is an excellent read for MSPs. You could start a YouTube channel, pin the testimonial video to the top to be a channel trailer. My MSP Marketing Edge members get five videos a month from us that they can add to their YouTube channel alongside their testimonial videos. You could repurpose your testimonials into written case studies, and these can be given to prospects as part of a proposal. And then these written case studies can go across all the marketing assets that you have. Plus, of course, you can use a screenshot of the client from the video as an image to accompany it.

And then finally step 10, shelf life. If you’ve got this far, and you’ve done all of this, high five, because you now have a powerful marketing asset that most other MSPs will never get round to creating, and that gives you a distinctive advantage over your competitors. So make sure you keep the original footage in a very safe place. 18 months from now, you could get a different editor to create new versions for you, or you could use clips from older testimonials in new mashup videos. And in theory, you can use these testimonials for years and years and years, but I would assume a shelf life of around about three years, that would be a good time to go back to some new clients and repeat this process again. In fact, if you have the resources, you could even send in a local videographer, actually physically send them in, holding a camera and a microphone to film your client in person. And that would be a huge step up in quality.

The truth about SMS marketing for MSPs 

Featured guest: Chris Brisson is the founder and CEO of Salesmsg (read as “sales message”), a leading AI-powered SMS platform designed to help businesses engage, qualify, and convert leads at scale through two-way text messaging. A serial entrepreneur and seasoned SaaS operator, Chris has bootstrapped Salesmsg into an 8-figure ARR business while maintaining strong profitability and a high-performing team culture.

Chris is at the forefront of AI-driven customer engagement, leading the charge to “Textize Your Business”—a methodology that empowers companies to turn messaging into their most effective conversion channel.

What does every single business owner that your MSP would love to work with have in common? It’s something they take everywhere with them, and they look at over a hundred times a day. Yeah, I’m talking about their trustee mobile phone. Pretty much everyone out there would love to get their sales and marketing messages onto those phones. Hasn’t that become the holy grail of the 21st century? A great way of doing it is with SMS text messages, but can MSPs do that? What are the pros? What are the cons? And how do you actually do it? Well listen up because my special guest right now is an SMS marketing expert, and he’s got this message for you.

Hey, I’m Chris Brisson, CEO and co-founder of Salesmsg.

And it’s epic to have you on the show, Chris, thank you so much for joining us because we’re going to answer a very big question to today. Should MSPs use text messages, SMS, as part of their overall marketing mix? Now, you are an expert at this to the extent that you started your own company. So tell us about the business that you started. What kind of got you started with that in the first place?

Yeah, well, first of all, thanks for having me, super excited to be here. So, I had my own company, we were sending emails, we were making phone calls, but no one was picking up and no one was replying to those emails. But magically when I could text them, I actually got responses. And so rather than using my own phone, I thought, there’s got to be a better way. How do I put this into a product? Turn it into a software? And essentially that’s where the idea came from. It was just in need of me wanting a conversational texting platform so I could send and receive texts to leads and customers. And obviously today it’s grown past that with a lot more automation and engagement tools. So you can grow your list, you can engage with them and essentially convert leads faster, close more deals, and use SMS too, sort of at the front of the funnel, connect with people.

So yeah, MSPs, I mean I’m a marketing professional, so most of the stuff that we’re doing is how are we capturing leads? So if we’re doing social, if we have web forms, we have contact forms, we are already capturing this information, and in most cases, maybe we’re capturing a phone number, but we’ve never really done anything with it. And so maybe when they fill that form out, we’re emailing, maybe we’re calling and they’re not picking up and so now we have this sort of back and forth game. SMS sort of closes that gap or text messaging or messaging closes that gap. Ultimately, everyone is on their phones, more and more people don’t want to talk on the phone or get calls from unknown numbers. So it’s transformed into a whole different platform, but ultimately it started with that core problem – how do we make messages great again?

I love any business that’s been started by someone who’s solving their own problem and realises, Hey, if I’ve got this problem, other people are going to have this problem and there’s a business to be created. That always fascinates me, and it’s so exciting to see that you’ve built that and you’ve grown it, and obviously you’ve taken it and started building in automation, all of the other stuff. What is it about SMS that stands out? The difference between SMS and email, is it the fact that email is passive? So the email sits there waiting for you to go and check it, which makes it convenient for the consumer, whereas an SMS demands my attention because it could be my other half, it could be my child, it could be a friend or something. Is that the thing that makes SMS more effective or is it something else?

Yeah, I like to say there’s really three channels. Again, we’ve got calling, we have email, and then we have messaging or SMS. And so SMS is just sort of native on the phone, there’s no app to download. Obviously around the world WhatsApp as a messaging platform is how in the UK or in Latin America, that’s the messaging platform.

When you send a text message, it’s a 98% open rate. The stats are within 15 minutes, 85% of people are going to open that text message, because it’s an inherent tool, everybody has it. 

It’s changed a lot, it’s gotten more busy, obviously, because it’s so effective. The carriers really from even a WhatsApp perspective, they want to limit the bad actors that are coming through. And so how do you cut through that clutter? Context really matters, so when somebody is going to your website, they’re filling out a form, they’re requesting a demo, they are buying your product. At that moment, that’s when you can engage with SMS. So one great thing we do is when someone books a demo, we just automatically send them a text message, Hey, it’s Chris, thanks for signing up for the demo. Hey, what’s the number one thing you’d love to talk about on our call? And it just starts that conversation because really what you’re trying to get to is a conversation, is an engagement, and you may discover, and we discover all the time, this is not a great lead, or, this actually is a great lead, boom. Then you open up the opportunity, Hey, can I just give you a call?, and you can bypass that. So when you call somebody cold, the likelihood they’re going to pick up is very low. But if you go from SMS and have a conversation with them and say, Hey, can I call you real quick? Hop on a call, and now you can move towards that. So it really becomes more of a, I would say, a permission-based channel to get to that next step.

Now, there’s amazing things you can do from, again, the lead engagement side, putting it into an AI agent that could essentially have conversations capture data. It’s really quite simple to do, but that’s this new future of AI messaging. So conversations have always been sort of this, there’s a human on the other end, and there’s a delay in a response, and that’s dependent on people and team to sort of get to those responses. But now with this AI world, you could essentially scale conversations like code. And so that’s sort of this new future that every business has that new capacity to allow conversations in their business to help them grow.

Yeah, I love it. So I love your emphasis on conversations and engagement over and above just sending out message, broadcasting something. And almost the broadcast of, Hey, something’s happening, do this, it almost feels like the 2010 way of doing texting, whereas essentially you’re just using it as another channel. Because you’re right, it’s all opening up on the phone, whether it’s on my email, my WhatsApp, my Telegram, my SMS, one of my other messaging channels. It’s all just messaging. But as you say, everyone, every single phone on the planet, even the old Nokia ones from 1997, they all still get text messages and they all still work, so that makes perfect sense.

So I think if I was talking to an MSP about this, they may have one or both of two fears. The first fear they might have would be, but I don’t want to interrupt someone. I don’t want to interrupt them at the wrong time. That would be the first fear. The second fear would be, oh, text messaging, that’s for consumer marketing, whereas we’re doing business to business marketing. In your experience and with, I think you work with thousands of companies, how valid are those two fears?

Not very valid. I think the way to look at it is most folks when they come into SMS, they think about that and like, well, how do I apply this to my business? So we have a framework, it’s called “Textize Your Business”. And what that means is you can use it to capture leads, to connect, to convert, and then to really care for your customer. So we’re a B2B company, we generate leads, we want to engage with those leads, we want to drive them to a meeting or to sending a promotional text to get them to buy a product. We also want to get a review from them, and we also want to support them being a customer.

B2C is sort of this high volume SMS marketing, which is, Hey, we’re going to broadcast and the core is we’re going to drive revenue. However, in a B2B is you have that capture, connect, convert, and care. And so the way to look at that is how can we use messaging to capture leads? So if you’re speaking from stage or you’re doing a presentation, you have an audience, how do you convert that audience into leads? You can have people scan a QR code or text this phone number, and you can put them through just an automated little bot to capture their name, their email, Hey, thanks for checking out the presentation, what’s the best email I can send you the slides? Oh, my email is this. And then boom, you capture an email, you can then push it to your marketing automation tool to deliver that lead magnet. So that’s one way to do it. If you have web forms, which most everybody has, now you can turn that into a mechanism to capture to then get into that conversation if you will.

And so the conversation is two-way texting. So you can text from your computer, you can call, you can use your phone, we have a mobile app. And so anywhere you are, you can get into those conversations. And then the conversion side is if you want to send out those promotional type texts or you need to book a meeting, we’ve got a way to take leads into booking meetings. So one thing that MSPs can look at, especially if you’re offering these services to other companies, is what I call sort of this messy middle. So there are companies that are generating leads and they need to convert those leads into meetings. Well, how do you go about doing it? Well, you’re calling, you’re emailing, maybe you’re texting, and you have this sort of messiness in between to go through this qualification process.

The new way is to put them into an AI SMS or messaging conversation that can engage with them with real language, using AI and your brand and is going to qualify them. So for us, it’s important to know, Hey, what CRM do you use? Where are you based? And these qualifying questions that this AI agent can effectively capture that information, qualify, and then book a meeting. So you go from generating leads to booking meetings, and so it can eliminate a lot of this messiness that happens in between because messaging is the channel that people connect. And so then the care is how do we support those customers through all that. And you can integrate this into many tools, but that’s the way to look at it. And you go, oh, wow, now I can layer on how do I integrate messaging to do this? One of the big challenges businesses have is you do meetings and there’s a no-show problem. A tiny little message, little text that you can send is if we’re going to go out to lunch, Paul, probably the night before or the morning of, I would just send you a text, Hey, just following up, are we still on for noon today? I just want to make sure. And just that little confirmation text can increase 10, 15, 20% attendance to your meetings. And so these are just some of these little tiny things you can do across the business that will make a great impact. And so that’s the way we look at textising it.

I love that. I mean, you’ve just thrown some insanely great ideas out there. Let’s bring it back to first steps. So if you assume that the MSPs who are either listening to this on the podcast or watching this on YouTube, not using SMS, right now. Maybe don’t have a lot of automation platforms because many of the MSPs that I speak to, they might have a basic CRM, but they’re using it as a place to keep email addresses and just send emails, there’s not necessarily an automation platform. There’s all those things you could do, but where would you recommend the average MSP should get started with building SMS into their marketing funnel?

Yeah, so running a quick audit. Do you have web forms? Great. Are you capturing a phone number? Awesome. Are you sending a text? No, that’s a great place to start. On your website, do you have your phone number? Is that phone number textable? One of the things that we find is a lot of businesses out there are using maybe an older calling platform, and it’s just calling, there is no SMS. So we can enable that number to become textable. And what happens many times is they enable texting for that number they’ve had for 5, 10, 15 years, and all of a sudden text messages start coming in and they’re like, Oh my gosh, how have I been missing this? And so there are these hidden assets that are already existing in the business. One, do you have a number, is it textable? Two, do you have web forms? Add SMS to get to this quick engagement to have a real conversation with them. Three, are people buying a product through yours? You’re probably already asking for a phone number. What are you doing with that? So those are three super simple assets that you already have in your business. That messaging can enhance the business big time.

Yeah, I love that. Chris, you’ve been absolutely great. Before I let you go, I’m actually going to ask you, and I never normally do this on the podcast, I’m going to ask you a trivia question. We have a service called the MSP Marketing Edge, and just a few months ago, one of our pieces of social media content that we wrote was about the first ever SMS message that was sent. So this one is top of brain for me. So two questions for you. When was it sent? And you can give me just a year. So what year was the first ever SMS sent and what was the first ever SMS message?

You’re putting me on the spot. I should probably know the answer to this question. Oh my gosh, Paul, I don’t know. I do not know. Okay, I’m going to say, I’m going to guess 1983, and it says hello.

Bit early, it was December, 1992, which is surprising. I’m 50, so I was like 18, and I can’t believe the first SMS was only sent when I was 18, that made my head explode. And it was an engineer in the UK working for a company called Vodafone, which still exists, which is one of our big four networks here. And the first ever SMS message simply said, Merry Christmas, simple as that. It was a test from one engineer to another, and in fact, they actually developed SMS, I think I read this somewhere else, they developed SMS just as a way for the engineers to communicate with each other when they were out fixing all the cell towers and stuff like that. And then some executive at Vodafone saw it and thought, oh, I think the customers would like that. And the legend goes, I think that’s where SMS comes from. So there you go. You can now use that as a bit of trivia in future podcast interviews and just look like a genius.

Chris, that’s been a really informative interview, thank you so much. So just tell us a little bit more about your business. What exactly is the platform? I mean, you mentioned you can send text messages from your laptop instead of a phone, which we can all immediately see the advantage of that, but what exactly does your platform do and how can MSPs go and have a look at it, maybe get a demo and see if it’s right for them?

In a nutshell, we allow engagement over SMS. And so as you generate leads, you can have conversations over SMS, and we help you drive speed to lead, so leads generated to get to that next step, to engage with them, to book a meeting, to drive revenue. And so we’re really big on that front end part of the business. So most companies come to us, we’re like, look, I’m generating these leads. I’m not engaging with them. And SMS has been this massive unlock of like, whoa, this thing works really well. So that’s a big focus for us. We’re a calling platform as well, so you can do messaging, calling, do a lot of really cool automation stuff as well. That’s actually really easy, it’s not an overwhelming task. So they can just go to salesmessage.com, check out the site. We’d love to show you what is possible with messaging with SMS. And soon we’ll have WhatsApp for the rest of the world, which would be really fun and exciting.

Paul’s Personal Peer Group

Ben, who is an MSP owner of seven years in Richmond, has this question: What is a trust badge?

A trust badge is any logo or any other kind of image on your website that makes you seem more trustworthy. Kind of makes sense, doesn’t it? It’s a way of sucking up credibility from businesses and organisations that you’re associated with. Many MSPs put vendor logos on their website, but please don’t do that. Trust badges only work when the person looking at them has heard of the company and ordinary people don’t know what Kaseya is.

A better form of trust badge is to put media logos. The mainstream media might not have big audience figures anymore, but they still have huge credibility. If you’ve been featured in any relevant newspaper, blog, radio station or TV station in the last five years or so, you can justifiably get a badge made up that says, as heard on or as seen in so-and-so radio station or XYZ TV or whatever, just as long as your appearance was in editorial and not the consumer complaints section. And no, you don’t need to ask them if you can use their logo this way, this isn’t legal advice, but often it’s better to seek forgiveness than it is to ask permission.

Now, if you don’t have any media appearances, then you could always use client logos. If you have a specific vertical, any clients will do because they’ll just see, oh, there’s other lawyers like me or dentists like me, or whatever your vertical is. For general businesses in a geographical area, then just pick your best known clients, who are the prolific networkers or the infamous businesses around town because every town has them.

One final thing, trust badges look really cool on a webpage when you make them all grayscale, and there are some really cool tools online that will make logos grayscale for you without you having to faff about with Photoshop. You could probably just do it in AI as well.

Mentioned links

• This podcast is in conjunction with the MSP Marketing Edge, the world’s leading white label content marketing and growth training subscription.
• Join me in MSP Marketing Facebook group.
• Connect with me on LinkedIn.
• Connect with my guest, Chris Brisson, on LinkedIn, and visit the Salesmsg website.
• Mentioned books: They Ask You Answer and Endless Customers, both by Marcus Sheridan.
• Got a question about your MSP’s marketing? Submit one here for Paul’s Personal Peer Group.

Welcome to Episode 303 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• How to market your MSP to accountants: Accountants are a perfect fit for MSPs. Learn how to speak their language to win over their hearts and minds to give your MSP the competitive edge.
• 4 huge marketing problems that damage your MSP: These marketing problems do massive amounts of damage to MSPs, and yet they’re so easy to overcome when you understand them. Are these damaging your business? Here’s what to do.
• MSP insider’s lessons from 18 years of marketing: If you want to grow your MSP by attracting new clients, the chances are you’re making some fundamental marketing mistakes. My guest today shares his 18 years experience working at an MSP and reveals what really moved the needle.
• Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Do you sometimes find that your team makes the same mistakes over and over again? Well, this is actually your problem, not theirs, and here’s a process to eliminate the problem.

How to market your MSP to accountants

Dream client alert. For many MSPs that target verticals or niches, they find accountants (CPAs) to be a very attractive sector. Are you targeting accountants? If not, you really need to hear this, and if you already are, then this is going to make things so much easier. Let’s deep dive into why accountants switch MSPs, what they’d want from you and how to grab their attention.

Accountants are a perfect fit for MSPs. They have a business that’s dependent upon technology. They’ve got compliance and regulations, and they’re often very stable businesses with lots of recurring revenue. So imagine this, you are sitting across the table from a busy accountant and they’ve literally got piles of tax returns and spreadsheets and calls with their clients all lined up. What’s the one thing that you know that they don’t want? More hassle. And understanding that is the first step in marketing your MSP to accountants.

Get inside their head and their heart and really understand what drives them and what would drive them to pick your MSP instead of someone else.

Accountants live in a world of rules, a world of deadlines, a world of compliance, and a world of absolute attention to detail. They value accuracy, speed, and security above almost anything else. So if you want them to even consider working with your MSP, your messaging has got to show that you understand their world. Talk about what matters to them, not technology. Instead show them how you help them keep their client data safe, how you help them to meet deadlines without system crashes, and how you help them eliminate the panic of last minute tech issues during tax season.

I mean you can literally paint them a picture, you can say, imagine your team working flat out in January (or whenever your local tax season is) and instead of the WIFI dropping in and out or your software slowing down or freezing, everything just works because in the background we’re monitoring everything, we’re fixing problems before you’re even aware of them, so you can focus on your clients and tax returns and getting things done while we are focusing on your technology.

Now that’s the kind of language that really gets into someone’s heart as well as their head. And then you start to think about how to influence them and get them to influence each other because accountants really do talk to each other. In fact, most people in any sector talk to other people in that sector. They ask for recommendations, they trust people who seem to understand their industry. So build up case studies specifically about accounting firms that you are helping or you’ve helped in the past. And use their words, words like, “Since moving to we’ve cut downtime by 40% during tax season.” Those kind of stories carry huge weight.

And here’s another angle, incentives. Accountants aren’t looking for freebies or gimmicks. They’re looking for partners who make them look good to their clients. So be that partner, show them how you’re going to help them impress their own clients. Maybe you could run a quick cyber security review for their top customers, but perhaps branded under their firm’s name. Or give them priority support during key filing periods. Little things like that really stand out.

Look at things like priority response during peak times, regular health checks before busy seasons, before the crazy time they have to file all the tax returns. Look at giving them a personal account manager who knows their deadlines, understands their industry, who they can pick the phone up to at any point. When you market to accountants, remember this, you are not selling IT support or technology. You’re really selling peace of mind, especially during their most stressful moments. You’re selling confidence that you know their world. That’s what they’re going to buy from you, not technology services.

So the next time you’re thinking about how to grow your MSP, don’t just target businesses in general. Pick a niche like accountants, learn what keeps them up at night, learn what they worry about, learn what they want and what they need, and show them that you got the answer. Show their heads and show their hearts. That’s how you build trust, loyalty, and a queue of accountants who wouldn’t dream of going anywhere else?

4 huge marketing problems that damage your MSP

If you’re not winning enough new clients, this could be one of the reasons why.

There are four huge marketing problems that do massive amounts of damage to MSPs, and yet they’re so easy to overcome when you understand them.

Let’s look at what these problems are, how to spot if they’re damaging your business and how you can obliterate them forever.

Selling managed services is hard and slow. There are four big problems that cause this, all of which are out of your control.

Problem one, is that decision makers don’t know what they don’t know. Ordinary business owners and managers know next to nothing about technology. In fact, they don’t even know what they don’t know about technology. They can’t explain what the cloud is in a sentence that makes sense and they don’t understand how dangerous ransomware is. And this explains why you can’t talk to them about technology in the same way that you talk to another technologist, they just glaze over. And if they do that, you’ve lost the sale. No one buys something they don’t understand.

Which leads us onto problem two, prospects make buying decisions with their hearts and not with their brains. Their brain prefers to make decisions based on facts, and that’s a big problem for the ordinary decision makers because to them all MSPs look the same. Their websites might have different words and pictures, but the themes are the same and the messages are very similar. Many MSPs copy the marketing of other MSPs and consequently end up in the soup of looking samey. Faced with this, the brain says, well, they all look the same, I can’t make this decision. And the brain delegates the decision down to the heart.

That leads to problem number three, inertia loyalty rules. This is the thing that keeps us with our CPA/ accountant years after we decide that they’re not right for us. And it’s what persuades an ordinary person to stay with their incumbent MSP long after they’re ready to move on. Why? Because better the devil you know, it feels safer to stay with someone I know but dislike than it is to move to you. These decision makers might not understand technology, but they do understand that if it goes wrong, they’ll be in big trouble. And people are more motivated to avoid pain than they are to pursue gain.

Problem four, people only buy when they’re ready to buy. There are so many things you can sell that you can persuade people to buy today rather than tomorrow. But managed services is not one of those for all the reasons we just discussed. For many decision makers, switching MSPs is a distress activity. They’ll keep putting it off until it becomes urgent, and it’s only on the day that they wake up ready to act that they’ll start paying attention to your marketing.

There is good news though. You can overcome these problems by asking yourself three magic questions and I have some suggested answers for you as well.

Magic question number one: How can you know when the time is right? There are a couple of ways to know. First, people leave clues by their behaviour. So for example, we give the members of my MSP Marketing Edge a comprehensive IT Services Buyers Guide, which is updated every year, in fact, we’ve just released the 2026 version. And it’s about how to pick an MSP. But the reality is that no one in their right mind would want to read this unless they were thinking of switching MSPs. So the very nature of someone requesting an IT Services Buyer’s Guide is a signal of intent. And you can also use tools, HubSpot to track how much of your marketing someone consumes. An increase in activity can be a signal of intent. Or a better way, you can just ask them. Get an outbound phone caller for your MSP and call people all the time. And these are relationship building calls by the way, not sales calls. Make sure your caller asks people when their current contract is up. Some won’t know, some won’t say, but many will. And then target them with a marketing campaign two to three months before.

Magic question number two: What are the emotional reasons that people would buy from you? Now this is a biggie. Think back to problem two that I just mentioned, which is that people buy with their heart and not with their brain. So give prospects plenty of emotional reasons to pick your MSP and you will totally transform your marketing. Luckily, there’s an easy way to answer this question. You just ask yourself, what are the benefits of working with your MSP? So for example, they’ll be much better protected from cyber criminals, so they’ll sleep better at night. Their technology will never hold them back. Their staff will complain less. Benefits talk to their hearts while features talk to their brains.

And that leads nicely into magic question number three: What are the logical reasons that people would buy from you? Ask yourself this, what are the features of working with your MSP? Is it 24/7 support both in your office and when you’re working at home? Is it that they have a strategic technology review with you every year? Is it a proactive approach to updates but done out of regular hours? Make your own list of the top three to five answers to magic questions two and three, and then make sure those answers are all across every piece of your marketing. Emotional reasons and benefits first, logical reasons and features second.

MSP insider’s lessons from 18 years of marketing

Now, what does it do? It actively captures this conversation that you and I are having as if I was helping you on a support ticket so that I’ll have all of the context of that conversation, not just fixed it or worked on issue or rebooted router 33 minutes. It’s all the context, all the stuff that’s never going to make it to your system of record to begin with. The PSA. And we do a bunch of other things with it and it’s, yeah, it’s amazing, it’s wonderful, but really it’s about solving for context for the first time. And we can take care of things like automated time entry or ticket creation or the things that are the bane of every MSP or technician’s existence because it always has been that way. But that’s really just solving for the foundational challenge of how as a business do you capture the context to unlock real business intelligence or what we call service intelligence. If a tier one technician is having a conversation with you, Paul, are they going to hear the same thing that a tier three would or a business owner or a CFO or a VCIO, or we can bring all those personas to every conversation so that we can hear things and filter things through those lenses and surface those opportunities for you.

Yeah, I love that. I love businesses that are built around a passion to fix the problems that you have suffered from, and those are always the best businesses because you don’t need to have product managers, you don’t need to do user interviews and all of that stuff. You’re literally just solving your own problem. And if you’ve got a problem, then the chances are that many of the 40,000 other MSPs have got that problem as well, which is really cool. Jeffrey, let’s stop there. Thank you so much for your time. Just tell us very briefly about Cyft. Tell us where can we get more details and most importantly, how can we get in touch with you?

Yeah, the best place to follow me personally is directly on LinkedIn, Jeffrey Newton. And the best place to get in touch is jeff@cyft.ai

Paul’s Personal Peer Group

Lloyd in Washington is quite frustrated. His MSP is growing and he’s been able to employ a couple of techs, but he’s frustrated with them. His question is: How do I stop my staff from making the same mistakes again and again?

When your staff make the same mistakes again and again, as I said earlier, this is a little bit more about you than it is about them. It’s kind of a reflection of you and your leadership skills. And please don’t be offended or threatened by this. It happens to me. It happens to everyone, all business owners. And as much as we’d love to, we can’t control everything all the time. So as our business gets bigger and we need more people, we have to put in place five elements to ensure things are done the way we want them to be done and eliminate mistakes along the way.

Here’s the first of those five – Systems. Build a system and or a checklist for every repeat task, no matter how frequently or infrequently it’s repeated.

Which leads onto two – Training. Give formal training to your team on how to implement those systems. It needs to be utterly clear in their heads what victory looks like.

Now, that training leads on to number three – Coaching. Regular one-to-ones can pick up problems and keep them on track when the effect of the training starts to wear off.

To help with that, number four – Environment of excellence. If you tolerate poor performance from even one person, it will send the wrong message to everyone. And by the way, this includes your own performance. Remember that your staff are kind of like children. They’re more affected by what you do or don’t do than by what you say, just like kids.

And then the final one is – Action on poor performance (aka the crunch meeting). To maintain that environment of excellence, you’ve got to take action on poor performance. So the most appropriate way to do this is through one-to-ones. Sometimes though, you do need to escalate things and make them realise it’s getting urgent now and they need to change or it’s going to affect their job. Of course, always get HR advice before a crunch meeting, but this is a good phrase to use. If you were in my shoes and these issues kept occurring, what would you do? Ask that question, then stay silent for as long as you dare after asking. And that forces them to answer. You kind of owe it to them that they get a little bit scared that they realise that actually the stakes are getting higher because that could be all it takes to force them into action.

And finally, never forget as busy and desperate for staff as you probably are right now, you should never be afraid of poor performing staff leaving. You should actually be more afraid that they’ll stay.

Mentioned links

• This podcast is in conjunction with the MSP Marketing Edge, the world’s leading white label content marketing and growth training subscription.
• Join me in MSP Marketing Facebook group.
• Connect with me on LinkedIn.
• Connect with my guest, Jeffrey Newton on LinkedIn, and visit the Cyft AI website.
• Got a question about your MSP’s marketing? Submit one here for Paul’s Personal Peer Group.

Welcome to Episode 302 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• 3 mistakes MSPs commonly make with Google: This is one of the most overlooked tools in your marketing toolbox – your Google Business Profile. Make sure you’re getting it right to get the most out of it for your MSP.
• Why MSPs should send personalised videos: Discover how these videos really can help to secure new clients for your MSP. And how when you open your mind to it you can spot opportunities to send them every day.
• What does great marketing look like in a mature MSP?: If you want to be successful, find someone who’s achieved the results that you want and copy what they do to achieve the same. And my guest this week has 26 years of MSP marketing expertise to share with you.
• Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Ever wanted to know your MSP’s true search position in Google?  Find out how in one simple step…

3 mistakes MSPs commonly make with Google

There are three mistakes that MSPs commonly make with Google. And when I say three things, I really mean four things because the first is assuming that AI is now your new focus for getting search traffic. Well, it’s not. It’s currently sending only about 1% of traffic to your website. So the focus right now still has to be doing better on Google. But why and how do you do this? What are the three other things that MSPs are getting wrong?

We’re talking about one of the most overlooked tools in your marketing toolbox – your Google Business Profile. Now, before you skip this or zone out, do stick with me. Google Business Profile isn’t just for coffee shops and hair salons. Your Google Business Profile shows up when someone googles your MSP’s name or even if they just Google MSPs .

Your Google Business Profile is like your digital shopfront and it can make you look trustworthy… or not, if you get it wrong.

So let’s look at three common mistakes that I see MSPs making and how you can fix them quickly and easily:

The first mistake is to have a boring generic business description. If your profile says something along the lines of “We offer IT support and services to businesses”, oh, you’re not alone. Loads of MSPs do this, but it’s bland and it’s costing you clicks. So here’s the fix. Speak like a human and not a robot. Use the first sentence to make it clear who you help and what problems you solve. So try something like “We help businesses worry less about IT with fast friendly support, bulletproof security and advice with zero jargon.” I mean that alone, just using that sentence instantly sets you apart from other MSPs.

Mistake number two, no photos or photos from the year 2005. Did you know that businesses with photos actually get more clicks and more calls from their Google Business Profile? You don’t need to go and hire a pro photographer, just pull out your phone, grab a team photo, maybe grab some photos of your office, your vans if you’ve got vans, you could do a behind the scenes look at your setup, it could be your help desk, someone answering a phone, it could be your security dashboard with obviously the sensitive stuff blurred out. People just want to see people, they want to see who they’re dealing with. And even one new photo added like today or this week can boost engagement. If you added a new photo every week or at least once or twice a month, that could be huge.

And then mistake number three, letting your reviews go stale. Google Business reviews are like gold dust. They’re a critical step in social proof, where people are more easily influenced by seeing what other people like them are doing. Who are they buying from? Who are they trusting? If other people like them trust you, then they can trust you. That’s how they feel about social proof. But lots of MSPs stop asking for reviews once they’ve got a handful of them. And yet Google loves fresh reviews and so do prospects. So here’s the fix. Make this a weekly habit. Every Friday look back at your tickets and look at who you’ve helped that week. Pick one happy client, send them a one-to-one email, “Hey, would you mind leaving us a quick Google review, please?” It really helps. Because most people want their trusted suppliers to do well and just send them the direct link to your review page to make it easy.

Now, one step up from this is to add an automation to your PSA, which emails happy clients after the successful resolution of a ticket. And maybe you’d put some kind of condition in there so they’re not being emailed and asked for reviews all the time, but perhaps every specific user at your client is asked no more than once every three months for a Google Review until they’ve left a review, at which point you can switch that off in their PSA. However you do it, adding new reviews all the time really do stack up and they really do make you stand out.

Look, your Google Business Profile doesn’t need to be perfect, but it does need to be active. Avoid these common mistakes, rewrite your description, add fresh photos and make review requests part of your ongoing routine. It’s all low effort stuff, but it really pays off.

Why MSPs should send personalised videos

Tell me, have you had one of these… a personalised video message. While it can be quite common for vendors to send them, what about MSPs? Well, I’ve heard from some that are regularly recording and sending personalised one-to-one videos as part of their marketing, but is it worth it? Can these kinds of videos really help to secure you a new client for your MSP? Let’s dig into the pros, the cons and what you need to get started.

So do you send these personalised videos? I’m talking the kind that you record on Vidyard or Bonjoro BombBomb or some other platform. It’s kind of just you sitting down talking one-to-one to someone else through a video rather than through a text email. And when you open your mind to it you can spot opportunities to send these every day. To say hi to someone who’s just connected with you on LinkedIn. Or perhaps thank a client for their patience while you cleared a problem. Or maybe show another client how to do something with a screen share. Or you could explain a proposal to a prospect. Or maybe even introduce your team to a new vendor.

I do this. I send an individual video welcome to every single new member of the MSP Marketing Edge. I have a standard script and on Tuesdays every week I record several of these in a row because even though it’s scripted and it’s the same script for each person, I record an individual video for each person saying their name, just mentioning them, saying hello to them, and then getting across the points I want to make. And that’s why I use a scripted video. That can be quite painful, by the way, that approach when you’ve got like 10 new members at a week. As you can imagine, that’s a lot of videos to film, but it’s worth it. I want each person to feel like I’ve taken the effort, which I have, to do a specific video to them, even though it’s scripted with the specific points that I want to get across.

And I do think that that kind of personal attention really pays off in the long-term. It shows that you care if you’re willing to invest the time to do that. Now, the complete opposite of that is an unscripted video that you do much more informally. It’s just you sat in front of your laptop in the office or on your phone just talking about something that’s of interest to the person who’s going to be watching that video. And those kind of informal, almost more off the cuff videos where perhaps you are not in a great environment like a studio or your office – I’ve done them in Starbucks, I’ve done them in McDonald’s before – sometimes recording something like that in that impromptu environment can be very, very powerful.

As AI generated content becomes more and more widespread, we’ve got to be working harder and harder to be seen as human and real.

So let me give you three of many reasons why I believe MSPs like you should be sending personalised videos to prospects and clients:

Reason number one, is that they still have huge impact. People really do not receive personalised videos as often as you’d think. Even though the tech has been around for years, the average person might only get a couple a year. So anything that rare just stands out. Most of the platforms will create an animated gif as the thumbnail, and often it takes the first two or three seconds. So here’s an idea, do something smart like starting your video, holding up a card with the recipient’s name to really catch their attention and peak their interest.

Number two, you can track if they’ve been watched. Most of the platforms will tell you when a video’s been watched. Sometimes my videos that I send out are watched seven or eight times, and I interpret this as the video link being passed around the business, which is great. From a sales point of view you want to know if a prospect has watched your video, right?

And then number three, they help you to stand out and look real. As I said, most MSPs aren’t doing this. Anytime you realise, hang on, the vast majority isn’t doing this, that is an opportunity for you to stand out. Don’t do what most other MSPs are doing, do what most other MSPs aren’t doing.

So are you going to start using one-to-one personalised videos in your business? 

What does great marketing look like in a mature MSP?

I think this is a differentiator for us. My marketing team works off of tickets just like everyone else here. We have Halo PSA, every single blog, article, graphic design, website update, whatever we’re going to do, we ticketize it. Everyone in the company sees marketing as a peer because marketing is working tickets just like everyone else here. And I think that’s a critical thing. We’re an MSP, we’re technology solution providers. We need everyone here to look similar and act similar and work similar. That brings us all together and makes it so marketing isn’t “other”. You do those things, you have the right talent, you really get that strategy in place with the budget, get that leadership, and then you execute like everyone should at an MSP with tickets. And in your PSA system, you’re cooking with gas.

Wow. Do you know, I am sure you’re not the only person doing this, but you’re the first person I’ve personally spoken to who’s using their PSA as a marketing tool, which is just insane. And actually it makes sense when you talk about it that way because you are avoiding any disconnect between the people who are delivering the work and the people who are bringing in that work, because ultimately everyone’s just part of the same team. Right?

Exactly. And when everyone’s using similar tools, it really does make everybody feel like they’re on the same team. It’s one of those subtle, unspoken thing that just keeps everybody in alignment.

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. John, you’ve been so generous taking us inside your business, and yet I feel like we’ve only captured about half a percent of what we could do. So please do come back on the show next year, come and tell us more about what you’re doing with your marketing. It would be great to have you back on. And just for those MSPs who are listening or watching this on YouTube who think, oh, this is a smart guy. I’d love to just talk to him for whatever reason, what’s the best way to get a hold of you?

So two great ways to get ahold of me. I’m on LinkedIn. I’m John Snyder net friends. You can also email me at johns@netfriends.com. Both ways are great, and I’d be delighted to hear from anybody.

Paul’s Personal Peer Group

Dane has run an MSP in New Hampshire for three years. It’s doing well but he’s concerned about his visibility online. His question is: How do I see my true search position in Google?

The problem with just Googling “IT support ” in your normal browser is that it doesn’t give you a true sense of where your MSP actually appears in search results, because Google personalises the search results you see based on the actions you take. So if you often Google the phrase “IT support ” and you click on your website, then over time your website will move up in the search results. But this will only be for you. Everyone else will see it in the original position where it appears for someone doing a cold search for that phrase.

So if you want to see what that is, an accurate set of search results that other people see, then always do that search in incognito. It really is as simple as that, and perhaps it’s something that you should be doing on a monthly basis just to check how well you are performing for that very simple search phrase “IT support ”.

Mentioned links

• This podcast is in conjunction with the MSP Marketing Edge, the world’s leading white label content marketing and growth training subscription.
• Join me in MSP Marketing Facebook group.
• Connect with me on LinkedIn.
• Connect with my guest, John Snyder, on LinkedIn, and visit the Net Friends website.
• Got a question about your MSP’s marketing? Submit one here for Paul’s Personal Peer Group.

Welcome to Episode 301 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• Should your MSP get HubSpot? A review: The system you use to manage marketing with your prospects has to be a good match for your MSP, otherwise you could have a very costly waste of time on your hands. So, is Hubspot the right choice for you?
• Free Windows 10 end of life marketing materials: Windows 10 end of life is now less than two months away and this could be a massive once a decade marketing opportunity for you.
• How to run your MSP by the numbers – and which to track: If I asked you about the most important marketing and growth numbers in your MSP would you know what those numbers should be? My guest works with MSPs to help them understand just this.
• Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Do you know what a UTM is and how it can benefit your MSP? Let me explain…

Should your MSP get HubSpot? A review

Whatever you do, don’t pick a CRM for your MSP until you’ve heard this, and especially if you’re looking at HubSpot. The system you use to manage marketing with your prospects has to be a good match for your business, otherwise you could have a very costly waste of time on your hands. So which is the right CRM for MSPs? Have you been considering systems like MailChimp, MailerLite, Growably from the Tech Tribe or even HubSpot? Eight months ago I switched my business to HubSpot, so let’s review it eight months on and see if I’d recommend it for your MSP.

On the 14th of April 2009 I committed to my first serious CRM. It was called Infusionsoft. I know the date because I’ve still got the welcome email. Now, back then I owned a different business, actually one I sold in 2016 just before entering the channel, but even back then I knew that finding and committing to good software that sat at the heart of my marketing was critical.

At the time, Infusionsoft was the hot property. In fact, I’d say it was instrumental in our success building that business. It allowed me to build up a large audience of prospects. I had 12,000 of them in that last business and using Infusionsoft I could grow a relationship with those prospects using content marketing all sent out in that CRM. And I had a telesales team whose job was to call those prospects and book them in meetings with our salespeople, and that allowed us to convert the relationships from prospects into clients.

I look back now at that 2009 to 2016 period and realise that was kind of a golden time for Infusionsoft, because since then it really has gone off the boil. First, there was a focus on not just being a CRM and a marketing platform, but becoming a payment platform as well. And then the original founders left and then the new people that took over, the new management team, they rebranded it as Keap, and they created a second CRM, which seemed to do the same things as the first CRM but in a different way. And then the original founder took control again and then they tried to bring those two products together as one, and I’m not quite sure how successful that was. And then they were trying to turn themselves into an automation business, but there was no clear roadmap of what that meant or how they were going to do it, and they also massively hiked up the prices.

Now I’ve been using Infusionsoft (or Keap) in the MSP Marketing Edge since day one, since we opened back in 2017, and I’ve been feeling for a while up to last year that we needed to change our CRM. But our use of it was so extensive, I mean, it was weaved throughout the whole of the MSP Marketing Edge that the thought of migrating to something new made me feel sick inside because as I say, we don’t just use it for our marketing. We run all of our portal automation, all of our clever stuff gets run through the CRM. The trigger that caused me to change happened in October last year, so in 2024, when Keap was sold to a company called Thryv, and I decided that that was a fire sale just based on the sale price that was sold compared to their revenue. That was my trigger to move.

There were only really two CRMs that we took seriously. The first was GoHighLevel, which as you may know, powers Growably in the Tech Tribe and a whole load of other platforms used across the channel. So if you are with a vendor that offers you a CRM or any kind of marketing level automation, the chances are pretty high that they’ve built it on GoHighLevel because that’s what that does. It gives you something that you can white label for your agency or your platform, and we looked very seriously at this for a long time. The pricing is very good, but we found it a bit buggy and because it had been built to be white labelled to do what we wanted to do with it would’ve required a huge amount of development time, probably another full-time developer.

So instead we decided to migrate to HubSpot, and as I stand here eight months on, I am still highly impressed with the HubSpot product. It’s amazing, and I realise how much using Keap was holding us back. Using HubSpot has allowed us to do more things across more channels and connect all of our activity together in the backend so much more easily. You can automate so many more things and now we are held back by our ideas rather than functionality.

It’s very rare for us to come up with an idea and then not be able to figure out a way to do it on HubSpot.

It’s now quick and easy to spin out new marketing initiatives to generate landing pages that allow me to launch those initiatives within 24 hours of thinking of them, and I can track exactly what prospects are doing on our website and on email and some other platforms to a certain extent. We get an idea of what they’re doing on social media, you are a bit restricted by the actual social media platforms themselves rather than HubSpot, but there’s more and more things that you can put into HubSpot and integrate and it all just act together. It’s amazing.

Increasingly, my team and I are spending more time in HubSpot, encouraging more engagement and more marketing activity with our prospects. And our database is growing as well, our ability to see who is a good fit for our MSP Marketing Edge is getting better all the time, right down to we can even see which of the prospects in our database are in available areas. A key part of the MSP Marketing Edge is that we only sell it to one MSP per area and that’s a genuine lock. When we are working with someone, let’s say in your area, we won’t work with anyone else, so being able to narrow our prospect list down – we’ve got around about a thousand MSPs in our database who are in an available area, they could buy what we sell – this is incredibly powerful and the ability to do that is completely automated. No human has to do anything to maintain that list, which is constantly changing every single day. I love it.

So overall, I’m very happy with HubSpot. I do have, for balance, two complaints and both of them eight months on are minor complaints at this stage. But the first is that I found the onboarding to be a massive headache. The lady onboarding us was very pleasant to deal with and she knew her stuff, but standing back and taking a big picture view, it was really poorly informed. None of the info that we handed out during the very long sales process was passed on to the onboarding lady. It was really frustrating having to explain our business again and how we were going to use it. Because we were a complicated case, we weren’t just the CRM, we were going to use it to power our portal and we’re doing that migration now. It was actually very stressful during the onboarding.

They set some arbitrary deadlines for when the onboarding must be completed and those were often thrown at me almost as like a punishment because I got a little bit behind on the things that I said I do, and almost every single call started with, oh, you need to hit this deadline. You need to be off onboarding by a week on Thursday, I guess because the onboarding person had targets to hit. And at one point I said, I do feel like the tail is wagging the dog here. I’ve paid a lot of money for onboarding and I’m being beaten up during that onboarding because it was also wildly expensive. We paid a few thousand pounds or dollars for mandatory onboarding and there was no choice to skip that, which I do understand as it ensures that new clients use the software, but it was kind of useful, but it was also the worst value for money for anything I’ve bought in the last few years. We ended up hiring a HubSpot consultant who is amazing and he’s still working with us today. Side note, if you would like a referral into our HubSpot consultant, just send me a DM or just comment on this post and I’ll give you his details. He’s been invaluable in integrating HubSpot into our business, but he was an external consultant outside of HubSpot and of course he’s a cost as well. He’s cost us thousands and thousands of pounds, none of which I anticipated when I started migration, and I don’t resent that at all, but obviously the bill has been high. The overall HubSpot bill has been high.

Which leads me onto my other complaint. The cost of HubSpot. You really do pay through the nose for every single bit of functionality that you want to use and let’s not beat around the bush. What they have designed is amazing. It’s an amazing piece of software that works very well. It’s logical, it has a few bugs, but those bugs get fixed. There’s very few things in HubSpot that you cannot do. There’s very few things that you can’t figure out. It all seems to follow the same kind of flow. Someone somewhere or a whole team of people somewhere have really thought through a lot of how they’ve built it. As a SaaS piece of software it is insanely good. If all of my SaaS software was that good it would be great, but it also encourages you to use new functionality in a way which makes you want something and then realise to get that you’ve got to move up a tier or you’ve got to add on another seat or you’ve got to add another bolt on or something.

In my first few months using it, I’d get so frustrated because there’d be a piece of functionality which I really wanted, we needed it, and it meant I had to go up another new tier or buy more new credits for something or something like that. Now I’m working well within my boundaries of what we’ve got available, but I’m still spending £1500 a month, which is around about $2,000 a month. And of course I’ve got my HubSpot consultants bill on top of that, just for a few more months until we get our full migration finished.

For context, my Keap bill was around about $400 a month, so I’ve gone from $400 up to $2,000 a month. It’s a big jump, but overall I’m not unhappy. So would I recommend HubSpot to an MSP? Yes and no. I believe you’d only get the full value out of it if you really use it, and that probably means a full-time marketer. So if you’ve got a full-time marketer in your business, HubSpot is a great choice. If you don’t, and especially if you as the MSP owner or manager is doing your marketing along with the 4 million other things that you need to do, then I believe it’s probably overkill for you. And as I say, it is so expensive if you want to use all of the toys. For most MSPs, about 80% of MSPs, a basic CRM really is good enough, if you’re just using it as a place to kind of keep all of your prospects and just send emails to them and maybe do a bit of extra marketing once or twice a month. You don’t need anything more than MailChimp or MailerLite, something like that, or just join the Tech Tribe and get Growably.

It’s only the 20% of MSPs, probably the bigger MSPs, definitely those with a full-time marketer that will really use the advanced functionality of the more comprehensive tool. I spend 80% of my time marketing my business, and even then we’ve barely touched 50% of what’s available to us in HubSpot. We are working our way through it, but even for us where we are a marketing business that does a lot of marketing on our own business, it’s still a very big toolkit with lots and lots of things. We’ve no way maxed it out. So yes, HubSpot, amazing toolkit, and if you’ve got a big marketing operation in your MSP, I can definitely recommend it, but do be prepared to hand over a kidney to pay for it.

Free Windows 10 end of life marketing materials

Windows 10 end of life is now less than two months away. And while I’m sure you’ve been all over this with your clients for some time, I know from talking to lots of MSPs that there are many, many, many businesses out there that have no idea this is even happening, and that creates a massive marketing opportunity for you. Let me tell you how to take advantage of this even at this late stage and where you can get hold of some free marketing materials that you could be using in the next 60 minutes.

You and I know that Windows 10 is now in its last few months, but ordinary business owners and managers, your clients and prospects, they might be kind of aware that something’s changing, but it is not top of mind for them at all. Even those who do know that Windows 10 is dying are not really acting with urgency to upgrade, migrate, or sign up for extended security updates. Do you agree? Do you see that lack of urgency in your clients?

This is very exciting because Windows 10 end of life could be a massive once a decade marketing opportunity for you.

It’s almost impossible to make someone buy managed services before they’re ready to buy. This is one of the reasons your sales cycle is so long. Why? Well, that’s best explained by looking at the four big marketing problems that most MSPs suffer from. The first is that decision makers don’t know what they don’t know. They know that tech is important, but they don’t understand it, certainly not at the level that you do. And because of that, number two, they make buying decisions with their hearts and not their brains. You can’t make a cognitive decision about something you don’t understand, so they delegate the decision down to their heart, which picks an MSP based on feelings and not facts.

To complicate it further, number three, inertia loyalty rules. If you don’t understand something, it feels safer to stay with a supplier you don’t like than move to someone new. This is also known as better the devil. And the final problem, four, people only buy when they’re ready to buy. Because of the other three problems, you cannot force a sale until they are 1000% ready, willing, and able to move MSPs. Side note, these four problems are a double-edged sword. They make it slow and hard for you to win a new client, but they also help you to keep that client for a decade.

So a major operating system end of life event gives you a temporary opportunity to blast through these problems for these three big reasons. First of all, it’s rare, it’s once a decade. Second, it introduces an immovable deadline. And third, there are serious consequences for inaction. It’s been known for four years that Windows 10 would expire this October, but it’s only as we get within a few months of that date that the urgency really starts to kick in. So here’s the big marketing opportunity for you between now and October the 14th, and probably actually a good few weeks after.

Alert existing clients and prospects to what’s happening and the deadline, educate them on the consequences of inaction and lay out their options. That’s it. That’s all you have to do. And you can do this by consistently putting out great marketing on this for the next couple of months. Educate enough business owners and managers and you will generate new revenue and not just in hardware upgrades or OS migrations, but in other areas as well.

Why? Because when they need help with something they perceive to be complicated, most people turn to the authority figure who’s educated them, and they go on to ask for extra help outside the original problem. Great, so let that authority figure be you.

Here’s the huge freebie that I was talking about at the beginning. If you want to do some marketing around this, my team at the MSP Marketing Edge has done much of the hard work for you. You can use the free materials I’m going to tell you how to get in a second, you can use them to educate existing clients and prospects about their options.

All you have to do is go to this page and enter your details: growth.mspmarketingedge.com/windows10.

Go there, fill in your details, and I’ll email you some Windows 10 marketing materials you can use. In there, there’s an editable eight page educational guide that’s in Canva, PDF and InDesign. There’s an editable infographic and carousel for LinkedIn. There’s some email sequences for existing clients and prospects. And there’s a video script. Plus I filmed a special video guide showing you how to use these materials.

How to run your MSP by the numbers – and which to track

Featured guests: Brian Hoppe has been part of the Managed Services industry since the early 2000s. For over 20 years, Brian has worked in multiple MSPs and has bought and sold multiple MSPs. He’s been everything from a technician to Ops Manager to CFO to CEO. He has grown multiple MSPs to over $5 million in revenue and managed MSPs in excess of $15 million in revenue. Brian has a thorough understanding of all the ins and outs of running a highly successful MSP. But more importantly, he understands how to help MSP leaders get the most from their business. His expertise in leadership and coaching can help any MSP owner or CEO achieve the results they want in both business and life. He is passionate about finding the right clients for his coaching practice to help take their business and leadership to the next level.

I would say it’s simple for those who understand how it’s to be done. There’s dozens of people out there who can help you set up the integration appropriately and all of those kinds of things. What I will say is that it’s most of the time the knowledge of what to look at and what to look out for. That’s the biggest hamper for profitability for MSPs. There’s data out there. Service leadership for instance, runs benchmarking and all of that kind of stuff. And in any room of a hundred MSPs, you’re going to find that there’s the 25% top performers, there’s those 50% kind of in the middle, and there’s 25% at the bottom. The top performers generate on average, about 2.3 times as much profit as somebody right in the middle. And what’s the difference between those average performers and those high performers? It’s really just the skill and the knowledge of the owner or the management team and their ability to generate those profits. And so actually the good thing is that all of those skills are learnable. I started out not knowing any of those skills 15 years ago and went from there to building a successful business and exiting. So those skills are learnable, which is great. And so it’s all about getting that knowledge of what to look at and why, and how to actually make changes to make your business perform the way you want it to perform.

You can see why running an MSP can sometimes be so frustrating because when you start, you think it’s about support and customer service and being good at tech. And then as you become mature as a business owner, you realise everything you’ve just said there, I know that someone’s going to listen to this on the podcast or watch this on YouTube, and their brain is literally exploding, it’s squirting out their ears right now because what you’ve just said is a missing piece of the jigsaw of, why have we got so much money coming in and yet there’s nothing left? You’ve perhaps just sent someone off down a direction that they wouldn’t have thought of. And we as business owners, and it’s not just MSPs, it’s all business owners, we’ve got to get really good at finance, we’ve got to get really good at marketing, we’ve got to get really good at sales, we’ve got to get really good at all of these other areas that are never about the thing that got into it.  As you say, that’s the difference between being one of the bottom or the middle MSPs and being in that 25% club, which you want to be in. Because the people who are making really good money from their business are the ones who stay business owners longer, they’re healthier, they’re wealthier, they have better lives, they have better relationships, they get divorced less, their kids still talk to them, all of that stuff, because actually there’s a balance, and you can’t be a business owner for 20, 30, 40 years without that kind of balance.

So for the MSP who’s having that epiphany right now, and then he’s going to look at QuickBooks or Xero or whatever they’re using and scratching the head, obviously you can help them, what’s the best way to get in touch with you and scream, Brian, please help me.

I’m on LinkedIn all the time, so Brian Hoppe, you can look me up. We probably have mutual connections if you’re in the MSP industry. And then my website, brianhoppe.com. You can always check me out there and get in touch that way as well.

Paul’s Personal Peer Group

We have a marketing acronym question that comes from Daniel, an MSP owner in San Francisco. His question is: What are UTMs and how would I use them?

So a UTM is a snippet of code that you add to the end of a URL, and it helps you to track exactly where your traffic’s coming from in Google Analytics. UTM, it’s got a weird name, stands for Urchin Tracking Module, and it was created by a company called Urchin Software before Google acquired it. You’ll have seen loads of UTMs before. So for example, if you take my URL mspmarketingedge.com, this is what it would look like with a UTM added: https://www.mspmarketingedge.com/?utm_source=googlemybusiness&utm_medium=social-media&utm_campaign=utm-social-media

The idea is that for each campaign you run and each platform you use, you create a unique URL with UTM parameters, and then in Google Analytics you’ll be able to see exactly where the traffic has come from and what conversions each campaign has created. Good news. There are free UTM builders all across the web, just Google for one.

Mentioned links

• This podcast is in conjunction with the MSP Marketing Edge, the world’s leading white label content marketing and growth training subscription.
• Join me in MSP Marketing Facebook group.
• Connect with me on LinkedIn.
• Connect with my guest, Brian Hoppe, on LinkedIn, and visit his website.
• Got a question about your MSP’s marketing? Submit one here for Paul’s Personal Peer Group.

Welcome to this SPECIAL edition of the show, Episode 300, of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green.

This week I’ve got an incredible and motivating story of resilience.

700 nights of “will the business survive?”

Featured guest: Colin Knox is a serial entrepreneur and seasoned executive in the MSP and SaaS space. As the CEO & co-founder of Gradient MSP, he leads the charge in transforming how managed service providers operate and grow, with a focus on automation, billing reconciliation, and revenue enablement. With multiple successful exits, over $15 million in capital raised, and a track record of building companies from startup to nine-figure enterprise value, Colin brings deep expertise in scaling businesses, fostering culture, and navigating M&A. When he’s not building businesses, you’ll find him sharing insights on branding, leadership, and the future of the channel on LinkedIn.

Hello and welcome to a very special episode of the podcast as we celebrate 300 episodes. Every single Tuesday since November 2019, we have put out a brand new episode of this show, and today I have an astonishing story that you will almost not believe. It’s a feature length interview with a well-known vendor in our space who nearly lost it all a few years ago.

Imagine how you’d feel if your business lost all of its available cash in one day, and you had to fire most of your staff, and this situation was so bad that it didn’t resolve itself for two years. Could you keep going? Could you push forward and still try to build something amazing? Well, that’s what my special guest did. His story is so inspiring and I’m delighted to introduce you to him right now.

Hi, I’m Colin Knox, CEO and co-founder of Gradient MSP.

And it’s great to have you back on the podcast, Colin. I think you were here in 2021. I say I think, that seems like so long ago, the podcast is in its sixth year now, and we’ve decided to go for at least 10 years. We’ll have to book you now to come back in like 2028 or 2029.

Sounds good.

So thank you for joining us again. You have joined us today to talk about something really important, which kind of affects every MSP at different stages of their business growth, and that is dealing with when things go bad. It’s the issue of resilience and we’re talking more today about mindset and how you get through problems and how you get through stuff that just seems too big to tackle. And you’ve got an amazing story to tell, which happily you are the other side of that story now, which is a great time to tell us. So before we get into that story and we talk about what the problem was and the lessons you’ve learned, just give us a sort of a brief overview of who is Colin Knox?

Yeah, Colin Knox. I often refer to myself as the accidental entrepreneur. I worked at an MSP, one or a few for a number of years, and came to a place where I started to get frustrated with things. I never really had thought of or wanted to be a business owner but finally just said, nevermind, I’ll step out and try it for myself. So I stumbled into entrepreneurship worked through all of the lessons learned some of the very hard way, some an easier way of what it takes to build a business, grow a business, exit a business, and maybe sometimes foolishly start a new business and go through it all again. So yeah, accidental entrepreneur, maybe with a bit of founder amnesia, some people call it, but hopelessly devoted to building great businesses and impacting others.

I love it. That’s a great title. In fact, that could be the title of your book when inevitably you write a book. I think all of us have a book inside us. Tell us briefly what Gradient MSP does before we talk about what you were trying to achieve and the problem that you ran into.

So we’re all about making the back office operations of an MSP easier. The core way that we do that today is helping them make sure that they get paid for all the services that they deliver. We partially automate, but really simplify and make easier the process of reconciling all of their vendor usage across all of their end customers into their PSA for billing every month. So that’s the initial core challenge that we sought to solve, and we’ve got a few other little auxiliary add-ons that we do, but that’s the core facet, is make sure that MSPs are getting paid for everything that they’re delivering.

Yeah, no, that’s a great mission. And what inspired you to start this in the first place?

We had an exit of the last company, did really well with that. I tried my hand at retirement, albeit for a very short period, but got way too bored and started just having conversations with MSPs again. I mean I’ve been in the space now for, I think it’s my 21st year, so knowing a lot of MSPs over the years. I started having conversations with them and after we caught up, it started it with one real question, which is, What is one thing that you wish you never had to do again as an MSP owner?

And time and time again, they kept coming back and saying, doing my billing every month and figuring that stuff out. And so we looked around, nothing existed that we could find on the internet at the time to solve it. We started digging in on why this might not have been solved or why MSPs were so complacent on it. And for us, it came down to a lack of integration between all of the vendors and the PSAs. I mean, it no longer was this Autotask and ConnectWise own the entire market, they still do really well and have good market shares, but there were so many other PSAs involved. Integrations were lacking between vendors and all the PSAs.

And then the business owners, I mean most of this industry is 10 people and under as a business, and they just weren’t in a place where they were ready to get rid of doing that. It’s such a sensitive thing. So we say, what the heck? Let’s give this a try and hoping and thinking ignorantly and maybe arrogantly that this would be an easy problem to solve and the business would just explode and boom did not go that way. It has been a lot of trial and error, a lot of working through things, a lot of patience and diligence and determination. But yeah, we’ve finally landed at a place where we’re effectively solving it for a lot of MSPs out there and continuing to learn more every single day as to the nuance and lack of standardisation in how MSPs bill their customers.

Yeah, I can imagine. I’ve never started any kind of that business. So I’ve started two main businesses and I’ve had a couple of other little side hustles over the years, but I ran a marketing agency, where you know what you’re doing, right? You’re finding clients that have got problems, you solve those problems. And now with the MSP Marketing Edge, it’s a version of the same thing. So we work with MSPs whose problem is, Where do I get clients? And we help them to generate leads and win clients. So I’ve never, and it’s never occurred to me to be of interest to me to start a business like yours where here’s a big problem that is such a big problem that no one else has even tried to tackle it. Or maybe they’ve looked at tackling it and thought, nah, but we are going to go in and tackle it.

And we know we can anticipate what a lot of the problems are, but I imagine when you go into something like that, and essentially it’s a software driven solution, I imagine as you’re going into that you are a conscious incompetent in that you don’t know what problems you’re going to come across along the way. So you could guess at the problems, we could all see that integrations will be an issue and lack of APIs, and I guess a few years back, PSAs were less open than they are now. But then you don’t know who’s going to enter the market. You don’t know who’s going to buy who. PSAs kind of came out of nowhere, what 10 years ago, so what’s the next tool that’s going to come out of nowhere that it would have to integrate with this? What’s the next billing thing? Microsoft brought in NCE a few years ago, what’s the next Microsoft stupid thing that’s going to mess all of that up?

So even going into it knowing you were a conscious incompetent, you clearly thought there was going to be, what, would it be riches at the end that you were driving? Because I think everyone looks eventually for an exit, was it that or you looking at, hey, we could actually build something here that helps people and we make money at the same time?

So when we did this, started this business, I’d say riches wasn’t anything in the sights for us. We had a very notable exit before. We did not need to work. We did not need to do anything if we never wanted to do anything again. So for us, I think it was just wanting to have an impact, wanting to be busy on something and wanting to build something that was fun to work on, something that could have an impact and would allow us to make some money. I wouldn’t say that we came in this ever looking for an exit. And as a proof point of that, I can’t share the name of the company, but we founded the company in October of 2020, and that was the start of it. We announced the brand or launched the brand in December of 2020. We actually launched our first product, which was just a sample to see if we can get attention in the market. Can we get time and effort from MSPs? We launched that in June and our great fortune and luck and timing and whatever else, we got a few hundred MSPs within about three months. We got about 300 MSPs using that in three months. We had a major platform in our industry come and offer us $10 million to buy the business at that juncture. To put it in perspective, we had across the founders cumulatively invested and put into the business at that point about a million dollars. So we weren’t out of money yet, it’s not like we spent a million dollars to get there, by the way. We can all just put it in as equal investment that way. So 10x return in six months, essentially, maybe eight months, we turned it down. We didn’t come into this looking for money and looking for an exit. If we did, we would’ve been stupid to not just take that offer at that point in time and go. But yeah, we sought out to solve a problem, have an impact, create something that we were proud of and something that was for a long-term that we could build and continue to operate.

How many nights did you lie awake at four in the morning thinking, why didn’t I take the money?

Initially, none. I mean to a lot of people, I’m sure to a lot of people listening to this, $10 million would’ve been crazy to have that. At that point in time, I probably owned 60% of the company, so call it $6 million in my bank account, that’s life-changing money for a lot of people. It wasn’t going to be life-changing and altering money for us at that point in time, and again, wasn’t what we were looking for. So at that point in time, I had no concern or no lost sleep.

Fast forward to November, we raised just over $10 million as a series A and things were very, very hunky dory as some people might say. I mean, we were rolling and laughing, things were just going really well for the business. That all shifted when market headwinds came in late spring, very early summer of 2021, which I’m guessing we probably chatted before all that happened is my best guess. Or maybe as that was happening. We ended up having a period between, call it June and November of, 2022 that we ended up going from 60 employees down to less than 30 employees. We had to try to reinvent and reimagine what the business was going to be because the path that we were on didn’t match with the economic climate anymore.

Over a two year period from, June 2022 to June 2024, there were probably 700 nights where I’d lay awake and think, “maybe we should have taken that money”.

Because over that period of time, I invested pretty much down in my last dime back into this business to keep it alive and keep it going and doing stuff. Fully in on the business, fully leveraged on the business. It is do or die. It is can’t walk away from this type of stuff. But we came through and I’d say at this point in time, I’m now again super happy that we didn’t just do that deal and everything and all the lessons learned and stuff over the last what would be almost three years now.

Yeah, I mean it’s an incredible story and obviously we assume because you’re talking about it publicly and it is out there and you’ve talked about it before, that you’ve come out the other side of that and the business has gone back into growth. And we’ll come onto that in a second. Let’s talk about resilience. So the vast majority of people listening to this, as you say, it’s 10 people or below, we talk to MSP owners and managers across the world, and they’re not typically people who raise 10 million. We all read about that and we read about Silicon Valley, oh, we raised a series A, we’ve got 40 million, and what is probably normal to some people is just mind bendingly nuts to other people.

I guess that means that when things happen, and suddenly the money stops.You’ve got 60 employees and they’re not being maintained by cashflow from products, they’re being maintained by investment funding. Everyone’s seen this story and it will happen again and it will keep happening, these things are cyclical and you just got unlucky being in that place at that very time. What I’m more interested in is the resilience. From one business owner to another, and the thousands of other business owners who will watch this on YouTube or listen on the podcast, those 700 nights where I’m guessing if the business had gone under, you’d have lost your original investment. So we can assume $600,000 from the numbers you were giving us earlier.

Oh, more than that over time.

Okay, yeah. So you’re significantly invested into this business, and of course you then end up with, you’ve then got a failed business and you’ve got no income and you’ve probably sunk all your assets into it. And not only your assets, you’ve sunk your energy and your time and your love. And that’s almost a grief process that you would’ve had to have gone through. So how did you keep yourself going, Colin? Because that’s a long time, that’s two years where you’re battling every single day. How did you keep yourself going?

Yeah, it’s tough, right? This is not a boohoo story and poor me, by the way. And I believe we’re always creatures of consequence of our own decisions and actions. I was fully leveraged. I sold my big old house, I moved to a half the size house, I put that money back in. I sold all of the fancy cars that I had, I put that money back in. I did everything that way. And you’re in a position, and I’m sure there’s MSP owners out there that have been in the position or maybe are today where it’s not even like the light at the tunnel, there is no light at the end of the tunnel. You have no idea if you’re making it out and you are running out of breath fast. So it’s tough.

And I think there’s a few things to it. One, there’s a lot of power in desperation, and that is a reality. When you sit and look at what happens if I give up here, you can fuel yourself pretty quick. Look, I still have a roof over my head and a vehicle, but my life savings is gone. My stuff is gone. When you start to think about reputation, most people are employable. How hard is it to go out and find a job when you’ve been the boss for the last 15 years, when you very notably had these highly publicised raises and growth stories and exits and then layoffs and turmoil and all of this stuff. You start working through and thinking through that, so desperation is one part of it.

Two is, I’m fortunate to have two children who are younger, and I tell them all the time and always told them, never give up, always give your all and pursue things. What would the message be to them to see me walk away from it and give up and do whatever? And so there was that for me.

And three, I think the big thing was the purpose. Why did we start this in the beginning? And I’ve talked about that on other podcasts before, but finding your why and knowing your purpose as to why you’re doing something is probably the number one thing that will get you through the toughest times and darkest days in the business. And we truly believed that we could find and build a product in a company that would turn around that status quo in our industry, that 50% of MSPs don’t make money and still driving on that, still wanting to be able to provide something that turns that, whether that’s from 50% to 40% or 30% or maybe one day zero, everybody making money is a big thing that drove us.

The fourth thing was that we still had a team, even after our second layoffs, I think we got down to about 12 or 13 people at the smallest point of the layoffs. I still had, call it 11 other people that were showing up to work every day, giving their all, knowing we had no certainty, knowing that there was no guarantee that they could all be making more money elsewhere, that they could all probably have less stress and less work to do elsewhere. That these people were showing up to work every single day with bright eyes and smiles and just ready to get down to business. It was probably that last bit.

That’s just amazing. I can’t imagine how you felt and where you were emotionally, or where you were mentally. I think probably having a family is one of the greatest assets you can have in a situation like that. I have a 14-year-old and I’m a sole parent, so I’m the only parent she’s got. And I have good days and bad days, but she puts everything in perspective, I think. And my lows have never been anywhere near as low as your lows, but everyone has good days and bad days.

Let’s wrap up, Colin. There’s two things I want to ask you. So one is I want to ask about Gradient MSP and where you are now and what you do in a second. And I think you deserve a very good free plug at the end of this, just as a reward, you’re collecting all the rewards now, which is good. Before we do that, I want you to imagine, as I said to you earlier we have thousands of people listen to these podcasts and we have a few hundred views on YouTube, which is great. I want you now to talk to just one or two people who are listening to this, who right now are in that bad place. And you said yourself that 50% of MSPs don’t really make money, and at any one moment you can assume that there’s an MSP somewhere in the world who’s just, they’ve hit that real bottom place. They’ve just been served notice on their biggest clients. They’ve just had that unexpected bill come in. It is maybe a bit of a health scare. And you and I both know it’s often a number of things that come together and it just makes you, oh my goodness, how am I going to get out of that? If that person was in front of you right now, and you had 60 seconds to just say something to them to help them realise that there is light, that no matter how bad it gets, there’s something coming. What would you say?

Yeah, I think one is to always remember any situation in life is temporary. I think Tom Hanks said it in a video thing, “This too shall pass”, the top thing to remember. The other is that you know as an MSP that there’s money that can be made as an MSP because there’s thousands and tens of thousands of them doing it successfully. So this is not a case of your business model. It’s a case of maybe some tweaks and stuff of what you’re selling and what your package is, what you’re charging, how you’re pitching it, how you’re going to market, how you’re doing. There are countless people out there that are successfully selling it, successfully delivering it, and successfully making money off of it. So you don’t need to sit there and say that this is impossible and this can’t work, and I’m going to give up. It’s just about watching and learning from others and making and applying those changes to your business. There’s a point of being humble in what you’re doing and recognising maybe I’m just not doing it right, and then taking and putting in that effort and going through those iterations to get yourself to a point that it is. But I guarantee you’ll get through it, stick with it, and I guarantee it can work. It works in any market, in any condition, in any geography. So yeah, you can do it.

I love that, and I completely agree with everything you said there, so thank you, Colin. Just let’s finish up. Tell us about Gradient MSP, tell us what you do for MSPs now, and what’s the best way to either go and have a look at Gradient MSP and get a demo, but also for those people that perhaps just want to reach out to you, perhaps tell us if we can reach out to you on LinkedIn or some other better way.

Absolutely. Reach out to me on LinkedIn. I think my handle on there is Reality Knox, look me up. You’ll find me, a smiley, bald guy on there. But Gradient MSP, if you’re an MSP owner or work at an MSP and you are just sick and tired of the frustration and hassle every single month to go out, collect, look at how much all of your customers are using of every single vendor and product you resell them. Go through the million mouse clicks in your PSA to check and update all of those and put in the hours, if not days of work every single month before you can generate invoices. Then come check out Gradient. We have, I think we’re around 90 integrations with channel vendors to go out and automatically pull that usage in for you. We tie into six of the most popular PSAs on the market to do the comparisons and give you just a clean, easy, single pane of glass productivity tool to go and update all of that stuff.

And so it’s all about making life easier. It’s all about getting rid of that hassle. So you go through every month, and if you’re at a point where you just don’t even want to do it anymore, we actually have a team of people that we will do your reconciliation for you as well. So if it’s, I just want a better, easier way to do it, we’ve got the software and the tool that can make that happen for you if it’s, I don’t want to do it at all, we’ve got the team and the technology to make that happen for you. So yeah, come check us out, meetgradient.com, read through the website, book a demo. Somebody on our team is happy to go and walk you through it all.

Mentioned links

• This podcast is in conjunction with the MSP Marketing Edge, the world’s leading white label content marketing and growth training subscription.
• Join me in MSP Marketing Facebook group.
• Connect with me on LinkedIn.
• Connect with my guest, Colin Knox, on LinkedIn and visit the Gradient website.
• Got a question about your MSP’s marketing? Submit one here for Paul’s Personal Peer Group.

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

• Marketing an MSP is like boiling water: Marketing your MSP is difficult. It requires a long-term strategy, not a series of one-off activities. But it will pay off for you very well with clients that stay with you for years and years.
• MSPs: Get a better understanding of your prospects’ pain points: You can get a better understanding of your prospects by using the “Five Why’s” framework. It’s a problem solving method developed by the founder of Toyota and I believe that you can use it in your MSP sales.
• How MSPs build trust, authority and credibility in the AI age: In this new world of AI some marketing tactics don’t work anymore and some are way more important than they’ve ever been. My guests reveal how you can use PR to your advantage in this new landscape.
• Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Do you struggle with content creation? I have a brainstorm of really great ideas for you to try.

Marketing an MSP is like boiling water

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MSPs: Get a better understanding of your prospects’ pain points

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

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

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

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

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

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

How MSPs build trust, authority and credibility in the AI age

Featured guests:

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

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

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

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

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

Paul’s Personal Peer Group

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

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

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

• What is Teams and how much does it cost?
• How do I start using Teams in my business?
• Why does Teams sometimes not work properly?
• What are the 10 most common Teams problems?
• How do I best use functionality in Teams?
• Which is better: Teams or competitor? (You could add in Zoom or something like that)
• Which is the best software for collaboration? A review for 2025.
• Should your vertical buy new PCs?
• Can a vertical use Macs and PCs at the same time?
• Reviewed: Best PCs for vertical in 2025?
• The Ultimate guide to optimising software in your vertical.
• What are the remote working best practices for vertical in 2025?
• Which is the best password manager for vertical? The top 10 compared.
• Should your company hire an IT person or use an MSP?

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

Mentioned links

• This podcast is in conjunction with the MSP Marketing Edge, the world’s leading white label content marketing and growth training subscription.
• Join me in MSP Marketing Facebook group.
• Connect with me on LinkedIn.
• Connect with my guests, Shanté Micah and Josh Moody on LinkedIn, and visit the Good News website.
• Mentioned book: Endless Customers by Marcus Sheridan.
• Got a question about your MSP’s marketing? Submit one here for Paul’s Personal Peer Group.

Welcome to Episode 298 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• ICP: Jargon or a powerful MSP marketing tool?: Your MSP’s Ideal Customer Profile is a clear picture of the type of business that you want more of. When you’re clear on who you are targeting, everything else becomes easier.
• MSPs: How to never drop a ball (no matter how busy you are): If you want to run the best MSP you can and find new clients at the same time without the fear of ever dropping the ball, you need to get this system into your life.
• AI is changing EVERYTHING with your MSP’s website: Websites that were perfectly optimised for Google just a few years back are now not good enough for the age of AI. My guest explains what MSP’s should be considering now and in the future.
• Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Ever wonder whether you should be sending promotional emails as plain text or HTML? I have a very clear answer to this…

ICP: Jargon or a powerful MSP marketing tool?

Just like in the tech world, marketing is full of confusing sounding acronyms. There’s your LTV, your CTR and your PPC, but while you can safely ignore those, there’s one that you must not ignore. Perhaps you’ve heard of it already. When you get this acronym right, it influences all of your MSP’s marketing and you get better results. Let’s talk about this acronym that you must be aware of and how implementing it in your MSP will help you win brand new clients.

So we’re going to talk about something called an ICP, which stands for Ideal Customer Profile. And don’t worry, this isn’t going to be some kind of big scary marketing concept. It’s actually really simple and it can make a massive difference to how effective your MSP’s marketing is. So what’s an ICP? Think of it like this.

If you could clone your best customer – the one who always pays on time, never complains, values what you do, and is a dream to work with – who would that be?

That’s what sits at the heart of your ideal customer profile. It’s a clear picture of the type of business that you want more of. And I’m not just talking about the vague stuff like saying small businesses or anybody with computers and a wallet. I mean details like what industry they’re in, how many staff they have, where they’re based, what kind of technology they use, who makes the buying decisions, and even what headaches are they dealing with right now that you can solve?

Why do you bother with all of this? Because when you are clear on who you are targeting, everything else becomes easier. Your marketing becomes sharper, your messaging really hits home. You stop wasting your time chasing leads that when never a good fit in the first place because you understand exactly who you want to work with. It’s like fishing with a rod rather than chucking a net into the sea and hoping to get a very specific kind of fish.

So how do you build your ICP? Well, I suggest that you start with your current clients. Have a good look at them, analyse them. It could just be while you take the dog for a walk, you don’t need to sit down and stare at a screen for another six hours, but just think it through. Who are your best clients? Who are the ones that you wish you had 10 more of? Write down what it is that makes them great. Look for the patterns. Is it that they’re all in professional services? Do they all have a round about 15, 20 staff? Do they all hate dealing with IT and they just want someone to handle it all for them and they’re willing to pay for that person? What are the things they have in common? Your best clients. And then turn that into a profile. And you might find yourself saying something like, We help 10 to 50 person accountancy firms in the southeast who are growing fast and who need reliable IT support, but they really don’t want to do it in-house.

That in itself could be your ICP, just that statement. It doesn’t have to be a massive document that you’re never going to look at ever again. And once you’ve got something as simple as that statement, then everything you do in your marketing points you towards attracting more of that kind of business. On your websites, your LinkedIn posts, your emails, they all need to speak directly to the people that you actually want as clients.

Let me give you a specific example of an MSP with a really clear ICP. So they work with dental practices, specifically private practices with between five and 20 staff that are based in their specific geographical area plus 50 miles. Their ideal client isn’t just any dentist, it’s a dentist that uses digital X-ray systems, has a receptionist who struggles with slow computers, and the owner hates IT and hates dealing with it. So that MSP positions themselves as the go-to IT provider for dental practices in that region. And their website talks about IT that keeps your practice running smoothly, even when the x-ray software doesn’t. Because that directly talks to people who are using digital x-rays. They go to dental conferences, they’ve even written a guide called the IT survival kit for busy dentists, and they’re not trying to be everything to everyone. In fact, they’re not even trying to be everything to every dentist. Because of that, they attract exactly the kind of clients that they want. Clients that are profitable, they’re easy to support and they stay for years. That’s the power of a really good ICP.

So quick recap for you, ICP means ideal customer profile and it helps you to focus on the right kind of clients. Start by cloning your best current clients and then use that insight to sharpen up all of your marketing. Very simple, very powerful. It’s going to save you a ton of time and move you a lot closer to winning new clients.

MSPs: How to never drop a ball (no matter how busy you are)

Does this happen to you during the day? You’re just trying to run the best MSP you can and of course, hopefully find some new clients, but come the evening, you’re trying to chill out and then all of a sudden your brain goes into overdrive. Did I send that proposal? Did I do that thing that I promised a client or did I forget it? If you want to run the best MSP you can and find new clients at the same time without the fear of ever dropping the ball, you need to get this system into your life.

Sometimes the hallmark of a business owner is that we pride ourselves on our busyness as much as on our business. Most of the MSP owners that I’ve met are very high performing individuals and I think this is why we get frustrated with our staff and other mere mortals who can’t do what we do at the pace that we do it. But even you and I have our limits and I know that I’m approaching mine right now. I’ve got several projects which all seem to be concluding at the same time. Home life’s getting really busier. My child is doing loads of stuff that needs transport and organising and thinking, and I am about to take an impending vacation, a short break, which is kind of clashing with a project deadline. And it’s all adding pressure. Yes, this recording is my way of getting counseling, thanks very much for being there for me. But actually no matter how busy I get, I rarely drop a ball, which is a very dangerous thing to claim in public, and I certainly don’t get everything done when I say I will. But I am able to make conscious decisions about what needs to be done now and what can be safely postponed.

I’ve used a simple but powerful productivity system for years and it helps me to prioritise what’s most important… what’s going to get me closer to my life goals.

I’ve distilled it down to six key things:

The first is to set very clear goals and review them every single day. Literally, one of the first things I do every day is to read my goals book, even at the weekend I do this. And if you don’t have written goals which are constantly top of your mind, you kind of can’t be more productive because true productivity is about doing less, not more, which means prioritising more. You’ve got to know what you’ve got to do to get you to the place you want to go. So my goals book contains my vision board. It’s a series of pictures representing the things that I want in my life in the near future. So there’s a picture of the house that I’m going to own next, a picture of the car that’ll sit on the gravel driveway of the house. There’s a picture of the villa somewhere hot, probably Portugal where I’ll be enjoying 10 weeks of the school holidays. All of that kind of stuff is on there. And then on the next page of the book is a summary of my key goals for the year. Each containing three bullet points on my strategy to achieve those goals. And I tweak these as we go throughout the year, but achieving each of these business goals gets me so much closer to my life goals. So for example, to have that villa in Portugal, I’m going to need both cash and time. I need cash to pay for it and I need time to enjoy it. So I have to make sure with my business goals and my business strategy, I’m not too tied up. It generates plenty of cash for me, but also frees me up to enjoy that time in Portugal. Does that make sense? And then the final page is a tracker for my daily KPIs, my key performance indicators, things like sleep and exercise, stuff like that.

Number two, use software. Personally, I’m an enormous fan of something called Todoist. I love the way that it drags and drops. I love the way that it syncs instantly between your phone and your laptop. And I like the way it works exactly the same way across every single device. In fact, I used Todoist more than almost any other software. Apparently over the years, I just checked, I’ve already completed more than 71,000 tasks in Todoist. Woo. But it doesn’t really matter what software you use so long as you rely upon it heavily. Great software makes it a thousand times easier to be more productive while doing less.

Number three, get everything out of your head. The most critical part of my productivity system is to leave nothing in your head ever. A task or idea that exists only in your head is too easily lost or worse. It takes up so much thinking space that it stops you from moving on to the next idea. Todoist has an inbox that I can add tasks to and I can even email them in using email or if I’m driving or something I can use, well, I try to use Siri, but we all know how hard that is, so I use an app called Brain Toss. And at night I have a pad next to my bed to write down ideas without having to wake myself up getting the blue screen of using my phone.

Number four, keep projects and tasks separate. Within your productivity software you need two separate sets of to-do lists. The first are projects and these are the big things that move your business forward. Each project has its own list of tasks all broken down into the smallest possible chunks. So by doing this, it allows me to sit and focus on a project for a few hours before moving on to the next project. The other to-do list I’ve got is just everyday tasks. These are things that need to be done, but they don’t necessarily help me achieve anything. So I do schedule tasks for specific days of the week and then I swap them around when they don’t get done. So for example, Tuesday is always the day that I’ll record my podcast and YouTube videos and that’s there in my productivity system every week, protected time. Whereas there are other things today, like I do a weekly update to my team of how well we’ve done in the last week, what our performance is. Sometimes that gets bumped off Mondays or Tuesdays and I end up doing it on Wednesdays. Doesn’t matter, but it never falls out of the productivity system until it’s done.

Number five, rank and dump. Not all tasks are equal, so you need to find a system of ranking them that works best for you. I’ve tried traffic light rankings before. I’ve tried the A, B, C thing, but now I just keep it really simple. I label tasks that get me closer to my goals and I put them at the top of the list. And critically, I also identify tasks every day that are so unimportant that it doesn’t really matter whether or not I ever do them. These are tasks that actually if I think about it, I was never going to do them anyway, but because they came out of my head, and remember I said earlier you have to write them down, if it doesn’t feel right to delete them because you had that thought, I just kind of file them away somewhere safe. I actually call this place the black hole.Now I can’t see the tasks in there and it doesn’t really matter because I was never going to do them anyway, but I don’t feel stressed by the fact that I’ve moved the task somewhere rather than deleted it. I’ve got it out to my head. I’ve decided didn’t want to do it, and I’ve put it in a folder somewhere where I’ll never look at it, but it’s there if I wanted to. My brain likes that.

Then finally number six, plan tomorrow at the end of each day. And this is the final work job of each day for me. I move any project items or tasks that are left over from today, I read tomorrow’s project and task list, and I rearrange items to reflect the ever-changing priorities. We all should do this every single day. You have to look at your calendar to estimate how much time you’ve got tomorrow for GTD, which is getting things done, and if you need to move some tasks to a different day so that your list tomorrow is grounded in reality, then do that. Once you’ve done that, you can shout hooray, and go and watch the latest episode of Daredevil or whatever you are watching right now on Netflix or Disney Plus. Tell me how good is your system for productivity in your MSP.

AI is changing EVERYTHING with your MSP’s website

We all know that generative AI is changing everything at a rapid pace, but have you ever stopped to think through the implications of that? Take your website for example, what was a perfectly good site optimised for Google just a few years back is now not good enough for the age of AI. My special guest today is on the frontline helping MSPs with their sites. We’re going to talk about the new paradigm for websites and look at how it’s affecting you right now.

I’m Matt Dorman. I’m one of two owners of Ndevr. We’re a technical services agency out of the US.

And thank you so much for joining me on the podcast Matt, because I want to talk about websites. It seems to me like marketing is changing and evolving at the most rapid pace ever, and it’d be interesting to see if you have the same experience because obviously we both spend all of our working lives helping people with their marketing and getting better results when their marketing. But with AI and technical things that are happening and just consumer and B2B demands, marketing seems to be changing at a really rapid pace right now. So that’s what I want to delve into today. But particularly based around MSP’s websites, I still believe that your website is your number one marketing weapon even with all of these other weapons that you’ve got. Ultimately, everybody looks at your website and makes an emotional decision whether or not you are worth speaking to based on the contents of your website. So that’s something I’d like to look at today. Listen, first of all just delve into you and your background. So what got you into this business in the first place?

Yeah, the actual business, it was a little while ago, but the technical side of building out websites like you said, I mean that’s one way of putting what we do, we build digital infrastructure for any kind of site. We’re actually coming close to the 10 year anniversary of our company. My partner and I, we actually worked at a firm before this together. She and I were kind of done with what we thought we were going to do. We were going to do some independent work on our own and one thing led to another and we started doing some projects together right away and we decided we wanted to form a company together. We’ve been working in the digital media space prior to that. I’ve been doing it almost 30 years now, so quite a while. It’s hard to say when it became like, oh, we’re going to do that as a company versus we were just going to do some independent freelance stuff.

That’s really cool. Well, you’ve clearly seen even just over 10 years, you’ve clearly seen a massive amount of change. And I remember in the year 2000, or maybe even 1999, we used to have here in the UK, we used to have these things called night schools, which as it sounds was like a college you could go to in the evening and it was all subsidised by the government until they shut it all down a few years later. But I remember going to night school for Microsoft FrontPage and it was the first time I’d ever been able to actually do HTML and build a website. And I remember I was just blown away by the opportunity that was facing me, and I kind of wish I could go back 25 years and speak to 25-year-old Paul and say, go build websites, go help people figure out online marketing years before it becomes really, really important. But even in the last 10, 15 years or so that you’ve been working with the internet and with websites, what are the big shifts that you’ve seen that are really starting to hurt people with their marketing today?

I think the elephant in the room is AI, the last nine months to a year have been a complete shift in how to build websites, and why to build websites. What’s your actual audience? I think it is not completely changed because we still have Google, we still have people going to Google and looking up search results, but that’s now drastically changing where you’re now having to really entice their AI or whatever AI a person’s using to interact with finding people, finding things, you’re now able to get into those results. And I was reading some articles today specifically around digital media publishers, so people that write articles, news articles and things like that… and

For years it’s been about page views and getting people to click through to websites. That’s turned on its head because now brand recognition is happening inside of a chatbot and people are getting their content there.

I wish I had the answer. I think there’s some ways of getting into there, but I don’t know yet because it’s constantly changing. We’re constantly changing how we’re using them also.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, even you and I are doing this interview at the beginning of June, 2025. It’s not broadcast for a few months, but even in those couple of months before it’s broadcast ChatGPT could release another iteration, there could be another amazing AI tool. Every day there’s hundreds of new tools being released and I think the generative AI revolution that we are seeing around us is certainly changing things. I have friends in their forties, their thirties and forties who say they use ChatGPT more than Google these days because it’ll do the research, it’ll do the recommendations, and they’re happy with the hallucinations. They can cope with it getting it wrong sometimes, which is kind of terrifying. So from a marketing agency’s point of view and looking at this of how MSPs can improve their websites, we know that most MSPs don’t do a great deal of work on their websites. So you are saying the work they should be doing should be based more around building up that brand equity now?

We were building out blog posts all about SEO, right? Keywords and injecting as much content as possible around your audience. What we’re finding now is around kind of the question and answer, having the content actually focused around answering questions versus having a lot of content now. That’s a different way of writing and a different way of creating the content on the website and structuring it also in a way that actually can be pulled in. Because people, like you said, people are asking questions to the ChatGPTs and others and then getting its research, and it’s telling them based on looking at websites, it’s still a crawler, what they’re telling it to tell the people. So if you can get your answers inside of your content, it’ll eventually show up to them. I think the hard thing is then measuring the initial KPI, because you don’t have a page view anymore. Right away you have an answer and they might have brand recognition about you, but you have no indication that it was actually coming there unless they click through or go to your phone call or go to your site to submit a contact.

Yeah, exactly. Just recently I read Endless Customers by Marcus Sheridan, which I’m sure you’ve come across or maybe his previous book They Ask You Answer, and Endless Customers absolutely nails that. You give the answers and you put them on your website and you make it easy for the AI to find them for exactly that reason. And I think that’s an instant and easy quick win for any MSP to do. Obviously, you and I have no idea where this is going to go, but we can see a shift, a shift in human behaviours. It’s just occurred to me, it’s almost like Google has forced us over the last 25 years to search in a specific way in that we’ve always had the questions, we’ve always had the question of which MSP should I hire, but we knew that the search engine wouldn’t answer that for us. So instead we just search for IT support near me or IT support city or something like that. Do you think, and again, just asking your crystal ball, make it up kind of answer, do you think in the next 25 years we are going to go much more down the route of going back to natural behaviours of just saying to maybe to an agentic AI that will go and actually do searching for us or go research a contract and have conversations with salespeople and do all of that for us, which is not unfeasible over the next 25 years. Do you think that’s the direction we’re going to go, or do you think it’s going to be something a bit different?

I think a year ago I would’ve said, yeah sure 10, 15 years from now. But I don’t know, I mean it feels like it’s months away now. I’ve gone in the past few weeks to looking at how we use them as tools and we’re typing things in. Now I’ve pulled in, I think it’s called whisper flow, and I press a key and then I just talk. And I’m now having to have a conversation with a screen essentially, but now it’s getting me to rethink because when I type, I feel like I type in a way that you’re talking to Google. I need this answer, this is how I’m supposed to type it, but when I’m talking I’m having a conversation all of a sudden. I’m 47 years old, I’m not adopting as quick as my sons and things like that, but I feel like now I’m having to because it’s so much easier for some reason, and that’s just been weeks or months.

I’m 50 so I’m feeling your pain. My 14-year-old recently did some revision for her exams by taking photos of the textbooks, putting them into ChatGPT and asking it to do the revision summary, which is so smart, right? It’s not lazy, that’s actually a smart thing to do. And if she’s doing that at 14, what’s she going to be doing at our kind of age? I’m actually quite excited by this. It is a lot of change. It is happening really quickly, but the reason I’m excited is because it creates opportunities where anything changes really rapidly. I believe that creates huge opportunities. And my final question for you, Matt, is what kind of opportunities do you see for MSPs to keep up with these changes in marketing and to actually iterate their own marketing to take advantage of it?

Yeah, I think one opportunity is if you get the audience to come to your website, having more integration. Even as simple as what used to be a chat bot is now a fully integrated bot onto your site, and it’ll actually give them those same answers that you were trying to ingest into it because they don’t want to click through or people are less likely to want to click around. Like where the search box was and some people, advanced users would use it to find articles or find content on your site. It never really worked well. So if you can implement a good bot that’s actually pulling your content in and actually keeping them engaged in your answers, that’s definitely one way. I think limiting that time period to getting to a person depending on the type of site you are, is still important. So if it can come up with that goal, that would be the biggest thing. I’m big on having just the actual information that the user wants and not a bunch of fluff, but I feel like some of that fluff is still needed for the new bots to crawl through.

I’m sure it will come out in the wash over the next two, three years, and just as back in the day as SEO was changing year by year, month by month, and people ended up going off in a certain direction, I’m sure it’ll be exactly the same with generative AI or it will all change so quickly that we are all constantly playing catch up. I suspect that may be a part of it as well. So thank you so much for your time. Matt, tell us a little bit more about your business and what you do to help MSPs with their websites.

So we handle all the technical implementations whether it’s third party applications like your CRM, your Salesforce or things like that. We do build websites, it’s becoming a smaller portion of what we do anymore because it’s so automated, essentially. We can help with SEO or AI engine optimisation. We do have tools for that, obviously other people have tools, but really integrating those tools into your processes. So whether it’s building out systems that have integration with your content management system or just giving you overall what’s going on. We’re based out of the US but we do work globally. So again, I’m with Ndevr and you can find me at Matt Dorman on LinkedIn. Reach out if you have questions. Happy to make connection, I don’t block my connections for sure.

Paul’s Personal Peer Group

MSP owner Gideon in Wisconsin has a question about promotional emails. His question is: Should I send promotional emails as plain text or use HTML templates?

I’ve got a very clear answer to this. You should use plain text or HTML that makes your email look like plain text, but never a pretty well-designed template.

Why? Because you’re not running an e-commerce business selling “things” and also you’re not selling to consumers. The second someone sees a very pretty email template, they know it’s a sales email, which is fine if they’re interested in the thing that that business is selling. But you are not selling in your emails… you’re educating, you’re entertaining. So you want your emails to look like they’ve been sent from one person to one other person. You can only do that with emails that look like plain text.

Mentioned links

• This podcast is in conjunction with the MSP Marketing Edge, the world’s leading white label content marketing and growth training subscription.
• Join me in MSP Marketing Facebook group.
• Connect with me on LinkedIn.
• Connect with my guest, Matt Dorman on LinkedIn, and visit the Ndevr website.
• Got a question about your MSP’s marketing? Submit one here for Paul’s Personal Peer Group.

Welcome to Episode 297 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• Every MSP should listen to this book: If you implement the simple ideas inside this book, it will dramatically improve your marketing – you’ll get more attention and ultimately a lot more business for your MSP.
• Would your MSP tackle a one off project to unlock MRR?: There is a way to warm up reluctant prospects and build a solid relationship with them, before asking them to sign a monthly recurring revenue contract with your MSP. Here’s how.
• This MSP looks back on his biggest marketing mistakes: If you could go back to when you started your MSP, what advice would you give yourself to avoid your biggest marketing mistakes? This is the question I asked my guest, see how his answer compares to yours.
• Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Are Google’s Core Web Vitals still a thing in 2025? Find out how this affects your MSP and what you should be doing about it.

Every MSP should listen to this book

I know I know, you want to grow your MSP, but actually you barely have enough time to stay on top of the big shows on Netflix, let alone learn how to improve your MSP’s marketing. But could you make the time if all you had to do was read or listen to just one single book?

Let’s dig into a new book that if you implement the simple ideas inside, it will dramatically improve your marketing. You’ll get more attention and ultimately a lot more business for your MSP.

What was your lockdown experience like? Well, some people had a terrible experience, of course, but others discovered new things about themselves. So for example, I discovered a bit of a renewed love of running which led me to doing a couple of half marathons over the years after. And actually I lost about two stone in weight, which sadly has come back now and doesn’t seem to want to go again. But also back then I fell in love with reading one more time and I got through tons of books that summer.

And one book that I read for the first time ever, which I had been meaning to read for years, was a book called They Ask You Answer, written by a guy called Marcus Sheridan. And this was instantly an insane book for me and it resonated with me in every possible way. So I went away and I implemented as much of it as I could in my own business, and I kept telling the MSPs that I was working with that they should do exactly the same. And actually, I decided I had to get Marcus onto my podcast, which finally happened in January 2023. If you want to listen to that episode, Google MSP Marketing Edge and Marcus Sheridan, and you’ll find the podcast episode. It’s episode 164. Marcus was very generous with that interview and it helped to position, They Ask You Answer in ways that made it super relevant to MSPs.

I tell you all of this as background as it helps to explain why I got so excited earlier this year when I heard that Marcus was releasing a new book. It’s been billed as They Ask You Answer 3.0. Version two was a bit of a refresher to the original book which came out in about 2019, whereas this new book is more than just an update, this is a reinvention for the modern age. You see, They Ask You Answer first came out in 2016, that was nine years ago, and the world has changed dramatically since then, hasn’t it? No more so than with the AI tools that we have today. And so They Ask You Answer has changed into something new called, Endless Customers. That’s the name of the new book and it’s available currently as a hardback, but it is also on Audible as well. And you can access more details about the book at the website endlesscustomers.com.

Now, let me be brutally clear about this. You NEED to read this book.

This is the one of the most valid marketing books that any MSP can read. And it’s not just ideas or opinions, it’s field tested stuff.

It’s been field tested for over a decade, and I know that many MSPs have used this. In fact, I know that Marcus Sheridan understands the MSP market based on my conversations with him a couple of years ago.

Endless Customers shows you how to become the most trusted and recognised MSP in your marketplace. How? By harnessing the power of the right content, getting your website right, the right sales activities, the right technology, and having a culture of performance. And there are so many big ideas in this book, but they all come with instructions on how to implement them, how to make them happen, and bake them into your business.

I look at a lot of MSP’s websites and their overall marketing, and I’ll be honest, the ones that excite me the most have used either this exact system or their own version of it. And you can see that those MSPs are so completely different from their competitors. You can see that the way they stand out, in fact, it almost makes me pity the MSPs that they are up against. And wouldn’t you want to be that MSP? Wouldn’t you want to be the one that other people look at and realise it’s going to be very difficult to catch up to?

So become that MSP before someone else gets there. It’s not an overnight transformation, but it is a transformation of your entire business. And it starts with one book, Endless Customers. Please get it, read it, listen to it, get copies for your team, give it to your team to read. In fact, there’s some suggestions inside the book about how you turn your entire MSP into an Endless Customers culture. This could be an insane differentiator and competitive advantage for your MSP.

Would your MSP tackle a one off project to unlock MRR?

Many MSPs hate this kind of work and refuse to do it, and yet by doing so they’re missing out on potential new clients. Wouldn’t you love a way to warm up reluctant prospects and build a solid relationship with them, before asking them to sign a monthly recurring revenue contract?

Well, that’s what this hated work can do. Let me tell you what the work is, why I think you should consider taking it on and how to use it as a marketing tool.

Would you take on a one-off project with no guarantee of monthly recurring revenue just to build a relationship with a prospect? I asked this question recently in my free MSP Marketing Facebook group. If you haven’t joined that by the way, just go onto Facebook, search for MSP Marketing, nip over to groups and you’ll see it there – MSP Marketing Facebook group. Free to join, but it’s only for MSPs, a vendor free zone. Anyway, I asked that question there and the answers were very clear cut. Many MSPs shouted, yes, a few shouted a very vociferous no, with a few kind of sitting on the fence. Let me read you out some of the comments.

First of all, we’ve got here some big fans. Darren said: Every day if their finances check out and there’s additional opportunity. And he means of course, for monthly recurring revenue. Sebastian said: Yep, best way to get in the door and also getting paid for a lead instead of you paying to acquire a lead. I like that. And James agreed with him saying: Providing the project is costed for and priced that shows it can deliver a profit at your required rate. You never know where that prospect may be in 12, 18 or 24 months time.

Rob said as well: Yes, definitely. A lot of our MRR has come as a result of one-off projects. We use it as an opportunity to impress and give an experience that they may want more of, often going slightly over what they were expecting and highlighting other things whilst working on the project. It gets their thought process whirring. It’s also an opportunity to get in and see what they are really like. Oh I like that, so it’s almost like he’s checking them out as they’re checking him out.

And then finally, for the yeses, Jeff said: Yep, absolutely. We have gained many clients from a relationship built just from a one-off project. Some of our biggest clients, even most of them, have had a bad relationship with another MSP. Doing a one-off project allows them to try us. You can prove to them you’re going to do what you say, at the time you say it, and within the budget that you gave.

Now then, as I said, there were a couple of people sat in the middle. So Jim said: It depends on the project. I regularly refer people to other computer repair guys locally as I’ve become quite adept at spotting nightmares on the phone. I like that. And actually Dan replied to that exactly this: Scope out whether there’s any leverage. If there isn’t, don’t waste your time.

And we did have a few definite nos as well. Gerard said: Nope, little chance it leads to MRR. Also too much sales and overhead time. And Rick said: No, as he’s a hundred percent focused on MRR. Our model for the last 20 years, defining the edge of projects with people you don’t know on equipment you don’t support or didn’t sell is a slippery slope best avoided.

So where do you sit on this question? To me, it’s a very smart way to overcome one of the biggest marketing problems that all MSPs face.

They won’t buy from you until they trust you, but they can’t trust you until they like you, and they can’t like you until they know you. Asking a business owner or manager to sign a contract and shift everything over to you, it’s a massive perceived risk for them. What if you can’t deliver what you say that you can deliver? What if their technology goes wrong? What if it damages their business? What if? What if? What if?

Well, you can overcome this massive perceived risk with great marketing, especially leveraging social proof like testimonials, reviews, case studies and risk reversal, such as a great guarantee. But you know what? Successfully doing a one-off project is way better. It’s the ultimate proof that you can deliver and it buys you time to have quality conversations with them about their overall technology, what they love and what’s frustrating them. Ask the right questions and listen really carefully to the answers and you’ll soon hear the people who are desperate for better help and really hope that you can provide it. So where do you sit on this debate?

This MSP looks back on his biggest marketing mistakes

If you could go back and talk to yourself the night before you started your MSP, what advice would you give yourself? Assuming it’s not, don’t do it, maybe you tell yourself about the biggest mistakes that you are going to make along the way, so that your younger self could avoid those mistakes. I’ve been speaking to a vendor who used to be an MSP and we’ve been playing exactly this game. Right now check out his biggest sales and marketing mistakes and see how they compare to yours.

Hey everybody. My name is Dustin Puryear. I’m the founder of Giant Rocketship. I was an MSP owner. Now I’m on the vendor side and fully automate ticket and work management for MSPs.

You went from the light side to the dark side, but thank you for joining us on the podcast. And by the way, really cool company name. I’m looking forward to hearing about how you came up with the name Giant Rocketship, that’s one of the coolest vendor names that we’ve ever heard. And let’s be honest, we’re surrounded by vendors with really boring technical sounding names, so that in itself stands out.

Dustin, I think you’ve got a really interesting story and we are today going to talk about the marketing stuff that you wish you’d known back in the day when you were an MSP. Let’s talk about that, tell us your MSP story. How did you get into it in the first place? What was the technology when you got into it? Are we talking sort of pre XP? And what was your MSP story? How did you get started? How did you end that story?

Yeah, interesting. So I come from the dot-com era, for anybody that knows that. I was a developer, I was a young kid out of college and that company was in streaming media in early 2000. It folded as you would guess, and I was looking for, what am I doing next? Single, no kids. I was like, well, I could just start a business, what’s the worst case here that I move in with my mom?

I was 22 – 23, I was a Unix admin coder guy. So I started a consultancy for hospitals and agencies. Then I realised it was hard for me to reproduce myself, started bringing in Windows people and then suddenly I realised I had a IT company and then we converted to a fixed fee model, which made me a MSP. And then 20 years later I sold that puppy.

That’s it. Simple as that. And do you miss it? I know that’s a strange sounding question.

I miss some of the relationships. The company that acquired us, actually, I was talking to the owner the other day and he said, man, you had some really good connections. Like the owners still ask about you, how’s everything going? And yeah, sometimes I’m just like, I need to reach out to ex customer A, B, or C and just go have lunch with them. Because I would have regular core lunches with the customers and I do miss that level of relationship. It’s not totally outside of how a vendor works with their customers, but just the scale a number of customers makes it more difficult to have that many relationships. So I would say that type of intimate relationship with your customers is probably what I miss the most about being a MSP.

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. And a lot of people would sell their MSP, go and have six months off and then start another MSP. Was that not something that appealed to you?

I thought about it, but Giant Rocketship had started as a little side project that came out of my MSP because we developed it originally for the MSP. So I really couldn’t just sit on it unless I was going to fold it. My Rocketship customers wouldn’t be happy with that. And also I think it scared my wife thinking that I would just be home all the time because she works from the office and I’m high energy, talkative, constantly making noises, banging on things, and I don’t know if she would’ve been on board with me taking six months off. So the votes were tallied and it was clear that I should just sprint to the next opportunity.

I love that. I sold my first business in 2016 and I was going to take six months off. It was six weeks and I started what is now my business I run now. I was so bored within six weeks, which is just nuts. So people like us, we are going to be in our eighties and nineties running businesses you know. It’s going to be quite a sad state of affairs, I think.

Yeah, I can see this full retirement concept. I mean, sometimes I’m like, Ooh, I just want a break. But I don’t know that I’ll ever actually fully retire. I enjoy it, and yes, it can be stressful sometimes, but actually I do better when I’m under stress. I underperform when I have no stress on me. I’ll dither, I’ll procrastinate, but if I have stress on me, I’ll perform well. And so actually I think I just thrive under a high pressure environment.

Right. In which case, let’s ratchet this up. We’re going to talk about Giant Rocketship at the end of the interview. Just before we ratchet up the pressure, how long have you not been an MSP? So how long have you been a vendor for?

Well, I just sold my MSP in October.

Oh, okay. So just last year then. Okay, so already then you’re a little on from that. And what’s some of the marketing stuff that you’ve learned in this kind of vendor startup phase that you wish you knew back when you were running that MSP?

Well, that’s the thing is our MSP, we were in the $2 to $3 million range, so not huge, but bigger than average. And there were things that we just weren’t mature on yet. And one of them was just how important strong KPIs are around marketing. I don’t think people properly track their marketing dollars. And the next thing, and I can talk about this all day long, is not being patient enough with marketing. The reality is sales should have a relatively quick turnaround. If you bring in an SDR, that person should start hitting within a few months. You might not be making your money back, but you’ll know whether you’re going to get something. Marketing, you’re looking at a solid year to really start seeing the return on marketing. 

MSPs don’t budget properly for marketing because they want a faster turnaround. They could be going in the right direction but they’ll abort a project because they don’t see the returns fast enough. And that’s broken thinking.

Yeah, I’m smiling and laughing and nodding as you say this because that’s exactly my experience. And do you know what, that’s a normal experience as well because as business owners, we are not used to waiting 3, 6, 9, 12 months for something to pay off, are we? We’re not quite the instant gratification, I need it in the next five minutes, that a lot of consumers are, but when you say to someone, oh, you’ve got to wait a year for that, that just seems nuts. That seems like the wrong thing to do. So did you learn that lesson in your MSP or is that something that you realised from reflection after exiting it?

I would say at the tail end of the MSP I started really understanding the timeline of marketing better. And I would say exiting it and being able to evaluate where I succeeded, where I failed in marketing and sales with my MSP and where I could apply that with Giant Rocketship. And I kind of joke, but I’m serious that Giant Rocketship has made me unlearn more than it’s made me learn because the service model, the way you sell it can be very different than a product model. But now that I’m in Rocketship and I have people that are really focused on how do you get the marketing working and what does that life cycle look like and when do you start a conversation and when should it hit to see if your numbers are correct? That’s just really opened my eyes to just how short term my thinking as a MSP was.

So you said you got to $2 to $3 million revenue, which as you correctly identify is not usual. It’s a little above where many people get to with their business. What were the marketing and sales things that you did back in the day that you think moved the needle the most?

Well, at that size we were very referral heavy, and that was a huge thing, just getting out there. I don’t know if they have the saying in the UK, but pressing the flesh, just shaking hands, kissing babies. But you need to be out there. If you are an owner for a MSP and you’re at $1 to $3 million, you still need to be going to your chamber meetings every week. You still need to be going to events where business people go, like learning sessions with your chamber or with your economic development agency in your state. Your face needs to be out there. You need to be out there on social media. You need to keep it obviously apolitical, you need to keep it straight narrow on business stuff, and you need to know what your job is. And as an owner for a MSP up to $3 million, you are the closer and you’re the face of the company, and that’s what you’re selling. A $10 million MSP is selling process. A $1 million MSP is selling the owner. And I think people get their wires crossed when it comes to that.

Yeah, I agree. And in fact, you are absolutely spot on. I would say probably 80% of the MSPs on the planet are owner driven businesses, they’re personality driven businesses. So the business comes from, the owner’s personality, it’s the force of energy they’ve got or the force of energy they haven’t got. It’s partly pressing the flesh, it’s partly the follow-up calls, it’s partly how they’re reflected on social media, but it is very much based around a person.

And you’re right, there comes a point where that business has to outgrow the owner. Now you can still be the face of the business. I’m the face of my business but believe me, I do very little work in the business. In fact, my job is this, only I can do this, only I can be on social media and writing our content, but I don’t do any of the customer service. I don’t write any of the content for our MSP Marketing Edge clients or anything like that. And it’s a very difficult transition for MSPs to make. And in fact, many MSPs don’t even like the fact that they are the face of the business, even though they are the face of the business. It’s a very difficult thing.

Final question about your MSP. If you did decide to start another MSP, what are the two, three things that you would do differently from day one. And I’m not looking for tech stack software choices or anything like that, I’m looking from a marketing, sales, and growth point of view, what are some of the two or three things that you would go in and instantly say, oh, I would do X, Y, Z differently?

Well, I do want to take one step back. And you brought up stack, and I actually just had this conversation with somebody the other day. If you’re a $1 to $3 million MSP and you’re focused on selling your stack, you are completely having the wrong conversation. That size customer doesn’t care about your stack. They literally don’t. A $500 million organisation that’s bringing you in for tier two escalation support, they care about how you run things. Smaller, they just want to know how you personally are going to handle things and what your account management looks like.

So if I were to go reinvent myself, I would completely do it differently. One thing is I would absolutely be all in, it took me a long time to learn that my face needed to be out there in the business community, and I just struggled with that. I just thought it was how good of a technical person I was. And it took me 10 years to realise, that from day one, I need to be out there shaking hands, telling people what I own. Second, the biggest mistake we made as a MSP, this is from the sales and marketing aspect, was we weren’t niched down enough. I was a solve all problems MSP. We had a few hotels, we had a few small banks, we had a lot of healthcare. I would niche down to one segment and I would go all in on that niche because I would be able to 10 x my marketing dollar. Whereas when I was broad based, I was one 10th the marketing dollar, because it was spread so thin. And people don’t understand that when you’re a broad based MSP, your marketing dollars are extremely expensive compared to a niched down MSP.

Yeah, I completely agree with you. Let’s talk about the vendor then. So you started Giant Rocketship back end of last year. First of all, tell us what is Giant Rocketship? What does it do? Obviously you work with MSPs, but what specific use cases or what problems do you solve? And tell us a little bit about the marketing you’ve been doing for it.

Yeah, so the use cases, what I found and what I’ve seen at all the MSPs is they’re just overwhelmed. They have more tickets coming in than they have technicians. They keep hiring more and more dispatchers and managers and service managers, and it doesn’t work. It doesn’t scale. And so Rocketship fully automates the service management. So we team up the service manager, service coordinator if you have one, and then we just tell you, look, this is great, but you won’t need to hire more service coordinators. You’re good where you are. And we fully automate the flow of work through your MSP. Rocketship makes a decision what technical resources do what work, when they’re going to do work, it tells them what order to do the work, and it tells them, don’t touch this ticket for three days. It’s as though every technician had their own personal secretary that was constantly optimising their day. And that is what Rocketship does.

That’s really clever. So how have you achieved that? Is that some kind of AI based solution or is that sort of based on the rules that you wished your technicians had followed back when you had technicians?

It’s a combination. We definitely have AI in there. And so the AI is more on predicting things, looking at the cadence of the staff, who’s running fast, who’s running slow for the day, for the week, for the month. It’s also somewhat rule-based. It understands that Meraki and Ubiquiti tickets go to the network team, password resets go to this other team. And then it understands ticket priorities, SLAs, and we have a bunch of our own unique ways of looking at stuff. For example, Rocketship understands that regardless of a ticket priority, some appointments are more important than the other. It’s more important to make the appointment for a VIP on a medium priority ticket than it is to make an appointment for a high priority ticket for a receptionist. That’s just the brutal reality. And so Rocketship understands all these conflicting priorities, massages them together, and then hands them kind of on a silver platter to the technician and just says, this is the optimal path for you to be successful for the day.

Yeah, I love it. It’s such a clever idea. And are you finding the marketing of that as a vendor on the dark side, are you finding the marketing completely different to how you used to market your MSP?

Yeah, because there’s almost no relationship selling with a product. And so the marketing is obviously you have to self brand, you know how that works. So as a founder, I do have to brand myself, Hey, I know what I’m talking about and I’m the founder. And so that’s important, but Rocketship has to stand on its own without the founder. It can’t be a hundred percent founder led, unlike a service company. And so I definitely had to learn some hard lessons and we continue to learn the lessons of what’s the vocabulary we need to use with customers? What are fun words we think are awesome but a service manager says, I have no idea what you’re talking about. And that’s so common in marketing, you think you’re saying something that’s clear, but your audience is unclear. They don’t know what you’re trying to tell them. And in marketing, you’re constantly testing, testing, testing everything that you say. And so that’s kind of where we are right now with the marketing is we’re constantly testing what’s the vocabulary we need to use and where are the people at that we need to reach.

Yeah, I love that. My one piece of advice, which obviously will change over time, but for how to get those exact words, is interview your clients. Literally record yourself interviewing them. Put the transcripts into ChatGPT or insert your generative AI engine of choice, and get it to do some deep research on what are the common words, what are the common phrases? So something like, you and I know that the word tickets is a standard word that’s everyone in the MSP world uses. A user doesn’t, users don’t call themselves users, but we know that they’re users and they submit tickets. So those are standard ones. But I bet you if you interviewed 10 MSPs and put every single word they said and got ChatGPT to analyse all of that and do some deep research, I bet it would give you two or three phrases that you can literally use those exact phrases in your marketing.

That’s a great idea. I haven’t done that.

That’s free. Well, I say that’s free, I’ll send you a bill for a $1,000 because you’re in startup mode, so you’ve got tons of cash. I’m joking. Dustin, that’s a fantastic interview, thank you so much for telling us about your MSP and your new venture. Let’s get you back on the show in the years ahead because it’d be really interesting to see how you develop that. I’m sure you have a ton of ideas of where that’s going to go as you grow your user base and you get more MSPs using it. Just finally tell us where do we go to connect with you? Have a look at a demo of that and get in touch.

Yeah, so giantrocketship.com, should be very easy to spell. That’s one of the things I like about that name, giant rocketship.com. You can reach me via email dustin@giantrocketship.com and we’ll get back to you the second you reach out to us.

Paul’s Personal Peer Group

Patrick has a 12 year old MSP based in San Francisco, and he’s trying to make his website as effective as possible. His question is: Do I need to worry about Google’s Core Web Vitals?

Oh, a nice quick answer to this one. Yes, Google’s Core Web Vitals is still a thing in 2025. I wouldn’t stress about it too much, but you do need to keep an on it, as it is important to your search results. So essentially, Core Web Vitals is a way of measuring how pleasant it is for people to use your website. So how fast does the page load? How fast is it when you interact, and how long does it take for the page to become stable? Your Core Web Vitals score will have an effect on your organic search results.

The easiest thing to do here really is an online test to see how well your site does right now and see what you need to improve. And of course, there are plenty of online tests for this. There’s a nice simple one at webpagetest.org/webvitals. But there’s also a Core Web Vitals report in the Google Search Console. So if you just Google “Google Search Console”, make sure it’s set up for your site, which you should do anyway because it’s got all sorts of useful stuff in there. And remember the basic rule, just do what Google tells you to do. If it’s identified something that needs to be improved on your site, then that’s your to-do list.

Mentioned links

• This podcast is in conjunction with the MSP Marketing Edge, the world’s leading white label content marketing and growth training subscription.
• Join me in MSP Marketing Facebook group.
• Connect with me on LinkedIn.
• Mentioned book: Endless Customers by Marcus Sheridan.
• Connect with my guest, Dustin Puryear on LinkedIn, and visit the Giant Rocketship website.
• Got a question about your MSP’s marketing? Submit one here for Paul’s Personal Peer Group.

Welcome to Episode 296 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• These emails help prospects love MSPs: It’s critical to have a series of good emails to send to prospects who are looking at your MSP for the first time. Early engagement is key for email deliverability and not being labelled as unsolicited spam.
• A simple way to reach senior decision makers on LinkedIn: Here’s a tried and tested LinkedIn hack to connect with the right people on LinkedIn. Remember, both decision makers and influencers are important contacts.
• Smart ideas to sell more to your MSP’s existing clients: Selling more to existing clients is the big opportunity and my guest tells you how to do it and how it can generate more delicious profit for your MSP.
• Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Do you upload PDFs to your LinkedIn personal profile? You should, the algorithm loves it. Here’s how…

These emails help prospects love MSPs

It’s a huge struggle. A lot of MSPs looking to grow, struggle to do effective data capture from their website, and this is an important way to build up your database of prospects. But it’s not just about getting them to fill in the form in the first place, that’s just the start of the process, the real question to ask yourself is: What do I then send them?

Let me tell you some of the perfect emails to send to new prospects looking at your MSP for the first time.

So tell me, do you have some form of data capture on your website? You really should. The most basic data capture is asking people to sign up for your email newsletter, which actually very few people will. A better form is to offer them something known as a lead magnet, also known as an ethical bribe, which is where you give them something in return for their email address. And this might be a guide, like a cyber security guide. Although the 2025 version of data capture that’s working really well right now is to do an interactive quiz and you allow them to build a scorecard for something. Again, something like their cyber security score would be a great way of doing that. But the data capture itself is only the start of the process.

What’s critical is to have a series of good emails to send new prospects, because you can make an assumption that they may be looking for a new MSP in the future.

And you need to send them content that’s going to influence them to pick you and not another MSP. So let me give you some examples, starting with the very first email you send to them. And the goal with this first email is to get them engaged with your content and either get them to click something on the email or hit reply. Why? For email deliverability. Because that sends a very clear message to their email agent that they are interested in your content and they don’t just see you as unsolicited spam.

I do this with the first email in my sequence. I introduced myself and then I ask the MSP who’s reading that email to hit reply and tell me which marketing problem they’re suffering with right now. And we do get a pretty good reply rate to that. Of course, I make sure I answer every single person who replies. I do that personally, which in itself is good for engagement. It’s good for showing there’s a real human at the other end who’s listening. And of course it’s good for email deliverability. So I would definitely do that with your first email.

Here’s what you could do in some of the other emails that you send out to people when they first join your list. You could send them some social proof, testimonials, reviews, case studies. People love seeing other people like them and what they’re doing. That’s what makes social proof so powerful. Now, this could be as simple as sending them to a page on your website where your latest reviews are, or if you don’t have that page on your site, just send them off to your live Google Reviews page.

Another email you send out could be educational. It could tell them about the biggest cyber security mistakes that businesses make these days. In fact, wouldn’t it be amazing if you put together a two minute video which you presented yourself? It doesn’t have to be slick and Hollywood. It could just be you talking into your phone telling them the biggest problems that you and your team see that cause the most pain for the businesses you look after. The kind of prospect that would actually watch a video like that is someone who’s going to be likely switching MSPs in the future. So that’s a very powerful piece of marketing to do.

Some other emails you can do is to ask them what technology questions they have. Perhaps even ask them what technology they’re running right now, what are they running their computers on? And anyone that replies with Windows 10 or XP, yep, there’s going to be a follow-up phone call there. But whatever you do with this, make it super simple for them. Let them just hit reply and ask you any question and you’ll answer. And do expect to only get a tiny number of people emailing back, but those that do are your highest engaged prospects.

You can also tell them about your service. Never be afraid to mention what you do or at the very least send them to a page that explains it. And of course, at some point, don’t forget to invite them to join other audiences that you have, such as connecting to you on LinkedIn, YouTube, or other places where you post content.

Now I’ve got one final piece of advice for you on this, and that’s to obsessively join other people’s newsletters. And no, I don’t mean other MSPs. You can be more original than that. Look outside of the tech world for inspiration. If you come across someone’s website and you think it’s great, regardless of what industry they’re in, but assuming it’s B2B, then enter your email address and join their list. And it’s always a smart idea to do research on what other businesses whose marketing you admire are doing. I do this all the time. I’m subscribed to hundreds of newsletters and at least once a week I’ll get an email from something completely unrelated to what you and I do, but it gives me an idea to improve my own emails.

Improving your marketing is an activity that never ends, right? Hey, do you want to join my email list because I spend a lot of time making sure my marketing is as good as it can be. And if that inspires you with your marketing, that would be great. All you have to do is go to my website, mspmarketingedge.com, and my lead magnet I’m giving away is a free magazine. So go into the navigation, look for magazine, and that’s how you can join my email list.

A simple way to reach senior decision makers on LinkedIn

What about this? To find new clients for your MSP, you head to LinkedIn and you find someone who could make a good client down the line. You make a connection request and then you wait and wait and wait for them to accept, but they ignore you. So you send them an InMail and they ignore you again. Nothing nada.

Thankfully, there is a tried and tested technique to get connected to the senior decision makers that ignore you like this, and to get a conversation going. Let’s find out why it’s such an issue in the first place, what the fix is and how to help you fall in love with LinkedIn all over again. You’ll love this idea. It’s smart, but simple and easy to implement. And I’m not claiming it as my own idea either. It was suggested to me on a call by an MSP called Jason Johnson, so thank you so much, Jason. And it is as simple as this.

If you want to reach senior decision makers on LinkedIn, then first connect to people lower down in their organisation.

Think about it from the point of view of the CEO or the big decision maker that you’re trying to reach. Let’s imagine they’re running a big business, they’ve got hundreds of employees, which is lots of seats for you, great. And they get LinkedIn connection requests all the time from strangers that they don’t know because those strangers all want a piece of their business.

So they tend to ignore most of their connection requests. And then they get a connection request from you, and they can see that you are already connected to 10 other people who work for them in their business. So they’re much more likely to click that blue accept button without thinking about it. Smart, right?

This is a good time for me to remind you that in any buying decision made by bigger businesses, there are two sets of people involved. There are the decision makers and there are the influencers. So the CEO or whoever might give the actual yes or no, but before they do, they’ll ask their team what they think. And that team can include other senior staff, team leaders, rising superstars, and especially their executive assistant or their virtual assistant. Most MSPs focus all of their attention on the decision maker, and they forget that the influencer can kill your chances of a contract with a single sentence expressing doubt about your business.

So a good rule to live by is that you never know who in a business will encourage or block buying from you. So treat everyone as a potential ally who should be positively influenced. And LinkedIn is a great place to start that.

Smart ideas to sell more to your MSP’s existing clients

There are of course, two ways to grow your MSP. There’s getting new clients and there’s upselling more to your existing clients. And in fact, it’s that second task that will really make a massive difference to your business. But have you tried it before and found it really hard to upsell clients? If that is the case, my special guest today is going to be a massive help to you. Why is selling more to existing clients the bigger opportunity? How do you do it? And how does it generate more delicious profit for you?

Hi, my name is James Steel and I’m the host of the Harvest Podcast, all around generating more revenue from your existing clients. And I’m also Channel Chief at Salesbuildr, a quotation and proposal tool for MSPs.

But that’s just the thing that pays the salary, so don’t worry about that. It’s Harvest that’s the show that we want to talk about because you found a niche within a niche, James, and I give you big applause for that. Your show is about how MSPs can make more money from their existing clients, which is a great subject. And I think you had me on your show a couple of months ago, which was a fun experience, so thank you for that. Always nice to return the favour and I know you’ve got lots to say about selling more to existing clients. So in your experience, does the average MSP embrace this and really go for this and just go after that extra revenue? Or in your experience, is it the exact opposite that most MSPs think that marketing and sales is all about bringing on board new clients and they forget to sell more things to their existing clients?

Yeah, I think there are a couple of groups. You’ve got those who absolutely get this idea and embrace the concept. I think we’ll dive straight into a concept that you’ve talked about in the past as well. They embrace the idea of this matrix setup of, okay, let’s look at all of my customers down one side and all the services along the top, and let’s just work out where the gaps are. So you get the group that are sort of doing that in a kind of ad hoc fashion, whether it’s on a spreadsheet or whether it’s through some sort of manual scripting and stuff through the PSA. They’re trying to get that gold mine of information basically that’s living in your PSA. And then you’ve got the other group who I think are just, it looks like the better thing to do is to just go straight to generating new leads. And I think that can be a problematic approach if you go there first.

And why is that such an issue if you focus all of your time on new leads?

There’s an enormous opportunity there within your existing customer base.

And this isn’t just about saying, okay, there’s a gap. I mean that is part of it, but I think there’s a couple of areas. One you need to know, okay, within my existing customer base, is my house clean first? Have we got this right? Am I billing everyone correctly because that’s a huge area, and have I adjusted prices recently, for example? I mean, I can only imagine what it must be like trying to keep up with the Microsoft Product Suite, as great as it is, it’s always changing, it’s absolutely sprawling. So trying to keep up with that and make sure that you’re always passing on the right costs and preserving margins continuously while you’re trying to run your business, that’s a really difficult thing to be doing, I think.

Yeah, I bet it is. And also I think it was Jay Abraham, who’s a legendary marketer still with us today, I think it was him that first pinpointed that to grow a business, you can’t just focus on bringing new clients. You’ve got to a) get new clients, b) get those clients to buy more from you or buy from you more often. And c) get those clients to spend more every single time they buy. So that’s obviously what your podcast is about. And I know you’ve been interviewing a whole ton of people asking their best ideas of how do you sell more to your existing clients. Can you give us some of the best ideas that you’ve heard over the last couple of months?

Yeah, that’s a really good one. So of course, we’ve got the profit matrix, you need to have that in place first. But actually I think looking at just standardising your stack, so getting away from doing everything. I had a wonderful chat with a guy called Jeffrey Newton from MSP Insider podcast. He’s also one of the leads at a company called Sift, and he was talking about the massive gains that they’d made by just stripping down what they’re working with. Not having umpteen varieties of firewalls, there’s this kind of ripple effect when you are working with sprawling portfolios that it’s not just tricky to sell, to maintain, but the entire business feels the effect of having multiple products that aren’t needed. So the more streamline you can get, and I’ve seen this time and time again with the highest performing MSPs that we work with, the more streamlined you are, the stricter you are with your portfolio, the better.

Give us another one.

We hear it a lot, but I think the pricing side of things is absolutely key. I really like those companies that have the arrogance, and I understand it’s tricky to do this from the outset if you’re just starting out, but the arrogance to say, my price is my price, this is my stack, I’m sticking to it. It’s amazing how your customers end up respecting you for it. I have to give a shout out to Ian Groves at Star Tech, I know this is something that he does very well indeed over here in the UK. And not only do your customers respect you for it ultimately, but your team know as well that there’s value in what you’re providing and you’re not going to budge from that, and that carries through. You’re not ad hoc discounting, we’re worth what we’re worth. And I think the best MSPs are doing that consistently.

Yeah, absolutely. I would agree with you. I mean, even if you’re a startup, and this was day one of being an MSP, stick to your prices. Figure those prices out, stick to them. I truly believe that what happens in the first 30, 60, 90 days with the client dictates your future relationship. And if actually right at the very beginning of the sales stage, you fold, they say, I want a discount. And you go, okay, here’s 25% discount, every single project you put in front of them, every single MRR service, everything, they’re going to ask for a discount.

I did that in my first business, our biggest client was a massive engineering company. They were spending a couple of thousand pounds a month with us, and at the sales meeting, the chairman said, I don’t buy unless I’ll get a discount, and I gave him a whatever discount. And it transpired in the months later that when I was working with the people under him that half of the suppliers he asked would give a discount, half wouldn’t. Those who didn’t, he respected more and who got more business from him and more sales because he wanted someone to push back. And obviously I was like 12 at the time, so I didn’t really get that. But it is fascinating how we get this pricing thing completely wrong in our head.

If you were to walk into an MSP tomorrow and you were to look at what they’re doing, and you’ve talked about some good things already, but if we were to look at a hardcore sales thing, so let’s say you’ve got an MSP that is actually in the mindset of, yes, I do want to sell more, in fact it’s an MSP who knows that retention gets better the more that you sell to a client, it’s the complete opposite of how it should be you. The more services you sell to a client, admittedly, you have to justify them, and you’ve got to justify the bill every month sometimes, but the more you sell to someone, if you’re selling them what they want as well as what they need, then the happiness can and does tend to go up. What would you recommend for actually getting into that sales? So do you recommend doing strategic reviews or quarterly business reviews as they’re called? Or is there something else that you recommend?

Yeah, I mean, I think everyone’s got their own way of doing this. What I really like and what I see a lot  is really taking a moment just to understand are there sort of commonalities within your particular customer base. Developing that domain expertise so that you’ve got a position there that is so strong because you understand the real nuances. I mean, the particular regulation, perhaps it’s a financially regulated industry or whatever it might be, things that only somebody in that space would know. And I think coming at it from that position, if you can do that, and you can come in and say, right, okay, I understand your industry perfectly, and I also understand the technology stack that aligns with that. I think that then puts you in a much better position to be able to introduce new products. And in terms of the conversation, I think the overwhelming advice definitely, and I see this on the podcast consistently, is let your customers talk.

I’ve seen it all from, I just go in there with a blank pad and just put it in front of them and say, just talk. I’ve got others that just say, right, okay, here’s a whiteboard, put your top three business objectives, nothing to do with technology. Varying different approaches on that scale. But I think if you are first of all aligned, you’re in that industry, you’ve got the industry knowledge, you’ve got the right stack, and then you can actually listen and see where that can apply. I think that’s really, really key to really eking out the most from your base.

Yeah, I agree. Isn’t that lesson one of day one of sales school, which is the more you talk, the less you sell, and the more you listen, the more you sell. It really is. It is about asking the right questions and then shutting up and letting them talk themselves into it. And I think actually with what we’re talking about here is account management. So bringing on board new clients, there’s a little more to it than that is more of a nuance. But when you are with someone already or they’re with you, they trust you already. They want you to succeed, they want to stay with you. They don’t want the relationship to go sour, so it makes more sense that you’ve already got that trust. Therefore, let them talk themselves into buying more from you. James, good advice there. Thank you very much. Tell us about two things. Tell us about your podcast. I’ve become a listener myself. Tell us what you cover on the podcast, how we can listen to it, and then tell us about Salesbuildr as well.

Wonderful. Thank you so much. Yeah. Well, Harvest is all about unsurprisingly, generating more revenue from your existing customer base. And we’re trying to keep it on that topic. We’re trying to keep it tactical, actionable, very short. We’ve got sort of segments in there for dispelling industry myths and things. So hopefully the idea is that you can always take away three actionable points for your MSP, take the idea, put your spin on it and put it into your business tomorrow. And yes, as for Salesbuildr, we are a proposal and quotation tool, which works beautifully with Autotask ConnectWise and Halo PSA, connecting to your distributors and of course your PSAs to build a portfolio and then to let you build beautiful drag and drop proposals right from there. And there’s a whole load of automation in there too. And you’ve got the whitespace view on top of that, which is look, your profit matrix built live from your PSA. So if you’d like to know more about that, head over to salesbuildr.com.

Paul’s Personal Peer Group

Damien, who runs his MSP in Manchester in the UK, wants to do lots more on LinkedIn. His question is: Someone told me we should be uploading PDFs to LinkedIn. Is this true? And how exactly do I use them?

Yes, it is true. They’re called LinkedIn carousels, and all they really are is a PDF that you upload to LinkedIn as a document. But instead of cramming hundreds of words onto each page, you might only have 10, at most 20 words per page. Think of it more as like a slideshow, almost like a PowerPoint, where the less you put on the slide, the better. And that means that people can read the slide really quickly. They can use the arrow to move on to the next page or just swipe their finger and over six or seven, maybe up to 10 pages. It’s an ultra engaging and easy to digest piece of LinkedIn content, which promotes top level interesting technology facts.

How do you make an easy one? Well, I would just get a designer to create a PowerPoint template for you with your MSP’s branding, and then you can easily set up a new slideshow anytime you then just save that PowerPoint as a PDF and you upload it to LinkedIn as a document. Just remember to post from your personal profile, not your business profile, because LinkedIn prioritises personal content over business content, and of course people buy from people.

So how do you do it? You just click start a new post on LinkedIn and then either hit the three dots, or if you’re on a laptop, hit the plus symbol. Look for the little icon that is a document, and that’s it. You upload it. Lots of algorithmic attention to your PDF Carousel. Oh, pro tip, the file name of your PDF carousel will be displayed in your post. So make sure that the file name communicates what it’s about rather than being a file name. You know what I mean.

Mentioned links

• This podcast is in conjunction with the MSP Marketing Edge, the world’s leading white label content marketing and growth training subscription.
• Join me in MSP Marketing Facebook group.
• Connect with me on LinkedIn.
• Connect with my guest, James Steel on LinkedIn, and visit the Salesbuildr website.
• Got a question about your MSP’s marketing? Submit one here for Paul’s Personal Peer Group.

Welcome to Episode 295 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• Ghosted? Send your MSP’s proposals in 3 ways: There are a number of things we can do to minimise proposal ghosting with prospects. Only sending it digitally risks your proposal being lost in digital noise.
• A free cyber security webinar outline any MSP can use:  Webinars are a great way to enhance your reputation and your perceived authority as the local tech expert. Let me give you a free cyber security webinar outline that any MSP can use.
• Why every MSP must niche in some way: My guest and I to talk about niching and about the power of super laser focus on a very specific set of people. Find out exactly what to do and how it works.
• Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Confused about which social media platforms to use to market your MSP? Let me tell you my top 5 in priority order.

Ghosted? Send your MSP’s proposals in 3 ways

This must have happened to your MSP… proposal ghosting. You send a proposal to a hot prospect and crickets. All the conversations, all of the relationship building that you did leading up to this proposal seem to have counted for nothing. So how do we fix this? Why don’t they reply? Why can’t you get hold of them? Are there three simple things that you can do that will improve your hit rate? Absolutely, there are, and let’s get into them right now.

A few years back when I was single, dark days, I was being ghosted all the time. OK, that was on Tinder and Hinge and Bumble and other platforms, but I know that you get ghosted by your prospects now they seem so hot, so ready to join you, and then you send the proposal through and they never get back to you. So you never quite understand what’s happened.

Is the problem that the price isn’t right, that you didn’t display an understanding of their business? Have they changed their mind? Have they gone off to another MSP? Have they signed another contract with their incumbent MSP? Are they actually dead? I mean actually really, are they dead? And you can phone them as much as you want, but there’s no one there to answer the phone. We all have these exact thoughts when we get ghosted by prospects.

The problem is not your prospects… the problem is actually you. You’ve allowed them to take some level of control of the sales process.

You’ve allowed them to ghost you. I believe there’s a number of things that we can do to minimise ghosting, not in dating, but certainly with prospects. Now, let me tell you about two of those things. The first is that I think you should send all of your proposals out in three separate ways, and then the second thing I’m going to tell you about is that you should always have the next appointment in your calendar. That’s coming up in a second. Let’s first of all go into some of the details.

So, how do you send your proposals now? If you’re like most MSPs, you probably just do it digitally. Maybe you use a specific piece of software or you have a proposal tool built into one of the platforms that you’re using and these kind of tools they are cool, especially as they can track who’s opening your proposals, how many times they view it, all of that kind of stuff. Or maybe you just pull a PDF together or even just an email and you just send it off to them by email. Most MSPs do proposals digitally because it’s quick and it’s easy, but anytime something is quick and easy for you to send out, it’s then quick and easy for people to consume it and ignore it.

We all have far too much digital information and that makes it really easy for us to receive something on email, read it, maybe save it to a folder somewhere, or add a label in our email, and then just kind of forget about it. The other issue with sending out proposals digitally is that it’s very hard for you to stand out from the other MSPs. So most times when you’re talking to a prospect, they’re also talking to other MSPs. And even if you know you’ve got the best package, the best price, the best position, you want to be 1000% sure that you always stand out against your competitors.

Let’s do that by sending them the proposal in two other ways. So yes, we send it to them digitally, but we also send them a video. And this should be a video that you record just for them, like a one-to-one video. So get yourself onto a service like Vidyard, Bonjoro or BombBomb where you can record a personalised video to someone really easily through your laptop or your phone. And what I suggest you do in that personalised video is you bring up a screen share of that proposal and then take them through the main sections of it. You’re looking for a 60 second, maybe two minute video max. But think about it from the prospect’s point of view. If you send them a proposal with a video that explains that proposal, they’re much more likely to watch that video  to read the proposal and they’re much more likely to be engaged with it.

The better you can communicate anything, the more likely it is that someone will take action on it, and that’s why I recommend you send your proposal out a third way. And you might think that this one is nuts. I suggest you print off the proposal and you send it to them in the mail. Yes, I’m talking about the proposal that’s already sat on their laptop, and in fact, they may have received it as a PDF and as a video explaining the PDF, and then on top of that, you’re going to send it to them in the mail as well.

Yes, yes, yes. I want you to do this because physical stuff stands out in our digital world. And you want that proposal to sit on their desk for a week, you want it to get passed around between offices, passed around in meetings, you want them to scribble notes on it. And I know they could print off the PDF, but most of them won’t do this. Send it to them physically and maybe even include some chocolate bars, some candy bars, perhaps even a printed case study with some social proof if you want to send them a mug with your MSP’s name printed on it. The point is that by the time you come to put in a proposal to someone you’ve already invested hours and hours of your time and probably a fair chunk of cash as well, just in generating that prospect and getting them into a meeting. Marketing is hard enough as it is, so you want to make sure at the point that someone’s actually asked you to submit a proposal to them, you stack the odds dramatically in your favour.

To summarise, you’re sending out the proposal digitally with a personalised explainer video and you’re sending them a physical copy in the post in the mail, and there’s one final thing that I suggest you do, and this one is actually probably your ultimate weapon against being ghosted. At the previous meeting where you agree you’re going to send them that proposal, make sure you walk away from that meeting with a follow-up meeting date already in the calendar. Because if you walk away from that meeting and there’s no next meeting scheduled, which is what most MSPs do, you are deliberately making your life too hard because that pushes the action taking back onto the prospect.

They then become in control, and I know that you are giving them some space to read your proposal and talk it through with whoever they need to talk it through with and get back to you with questions or a yes or a no or whatever. But they can have that space and you can still have the next meeting booked after they’ve had that space. The follow-up meeting needs to be scheduled in their calendar. In fact, it must be this way. It’s the only way you can keep control of the sales process. So at that meeting where you’ve gone out, you’ve collected the information, you’re going to go away and write the proposal and send it to them. You ask them how long will they need to read it, absorb it, discuss it? Who do they need to speak to? Which meetings do they need to have? What are the other proposals they’re waiting for so that they can compare your proposal to the other peoples? They’re going to do that. So you might as well talk about it. Let’s say they need two weeks to do all of this. So you say to them right there in that room, okay, everyone grab your phones now, grab your calendars. Let’s schedule the follow-up meeting between you and me. And at that meeting you can ask me any outstanding questions and then give me the good news that we’ll be working together. And if you say that line with a bit of a cheeky smile, that can make quite a difference as well.

Now, these are some really, really easy changes to make. If you could find 30-60 minutes today to implement those changes, even if that only won you one new extra client over the next 12 months, surely that’s going to be the most productive hour of today, right?

A free cyber security webinar outline any MSP can use

Would you love to do a cyber security webinar to promote your MSP but you have big concerns? Maybe you’re worried there are too many other MSPs doing webinars or what exactly would you say? I mean, you know your cyber security stuff, right? But maybe you’re not convinced that you could communicate this well to an audience. Well, good news. I’m here to help, and let me tell you why prospects are actually very keen to attend any webinar that you put on. And let me give you a free cyber security webinar outline that any MSP can use.

Yes, the world does need more webinars. It might seem to you like every vendor in the channel is doing a webinar every single day, but that’s just the view from inside the channel, from inside your MSP. To ordinary business owners and managers, the people that you want to reach, they might feel the same about the vendors in their world, but they do still have room for one more webinar on a completely different subject, and that subject is cyber security. And it should be your MSP that delivers it to them.

Webinars are a reliable way to reach the right people, get them engaged in what you have to say, and persuade them to talk to you at the point they’re ready to take action.

As the person presenting the webinar, it enhances your reputation and your perceived authority as the local tech expert. When I speak to members of my MSP Marketing Edge about webinars and what they’re thinking of running, their two biggest fears are: what technology to use and what to say. Well, the first one is easy. The technology is super easy, and I’m not going to suggest a specific platform here as we all have different software preferences, but 15 minutes just firing up the Google machine will give you a very, very good idea of all of the platforms that you can choose from. Although please don’t overthink it. The simplest way to get started with a webinar is just to use Zoom. On a free plan you can have up to a hundred people for a 40 minute call. And trust me, that is more than enough to just get started to try your first few webinars.

So the harder of those two questions then is, what to say. And I can’t write your webinar for you as it wouldn’t be authentic for you to use my words. But what I can do is give you an outline. It’s the structure of the webinar, and you can fill in the gaps to produce a cyber security webinar that’s ready to roll out right now. Swipe and adapt this cyber security webinar outline. Now, I’ll first of all give you the too long didn’t read version, and then I’ll add a little bit more meat to the bones. So we’re going to look at a hook, a three-line agenda, who you are, we’re going to present the content in three different sections, we’re going to present a social proof story, do a conclusion, next steps, Q&A, and then very finally the follow-up. That’s the TLDR, the too long didn’t read version.

Let’s go into some more details starting with the hook. Your opening sentence must hook them in and make them think, whoa I’m glad I attended this, and also encourage them to stay till the end. So here’s an example: “20 minutes from now, you’ll be armed with three simple things you can do to protect your business from a cyber attack. These three things work for any business, anywhere, and you need them. Since I started this webinar 12 seconds ago, there’s been a cyber attack on another business in this town. Every 39 seconds somewhere a business is infected with ransomware, which is another kind of malware or they fall for a phishing attack. So let me tell you what all of these things are and how to protect your business from them.” And a cool thing actually will be to have a cyber attack counter or something on the screen and perhaps every 39 seconds or whatever it would go up by one. I’m not quite sure how you do that, but that would certainly help you to get your point across.

Next thing then is the three line agenda. Once you’ve hooked someone in, and well done for that because that opening line is everything, it really is. Once you’ve hooked them in, you’ve convinced their heart to stay on the webinar, now you need to give their brain some evidence that it’s worth them investing the next 20 minutes of their life with you. And that’s what the three line agenda is. So for example: “Here’s what we’re going to talk about. First I’ll explain the three main dangers facing your business today, those things I just mentioned. Let’s get inside the mind of the criminal. Let’s explain what they’re trying to get out of you and why. And let me tell you some common ways they’ll try to trick you and your team. And then I’ll tell you about your defences and how they’re a mixture of protection from software and things that humans must do. Finally, I’ll summarise what we’ve been talking about and give you some quick wins to increase your protection today. I promise everything I’m going to talk about will make sense no matter what level your tech ability. And right at the end we’ll do a Q&A where I’ll answer any question that you have.” Feel free to take that, rewrite that into your own words, and feel free to use that.

Now, let’s talk about the who you are section. This is about establishing your credibility. Give them a few lines on your background, how many businesses you work with, and also your passions. Some work ones like protecting business owners from cyber criminals and showing them how technology makes everything easier, but also don’t forget to show them how relatable you are. Maybe you’re a parent, maybe you are into the local sports team, maybe you volunteer in the community, those things are important as well.

The next part is your content split into three sections, and this is the bulk of your webinar content. You organise it into three sections to give it some structure and make it feel understandable and highly valuable. And trust me, it’s way too easy to bore a webinar audience by talking too much. So let’s say you’re talking about ransomware, other malware and phishing. Well, those are your three sections. That’s how they could be structured. Simple as that. You could spend two to three minutes talking about each one. “Let me tell you why cyber criminals are interested in your business. These are their most wanted outcomes, stealing money, stealing data, creating disruption. They have three primary ways of doing this. Ransomware, other malware, phishing. Let me show you examples of each one and let’s see if you’d have spotted the telltale signs. I’ll also show you how it’s getting harder to detect attacks because of AI and how the best defences are a blend of software and humans paying attention. And here’s a mix that we recommend and how we train people in a way that’s fun and not boring.”

Next part then is your social proof story. So if you’ve got one, please do present a story of a real client of yours that you saved from a cyber attack. Of course, you’ve got to anonymise them unless you have permission from your clients to use their story to educate other people. Now, if you don’t have your own story, then just ask your MSP peers for a story you can borrow or go onto Tech Tribe and find someone else’s horror story, something like that. Just don’t use one of these big business stories as the ordinary business owners and managers that you want to reach, they find it very hard to relate to big businesses, like those massive corporations. They cannot relate to them being attacked. And don’t think that you need to have huge, huge dollar or pounds numbers to get the people to pay attention to you. If a business their size has been attacked and was let’s say down for a couple of days, that is actually a thousand times scarier to them than a giant corporation losing $10 million.

Next section is the conclusion here. You’ve got to summarise what you’ve been talking about and then give them what you promised earlier, some quick wins to protect their business today. Now, these could be as simple as guidelines on checking emails more carefully before they click on links or download attachments. I’d be very cautious of giving them security software suggestions though is really you want them going through a full appraisal with you before you recommend solutions.

And then you come on to the next part of the webinar, which is your next steps, and this is the call to action, the thing you want them to do off the back of attending this webinar. Now, ideally you’d have something available they could commit to at low cost or no cost. And I believe actually that low cost works better for this than something that’s free, as getting someone to pay something is an indication of true commitment. So for example, you could do like a $99 mini security audit, and this is your prospect buying a small amount of your time to look at what they’re doing well and what they’re doing not so well just make sure that a feedback consultation is built into that audit. So for their $99, they’re actually buying an in-depth sales appointment with you. Yes, please. That’s exactly the kind of thing we want, but as I said, be very wary of giving that away for free. The tire kickers, the time wasters will always take up that free offer, but it will be a nightmare delivering it and they won’t join your business anyway as a client. If you can get someone to pay one to maybe even 300 pounds, $300, they are going to be a much higher quality prospect.

And then the final section of your cyber security webinar is a Q&A. And you leave this till the end because a number of people will drift away during a Q&A. Some will hang around because they want to discuss the security audit or just ask you a question and that’s okay. Just make sure you answer every single question, even if it’s just you and one person left at the end. The more value you give in a webinar, the better. But then we mustn’t forget the follow-up. You should always phone everyone who attended your webinar but didn’t buy the security audit and ask them for some feedback on the webinar. You want to get them talking about security and how they feel about it. You may get one or two extra sales from that. Some people always need a bit of time to just think about things, even if it’s just spending a hundred dollars. So it’s also worth emailing a recording of the webinar to those people who didn’t show up. To be honest, you’ll only get roundabout a third of people who registered actually turning up for the live webinar. But don’t ignore the two thirds who registered but didn’t attend. With some work there are possibly a couple of extra sales hiding in there for you. And if not, you just need to be patient because they probably will have a conversation with you at some point in the future. And that’s why you need to be repeating webinars regularly, ideally as often as once a month.

Why every MSP must niche in some way

Tell me how big is your MSP’s marketing megaphone and is there any way that you can make it bigger? When trying to talk to potential managed service clients you may have heard that finding a niche or a vertical is way more effective, but why and how exactly does it work? I have an expert joining me right now to explain why you might be better off with a teeny weeny bullhorn rather than a big noisy whopper.

Hi, my name is Adam Walter. I am from Humanize IT. We are a SaaS company for MSPs where we help digest all that information from your PSA, put it through our engine and output projects that are meaningful to your clients so you can focus on the conversation and the relationship with your client, rather than putting together these six hour PowerPoints and all these quotes. We take care of the proposals for you, we take care of the marketing for you, we take care of the project roadmaps for you. All you have to do is talk to your client and you’ve got an excellent QBR or an account management session.

Adam Walter, back on the podcast after a couple of years and straight in with a 30 second elevator pitch. I mean, literally no other guest gets away with that. Everyone else gets a three second intro and somehow you get an elevator pitch. Dude, thank you so much. I think I just said, dude, for the first ever time on the podcast there as well, welcome back to the show. I don’t know how long it’s been, but it’s been too long. It’s awesome to have you back. And we will talk a little bit more about Humanize IT maybe towards the end of this interview. I think you’ve had your free plug already, but we want to talk about niching and we want to talk about the power of super laser focus on a very specific set of people. And I know you’ve got lots of experience of that. But before we get into that, let’s just set some context. Let’s set some credibility. So assume that whoever’s listening to you right now are watching this on YouTube, doesn’t know who you are, shock horror, how can that be? Maybe there is someone out there. So just tell us who are you, Adam Walter?

Yeah, I have been in the industry for a long time. I got my bachelor in Science and Computer Science in 2002. I had a minor in art and then I’ve got a partial MBA because I didn’t want to finish out learning supply chain management. So I’m all over the world, I’m very widely experienced. I was a Nexus core ad man, I was a CISSP, I was a critical infrastructure security director. I run large teams, small teams, I have a lot of experience. A lot of people know me from conferences. If you talk about something, I have a story. There’s a story there. And so I formed a company called Humanize IT in 2017. Well, technically I formed Virtual C to be a CIO for hire for small businesses and to take my expertise and help small businesses get that same advantage that large companies got. I didn’t know VCIO was a thing, I just wanted to be a fractional CIO. Did really well there, formulated Humanize IT in 2022 actually, and started helping MSPs have those better conversations with their clients. They could help drive revenue for their clients and themselves at the same time.

Yeah, no, I love that. And we will talk more about Humanize IT just towards the end of the interview. I’m actually interested in what you’ve done over the last couple of years. You have shifted and changed and I read your marketing, your emails that come out every week and sometimes twice a week. And it’s all good stuff. And I’m just interested and curious what you’re doing and why and what’s driven you to change. But we’ll come onto that in a second. Let’s talk about niching first of all. So when we talk about niching, what exactly do you mean by that? What’s an easy definition that everyone can understand?

Yeah, niching is specifically focusing on an industry for delivery. So if you look at your local town, your marketplace, you see some of your clients as an MSP are manufacturing. Some are construction, some are accounting firms, some are dentists. Not so much in the UK though, right? You have doctors, you have lawyers, you have people in all different areas. Well right now, MSPs tend to and service providers across the board. But whether it’s a lawn care company or a computer firm, you’re spreading yourself across every single industry. Niching is picking one or two of those and saying, I am just going to service attorneys. I am just going to service medical service providers, or schools, or manufacturing firms. And when you do that, you say, I’m not going to do dentists. I am not going to do lawyers. I’ll let somebody else have that. So you define who you care about and who your target audience is. You draw a picture of them. A lot of marketing companies will even have you draw a picture. What is the name of this person? What kind of car do they drive and what do they care about? But you only care about dentists.

Yeah, or lawyers or whatsoever. I think we actually nailed that there. Yeah. So let’s take one from outside of tech. So you mentioned lawn care there, and you also said something very important, which is you decide what you don’t want. So I have, as you said, I’m based here in the UK, we get the odd summer day once or twice a year. So I do have a lawn in my garden and I do have a company that comes and they do things to the lawn, I don’t know what they do. They aerate and they put things in and they add worms or who knows what they do, who cares. But the point is the lawn looks nice. And that company is a specialist domestic lawn company. That’s what they do. They only do domestic lawns and mine’s just a normal, average sized lawn. And I know that there are also lawn care companies that specialise in, for example, lawn care for hotels or lawn care where there’s a large amount of lawn, which is a completely different proposition to my lawn.

Now my daughter’s 14, we go on the lawn like once a year, whereas a lawn belonging to a hotel, it’s going to have people on it all the time have, there might be specialist lawn care firms for sports teams or whatsoever. And each of those is probably very similar, 80% of the work is very similar, but there’ll be a 20% that you wouldn’t do. What you do on a sports pitch you wouldn’t do on a domestic lawn. And it’s that 20% is the specialist thing that I think people are looking for. So when you say, right, I’m going to focus, my MSP is going to look after lawyers, but we can niche within the niche. We want lawyers where there’s at least 10 support staff, where there’s at least three active partners, where they have an office, we don’t want a fully remote company, for example.

And the more you get into that niche and be very, very clear on who it is that you want to reach, I think that becomes more powerful because then you can make the message and the marketing you’re doing talk exactly to that person. So if I pick up a leaflet that says lawn care, which is the general lawn care versus lawn care for averages size lawns, in average sized villages, with the kind of weather that we have today, which of those two things is more relevant to me? It’s the one that talks directly to me about my lawn, about this, about the that.

So from your experience, and obviously you talk to thousands of MSPs, same as I do, so from your experience, do you find that most MSPs dip their toe into a niche and they’ll say something like, oh yes, we do lawyers, we’ve got a page on our website about that, but that’s all it is, there’s no real niching. Or do you find that some of them actually do go the whole hog and go the whole way?

We see a little bit of both. So we see people who are accidental niching, when you’re going to do it because you have people you naturally gravitate towards. And when you started your MSP, you probably started with a friend who needed IT support, and that just grew your company. So for me, in 2017, I started off doing CIO work for private schools in the Lutheran school districts. And the reason was they had no CIO, they had no IT department because they were not a unified school, and they’re not like public schools or Catholic schools where there’s this big system. They were just trying to figure things out themselves. So me acting as a fractional CIO and there’s 160 of these schools in Nebraska, worked out really well for me and for them. And so I defined that early on, this is what I am doing. And I kept doing that and I started developing skills that were unique to them, such as helping them with E-Rate, helping them with their particular politics that they deal with within their senate, within their districts and how that works. And so I knew how to help them with grants. I knew how their cadence worked throughout the year with their donors, and I helped them develop out stories to get those donor dollars and to compete with the school districts in their area.

And so with MSPs, when I see them do this, the really neat thing that I’ve heard, especially all throughout 2024, was I kept hearing about MSPs who just leaned into the niche they already had. They didn’t know they had it. It’s like, oh my gosh, we’re already dealing with attorneys. Let’s just lean into that and really support LexisNexis or their software suite and what they’re trying to do. And they started charging like $500 a seat, $600 a seat, US dollars. So they lost a third of their customers because they couldn’t afford them anymore, but that was okay. So they just cut their workload down by a third and increased profits from $150 an endpoint to $500 an endpoint. So they’ve tripled their revenue and they have less work, and they’re very happy with it because now when they walk into this town, they are the premier attorney MSP. They know how to give you an advantage. They know the technologies that are going to come out for attorneys that are going to benefit them. And so the attorneys are willing to pay more for that unique boutique feel.

Yeah, I agree. And that’s when you know you’ve got niching rights, isn’t it? When you become the premium, the top end choice, and actually you want the lawyers, well, we all want lawyers to be in pain, but you want the customers to feel the pain of, oh, I really need those guys, want those guys. They’re the best ones. They understand our business, they understand this. They’re already working with 30 businesses like us, but they’re really expensive, but it’s worth it. And that’s great. I love hearing about businesses that do less work to make more money. To me, that’s a really smart kind of business. I guess one of the fears I hear when I talk to MSPs is that their fear is that in committing to a niche and especially a niche within a niche like lawyers of 20 people or 10 to 20 staff or manufacturers that only do this or whatever one of their fears is, but if I go all in on that and I focus all my marketing on that, I’m not going to attract other kind of clients. What would you say to that kind of fear?

If you want to grow you’re going to have to take some risks, and a fear of not wanting to lose your clients is something that can hold you back.

And sometimes the fear is just, well, they were my first customer. Okay, cool. They’re a pet project, they’re a loss for you, but you love them and you’re going to keep them on. That’s fine. But when you sit down and you look at the risks involved, if I increase my cost per seat for attorneys or let’s say dentists or schools so that they can have a unique experience, it doesn’t mean you have to get rid of all of your old ones. You can create a secondary breakdown of cost for them, but it’s not recommended. Eventually you have to outgrow your shoes. You eventually have to get forward if you’re happy where you are, stay where you are.

But if you want to grow, there’s going to be some pain involved. You’re going to have to get rid of some unhealthy customers, and you have to identify what unhealthy means. And it might mean that they are not in your vertical, they’re not in your target audience. They as in they’re not paying enough or they don’t fit into the solution stack you have because you, you’re focused on this area over here, but until you define what you are, you can’t define and say no to the things you aren’t. And so that’s, you keep bringing on unhealthy clients, so desperate for money. You haven’t defined what a healthy client looks like.

Yeah, I think that’s a really good way of putting it. We’ve all been there, haven’t we, we’ve all been in business where we just take money because there’s money there, there’s work there, even though we know we’re going to regret it down the line, and this is not going to end well. I’ve not done this in this business, but my previous business which I sold in 2016, I absolutely survived for four years just taking anything that would come in, and obviously it all went bad at the end.

Okay. I think one of the other benefits about niching, Adam, of course, is that you become the biggest fish in a relatively small pond. And when you are just fishing for clients in your geographical area, in your town, your county, your state, whatever it is, you remain a small fish because in fact, there’s you and there’s the 40 other fish, which are the 40 other MSPs. Whereas when you are the most expensive managed service provider providing strategic cyber security, growth advice and consultancy for lawyers of a minimum of 20 staff just within this town, you suddenly become the biggest fish, if not the only fish within the pond. And that means you get all of the business. And when you take that to a whole extreme and you start dominating, you’re talking at all the conferences, you’re being written about in the magazines, or you are writing your own tech columns in their blogs, or you’re part of their communities or whatsoever, that’s when you really start to dominate a sector, which is so exciting.

Let’s finish with one final question on niching, then we’ll come on to Humanize IT, which is give me some examples of good sectors to be in and bad sectors to be in, just from your experience.

From what I hear, so I’m talking to MSPs all the time with our business, good industries to be in… education, especially private schools. I can tell you 100% this is an underserved community because their MRR is terrible, but you know what? They’re really good at, donors. So it is easier to ask a private school for $150,000 than it is to ask them for $3,000 a month. And that’s an example of why niching works, because you understand the finance of this sector. You know that if you lay out this is how it’s going to benefit the kids, this is how they’re going to get a competitive advantage in the area of science, technology, any of the STEM stuff, because we’re going to build labs for this and they’re going to be powered by this kind of technology, or we’re going to help the teachers become more effective and teach across campuses in an easy way. Then you’re telling a story and you’re building a stack, and donors are willing to give them money for that. They love that, and you’ve got to get to know them.

Other areas that are really good, the niche… medical. Are you helping people with HMS? Do you have dedicated HMS staff in house that can come and say, Hey, I can help you with Epic. I have three certified techs here. No one’s going to compete with you. And so now you have somebody who’s going to come and help them with their medical office when they can’t get somebody on the phone. Somebody who’s going to teach the staff how to run this and do lunch and learns on better serviceability or how to do this and that, you now become the 800 pound gorilla or the big fish in a small pond because none of the other service providers can do that.

I have one MSP who does wineries. They were on our podcast earlier this year, and he just does wineries. He’s like, I’m not a real MSP. I’m like, why not? He’s like, well, I don’t have all these things. I’m like, you don’t need all those things. Do your wineries need all those? Well, not really, but I want to be a, and he’s beating himself up because he has his expectation of what an MSP is rather than realising you have a captive audience who loves you because you uniquely have a set of services that they need to offer their clients. Lean into that, and he did, and it’s working out really well for him.

I love that. I want to do wineries. That would combine my favourite hobby, which is wine with my favorite work activity, which is marketing. I might start Paul Green’s winery marketing business. Yeah, I need to think that one through. I’m going to throw in a sector that I don’t think is a great one for MSPs, and that’s manufacturers. And I know there are lots of MSPs that love manufacturers. What I don’t like about manufacturers is the bespoke amount of work per client. And again, some MSPs, they pride themselves on that. But one of the other beauties of niching is that you’ve dropped in various software packages that various niches use, like you mentioned LexisNexis earlier, which is a legal thing. You learn LexisNexis for one client, you already know it for the second client, the third, the fourth, the fifth, it’s no different, it’s the same software. Whereas if you’ve got manufacturer A who’s running an A B, C machine that’s run by one XP computer that hasn’t gone down since 2006, and it’s like, A) why would you want to have that responsibility? And B) you’ve got to learn all about that machine. Then the next client has a completely different machine made in a different country where the instruction manuals in German and it’s like, yeah, we’ve got to support all of those. But anyway, that’s just my personal thoughts on that one.

Let’s move on to Humanize IT. So you have transformed in the last few years. What was the problem? What was wrong? Where were you then and where are you now and what sort of drove that transformation?

Yeah, I originally started off Virtual C, a fractional CIO firm. I have a lot of management experience. I’m not self-taught, I’ve been mentored, I have the education and I have the experience as an engineer. I was in the data centres, I was the tier three go-to buck stops here admin for billion dollar companies. And I got into management and I realised that I missed working for small businesses. So I formed my own company and then brought on a couple people, and we started teaching MSPs how to do actual CIO work. Because the idea of what a CIO was broken in the MSP world. Everybody was basically, what we would call in the corporate world, a manager of desktop engineering is what people were calling CIOs in the MSP world. And so I started saying, we need to start talking about profits. We need to talk about how you’re going to design out strategy for your clients from a business standpoint and how a technology’s going to affect that.

And I did really well there for a long time. I was using a software called Managed Services Platform to do gap analysis. And during the pandemic, I had enough money that I ended up buying managed services platform and turning it into a tool that would help CIOs dissect what was going on within their MSP and align it with what was going on with their clients. So you say, Hey, look, I see you’re trying to grow your sales by 20% next year. You don’t have a SharePoint portal that will help you manage contracts and get them out to your clients faster. And so you’re helping promote projects that will enhance your clients over time. And there was no real tool out there that was fitting this.

They were calling them QBRs, they were calling them strategy sessions or whatever, but they kept focusing on tickets and assets because that’s what the channel wanted them to focus on, reselling licenses and assets. So we came in and designed a product using our gap analysis software that focused on delivering better services to your clients that they actually need to run their companies effectively from a strategic standpoint. So you work with Adam Walter’s MSPs, you’ll say, our MSPs are going to help your business become more profitable. We’re not going to save you money. We’ll do that too because it’s operations, but we’re going to help you find areas where we can enhance your revenue, enhance your profits, and reduce risk. And we happen to use technology to do that. That is the message that needs to be out there, and that’s the message we’re trying to get to people.

I love it. So do you know that counts as your pitch? You’ve just had your pitch for Humanize IT there. You’re allowed 30 more seconds just to speak directly to the MSPs that are listening to this or watching this on YouTube. Just tell us what you can do for them and what’s the best way to get in touch with you, Adam?

Sure. Come to humanizeit.biz, get a demo or just sign up for a free trial. You will be up and running in about an hour and you’ll digest things out of your PSA or as of last month, Ninja RMM. We will digest directly from them, give you a list of projects that need to be worked on with this client. And all you have to do is walk in and do a QBR or a strategy session, but focus on what the client needs to do and then align the projects, the 300 projects you have there, and prioritise the ones that they care about and are help move their needle forward. And you will have a sticky client that will be loyal forever.

Paul’s Personal Peer Group

Scott has an 11-year-old managed service business in Canada, and he’s wanting to increase his visibility. His question is: What social media platforms should I use?

Social media of course is a great way to reach leads, but you must make sure that you are using the platforms used by ordinary business owners and managers. So here are five I suggest in priority order:

Number one, LinkedIn. It’s the number one social media platform for MSPs. Make sure you use your personal profile and not a business page to post social media content as often as you can. Ideally at least once every 24 hours, the algorithm likes that. And you’ll grow relationships with your network.

Number two is Google Business Profile. Bit of a surprise entry at number two, but actually an active Google Business Profile is a very easy way to boost your SEO or search engine optimisation. If you post a single Google business update every week, you’ll help to keep your profile active and current.

Number three is Instagram. Use this to reach business owners who actually use Instagram for their own marketing and therefore they’ll be on it regularly. If they’re on it regularly, it’s a great place to reach them, isn’t it? That would include retail and hospitality.

Number four, Facebook. Whether you love it or hate it, or maybe both, Facebook is the universal social media network. So do set up a company page for your MSP, which is also good for search results as well.

And then number five, I’m not sure about this one, it’s Twitter, or X. I’m not sure about it because it used to be so useful back in the day to reach a very niche audience, like we were just talking about with Adam there, but it has changed so much since Elon bought it. And we all know the problems of X. So I think you only use X if you are personally a fan or if your audience is highly active on it.

And of course there are a couple of alternatives of X, the one that seems to be getting a little bit of traction but nowhere that close is Bluesky, which is also worth you having a look at. But Paul, what about *insert the latest social media here* – Well, you can ignore the shiny new social media apps. What’s about to come out tomorrow, what’s coming out next week. Because until the majority of your prospects are using it or talking about it, you’ll get a much better return on investment sticking with the big platforms that most people are already using.

Mentioned links

• This podcast is in conjunction with the MSP Marketing Edge, the world’s leading white label content marketing and growth training subscription.
• Join me in MSP Marketing Facebook group.
• Connect with me on LinkedIn.
• Connect with my guest, Adam Walter on LinkedIn, and visit the Humanize IT website.
• Got a question about your MSP’s marketing? Submit one here for Paul’s Personal Peer Group.

Welcome to this SPECIAL edition of the show, Episode 294, of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green.

I’m interviewing an ordinary business owner and he’s going to talk about why he’s unhappy with his current MSP and is thinking of switching.

SPECIAL: Why this business owner will switch MSPs

For MSPs looking to find new clients, this is the holy grail. It’s taken nearly 18 months to arrange this, but boy is it going to be worth it. It’s a conversation with an ordinary business owner, the type of person who might be your dream client. It’s the number one wish I hear – I’m the owner of an awesome MSP, but it’s so hard to get new clients if only I could get in their head to find out what I could do to attract them, especially if they’re currently with another MSP who they’re thinking of leaving. Well, here we go.

Now I’ve agreed to keep his identity anonymous so he can be extremely open with answers to questions like, why he’s unhappy with his current MSP, what’s changed in the last few years, what he likes and dislikes about them, and why he’s thinking of switching. Oh, and most importantly, what could you offer him that would win him and keep him in your business?

Welcome to this very special episode of the podcast, and I have a treat for you today. This is an idea I’ve been trying to implement for years and years because I think it’s really going to help you get an insight into what happens in the head and the heart of an ordinary business owner when they may be thinking of switching MSPs. We’re going to interview today someone who’s been a friend of mine for over 25 years, but his identity is going to be kept a complete secret. In fact, I’ve given him a false name. I’ll introduce you to him in a second.

He’s with an MSP right now that was acquired sometime in the past, and as I’ve been talking to him over the last few months, I’ve realised his satisfaction levels with his incumbent MSP have been going down and down and down. They’ve done nothing wrong, it’s all just tiny little things that have chipped away and he’s now getting to that point where he might be ready to switch MSPs.

Let’s see if today we can figure out how he thinks, how he feels about his MSP and what are the things that he would go looking for from another MSP. If you can understand how ordinary people think and act, the chances of you getting them to come to your MSP goes up dramatically. So let me introduce you to my friend, we’re going to call him Jason. His real name is Sean, but we’re not going to use that, we’re going to call him Jason. That’s not his real name that was just a joke.

Jason, thank you so much for jumping onto the call. Obviously we don’t want to identify you because we don’t want any awkward conversations between you and your incumbent MSP. So without revealing what you do as a business or where you’re based, just give us an idea of your company. So how many staff have you got? Are you like a professional services company or a consumer driven company? Give us a bit of an overview.

We are I guess a professional services company. We’re a marketing business at heart, obviously based here in the UK, and we have got staff who are employed in the UK and in the Philippines. We’ve also got contractors in the UK and the Philippines as well.

Okay, so you’re spread around the globe, even if that’s just two locations, which is a pretty common setup these days I think for many businesses. Obviously this is your business, you started this, you’ve grown this over a number of years. If you go back in your mind to when you first started to take on professional help. so before we talk about the switching and the dissatisfaction you might have now, let’s talk about why you picked an IT company back in the first place. So when was the point you first realised, oh, I can’t do all of this computer stuff myself?

Well, I guess I came from a corporate business where all of IT support was organised and pretty much on hand. We were just given the phone number or the email address to get hold of somebody if we needed help with our devices. So when I started up the business nearly 10 years ago, I knew at some point I’m going to need IT support. And it was within a few months, I guess, of starting the business that I reached out to somebody. I’ll tell you where it began, who I’m with now and who I was with before they were acquired is not where I started. So I started off with somebody local, had a bit of help from them, but then I ended up in a conversation with someone through, let’s call it networking, and started to realise that these guys could offer a service.

There was a relationship there first before I made the decision to settle with my MSP, who I’ve been with eight or nine years now.

Got it. Got it. So essentially you were in the MSP space, Jason, I nearly said your real name then. We call that break fix, how you started. So you started with someone who just helped you out a bit when you ran into a problem and then you say about eight, nine years ago you met someone at networking and you got into a more formal relationship and did you sign a contract? So were you paying them money on a regular basis?

No, I don’t recall signing a contract. I may have, but it might’ve been just a very low key one if that was the case or just an arrangement over email. I’ll tell you what, the point where I went from somebody helping me out to signing up with an IT support company, was when I started employing staff so that they had a bit more structure when they had problems. Don’t talk to me, here’s the phone number, here’s the email address, they’ll sort you out.

Got it. So you were happy to invest the money into someone else fixing those problems so that you could focus on what you wanted to do and not your staff complaining about slow computers or this doesn’t work?

Absolutely, yeah. I mean, I know my way around a computer, but I’m no where near as skilled as someone whose job it is to fix computers.

Yeah, absolutely. So the MSP that you were with got acquired, and again, we don’t want names or anything like that, but I want the MSPs that are listening to this to understand how ordinary business owners feel when their MSP is acquired. I always think that’s a great time to go looking for, to go and try and pick up clients from that MSP. So if you’ve got a competitor in town that’s been sold to a super MSP, I think that’s a great time to go and talk to clients because of the levels of dissatisfaction that Jason is going to be talking about. So how long ago did this acquisition happen and how did you feel about it when it first happened?

Well, I think it was about three or four years ago. There was an interesting moment actually that came about before the acquisition was announced. And what it was, was we all of a sudden had a large contract put under my nose with the incentive of some discount for signing up for the next 12 months, and it all felt a bit rushed and hurried and I ended up, it didn’t feel right that I was given a deadline to get some incentives, but I had to sign off a 25 page contract, which I would not do. I would want to read that to see what was in it. And the headlines on it were locking me in for 12 or maybe 24 months. And I didn’t realise till afterwards what was going on because it came out of the blue and that was all part of the sale of the business as they were looking to lock everybody in on firmer contracts than what they had in place for the time leading up to that point.

I guess I remember it rubbed me up the wrong way at that time and then I didn’t sign the contract.

But anyway, we ended up, within a few weeks we found out that this business had been acquired. It all made sense and I don’t think for me anything really changed other than that, we were still dealing with the same company that had just been sold. So yeah, that was kind of what happened at that point. And it’s probably more in recent years as they’ve merged the acquired business into the master business that started to notice that things have changed how they operate a bit.

That makes sense. And just one follow up question on the contracts. I think we can all look at the MSP that was selling and very quickly was scrambling to get his paperwork in place to sell that business. Had that been done perhaps 12 months earlier with less rush with less incentives, so it was a case of, oh, actually Jason, we’re formalising all of our client agreements, here’s an agreement, take your time to read it, but we would like you to sign this because it protects you and us. And this is a bit of a leading question, but do you think that would’ve been a more palatable thing for you to swallow than that sudden rush for you to sign the contract?

Yeah, it was the rush, I could feel something going on, I didn’t know what it was but it was certainly nothing that had happened previously. So I think if they had taken a bit more time with it, had a deadline of three months away rather than three weeks and then three days, I probably would’ve read it through and gone, yeah, that feels like a fair deal to sign all of that off to get an incentive. I guess the other thing that I’ve always been held back by with arrangements like this, particularly committing to 12 month subscriptions for software like Office 365 for example, is we are a growing company and we’re not always adding new employees, sometimes we’re taking some away. So it fluctuates quarter by quarter as to how many licenses we need. So I’ve always sort of steered clear of 12 month contracts thinking not till the business has really settled and even now eight or nine years on, I still am much happier paying a little bit more for a monthly contract or license that we can get rid of when we don’t need it.

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. There’s two things to unpack from that then I think for MSPs listening. Number one is at the point you think I might sell my business, that’s the point to get your clients onto contract, not as you’re actually going through the sales process. It takes a year, 18 months to go from thinking about selling a business to actually signing on the dotted line. So yeah, the slower you can make that for your clients, the better. Obviously you don’t want to give away what’s happening. The second thing for you, Jason, is you have no idea how difficult Microsoft makes 365 licensing for MSPs. Really, there’s a whole, it’s just one of the most difficult things which should be quite simple but all to do with that 12 month licensing. But nevermind, there we go.

So you are with this MSP, they get sold to someone else. Initially you don’t see anything that’s changed because you’re still dealing with the same people and the same office that you’re dealing with before, but slowly things start to change as they integrate, as you call it, the master MSP integrates the new acquisition in. So what kind of changes did you see, and this is where I’m really interested in you as the end decision maker. So if we remember why you hired these people in the first place, you hired them so that they can concentrate on the technology and you can concentrate on the business, which is the perfect relationship, but you must have noticed things changing over time. So tell us what kind of stuff changed and how it impacted you.

There was nothing particularly significant, I guess I had a good relationship with the people that ran the company before it was sold. I knew them personally, I’d see them at networking events and chat and catch up and became quite friendly with them. So the owner, he departed obviously and then some of the staff. I think maybe all of them followed through into the master business or with the sale and over time people sort of moved on and so forth. And to be fair, the people that we’re now dealing with, I think some of them were there originally and some of them are new as part of the master business. They’re good people, no question. I think what is probably kind of greater with me a little bit is the bureaucracy that I feel coming in, which may be a result of it being a bigger business and a little bit more rigid to deal with compared to something which was smaller, almost a family business kind of feel to it.

The reason we’re having this conversation now is because, well, let me turn this into a question. Is the reason we are having this conversation now because your level of dissatisfaction has reached a point that you are thinking, do I want to stay with these people or do I want to move somewhere else?

I’m not actively looking. I’ve got other priorities, I’ve got bigger issues to fix than changing IT company. And I guess it’s a little bit like your accountant or even your marketing provider. It’s not something that you want to do willy nilly. You’ve got relationships and you’re kind of ingrained in their business a bit. They understand your business and everything’s set up.

I would be open to switch MSPs if I met somebody who encouraged me to come with them, but that’s not happened to this point.

I think what is interesting, there was a moment about four to six weeks ago which had become quite typical and that is we’ve just decided that we’re hiring a new person, we’ve offered them the job and I would, along with a few other things, say to them, right, I’m going to CC you on an email to our IT support company and you’re going to see me asking them to set you up on office 365 and get your email address sorted and so forth. And I’ll CC our marketing operations manager as well so that she can see the email address and then go and get your email address sorted out for subscriptions to the task management system, to the time sheet system to all of the other places that we need them subscribed to. So I sent that email off at something like 10 in the morning, went and did a day’s work thinking, right, that’s one job done and dusted and went back to my emails at about six o’clock that evening only to find that I had a question over it, Would you like that to be a monthly subscription or an annual? And I’m thinking, well, all the others are on monthly, why all of a sudden that question? And by the way, you’ve just cost eight hours of getting this job done, which we need done for the person starting tomorrow by asking that question.

Then I went back with an answer and the next morning I expected them to jump on it straight away and get everything in place for this person who we were meeting to onboard at something like midday the next day. And 11:00am came around and we still didn’t have an email address for them set up and I was told that their sales person would be in touch with me to sign off the paperwork. And as much as I didn’t really mind having to sign off the contract for a monthly subscription to a basic Office 365 license, we ended up in an onboarding meeting, first of all apologising to the person that we hadn’t got their email address set up and most of what we were going to talk about today and get them onboarded with is not available because that email address doesn’t yet exist. So that moment there, and it’s not the first time that’s happened, is the sort of thing where you do start to think, do you know what, there’s got to be an easier way than this.

And you said earlier that you’re not actively looking, but if you met the right person. You also talked about something we call inertia loyalty, which we’ve talked about a lot on this podcast, which is exactly as you said, Jason, that it feels easier to stay with someone you’re with than it does to move to someone new. Often people don’t buy until they’re ready to buy, and today you’re too busy doing other things in the business. But I guess if you went to a networking meeting or you had an email or a LinkedIn conversation with someone tomorrow and you could see that, oh, actually this is a different kind of IT company, they’re going to approach things a bit differently. There’s less bureaucracy. I haven’t got to talk to a salesperson. We can just pick up the phone, we can have a two minute conversation and we can just make things happen. And I think we can all see based on what you’ve just said, how that may put it in your mind, do you know what, maybe I will switch.

So essentially your MSP now is slowing you down. That’s the unintended consequence that something new you wanted to do, you’re clearly a fast mover. No MSP wants 24 hours notice to set up a new user, but as the end client, you don’t really care about that. I guess you just want to get that thing done.

Let me ask an open question. If your incumbent MSP that you’re working with right now, if they could do anything to address your dissatisfaction and make you feel more valued and make you feel, actually I do like these guys and I do want to stick with them, what could they do?

I think it would be a conversation where instead of having to sign off on something really quite insignificant every time we to add a new license that there’s just some type of standing arrangement that tell me all the questions that you want from me unless I tell you otherwise it’s going to be monthly, it’s going to be at the basic level, I’m going to need it within 24 hours. So the valid questions that your frontline people are going to be asking, they can have a look at the record and go, right, well I already know that even though he hasn’t mentioned it on this occasion, he wants monthly, basic and we don’t need to sign off on a contract for a single license.

That makes perfect sense. So they just make your life easy essentially. And I guess there are different types of people that like different things. So you want that so you can move at speed, but then another client might want the control of, I want to sign off every single new license. And I guess that MSP has got to try and be flexible to your needs, but also to document them so that they’re not constantly asking you again and again the same questions.

Let me flip that same question round and ask, if you met a new MSP tomorrow, what kind of things would they say or do that would make you sit up and think, I really need to talk to these people. I really need to pay some attention to these people.

I’d be more inclined to move to an MSP that’s local to us than just another one remotely somewhere in the UK. That would probably make a difference.

Occasionally you end up with a hardware issue. There is a local company in town here that I would take that repairs computers physically, I don’t even know if they offer IT services. I’ve never asked them, they’ve never asked me. But if there was a company that offered IT support and did computer repairs, that would be appealing.

Interesting. I say interesting because the vast majority, like 99.9% of the work is all done remotely by everyone now. Apart from hardware repairs, what are the benefits do you perceive there would be from having a company that’s local to you that could physically come into your office? Even if they don’t.

It’s probably just the hardware repairs and maybe just having the opportunity for a stronger relationship, a face-to-face relationship on occasions.

Which actually leads on to what is probably going to be one of my final questions, which is looking at your business strategically. So one of the things that I recommend to the MSPs that I work with is that they move their relationship to a strategic relationship as quickly as possible. So in layman’s terms, a non-strategic relationship is where the guys underneath your desk plugging a cable into your computer and you can see a bit of his butt crack. It’s not pleasant, no one wants to see that. The complete opposite of that is a strategic relationship where the owner of the business or the relationship manager or whoever it is, he’s talking to you about your business and your goals and what your growth plans are and what the big picture is for your business. And then they can give you a technology strategy or they can give you good advice. So have you ever had that kind of relationship with either with the first MSP that sold out or with the MSP that you have now?

More so with the MSP that we’ve got now. And to be fair, I think they sort of opened up a conversation like that and I think what happened is it, it never went very far. We had one or two conversations, I said, yes, we want to achieve this, that and the other, and they put some ideas to me. But because I think there was quite a bit of time between each conversation, and I don’t know whether you are the same as me, but I find it difficult to go back to things if it’s been a few weeks, I have to reset and go and remember about where do we get to and what was the objective here. Whereas if it was happening day after day after day and we had it sorted within a week, then I might’ve signed off on a bigger commitment to them.

But they did come from a strategic angle to some extent, their business development person, I would be open to that conversation. How could they help me better? How could we streamline things if we had better technology that we were not aware of, that could increase productivity for example. I suspect we are not as secure as we could be. I think we are, but they’d probably tell me otherwise. So I’d be open to hearing a bit more about how we could be more secure, so long as it’s not coming from a point of painting a very doom and gloom bleak picture that your company is full of risk, etc, etc. I’ve been put off by that in the past where the whole cyber protection is, for me, it’s been overcooked and you’re left feeling quite fearful of what could happen rather than necessarily supported.

Don’t sell cyber protection by trying to create fear. Explain it in a slightly more supportive way than that.

Yeah, I completely agree with that and that’s fascinating to hear an ordinary business owner say that. So Jason, thank you so much. You’ve been very kind with your time. Talking about your experience is what it’s like to be a real business owner stuck in this situation. It sounds like the MSP that’s got you could actually rescue you quite easily with a little bit of strategic work and some better account management, which is really interesting. Now, one thing you’re not going to be aware of is thousands of MSPs listen to this podcast all over the world. So I’m going to get like a thousand emails now from people who want an introduction to you. Do you want me to forward those emails onto you?

I don’t think we’re at that point. I’m more inclined to go and talk to our IT support company now and say, listen, we need to chat about a few things that we might need from you that we haven’t got at the moment. That’s, again, that feels like the more comfortable conversation than somebody saying, come with us.

That was supposed to be a joke, by the way.

Thank you very much.

I could just forward those emails on. Anyway, Jason, thank you so much for your time today.

No problem.

Mentioned links

• This podcast is in conjunction with the MSP Marketing Edge, the world’s leading white label content marketing and growth training subscription.
• Join me in MSP Marketing Facebook group.
• Connect with me on LinkedIn.
• Got a question about your MSP’s marketing? Submit one here for Paul’s Personal Peer Group.

Welcome to Episode 293 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• What if you only had 90 days to win new clients?: Imagine you absolutely had to generate new business, FAST. Let’s explore where you should focus your time, effort and resources.
• 3 HUGE questions to ask about your MSP’s clients: It’s very common to hope that the awesome retention of your key clients just continues, but unless you really give them what they need and want you run the risk of losing them.
• This MSP’s best ideas from his 8 year podcast: My guest is a long-standing MSP owner and eight year podcaster. He’s here to share the very best things he’s learned during that time.
• Paul’s Personal Peer Group: You still hand out business cards, right? You definitely should, and here’s my recommendation of what should be on them.

What if you only had 90 days to win new clients?

Are you ready to take the MSP experiment? How would you do if you had to win a load of new clients within the next 90 days? Yes, just 90 days to find and sign up new managed service clients. The reason isn’t important, it’s a thought experiment, but does the sound of having to do that make your blood run cold? If so, let’s dig into why it’s such an important test and the real world benefits to your MSP.

This is kind of based on a question I was asked on a podcast I appeared on a few months back. I can’t quite remember which one it was right now, but the host asked me if I had to start an MSP from scratch, what would I do? And I think he was waiting for me to suggest which RMM I would use and which PSA and what my tech stack would look like. But the answer I actually gave was that I would figure out all of that stuff only after I’d won some clients.

I’d focus all of my time, effort and energy into creating a pipeline and then shaking that tree until some new business fell out of it.

Yeah, I know I’ve mixed up my analogies there, but you see the point I’m making, right? I’ve never actually owned or run an MSP, but I’ve been a business owner for 20 years and there’s no point getting your operations ready and perfect if there are no clients to put through those operations.

So let’s make that a real life question for you. Not what would you do if you started again with your MSP, but if you absolutely had to generate new business in the next 90 days, what would you do? Don’t get too hung up on the why’s about this. Just imagine you’ve lost a big client or your personal circumstances dictate that you just need more cash. The reason is not relevant. What’s more important is to talk about what you would actually do.

A quick aside, if that was a real situation for you and you desperately needed more cash in the next month or so, that cash is going to come from your existing clients. There’s always more revenue and certainly high levels of profit to be made selling something to your existing clients than winning new clients. But for the purpose of this piece here, what would you do to win new clients in just 90 days? Well, let me break this down into a series of suggestions.

The first of those would be actually the way that you think and the way that you act. One of the reasons that many MSPs really struggle with marketing and winning new clients is because they simply don’t take it seriously. If you’re only spending 20 or 30 minutes a day or even a week on marketing, how can you expect to get momentum on that? How can you expect to get traction? There are MSPs that have full-time departments of people who are generating leads, warming up those leads and turning them into clients. And I appreciate these are probably bigger businesses than yours, but they’re properly resourcing what is a critical function of growing a business. So if you need new clients in the next 90 days, you have to throw yourself into that task. That means a minimum of 90 minutes every single day working on your marketing, and that really is the minimum. Depending on how urgently you needed new clients, you’d spend more and more and more time.

I’ve always thought in the back of my head that if my business was in real trouble and I needed to generate new revenue urgently, I reckon I could free four to five hours a day, just things I could just drop in my day and it might create a bit of chaos and I’d be calling in all sorts of favours from colleagues and perhaps even parents to help ferry my child around to afterschool clubs and stuff. But if it came to it, I could arrange that within like 48 hours, and that means that very quickly I’d have four to five hours a day of extra time to invest into new marketing to win new clients for my business. And in this kind of emergency situation, the 90 day thing, you’d have to be willing to do the same thing, even if that creates some short-term pain. Because it is only short term and it will ease quickly once the new clients start coming in.

Time is a necessary resource. And also cash. You need a bit of that as well. It always shocks me how little some MSPs spend on marketing, how little they invest when there are some amazing marketing resources out there. And obviously I’ve got to give a shameless and blatant plug for my own service here, the MSP Marketing Edge, which is for as little as £149 or $199 per month, and we only work with one MSP per area, but I’ll just leave that one there.

So, you need a mindset of total urgency that’s vital and you need to resource it properly. Those are kind of a couple of the basics. And two other of the basics that you need is to make sure that your website and your LinkedIn are as good as they can possibly be, without spending tons of time on them. When someone’s thinking about talking to you, they will check out your website. They’ll have a look at your LinkedIn as well, both your personal profile and your business profile. And it really doesn’t take that much effort to get both of these assets to be as good as they can be. The basic rule is to make them reflect who you are as a person and the benefits of working with you. People will choose you or not choose you based on their ability to relate to you and how you can make them feel.

If your website is cold and it’s all about tech and stock images and looks the same as all the other MSP websites, then you’re going to get the same results as all the other MSPs, which is a poor pipeline of prospects. Never be afraid to stand out, to be a little bit different, although not by using a gimmick. Be human, be real and talk to people in their language. At this point, let me mention the three step lead generation system that I’ve been recommending for years and years in which my MSP Marketing Edge is built upon. We help MSPs to implement it. It’s six words, super simple but incredibly powerful. Step one, build audiences. Step two, grow relationships with those audiences. And step three, convert relationships. Now, I’ve got videos on YouTube and podcast episodes dedicated to this system, but if you’ve only got 90 days, we want to do the super speedy version of it.

Let me give you now a version that takes more time and more resources, it’s more intensive if you like, but it should give you results faster. So it’s not something you’d build for the long-term, it’s the emergency version. You start by auditing what you already have. Very rarely in an established business are you really starting with any marketing from scratch. More likely you are already sitting on a bunch of assets that you are not leveraging enough. So what data do you have of prospects in the business that you’re not using? Do you have a draw full of business cards of people you’ve met at events over the last 10 years that you never really followed up on? Do you have inquiries on your Outlook of all the people you spoke to years ago and you have no idea what’s happening with them today?

These are all marketing assets that you can leverage because you can email all of these people, you can phone them, you can add them on LinkedIn. And yeah, some of them are dead, but some of them are also no longer the one man bands or one person bands they were 10 years ago. Now they’ve got 25 staff and they’re dissatisfied with their incumbent MSP, but you have no idea until you reach out to them. So look at emails, notes from calls, find old notepads, read everything from back in the day, Any old interaction from anything up to 10, even 15 years ago. It could be a relationship you could renew in the next 90 days. That’s step one, which is to build audiences.

Now, step two, grow relationships. And the first thing there is to invest some of that time that you’ve created each day into spending time on LinkedIn. The key to marketing your MSP is to get the right message in front of the right person at the right time. So every day on LinkedIn, I suggest you focus on the four Cs: connect, contact, content and comment. That means connecting to new people, sending them a message to contact them when you are connected, putting content on LinkedIn every day. In fact, one piece of content every 24 hours works best right now for the algorithm. And then finally commenting on other people’s posts.

And it’s this commenting which encourages people to connection request you. So it’s not just a flood of one-way requests from you to other people, it’s two-way traffic. LinkedIn is an amazing place for MSPs to go farming for new clients, but it isn’t a fast place. It’s really hard to speed it up. It’s farming, not hunting. So for that reason, I suggest you get out networking, not the cables, the early breakfast meeting people in a hotel room, that kind of thing. See if you can find one event every single weekday for the next 90 days and go attend it. And that might not just be in your town, but other nearby towns. Or you might look at vertical specific events, but your goal is to get in front of other human beings at least three, four, maybe even five days a week. Start meeting people, start building relationships.

Because unlike all of the digital stuff, which is free and easy to do but takes a long time to build a relationship, in networking you have to put time and effort in, yet the relationship is built significantly faster. Don’t assume you’re going to get clients from the first time you meet someone, but you may meet the same person two or three times over a number of weeks or months. And that leads maybe onto them referring you to someone they know who’s looking for a new MSP or it might set up a conversation that you have with them.

Networking really is a great place to go farming for business, but most MSPs don’t bother with it. And I do understand that. Personally, I don’t like networking myself, in fact, I actively avoid it. But in a situation of urgency, what I would do is hit a turn of networking events consistently over 90 days. And if you do this, it will propel your relationship with prospects forward and quickly enhance your reputation and profile.

And then the final step is to convert relationships. And I’m afraid you need to do another activity here that may be uncomfortable to you, but that is to pick up the phone for at least 60 to 90 minutes every day and make outbound phone calls. Phone anyone and everyone. Everyone on those old business cards or those old contacts you found phone, everyone you meet at networking events, whether you believe they’ve got any business for you or not. You use the phone to reach out to people and build relationships by talking about their favourite subjects themselves and their business.

The last thing you do is talk about your MSP and what you do. These calls are a relationship building exercise. Most MSPs have massive follow up failure and would never do this. So they miss out on the low hanging fruit, the easy winners that are just sitting there, but you don’t find out about them for the sake of not making a phone call. This kind of marketing, it really is a numbers game and the phone just speeds things up for you massively.

My final thoughts on this, a lot of the stuff I’ve just, there really doesn’t sound like fun, does it? And yet it works because when you throw yourself into 90 days of activity like this and you see it through day in, day out, even on the days, you really can’t be bothered to do it, something amazing happens. You build up Big Mo, also known as big momentum. And momentum can count for so much within marketing. You should always be aiming to get a ton of momentum going in your marketing. Once the wheel’s spinning, don’t let it slow down. In fact, keep speeding up and up and up and up. So I know this is a fictitious 90 days, and you probably don’t have that kind of urgency in your MSP, but is there something here that’s made you think, yeah, I could do that.

3 HUGE questions to ask about your MSP’s clients

You ready for a bit of daydreaming? Think about how you feel about your MSP’s current clients. Maybe you’ve got one or two clients that are much bigger than the rest of them or have been with you for much longer than the rest. Does that sound like your business?

It’s very common, and it’s also very common to hope that the awesome retention of these key clients just continues. In fact, I hope that all your clients will enjoy the same retention. But of course, hope is a terrible strategy.

Here are three unbelievably important questions that you should ask yourself about your clients. And these three questions are so important that you need to take them very seriously. So turn off your phone, unless you’re watching this video or listening to this podcast on your phone, mute your PSA’s notifications, in fact, better still switch off your WIFI and snap your SIM card in half. Maybe even go and borrow an energetic dog just to take it for a super long solo walk where you can’t be disturbed. And then when you’ve done all of this, ask yourself these three questions.

Thinking about your existing clients: What do they need? What do they want? And how can you best satisfy these needs and wants?

Let me repeat those: What do they need? What do they want? And how can you best satisfy these needs and wants?

If you can answer the first two of these questions, you’ll know what’s happening in your client’s heads (their needs), and what’s happening in their hearts (their wants). And then you can answer the third question: How can you best satisfy them?

When you give your clients what they need and want, they will truly see you as a partner. And the word partner is overused within the channel. Big vendors think that the second you sign a contract with them, you become a partner, but that is not the case at all, is it? Partnership needs to be earned, and that’s by satisfying your client’s needs and wants. Do this for your clients and they’ll never, ever, ever want to go to any other MSP, because they will feel that you know them better than any other technology expert could. That is a genuine partnership, and it’s the root to the world’s most insanely great retention.

This MSP’s best ideas from his 8 year podcast

Do you suffer from analysis paralysis? For many MSPs looking to make more money and grow your business, there’s just too much advice and knowledge out there. Information overload. Not only is there so much, but a lot of it is conflicting advice. So you wouldn’t be blamed for not knowing where to begin.

Well, the paralysis ends here. My special guest today can distill eight years worth of learning in just a few minutes. What are his credentials? He owns an MSP and he has his own long running podcast, eight years in fact. So I’ve asked him to give us the very best things he’s learned from his podcast to you right now.

Hello everyone, Uncle Marv here, and I am the host of the IT Business Podcast and I have a boutique MSP in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

And this is kind of weird for me where I’m asking the questions and you are giving the answers because you and I have done this two or three times before, but it’s been on your podcast, the one that you just mentioned. So thank you very much for taking the time to come onto my show. In fact, because of your podcast, Uncle Marv, it feels weird calling you Uncle Marv, I’m just going to have to call you Marv, I’m sorry I can’t do it. Because of your podcast, we want to learn what you’ve done to improve your MSP and your greatest lessons from all the years that you’ve been doing that podcast. Because it is a great podcast, you’ve been doing it so consistently. I don’t watch every single episode, I don’t think anyone watches every single episode of every podcast, but you have some really cool people on. You do some really interesting subjects, and your passion for the things you’re talking about always comes over, which is just amazing. So let’s delve a little bit more into your story before we talk about the lessons you’ve learned. So how long did you say you’d been running your own MSP for?

So I started my business in 1997, and I transitioned into MSP around 2014, 2015.

Okay. And were you in break/fix before?

I was doing whatever came up. Break/fix, reselling, whatever.

Cool. And what was the trigger that made you go down the managed services route?

So it was odd because I kind of was already doing a little bit of it. My law firm clients were paying me retainers, which is almost the same as the recurring revenue that MSPs were getting. But what really stuck for me is I was looking for a way to support one client that had five offices, and I wanted to be able to have access to all the machines from all the branch offices. They were all across the state. And I had been doing it with patchwork products up until 2014, 2015 when I ran into some other people that said, oh no, you need an RMM tool, you need this. And that’s how I made the transition.

It’s cool, isn’t it? I guess this is 11 years on, it’s kind of weird hearing you talk about there being a time when perhaps you didn’t know that RMMs were the tool or that you needed a PSA. And I know you’re not the only person in that situation. Just 10 years ago, it does seem kind of weird now in that’s the basic tool, isn’t it? Having those tools in place, you’re not really in business, but even as shorter time ago as a decade ago, that was not necessarily the case. Obviously you’ve been in business since ‘97, what was that? Like XP? Was that the OS at the time?

God, I remember installing Windows 3.1. Let’s see, I was still at the store and we had just started with 95, 98. That was it.

Amazing, amazing. My very first PC that I owned was Windows Millennium edition. Do you remember that?

I do. We tortured that thing.

Yeah, I remember. That’s probably why I’m a Mac person now. That was my first proper intro to PCs and it was horrendous, I didn’t like that. But anyway, so you obviously have this podcast now, which you do on a regular basis. So tell us what got you started with the podcast and a little bit more what it’s about and who it’s for.

So it was around that time that I started running into other people and learning about this MSP community. At the time, I was actually paired up with other computer repair shops, other IT business owners that weren’t necessarily MSPs, but we were supporting businesses. And there was a bunch of podcasts that were out there. I had just kind of found out about them, and they were talking about the same daily struggles that I was having. And I said, you know what? I can listen to these people because talking about the same thing. And so I met them and started to be a guest on their podcast. And a slot opened up for a business focused podcast for techs that wanted to support business. And it had been on a hiatus, but people were looking to bring that back. And so I offered to help with that and I would do all the work and let the talent guy, the person that everybody really wanted to listen to, I would let him just show up and I would do all the work for him. So that’s how I got into the podcasting.

That’s brilliant. And what has been your favourite moments over the last few years?

Wow. Favourite moments. So I can say this, because of the podcast, I’ve been able to do a lot of things that I had not originally planned. They weren’t really part of the MSP space, but being able to attend conferences as a podcaster, a lot of conferences I wouldn’t probably pay to go to between the ticket price, air fare or hotel, but I’ve been able to go as a podcaster. So that’s been one thing. I would say the other thing is because of the podcast, that community that I was originally a part of, we’re all still friends, we all still hang out. We have another conference that we have done. It started out as the Unconvention, it is now called Techcon. And it’s basically all those people that we started with in terms of sharing information over the original podcast.

I love that. Absolutely love that. It’s funny you’re talking about going to exhibitions. So I went to ScaleCon in Las Vegas for the first time last year, and it’s the first time I’ve been to the US professionally. So I’ve been to the US dozens of times. But my debut appearance and the first 30 minutes walking into this big hotel in Vegas, I felt like a celebrity. There were all these people coming up to me saying, oh, you are Paul Green. That’s amazing. Can I get a selfie? It’s so cool to meet you. And I texted my girlfriend later that day saying it’s like being a celebrity. And obviously she didn’t believe me, but this is the power of a podcast. And I think we’re not really talking to them about MSP starting their own podcast, but for anyone listening to this or watching this on YouTube that’s thinking, I’d like to do a podcast, just do it right. It’s not difficult. If Marv can do it, if I can do it, anybody can do it.

I think it can be a very powerful tool for an MSP to reach an audience. It’s easier if you have a niche or a vertical. So if you are an MSP that supports CPAs, let’s say in Florida, we’ll go with your state, right? It’s the easiest thing in the world to do a technology podcast for Florida’s CPAs. I mean, that sounds like the smallest podcast in the world, but actually that’s the most focused podcast in the world. And I think the secret of any podcast is knowing who you want to reach and why they would be interested in listening to you, and then sort of going for it like that. And the side benefit is you get recognised when you go into convention centres, which is kind of cool. I’m sure you’ve had exactly the same experience, Marv.

So let’s talk about what lessons you’ve learned from your own podcasts that have helped you in your MSP. Because obviously, as you just told us in your story, you didn’t start a podcast to help your MSP, but it’s inevitable because of the cool people that you’re interviewing and the ideas that are coming up, it’s inevitable that you’ve come away from podcast recordings and thought, oh, that’s a really good idea. I’ve got to implement that. So tell us some of the best ideas you’ve heard in the last couple of years.

I don’t know if I can pick just a few best. I mean, obviously we learn about other people’s way of running their business and we take little bits and pieces from each one of them. Probably some of the big things, of course, are going to be the way that we price our services. Everybody kind of talks about their philosophy and how their clients respond.

We all think our clients are different, our MSP is different, but yet we’re all really doing the same basic thing.

But it’s how we can identify what works when it comes to pricing for this client, for that client. That’s probably one of the big things. Of course, the way that we do projects, the way that we do the support of a specific service, cyber security, Voiceover IP, those are all things that through the podcast and being able to interview other people, hearing what they do, which then may lead to a conversation off camera. Where we come back a week later and say, Okay, remember that thing you mentioned on the show? Tell me more about that.

And people do it to me. People will write me or call me and say, Hey, I heard you talk about this. Can you tell me more? So it’s really more this, again, we go back to community, the community of collaboration, being able to share thoughts and ideas to help each other out. And it’s not always about the business either. I mean, I’ve had people come up to me and I may have said something about health, and that has spawned a whole other discussion on health. And it, again, part of it’s because people have seen me over the years, that consistency of being there, and some people now, it sounds weird, but people that know me but I don’t know them, they think we’re friends. And so there are times where people will come up and be like, finally able to put a face to the name or a face to the voice, because a lot of people hear me in the car, they hear me walking around, and then we can actually talk and communicate and share some stuff.

See, this is exactly it. This is what I was talking about. You are famous and you are the friends of the people who are listening to you or watching you because as you say, you are there with them in the daily parts of their life. They’re taking the dog for a walk, the commute, and you’re giving them ideas, or I appreciate many of them don’t come from you, they come from the people you’re talking to and the information you get on, but you get the benefit of that. I think that’s just a wonderful thing.

You also said a word which I want to pick up on, which is consistency. And I think looking at this as a general marketing lesson, you’ve been doing this, the podcast for, what did you say, 2017, I think you said eight years. So you’ve been doing that consistently for eight years, turning up, doing the hard work. I know for a fact there will be days where it’s podcast o’clock and you think, I’m too busy, I can’t be bothered, I don’t quite feel right today, I just want to go and have my dinner, I’m done. I just don’t want to do this today. But you do it right, you turn up and you’re consistent, and you do the podcast. And I know that because I have those days as well as does every other human being. We all have it with anything consistent. But one of the key things with any marketing is to do, whatever you’re doing to do it consistently. I see people launching podcasts, doing a season, whatever a season is, it might be 10 episodes, and then they stop and they say, oh, we’ll come back next year. But you never get to build up momentum. And I’m sure your podcast had very low listening, viewing figures early on, and then it builds up over time. It’s exactly the same as happened to mine, my first week no one watched it, there was no one there. In fact, it was audio only, no one was listening. But now we have a pretty reasonable audience, and a lot of that is the consistency of turning up. And I think there’s some massive marketing lessons in that, which is just wonderful.

Well, let me tell you this, I treat the podcast the same way I do the business. And in the podcast, you have to know who your audience is, ask them what they want and give it to them. It’s the same thing we have to do for our clients when it comes to the MSP. You’ve got to know who your clients are or know what you are able to do for your clients because they don’t care what you’re doing for all those other people that you support. They want to know, What is it you’re doing for me? How are you helping my business? And it’s the same thing, but that thing about consistency in being there, sometimes clients aren’t going to buy from you on the first or the second or the third time they see you or whatever, but down the road they may be like, Oh, you know what, I’ve got this problem, I know this person that can help, let me reach out. That’s all it is.

Yeah. And I completely agree, and actually, if they have a conversation with you today and then next year and the year after and the year after, and each time it’s a consistent experience for them – you’re professional, you’re courteous, and you’re not pushy, you’re not salesy, you are absolutely right, at the point they’re ready to buy, they’re dramatically much more likely to buy from you, because that consistency pays off for you in the long term. So I love that, wonderful. Thank you so much for joining me on my show. Next thing, you and I have to go on someone else’s show together, we have to package ourselves up as a duo. Or we get you to ScaleCon 25, which I know is in the planning stages, and you can be the celebrity this year. In fact, maybe we could roll out a red carpet, we could maybe have you abseiling in or dropped off by a helicopter.

We’re going to have a theme song, obviously walk in there.

Love it. You could just be high fiving the audience as you go in. That’d be wonderful. Let’s finish off, just tell us a little bit more about your podcast, who it’s for, obviously it’s for MSPs, but who specifically it’s for, why they would want to listen and where do we listen to it?

Yeah, so Uncle Marv’s IT Business podcast, and it’s a show for IT professionals and managed service providers, essentially anybody that supports business, whether you’re the business owner or the tech. And what we do is we talk about products, we talk about stories, we talk about tips. All those things we can do to run our business better, smarter and faster. I do interviews with other MSP owners, I do interviews with vendors in the space. That’s one of the things we need to know. We need to know who are the vendors that can help us with the products to support our clients. And as to where you can find it, the easiest place for me to tell you to go is my website, ITbusinesspodcast.com, and you’ll find all the links to all of the podcatchers out there, whether it’s iHeart or Apple, YouTube, you’ll find where you can go and subscribe to the show and follow, and it’ll be both audio and video. So that’s where you start.

Paul’s Personal Peer Group

Stewart has an MSP based in Washington, and he wants to get something physically into the hands of his prospects and clients. His question is: What should go on my business card?

I’m actually a huge fan of business cards along with all things physical, because thanks to the way our brains are wired, physical things have 10 times more impact on a person than digital things do. If you meet someone in real life, you need to give them a business card, right? Yeah, even these days it’s still a basic business tool.

But what do you actually need on there? Well, you only really need your basic details: your name, your email address, your website address. Any more text than that is just clutter. And let’s be honest, we know they can get all of the details like your Instagram and your Snapchat (that was a joke), they can get all of that from your website. However, there’s one thing missing from most business cards I see. YOUR PHOTO. To me, this is the most critical element of any business card.

Why? Because when people meet you for the first time, they are less likely to remember your name. And it’s almost guaranteed that they won’t remember the name of your MSP, but they will remember your lovely face and how you made them feel. And people might say, oh, I’m no good with faces. But trust me, if you say that, you are contradicting a hundred thousand years of evolution because we are the descendants of the cave dwellers who learned to recognise the faces of hostile enemies and avoid them. We know they avoided them because survival of the fittest, we’re their ultimate offspring.

So we are more likely to remember faces than the made up labels that we attach to ourselves, which is our name and our company name. We’re also much more driven by our limbic system. I was talking about that earlier as well, wasn’t I? It controls our emotional responses more than our rational thinking brain does. Put it like this, have you ever spotted someone that you dislike walking into a room and you kind of immediately felt this sense of dread? That’s your limbic system reminding you the way that face makes you feel. And yes, it’s perfectly normal. You’re not a bad person. In fact, most other people probably feel the same way.

Now the good news is that you are a great person, and when people see your face entering a room, it makes them feel happy. So put your picture on the back of your business card. People will remember you. They’ll remember how you made them feel, and they’re dramatically more likely to refer you or to actually go on and do business with you.

Mentioned links

• This podcast is in conjunction with the MSP Marketing Edge, the world’s leading white label content marketing and growth training subscription.
• Join me in MSP Marketing Facebook group.
• Connect with me on LinkedIn.
• Connect with my guest, Marvin Bee on LinkedIn, and visit the IT Business Podcast website.
• Got a question about your MSP’s marketing? Submit one here for Paul’s Personal Peer Group.

Welcome to Episode 292 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• Does your service desk manager really need to be a tech?: A service desk manager’s job is to make sure your MSP’s clients are delighted while freeing you up to grow the business. It’s possible that the best person for this job isn’t a technician.
• How your MSP can break into a new vertical: It’s easier to do marketing, find new clients, and make more money for your MSP, if you choose a vertical. Here’s how to get started.
• The framework MSPs can use to be more efficient: Visionary leaders are notorious for moving at such speed that they leave a trail of chaos behind them. My guest helps such visionaries put an end to operational chaos and create operational excellence in their business.
• Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Have you considered how your MSP would respond to a supply chain attack and what marketing actions you would take? If not, it would be a very wise idea.

Does your service desk manager really need to be a tech?

You may just have to tear up that job ad, and let me tell you why. We all know a service desk manager is a critical role. It’s their job to make sure the clients are delighted while freeing you up to grow the business. But whoever said that a service desk manager has to be a tech. What if there’s a different kind of person who’s much more suited to this kind of role?

I really do talk to a lot of MSPs. In fact, it’s one of the most wonderful things about the work I do. I get to talk to lots of different people about lots of different things. And because of my work in my MSP Marketing Edge where we are working with 700 MSPs, I talk to people in all sorts of different circumstances. So we have startups, two businesses that have been going for 30 years. We’ve got one person bands, two businesses with 200 employees. We’ve got all of these and everything in between.

But there’s one thing that I notice again and again and again, and that’s that the most successful MSPs, and let’s define successful as, the owner can do what they want to do with their life. They’ve got enough cash and they’ve got enough time, that’s success is to have that.

The MSPs who are most successful are those where the owner is surrounded by a very good team who take on the burden of the work for them.

Because it’s just too difficult to do everything yourself for more than a couple of years. What’s acceptable for our first few years in business gets tiring and boring as time goes on. And I’m sorry if that’s disappointing news for you because you never wanted to have staff, but it is the difference between just working for yourself and having a business that can survive and thrive without you.

And of course, one of the most key hires in there is a service desk manager or change that job title to whatever is appropriate for you. But basically someone whose entire role is to keep the clients happy and make sure that the work happens as it’s supposed to. Now, different MSPs have different ways of doing this, but they all come down to the same things. You’ve got some technical resource and you’ve got customers who want things to be done, and the service desk manager sits in the middle of that making the magic happen. If you own the business and you are currently doing that as well as the marketing and the sales and looking after the team and account management and finance and admin, that’s so tiring. What a liberating role to have a service desk manager whose entire working existence is focused on the clients and managing resources.

For some people, that’s their dream job. But let me challenge you on exactly who should be doing that job. You see, I’ve always believed and in fact operated this way, that it’s better to hire people who have a great mindset and then train them with the skills that they need to do a specific job. Back when I was working in radio in the early noughties, I had two radio presenters working for me who were either end of this scale. So Kev was naturally talented, but he had a terrible mindset and he was lazy, whereas Tom was less naturally talented, but worked very, very hard to make up for it. Now, guess which of those two was a pleasure to work with and went on to have a very successful career. And guess which one was such a pain in the backside that I took immense pleasure in firing him one day. He’s still in radio, but only just hanging on compared to the other guy.

So if you go with that, mindset first then upskill them, let me ask you a question. Should you necessarily hire a technician to be your service desk manager or should you hire a normal person and then just teach them a few technical skills that they need? Because what are the other skills that the service desk manager needs, right? Well, they need to be great communicators. They need to have the ability to plan and manage resources. They’ve got to be flexible and able to respond to problems quickly. And of course they have to be good with people and to help a team to work efficiently. That means building trust, it means keeping a team motivated, and I’m sure there are other requirements that I haven’t yet thought about.

Here’s the thing. There are people out there who have the mindset to thrive under those exact circumstances. Maybe right now they’re in other sectors, they’re not necessarily even working in technology. But really what technology skills does a service manager need? Does the service manager actually need to know how to configure a server? Do they really need to know how to talk to the third line technician who’s going to do it? Or can a normal person who has spent a career somewhere else keeping clients happy and managing resources, could they do the same for your MSP? What do you think about this? Is hiring a normal person instead of a tech to be your service desk manager, is that an interesting idea to you, or do you think I’ve completely lost the plot?

How your MSP can break into a new vertical

There’s a certain type of MSP where everything’s easier.

It’s easier to make more money, find new clients, and do the marketing that’s going to find you those clients and get all of that money into your business.

In fact, you may have heard that it’s the MSP’s targeting verticals that are enjoying this easy life, but how exactly do they do it?

Let’s find out how your MSP can break into a new vertical and why it’s going to make everything so much easier.

There are many benefits of marketing to a vertical. You can do it alongside your general business if you want to.

And once you’ve picked a vertical, there are a number of actions that you should take to get your marketing properly set up. Here are the first nine that I recommend in the order that you should do them.

Number one, build a website just for that vertical. The easy thing is just to put a page on your existing site, but don’t do that. If you’re going to do this and go for a vertical, really go for it properly. And that means a second website. Put together a proper four to five page website because the goal is to appear to be a true specialist to your target prospects. And a proper website is a basic MSP marketing fundamental. Also, the process of you going through creating that new website, it kind of imprints inside you at your very core that this is a big direction you’re going in and you’re going to take the whole marketing journey so much more seriously.

Number two, set up a vertical specific LinkedIn or Facebook or Instagram, depending which platform most decision makers in that vertical use. So for example, in hospitality and retail you would use Instagram, for B2B you would use LinkedIn, but again, have a separate one to your regular one. You can have your general LinkedIn, that’s just for your general business. And then you can have a vertical specific LinkedIn that’s just for your vertical business. And it means that in your vertical business, you are only connecting to people who are in that vertical. It allows your marketing to be targeted on LinkedIn very, very easily.

Number three, start posting regular content so you have a presence. Make sure to edit your content slightly to put the name of the vertical into the headline or the paragraph, like the intro paragraph. Sometimes making content seem relevant to a vertical is as simple as just mentioning that vertical. So you might say, Here’s how technology can improve productivity for accountants (CPAs). But also look at how they refer to themselves and their businesses. So to take CPAs as an example, they don’t have a business, they have a “practice”.

Number four, start networking within that vertical and meeting as many decision makers as you can. Look for relevant vertical business shows or other events that you can attend because nothing but nothing beats pressing the flesh when you’re just getting started in a new vertical, or in fact, in any new market. You’ll have a marketing revelation at every event, I promise you.

Number five, build your email list. It’s so easy to get started with a vertical, you can just buy targeted data or scrape targeted data or just go onto Google, type in the vertical you want to reach and the geographic area where they are and there’s everyone that you want to possibly reach.

Number six, get your marketing machine working, generating prospects that you can speak to and then call them. Once you’ve got someone into your audiences and you are growing a relationship with them, you always want to pick up the phone and just call them and speak to them. Phone calls will get you where you want to go faster, I promise you. And I know you don’t like picking up the phone, you don’t like making outbound calls, but these don’t have to be sales calls, they can be relationship building calls, they can just be research calls. Tell me about your business. How’s everything going? What’s holding you back right now? You could almost say to them, Hey, we’ve just started working with vertical businesses. I’m just doing some market research, do you mind if I ask you a few questions? They won’t hold that against you if a year or two down the line they’re genuinely seriously looking at using you as their MSP.

Number seven, once you have your first vertical client, and actually the easy way to pick a vertical is to take a client that you’re already working with. Let’s say you’re already working with a dentist and go and look for more dentists, but that’s by-the-by. Once you have one vertical client, work hard to delight them then turn them into a case study or a testimonial as quickly as you can, because this gives others the faith to buy from you. When someone’s working with a vertical specialist, they expect to see reviews, testimonials, and case studies from other people in their vertical.

Number eight, look for other forums where your vertical decision makers hang out. Do they have Facebook groups, LinkedIn groups or chat forums? Can you become a member of these groups? And it’s best to do this properly and above board rather than trying to sneak in. Don’t sell, never sell in these things, add value by answering relevant questions and make sure that there is a link to your website in your profile.

And then number nine, get to know the movers and shakers in the vertical associations. Ultimately, you and the associations and any kind of groups, you’re all serving the same people in that vertical. So be persistent getting to know them, but do play a long game. You’ve got to build trust with them before you can attend their events and get involved in their organisation. The key question to ask is what do they want or need and how can you help them to get it? It’s almost a universal law that, if you help someone else they will help you.

The framework MSPs can use to be more efficient

So you have big things you want to do with your MSP, and that’s great until you start to implement. Because as any business owner knows few plans work out exactly how you thought they would on day one, and no more so than in operations especially in fast-growing MSPs.

My special guest today is an expert at helping ambitious business owners like you leverage AI to make operations so much more efficient.

Hi, I’m Emma Rainville, and I have been dubbed the Wizard of Ops. I help visionary entrepreneurs end operational chaos and create operational excellence in their business through streamlined operations.

Amazing. And you definitely win the best podcast title of the year, the Wizard of Ops. Who was it who gave you that title?

Perry Belcher. So of course the godfather of marketing gave me the title, so obviously I win.

Yeah, absolutely, you’ve won like times thousand, and the vast majority of MSPs listening to this or watching this on YouTube may not have heard of Perry Belcher, but for a marketing fanboy like me, it’s like, oh, wow. I mean, Perry Belcher is just one of the big names of marketing, of small business marketing. He’s been around for about 20 years and I’ve given him a few thousand over the years for various courses and things. Everyone wins because Perry stuff is really good.

So explain to us what being the Wizard of Ops mean, and you said obviously you help entrepreneurs with their operations. What do you actually do? What’s your day-to-day life like?

Sure, so my company is called Shockwave Solutions, and we’re a fractional COO services company. And what makes us unique is that we come with an execution team. So you don’t just get a COO that’s going to give you a bunch of great ideas and then you have no way to plug them in. We come with a team that’s actually going to plug them in and get you results. And so what we do is we come in and we specifically work with visionary entrepreneurs. Visionary entrepreneurs are a different animal all of their own. They need to be managed and nurtured while plugging in their vision because they have big, big, big dreams and goals, and they just need streamlined operations to get them to where they’re trying to go.

So when you talk about working with visionary leaders, are we talking about the kind of person that is moving at such speed towards this amazing future that they leave this trail of chaos behind them?

Absolutely. That’s exactly what happens. And then as soon as they’re done relaying that vision, they’ve already thought of the next thing they’re going to do. And before anyone can plug anything in, they run back into the room and throw wrenches at the entire team who’s trying to build the first thing. So they’re generally frustrated with the fact that their whole team can’t keep up with them.

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. And I think even if you would consider yourself not to be a visionary entrepreneur, I think every business owner on the planet can hear what you’ve just said there and think, yeah, whether I’ve done it deliberately or not, I’ve done some level of that to my team. I know I have, and I know a lot of the MSPs that I work with have. And I think partly that comes from the fact that as the business owner, we decide we want to do something and then we sit for days or weeks or months thinking about it, planning it, talking about it, fleshing it out in our brain, and then one random Wednesday afternoon, we’ll call everyone together onto a Zoom or a Teams call and we’ll say to them, Hey, guess what, we’re going to do this amazing thing, which is A, B, C, and that’s going to cause X, Y, Z to happen and blah, blah, blah. It’s brilliant. Let’s go. And what has taken weeks to ferment in our brain and become fully firmed in our brain, we’ve just dumped on our team with 10 seconds notice, and then we wonder, why don’t they get that? Why isn’t everyone running around?

Also, it hasn’t been fully formed, you have the big picture and not the details. So you believe that you’ve relayed this beautiful map of excellence to exactly where you want to go with simple, streamlined plugin. And what you’ve really created was a whole bunch of questions that you have no tolerance to sit and answer.

I love that. My team are going to be listening to this podcast nodding their heads going, Yeah, we understand that completely. So it’s almost like you guys then are the support for the survivors group that’s left behind.

It’s a great way of putting it, I call it integrator. But we basically take the vision and we strategically plan it, and then we integrate it into the business at the appropriate time.

How do you do that? And I’m not asking you to give away the secret sauce or your business but how does anybody plan that kind of implementation around that speed and that urgency of changing things and getting things done?

Sure, so it’s two methods. The first one is having a foundational framework, and that’s called WAVE: Written vision, Absolute focus, Values driven future and Execution plan. So where are we actually trying to go in 1, 3, 5, and 10 years? I need to understand very intricately what you want the business to look like. It doesn’t have to be specifics, but what does the business look like, what are we trying to build? The number two thing is what am I absolutely focused on? When you come up with a hundred great ideas, what am I focused on? What is the business’s purpose? What is the problem that we solve? Values driven future, what are our values in the business? What’s important to us? And then execution plan is how do we execute and continue to move forward? So what that means is what is our meeting cadence? What is our communication channels? How do we set goals and how do we change things? When is it okay, and when is it not okay? When you have a plan ahead of time that allows you to set boundaries and rules around it, it makes everything a lot easier.

When everybody on the team knows where we’re trying to go and what we’re trying to do, they’re able to fill in a lot of the blanks themselves.

And then the second thing is an operational framework. So we have the foundational framework, then we have the operational framework, and that’s the one that’s going to direct our business on the day to day. So that’s called SCOPE, and that’s what my book is called. So S is setting your vision. S is actually WAVE, so setting your vision. C is creating processes, making sure we have all of our processes documented, understood, profitable and efficient. O is operational excellence, always functioning in a way that is operationally excellent. That means from the sales process to delivery process to the day-to day of our business, things are running in a way that makes our customer base or our client base happy. P is people development, can’t grow your business without growing your people. That’s a mistake so many people make. And then the E again is execution. How are we going to execute all of this? So when a big great idea comes into play, that fits our absolute focus, at what point do we insert that in the business so we don’t burn everything else down that we’ve planned? And when you have those boundaries, those guidelines, those rules and that roadmap, you’ll go from a great idea to a great business, to great revenue, to really great profits.

I love that, and the business owners, the visionaries that you’re working with, because obviously you’ve got a framework there, and sometimes visionaries don’t like having to comply to a framework and having to fit within a framework. So even though everything you’ve said there makes perfect sense, do the people you work with, do they feel like that’s holding them back, that it’s reducing their speed? Or do they actually see that actually we’ve got the power here of something that takes all these amazing ideas and focuses them down into the one thing that’s going to make the big difference this week?

So the first month, they love the idea of it all. The second month, they’re angry and frustrated. The third month they start to see some serious traction with projects that they’ve not been able to get off the ground for a long time. By the sixth month, they see that their new ideas are being implemented, but their old idea not dying because of it. And the freedom of not having to make every decision or figure out every detail by month six feels so good. I have never had anyone that I’ve worked with under these frameworks ever say to me after six months, I hate this or I don’t like this. Actually, I’ll get a phone call like, Hey, I’ve got an idea. Can you do an absolute focus check? Meaning does it fit in our business?

I love that. Emma, let’s just focus our final question or so on the survivors club, the implementers. So we have all sorts of people listen to this podcast and watch this on YouTube, and the vast majority are MSP owners. But I know we have some managers, I know we have some marketing managers, marketing implementers, all sorts of people. If for someone who’s working with someone like that who is creating chaos, what’s a good first step in telling them to get help without actually using those two words?

I think that there is, particularly with aggressive people, which is usually a visionary entrepreneur, they’re very aggressive, particularly when it comes with their vision and how simple everything is. I think that the best thing to do is sit down with them and say, and these words work really well for me every time, I want to slow down for a minute just so that I can go fast. I have some clarity that I need. I think that I can accomplish what you’re trying to accomplish, but I have some holes and some pieces here. And when you’re not high enough up, that’s the best way to do it so that they slow down enough to answer your questions, and after you’re capable of doing what they need you to do after that conversation, they’ll trust that conversation. And it’ll happen just because instead of you asking for it, I think that’s the best way to go about it.

Yeah, I love that. Emma, thank you very much. Tell us a little bit about your book, where we can get hold of it. Tell us about your business and tell us how we can get hold of you.

Sure, my business is Shockwave Solutions, we’re a fractional COO services. We help visionary entrepreneurs create operational excellence in their business. You can find us at www.shockwavesolutionsllc.com. My book is called Scope, you can get it on Amazon, Scope by Emma Rainville, or you can go to readscope.co and grab it there. Thank you so much for having me, it’s been a lot of fun.

Paul’s Personal Peer Group

Dan owns an MSP in California, and his question is no doubt inspired by any number of recent events in the news and one all MSPs fear: If you are compromised in a supply chain attack, what marketing actions should you take?

I know this is one of any MSP’s worst nightmares. One of your key vendors is breached and because you use their tool, hundreds of endpoints under your care are compromised. Well, the golden rule for this situation is constant communication with total transparency. You have to step up your communication with clients and tell them what’s happened, how it’s happened if you know, how it affects them and what’s happening now.

In a situation like this, communication and transparency count for everything, and they will protect your long-term reputation at the expense of some short-term pain for you. There are some things you can consider in advance. How will you communicate properly with all clients? Is it worth you perhaps even preparing a status update page that you can roll out? Can you record audio updates on your phone system before they’re connected to someone who’s calling in for example? What extra resource can you bring into the business to focus on talking to clients? Is there someone who can come in to just sit on the phone and just answer people? I know they’re saying the same thing again and again and again, but if people are worried, you need to have someone that they can talk to. And if that’s stopping you from taking technical action, you need extra resource for that.

And then what will you say to clients if there’s little information coming out from your compromised vendor? How will you respond if the attack is big enough to hit the national news and your clients ask whether you are affected? And how will you respond if the details of your supply chain attack somehow become featured in the local media or maybe even on social media? Also, and this is a critical one, what would happen if this happened while you’re away – you’re on vacation, you’re on holiday, or you are unreachable in some way. If you’re going to make a plan, it’s got to be a plan that your service desk manager or someone else in the business can implement whether you are there or not.

Mentioned links

• This podcast is in conjunction with the MSP Marketing Edge, the world’s leading white label content marketing and growth training subscription.
• Join me in MSP Marketing Facebook group.
• Connect with me on LinkedIn.
• Connect with my guest, Emma Rainville on LinkedIn, visit the Shockwave website and check out Emma’s book: SCOPE
• Got a question about your MSP’s marketing? Submit one here for Paul’s Personal Peer Group.

Welcome to Episode 291 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• They want to buy 365 direct – fight it, or accept it?: If a client wants to buy 365 direct, it’s not necessarily a bad thing… it could actually become a massive sales opportunity for your MSP.
• Should your MSP start a podcast?: Lots of MSPs have asked me for advice on setting up a podcast, and yes, having a podcast can be an insanely powerful marketing tool. But should you do one? Let me help you answer that question.
• Ask these questions to pick an MSP marketing agency: Many MSPs hate marketing and they hate agencies even more. My guest is going to tell you the specific questions you should ask a marketing agency to separate the good guys from the bad.
• Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Have you ever considered sending an impact box to prospects? Find out what you should include in yours.

They want to buy 365 direct – fight it, or accept it?

Are these clients for real? They want to switch to buying 365 directly to save a couple of bucks a month. This is a scenario most MSPs face at some point, but should you fight it, try and educate them or let them just do what they want? What if I told you this wasn’t necessarily a bad thing and could actually become a massive sales opportunity for your MSP.

As someone who doesn’t personally have to deal with 365 and all the licenses and NCE and all of that, it does look to me like Microsoft has made it as hard as possible for you. That whole NCE thing is a massive pain, right? And especially if you have a client where you’ve made an annual commitment and then of course they hit you a few months in that they want to buy directly, and that just creates a headache for everybody.

It’s not like 365 is a high margin item for you, but from the client’s point of view, 365 is right there at the core of their experience.

Outlook and Teams and Word and Excel, these are all applications that most businesses use multiple times every single workday. So they want them to work, they want them to be productivity tools, not pains in the backside tools, and I think that’s a basic and perfectly understandable requirement of any business owner or manager today. Don’t you agree? So if someone wants to move the licenses away from you, buy direct and save themselves a couple of dollars per user per month, what should you do?

I’ve asked a few MSPs this question over the last couple of weeks and some of them have said that you should just roll over and you should just take it. So invoice them for any out-of-pocket expenses caused by NCE. Make sure they know how that’s going to affect the direct support that you give them and then let them go off and buy it from elsewhere.

Others have said that you should fight really hard to keep everything under your jurisdiction. Isn’t that the point of a managed service provider that you are looking after all of their technology? And that starts with the very basic help desk functions and goes right up to their technology strategy. Now if you don’t have some level of control over everything in between those two items. help desk and strategy, then surely you’re making your life harder than it needs to be and that must have an impact on the service that you can deliver to them and the service that they’ll enjoy.

So maybe the message you want to send them is telling them all the downsides, all the bad things that could happen, like the fact they’ll have to deal directly with Microsoft if there’s an issue. They’ll have to pick which license is best for them as well. Of course they’ll have to set up their new users, they’ll have to manage their users, deal with all of that headache. And of course it complicates your basic support or it could have an impact on some of the other work that you’re doing for them.

The challenge for you if a client asks this and you want to fight it, is to make them realise how much extra work they’re going to have to do for saving $2 per user per month. So to recap, some MSPs would roll over and say, here you go, other MSPs would fight it to keep it. To me there’s a third option and that’s to use this as an early warning of some potential future change in your relationship with your client. Because let’s be honest, this is just not a sensible decision that would be made by a sensible decision maker. Is it? It’s taking on a lot of extra work to save a tiny amount of money. And that rings an alarm bell for me.

Is your client desperately trying to cut costs? Does your client really not understand what you do for that $2 per user per month? Is your client actually thinking of switching to another MSP or doing something completely different and this is kind of your first notification of a very long process where at the end of it they’re going to leave and go to someone else. My suggestion is that if this happens to you, you don’t use this as an opportunity to go in and say stay or go. Instead, you use it as an opportunity to start a discussion to have an in-depth conversation about their business, where it’s going, what the goals are, what their issues might be, what are they facing at this very moment.

Very rarely are you as the MSP, the cause of some problems in their business, but you can become the victim of other problems that their business has. We’d always want to have a business discussion with someone before they made a major decision about doing something different, wouldn’t we? And this might just be the early warning that you would always want to receive. It’s actually quite cool to get it even if it does cause you a little bit of distress and of course some work. And do you know what, it might even lead to an upsell opportunity. Sometimes people cutting costs is a sign that they’re actually looking to spend more but in a different direction. So there might be some other services that you can sell them or you might be able to come up with a more comprehensive deal that helps them achieve the things that they want to achieve.

Now I would love to know what you think about this and did you know I have a Facebook group that’s all about discussing marketing and business growth and it’s a vendor free zone, only MSPs, no vendors. To join, go onto Facebook, type in MSP marketing in the search bar and then go to groups and you just look for the MSP marketing group. You’ve just got to prove that you’re an MSP by answering a few simple questions and I look forward to discussing this with you in that Facebook group.

Should your MSP start a podcast?

Have you ever heard me on my podcast and thought, that seems easy, I should do that? Lots of MSPs have asked me for advice on setting up a podcast, and yes, having a podcast can be an insanely powerful marketing tool. But should you do one? Let me help you answer that question, and if you do get started, let me tell you about these specific things you need to consider before you get started.

So Paul, should I do a podcast for my MSP? Well, my easy flippant answer to this is probably not, no. Because unless you have a real passion for podcasts and you’ve always itched to do your own, you’ll quickly find that a regular podcast is a total pain. However, the benefits are huge. I found that my podcast has been a key tool to reach people that I’d never have reached any other way.

It’s helped me set myself up as an authority figure. It’s helped me to open doors to influential people by interviewing them and it’s helped me to build a brand new audience. Would you and I be talking right now, either you listening on the podcast or watching me on YouTube, if I wasn’t doing this?

If you do fancy doing a podcast, these are the main 10 areas to consider.

The first is your target audience. Who are you going to do the podcast for? Now this is easy if you operate in a specific vertical, but much harder if you just operate geographically. You have to really ask yourself why would someone choose to listen to your podcast? What’s in it for them?

The second thing that kind of leads on from that is the podcast title. You need a unique title that will catch their attention. It also needs to be something that’s not already being done. And remember, ordinary people, the business owners and managers that you want to reach, they’re not as interested in technology as you are. So having a podcast about technology is probably not going to be interesting to the people you most want to reach, but they are interested in growing their business, increased productivity and just having a smoother, better run business.

Number three is regularity. So weekly gets people into the habit of listening. We’ve been doing it weekly since around about November 2019, but I’ll be honest with you it’s a treadmill, it really is. I work several weeks ahead, so I never miss an episode and that requires a lot of discipline. For example, right now I’m recording this on a Tuesday morning. It’s so sunny and beautiful outside I want to be out in my shorts working in the garden, but instead I’m in my studio and I’m recording the podcast because I need to do it now because my whole team is waiting for me to record that podcast so they can go and do the editing and the promotions and all the stuff they need to do. Discipline is a big thing with a podcast and if you’re going to do it weekly, you’ve got to work ahead and make sure it appears weekly.

Number four is format. So lots of podcasts are just an interview with a guest and that is a kind of an easy way to do a podcast. The downside is if your guest is a bit boring or the listener doesn’t like the guest or their subject, they’ll just skip the whole podcast and that damages the principle of trying to get them to listen to you every single week. So the other way to do it is to have several segments to the show. That’s what we do in our podcast. If you listen, you’ll hear me, I do a talky bit and then I’ll do a tease or something and then I’ll do another talky bit and another tease, and then we have the guest on and then we sort of finish with a listener question and that’s a pretty good format that’s worked well for us for a number of years.

Number five to think about is specific content. So what exactly are you going to talk about? It’s worth having a content calendar to plan this and mine stretches months into the future. So as I’m recording this, we are here on the 29th of April. You know that this is obviously going out in June and we have a plan right up to September, October right now. The quickest way to lose motivation for your podcast is to be scratching around for content ideas. You’ve got to think ahead and make that systematic knowing what you’re going to be recording months in advance.

Which brings us onto number six, recording. You need a quality USB microphone. I use a Shure MV7. It’s quite difficult to say, although don’t get too caught up on the technology. For years, I used a really old Samsung Meteor microphone, it must’ve been like 10, 15 years old, and that was fine enough until we upgraded, did the whole studio out and decided to upgrade the equipment, and that was years into the podcast. Just as you can have the very best golf clubs and be a terrible golfer, you can have the very best microphone and produce awful content if you’ve got nothing to say. Make sure you do record somewhere quiet, you’ll get great audio quality recording in a small cupboard. And I do mean that, a friend of mine does voiceovers for national radio and he does it in his under stairs cupboard with a blanket just to kind of deaden the sound. Now today I do mine in a large open space at home. If you’re watching this on YouTube, you’ll see my studio space and it doesn’t sound too bad because we’ve put acoustic tiles on the ceiling and on some of the walls as well. But if I had to start again and I didn’t have this space, I’d just go in a small cupboard and I’d just use my microphone and just reduce the space because you reduce the amount of boom that you can have if there’s not so much space.

Number seven then is production or jingles, you know when the guy that says on the podcast of Here’s Paul Green’s marketing podcast, something like that, you just get someone on Fiverr or Upwork to make this for you. There’s so many people out there that will do voiceovers. You can source your own or you can just get someone who’s got a good voice you love to do it for you, and then get someone else on Fiverr or Upwork to produce that, to turn that into a little jingle that you can play out. Just don’t let anyone who does this for you try to charge you any kind of ongoing licensing fee because that is nonsense. Pay once and own the work.

Number eight is editing. As with videos, really it’s the editing that makes or breaks a podcast. We have two people that work on our production. We have James, who’s our producer, and Simon who’s also our producer and our editor. And Simon sits and edits this just down to a level of perfection. He takes out all of my ums and uhs, he’ll get rid of my mistakes, he tightens it all up. He does a fantastic job. And when we first started, it was just me and James and we just did a quick edit and got it out there. Now we spend a lot of time, we repurposed a lot of our podcast into YouTube, into other platforms. We cut it into shorts, we cut it into clips for LinkedIn. But all of that is stuff you do down the line. And we use Premiere Pro now because it’s a fantastic tool where you’ve got a flow and you are repurposing content. But again, if I was starting again tomorrow, even if it was just me editing my podcast, I would start with something called Audacity that’s an open source audio editor. It’s a really great piece of software. However, as quickly as I could, I would outsource the editing if I was starting again. So he takes my editor Simon, around about two to three hours a week. He takes my recordings, my ramblings, and he turns them into a well polished product. But please do not underestimate how important the editing is. The talking bits that I do, which takes me around about an hour a week, plus my interview. That’s nothing compared to the time that Simon puts in making it perfect. So if you listen to the podcast or watch the videos and you think this is good, this is professional content, it’s Simon that’s doing all the heavy lifting on this. Thanks Simon.

Then we go onto number nine, which is hosting. So we use something called Castos, which automatically publishes the podcast to all of the major platforms, it’s why we’re on every single major podcast platform. And as a bonus, we can control and publish the podcast through our WordPress website, which is really easy. But that was a choice we made six years ago. And there are lots of hosts around, there are other hosts that are perhaps a bit more up to date. There are some, and I can’t remember its name off the top of my head, but there’s one which can dynamically insert adverts. So it can take all of your old podcast episodes and insert new adverts into your old podcast episodes. So it really is worth you checking out all of the major players and you definitely want to get your podcast transcribed as that becomes valuable content for your website. We don’t use Castos’s own automated transcription, we prefer Rev.com’s human checked transcription, so they do it on AI and then a human checks it. And the reason we do that is because we take that transcript and we use that to build our entire podcast page. So if you go onto mspmarketingedge.com and you have a look at the podcast and you’ll see for about the last 15, 20 weeks or so, which is when we last changed it, we have insanely good pages where the whole transcript is on the page. We pull out key quotes, we have links to things, we have other resources that appear in the page. And that takes Laura who’s on my podcast team, it takes her a couple of hours a week to do, but it’s worth it because we do see some good traffic coming into that.

And then finally number 10, it’s the final item and it’s promotion. Now, this is the biggest question to answer. How will you promote your podcast to the audience that you want to reach? So here’s what we do or a little bit of what we do for ours. I’ve already mentioned a few things, we do like repurposing the content onto different platforms, but I send out a big email to my database every Tuesday. I post it in my Facebook group, that’s my MSP marketing Facebook group that’s only for MSPs. We post it on LinkedIn, actually goes across the week in two or three different ways. And for special episodes, we do sometimes run paid ads as well. One other thing that we do is we ask the guests to promote it to their audiences. So we’ll only do that if they’re guests from within the channel, because that’s a sensible thing to do. But we do also invite on strategic guests. So people that I know are very well connected and will bring a lot of listeners onto the podcast. In fact, the pro tip on that one is go and find all the other podcasts that are big that you want to be on and invite the host of those onto your podcast. So they come onto your podcast, you do an interview with them, and inevitably during that interview, they will say to you, would you like to come on and be a guest on my podcast? So you actually promote your podcast by appearing on other people’s podcasts, and as long as you’re all reaching the same audience, that’s a really great idea.

Ask these questions to pick an MSP marketing agency

Many MSPs hate marketing and they hate agencies even more. But why? Is it because they’ve had their fingers burned, they’ve spent a ton of cash on an agency and felt they never got value for money? Or is it because agencies persist in making marketing seem mysterious when it’s really not? My special guest today is going to tell you exactly why MSPs hate marketing. And if you are hiring a marketing agency, he’s going to tell you the specific questions you should ask to separate the good guys from the bad guys.

Hello, my name is JP De Silva and I am the founder and owner of Create Want.

A marketing agency. And thank you so much for joining me on this podcast, JP, because we are going to talk today, two marketers having a discussion about why people hate marketers, which sounds like a bizarre conversation for us to have, but there is a solid reason for us talking about that. Because we believe that actually it unfortunately makes MSPs hold themselves back because of their dislike of marketing and marketers in general. So we’re going to explore that today and try and make it more comfortable for you as an MSP if you are thinking of hiring a marketing agency or bringing a marketing person on board. We want to sort of help you by knowing what are the right questions to ask, what are the things you should consider and why you shouldn’t hate marketing people. That’s our goal for this anyway.

So tell us a little bit about you. I know those people watching this on YouTube will see that you look like you’re about 18, but you’re telling me that you’ve been in marketing for 25 years already. Tell us about your background.

Yeah, I’m past 40. So yeah, I have been in the industry probably for about 25 years, and it all started when my dad was a computer programmer before internet was a thing. And I was always with computers and marketing related stuff, and I started helping people trying to get their name out. And I found out that a lot of business owners didn’t understand the principles of marketing and how it works and what to expect, and it created a false expectation. So over the years, I started to lean more towards how can I get this person to understand how these work so they can make a more responsible decision when it comes to, oh, I’m going to invest money here or I’m going to do this. And it became a very fun thing just because I’ve heard probably about every question, every complaint people have in the industry, which has helped me to develop things that is going to help them overcome that.

That makes sense. And certainly back in the day, and even today still to a certain extent, people who don’t know much about marketing or technology assume that if you can do computer stuff, you’re good at marketing. We see this with the MSPs. MSPs are sometimes asked by their clients, can you build us a website? To which of course we know that managing someone’s technology and building a website are two completely different skills, but the end users, the end business owners don’t do that. I remember 20, when was this back in 2005, so yeah, 20 years ago, my last proper job before I started my first business, I worked for a newspaper publishing company here in the UK. So 2005, fairly early days on the internet, but I worked in the internet division. And at one point just before I left because things were going stupid, they decided that they should give the responsibility for the internet publishing division to the IT department. And their thinking was, these are our news websites, so the computer people should run them. And of course, it was just a case of no, they’re websites, it’s just the conduit to get the news out to people. I made this argument in a meeting, that would be giving the printing press over to the IT people. They wouldn’t know what to do with it and they wouldn’t know what to do with the websites.

So you must have seen then over the years, things completely change in terms of the rise of digital marketing and all the offline stuff, even though some of it is still valid, it’s just not popular these days and most people don’t do it. What are the big changes have you seen over the last 25 years?

The main thing I feel is it is so much easier to put content out. It is so much easier to put junk out that makes it harder for something like Google or any search engine to try to sift through all of the stuff available to be able to come out with a proper answer. And I tell a lot of people that anything from Facebook, Instagram, paid ads, SEO, I look at it like a highway. There is a highway and there are billboards. And those billboards are your SEO strategies, your Google ads. And the truth is that we’re running out of highway. There is so many people posting, doing this and that it requires a clever creative outside the box intent to come up with, okay, this is how I’m going to target my perfect audience, because it is not like before where you just needed to put your name in the yellow pages and make the best offer and wait for the phone to ring. Now there is a lot more territory to cover, which doesn’t make it necessarily harder, you just have to put a little bit more, oh, okay, I’m going to try this with intent, and it usually works.

Yeah, I agree with you, there’s a lot more junk out there. And of course, the last two years with the rise of AI, we’ve seen a lot more what people are calling AI slop, which is just nonsense that’s out there and I think there’s no long-term future in that AI slop, but where we stand today in 2025, that is surprisingly dominant on a lot of platforms.

Let’s talk about MSPs. So JP you know MSPs, I know you work with a number of MSPs, although you’re not an MSP marketing specialist, you work with lots of businesses and MSPs are amongst your client roster. So you know that they’re primarily technicians first, that they’re driven by helping people, solving problems, great customer service, all of those things MSPs love. And the vast majority hate marketing. And I know that that’s not just managed service providers. You see that from all sorts of business owners. So why do people who are not marketers hate marketing?

The fastest way to answer that is because they don’t understand it. That is the fastest answer. Now, the next layer to that is the fact that they have been screwed over in the past by somebody. Now granted, I believe there is people out there who are not necessarily the most honest, but really everybody’s trying to do their best. And the problem is that if the business owner doesn’t understand what’s going to happen when they implement certain strategies or what to expect or don’t understand the foundation of it, they’re going to listen to what that professional marketing agency/freelancer is saying, and they might be implementing something that is not going to work for them. And it’s not because the marketing agency is intentionally doing that. It’s not because the business owner is intentionally doing that. They just don’t understand how it works. So I give this example, sometimes I say, listen, because I know how to run ads or because I’m an expert on video production, that doesn’t mean it’s the right thing for you.

And I think that’s where the disconnection usually happens. Hey, I need more clients. And they say, oh, well you need to run ads because that’s what the agency knows how to do. Now it might work but it may not be the strategy for them.

I truly believe that the main reason people end up hating marketing is because they don’t understand it.

They say, Hey, I want to do X, Y, and Z, and I need this many leads. And the agency is like, oh, okay, well let’s do blah and then they don’t get the result and then the client is like, oh no, I want to replace my agency. We’ve been gifted to having clients for over 15 years, and it is often we get people like, yeah, we’re not happy with our agency. And believe it or not I always, and this might be sound odd, but I always vouch for the agency and not for the client, simply because I know there is something they did not understand in the process. And if they were to have that information, it would be a lot smoother.

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. So you are actually trying to help educate them about the things that perhaps their previous agency didn’t educate them. It’s interesting what you say about the agency falling back on their own capabilities. It’s like if you go to a guy who’s holding a big hammer and you say to him, I’ve got a problem. I need a hole in the wall. He’s going to say, I know how to get a hole in the wall, I’m going to hammer it. If you go up to a different guy who’s got a drill, right, and you say, I need a hole in the wall, then he’s going to drill it. And both of those people believe that their way is the best way. And I think that’s a really good way of for you of describing how marketing agencies come at it. If they’re good at making outbound calls, they see that as the answer. If they’re good at SEO (search engine optimization) they see that as the answer, which is really interesting.

So let’s bring this back to being an MSP owner. So if you are an MSP owner you know you need to do marketing to win new clients, you know you need new clients to increase your profit, you know you need to increase your profit to have a better life, right? That’s an established thing, but you’re stuck on what is the best marketing solution for me? Put yourself in that person’s shoes. And what do you think are some of the right questions to ask or sort of avenues to explore before you pick? Well, I guess there’s two things. There’s what kind of marketing do you do? So do you go down the DIY route, (do it yourself), or do you go down the done for you, or do you find something in between? And then how do you actually pick that right person?

That’s a very interesting question, and there is a few ways we can answer it, but I feel like the one thing people should keep in mind, regardless of the option is, it has to be simple. I’ve worked with some of the biggest brands and some of the smallest businesses, and the simpler the better. Do not make it complicated. It is not complicated. If it has a billion steps and all this different stuff, it is probably not, right? Not to get carried away, but if any business owner were to look at how they started their business, it was them being passionate about what they were doing, giving that information to another person who was also in need of that, that’s the simplicity of it. All we’re trying to do is to recreate that same process, but to thousands of people. That’s it. At any given time, any coffee shop, any MSP, any lawyer started by, okay, it’s just me, I’m a small business, I need to start to drum up some money. How do I do this? And they we’re just doing that.

So if a business owner is in the position of how do I approach this need, number one, have a strategy. Whoever you’re going to work with needs to put together a strategy, something simple that says, Hey, this is your perfect audience, your perfect type of client. This is what they need and this is what we can say to them so they understand we can offer that. What is going to be the medium we are going to use to deliver that message. And they should be able to walk you through sort of like, this is what’s going to happen and it’s going to lead to this and it’s going to lead to this, and this is what you’re going to have at the end. So not sure if I fully answer your question, but that is what I would recommend to an MSP owner or a business owner who’s like, how do I pick my next marketing agency because I’m frustrated with the current one? Well make sure that they have a plan and that they are able to explain to you what’s being done and why.

Yeah, I think that’s great advice. And of course as an MSP owner, you’re dealing with very technical and very difficult, complicated things in your work. And so it’s easy to assume that your marketing should also be difficult and technical and multi-step. And I completely agree, the simpler you can make it, the easier you can make it, well, the more likely it is to happen for a start. Simpler, easier marketing that happens is always better than complex smart marketing that doesn’t happen because there’s just too many steps in it. So that’s really good advice.

Final question for you, JP, is if you could have every MSP owner that you speak to know one thing, apart from the stuff that you’ve just said, what would that one thing be? Or if there’s no one thing, what would be the one question you would want them to ask of you?

So one is they need to track everything. They need a system or something that allows them to see the progress of what’s being done. So if they’re writing content for SEO, they need to see is the traffic increasing? If they’re doing social media, do we get more exposure through social media? Are we doing email campaigns? Are people just track, look at it just like a diet and people track their weight and their measurements and stuff. Just measure things out to make sure that what you are doing it is working or is not working so you can make adjustments. Please, please have a strategy. A strategy is your GPS. It is going to take you from point A to point B. Can you make it without a strategy? Yes. But if you have a strategy is going to be the easiest way to figure out if you’re doing the right thing or if it’s going to work out.

And it takes time and money. A lot of people have the misconception that is going to be, I’m not saying it has to be expensive, but I feel people need to understand it is going to take work. It is going to cost certain amount of money. I know people always try to get, how can I get the cheapest option or whatever, which is fine, they should, but they need to understand that they’re going to get the result they’re paying for to some extent. So they need to be conscious of that and think with that a little bit.

Yeah, I agree. And selling a managed services contract, perhaps one of the longest, most complex sales B2B sales that there is, apart from the multimillion pound sales that are being made to enterprise companies and governments, those are probably longer and more complex. But in terms of small business transactions, absolutely it takes time, time, time. The flip side of that, of course is you keep the client for 10 years, which is unheard of in other B2B sales. JP, thank you for your time today. Briefly tell us what does your business do, how do you help MSPs and how can we get in touch with you?

Sure. The name of my company is Create Want. And that’s what we do, we create want for people’s products and services. We believe that marketing has gone the wrong way by pushing people into buy now or you will lose an arm or get it this and all that. And we figure out that everything you’ve bought, you bought it because you want it. So I was like, well, why are we trying to push things into people? Why we don’t just create want, why we don’t just make it so people want it. And there is many different ways, videos, SEO, emails, etc. So we try to figure out, okay, what is going to work for this particular person? And a lot of our clients are actually agencies, marketing agencies, marketing directors, business owners, and we find a lot of joy doing that because it’s not just meh marketing it’s, Hey, how can we actually create want for your services?

And what’s the best way for us to get in touch with you?

JP@createwant.com, that’s the easiest way. That’s my direct email and I love answering questions. I could spend my entire day just helping people answer question. It is the thing that I’m most passionate about. I don’t charge anything for it. I just want to help people accomplish their goals.

Paul’s Personal Peer Group

Gideon runs an MSP in Texas and he really wants to make an impact with his prospects by sending them physical stuff in the mail. So his question is: What should I put in an impact box?

An impact box, also known sometimes as a “shock and awe box”, is a box of stuff that you send to a prospect in order to make an impact. And the idea is to really punch through and show them that you mean business. Now you don’t have to spend a fortune on your box. The contents could include something as simple as a handwritten short intro note. And yes, it should be handwritten so it stands out and has value. And you just need to say something like, Hi Dave, I know that picking a new IT support company is a big decision. We’d love to partner with you. Here’s a copy of my IT services buyer’s guide and some case studies plus some snacks to enjoy while you are reading them. If you’ve got any questions about joining us, please give me a call on this number.

You’d also put in there your proposal or maybe your confirmation of a meeting or a follow-up meeting depending where in the sales process you send them this impact box. I mentioned earlier that thing called an IT services buyer’s guide. Well, this is a guide that tells them how to switch from one MSP to another. We actually give one of these to our MSP Marketing Edge members and we update it every year. It’s a very, very powerful tool because the only people who would read something like that are those people who are almost ready to switch from one MSP to another. So it’s a great way for you to stamp your authority as the person who wrote the book on how to pick a new MSP. Can you see the power of that? That definitely goes in your impact box.

You’d also add in a selection of case studies, and I know that that would be a second piece of printed material. You’ve got your IT services buyer’s guide, and then your case studies. But each of these things play a different part. In fact, one idea to move away from just being printed stuff is to actually put video case studies onto a USB. But then you’ve got the thing of your prospects plugging a USB from a stranger into their laptop. And we all know that they would do that, but you don’t necessarily want to encourage them to do that.

Next thing that goes in your impact box is some edible stuff. So chocolates, biscuits, sweets, candy, whatever. I mean, what you can do is if you could find out the favourite chocolate bar of the person you’re sending it to, that would be so powerful. Imagine if their favourite chocolate bar was a Snickers and you put five Snickers bars in that impact box. I mean, that just shows a level of care and attention to detail that’s so high.

And it’s actually quite easy to find out. You just ring up their business, speak to the receptionist and say, Hey, I’m sending a box of stuff to this person. Just out of interest, what’s their favourite candy bar? What’s their favourite chocolate bar? And then you just go out and you get a few of those. If you didn’t want to do candy chocolates or sweets, you could just do perhaps a few cans of Coke or Pepsi or tea bags or sachets of coffee, something like that.

And then finally, you should do a piece of merch – merchandise. I’m down with the kids. I can say merch. It could be a mouse mat. Do people still use mouse mats? I see MSPs using them but I’m not convinced that normal people do, but it could be a mouse mat, a pen or a mug or something like that. It doesn’t really matter just find some merch that you like and get some made for your impact box.

Then make sure the box looks really nice inside and outside. So inside you can use sheets of gently crumpled tissue paper to achieve that. And then the outside, you could get your box printed in your MSP’s brand colours. Well, the simpler thing is just to buy some boxes off Amazon or wherever and then get some stickers printed with your logo and perhaps saying what it is. The perfect way is to get it printed to your brand, but sometimes the perfect way just slows everything down. Whereas you could get an impact box put together in the next two days if you just did it, and then you refined it down the line.

Mentioned links

• This podcast is in conjunction with the MSP Marketing Edge, the world’s leading white label content marketing and growth training subscription.
• Join me in MSP Marketing Facebook group.
• Connect with me on LinkedIn.
• Connect with my guest, Jean Paul De Silva on LinkedIn, and visit the Create Want website.
• Got a question about your MSP’s marketing? Submit one here for Paul’s Personal Peer Group.

Welcome to Episode 290 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• Can your MSP offer an easy first purchase?: One of the biggest MSP marketing hurdles is asking potential clients to go from nothing to a monthly recurring revenue contract. A better way is to give them an easy first purchase.
• Does your MSP do whatever it takes to keep clients happy?: Flexibility and initiative needs to be a culture within an MSP, not a policy. A culture of “do whatever makes technology easy for clients” would be a powerful retention weapon.
• Build a personal brand to build your MSP: My special guest is a personal branding expert and explains how it’s easy to build and can be incredibly profitable when you get it right.
• Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Ever wondered why your MSP’s marketing and sales are SOOOO slow? Let me explain and advise what you can do about it.

Can your MSP offer an easy first purchase?

Here’s something you know already, it’s just too darn hard to get new managed service clients. One of the biggest hurdles is that you are asking them to go from nothing straight to a monthly recurring revenue contract at the click of a finger. Surely convincing them it’s safe to start spending their money with you is easy. You just put a strong case forward and then dazzle them with the service that they’re going to be getting, yeah? If only it was that easy. So if the client finds signing a contract with you a bit scary, how do we fix that? Is there a way to make them feel happy committing to you and spending money with you? Absolutely there is, and let me tell you what it is.

What we’re really talking about here is building trust.

Trust is a massive currency within marketing and sales. The more trust you have, the more likely people are to sign a contract and throw themselves into your care.

But the opposite of that is also the case. If you don’t have enough trust built with your leads and with your prospects, then asking them to go from no buying relationship with you straight into a managed services contract is a big ask. I know it can be done and it is done every single day, but surely we should be trying to make our lives easier. If you look at this from the point of view of the person buying, and by the way that’s always a great way to look at any of your marketing and your sales, always, always, always look at it from the other person’s point of view. So when they start looking for a new MSP or maybe even their first MSP, we call them suspects. They have their arms folded, they are suspicious of everyone they find and they are not overly impressed with anyone at all. And even if they’ve been given a warm referral from a friend or they find an MSP online that has tons of social proof, so it looks like a safe choice, they are still suspicious asking someone to trust you with their technology. And as we said, it’s a big ask.

Now, they might not know what they don’t know about technology, but they do know that if you get it wrong their business is dead in the water. And this is one of the reasons why it takes so much time to build a relationship and warm up an arms folded suspect, turn them into a lead turn that lead into a prospect, that prospect into an opportunity. It takes time, it takes effort, and it’s exhausting because the risk is so big from their point of view. So let’s see if we can de-risk that for them.

One of the ways that you could do that is with a risk reversal guarantee. I’ve seen only a small number, actually a tiny number of MSPs do a guarantee and the ones that do it the best, they have massive guarantees. They guarantee absolute complete delight, complete satisfaction. And if the client doesn’t experience that, they can walk away, in fact they will help them migrate over to another MSP. I’ve seen one MSP even do a money back within the guarantee, if you’re not happy in the first six months, we’ll let you move somewhere else and you’ll get your money back. Now, if you’re really confident about your delivery and your ability to create and maintain relationships with clients, then that’s a smart route to go. However, for a lot of MSPs, a guarantee like that and especially a money back guarantee is a very scary thing to do.

If that’s you, maybe a better way is instead to give them an easy first purchase. What is this? It’s something that they can buy from you that’s a one-off. It allows them to essentially sample your business. They can see what your customer service is like, what your delivery is like, what the quality of your work is like before they even have to think about actually signing a contract with you. And this process affects them a little bit at a cognitive level, but it affects them massively at an emotional level.

If you can persuade someone who doesn’t know you to give you just a little bit of money to do a one-off thing for them, then they are dramatically, and I do mean 10 times more likely to enter a long-term managed services contract with you. Do you like the sound of that? Yeah, me too. So the final issue that we’ve got to fix then is what do you sell them? What is this easy first purchase that you could get them to invest in? Well, there are lots of different things that you could try. So you could start with something that’s perhaps not directly related to the technology services that you supply.

One idea for this is perhaps a lunch and learn what if you could get someone to give you 20 or 30 pounds or dollars and come and sit in a room with you for a couple of hours, eat a sandwich, sit there listening to you talking about, cyber security, productivity, something like that, the content of the lunch and learn doesn’t really matter so much, but that’s a very easy first purchase. And don’t forget, you are asking them not just for their money in this instance, you are also asking them for their time as well. And the prospect who gives you both time and money is actually a very, very high quality prospect compared to someone who perhaps just gives you a bit of money or just gives you bits of time, but not both of them.

So you could then take that lunch and learn idea further and turn it into perhaps a seminar, maybe a webinar, although I do think in-person stuff is really better for this. You could even do onsite training. I do know of an MSP that does remote training for companies on how to stop their staff clicking a bad link in the email. So it’s only like a 20 or 30 minute session. They do charge for it, it’s done on Zoom typically over lunchtime. The real power of doing that training is as part of that process, as part of the delivery, the MSP has a review booked with the decision maker at the end of the training so he can go back and report to the decision maker on who struggled with the training, who may need further training. Here’s a kind of general assessment of what I think the business’s likelihood is that you may accidentally click a link. They can talk about other issues, other protections, and all of this training and the feedback. These are just tools to get this MSP I know onto a quality call where with a decision maker where they’re talking about that person’s business. And as you can imagine, a lot of sales meetings come out of that process. So the prospect has been paying for training that ultimately gets them to trust the MSP and then they’re very happy to go on, or many of them are happy to go on and have a sales meeting.

And let’s take that onto one other idea and that’s to do some level of technology strategy consulting. So if doing seminars or training doesn’t excite you, then obviously don’t do it. You must always do things like this that get you excited, otherwise you just won’t do them or you will do them in a very lackluster way. So what about giving someone a 90 minute technology review and perhaps even pulling together a technology strategy for them. That could be a 60 or 90 minute meeting sitting with them talking about their business, their goals, everything that they want to achieve, everything that’s important to them. And then you go away and you build a technology strategy for them. And I appreciate that that’s going to be quite a light document because you’ve just had one meeting, you don’t know them very well.

But here’s the thing, if you position it and price it accordingly, for most businesses that have no technology strategy whatsoever, and isn’t that the vast majority of businesses, something that’s been built with 90 minutes of your time talking to them and then you going away and doing a bit of thinking and a bit of writing and actually committing a strategy to document. For most businesses, that’s going to be way better than having no strategy document whatsoever. And remember the big picture here, the point of the strategy document is to open bigger conversations about their business, where they’re going, what support they’re going to need on the way.

Please don’t overthink this. Don’t overthink what you can and can’t do for just a couple of hundred dollars or pounds. In fact, I suppose you’ve got to think about the bigger purpose here, which is to get them buying something from you. Something, anything, but then being delighted by the delivery. And a side note on this, if you can find businesses that will pay you a thousand pounds of dollars or more for that kind of strategy consultation that we were just talking about, as you can imagine, they will make much better managed services clients in the long run.

Does your MSP do whatever it takes to keep clients happy?

So what’s it like doing double the work? It’s hard work landing managed service clients and then there’s the constant hard work of making sure those clients are happy. You may be happy to bend over backwards to offer a great customer service. You’ve got a vested interest in it. But what about your staff? What if they don’t all share your passion for bending over backwards? What if that’s having a long-term impact on retention that you won’t feel until it’s too late? Good news, there is a fix.

A few months back I was standing staring at huge amounts of delicious food in a brand new cafe that I’d never been in before. It was actually inside a meeting venue in central London and I’d been meeting some really cool people there. And we were delighted to discover that the in-house cafe was serving real food, not just the usual crusty old sandwiches. And the food was subsidised and it was really cheap, like a hot meal for £5 (about six and a half dollars), something like that. That’s a bargain, right? So the only problem was the complete lack of flexibility demonstrated by the staff.

They would only sell the set meals on the menu. And here’s how my ordering experience went, and I’m going to tell you line by line, I did write it down after it happened. I started by saying, Hey, can I have a jacket potato with just cheese please? And the server said, That comes with cheese and beans. And I said, Well, I don’t want the beans, so can I just have cheese please? And the server said, You don’t want beans? And I said, No, I don’t want beans. And the server said, But it comes with beans. And I said, Well, I don’t like beans, I just want to have cheese, please. And then I kind of paused the beat and I looked down and I spotted that there was broccoli. And I said, oh actually, can I swap my beans for broccoli? Don’t judge me on having a baked potato with cheese and broccoli, I just like that. But anyway, the server said, No, I’m really sorry, but it’s only cheese and beans. And I actually stared at her at this point and I was genuinely astonished. And I said, So I can’t have broccoli? She said, No. And I said, Well, can I pay extra for the broccoli? It looks really good and now I just want some broccoli. And this is genuinely what happened, she said, No, you can only have cheese and beans. And I said, Really? And she actually said these words, she said, It’s our policy. You get some side salad, but broccoli isn’t side salad. And I said, Well, what if I don’t have beans and I don’t have the side salad, but I have some broccoli instead? And she kind of thought for a second and then she said, No, no, we can’t do that. And I said, Really? But you’ll make more money on the meal, so let me pay extra. I’d like to have broccoli. And the server said, and I know this is how bad this conversation was going, she said, Look, if you want broccoli, you’ll need to order a meal that comes with vegetables, jacket, potatoes come with cheese, they come with beans, they come with a side salad. They do not come with vegetables. And at this point I was aware that there was a long queue behind me, everyone was starting to grumble, I was that guy. So I said, Alright, I’ll just have the potato and cheese then please. And I looked really sad and I had a glum face and also made a mental note to buy broccoli on the way home, it didn’t taste as good at home because it never does.

Now, I promise you, I haven’t exaggerated that story at all. My gut feel is that the server showed this complete lack of flexibility because of the culture of that cafe. Maybe their whole day is geared around efficiently serving the hundreds of people who have meetings at that venue. So somewhere along the line, rather than do what’s best for the customer, they’ve developed a policy of never deviating off the menu. Because that makes sense, doesn’t it, for an efficient process. But surely the staff should be given initiative to do something simple that customers would like swap one dish for another.

In my business, the MSP Marketing Edge, we do have a culture of you should do whatever makes marketing easy for our members. And this drives everything that we do. And it means that my team very rarely need to check in with me. So if a member asks them to do something that’s a little bit off piste, it’s not what we would normally do, if we can help and if it makes marketing easy for that person, then my team just do it. They use their initiative so we don’t have to have conversations about should we do this? It’s our culture, it’s our mission, and we keep it alive by feeding it every day and talking every day about what can we do to make marketing easy for our members.

A culture doesn’t come from putting up a sign on office walls. It doesn’t come from telling your staff how to behave. It doesn’t come from standard operating procedures. It doesn’t come from what’s obvious to you as the owner. Because as a side note, what’s obvious to us as business owners is very, very rarely obvious to our team. If we don’t tell them exactly what we want and why we want it, they are constantly trying to guess what we want and then give it to us. And this is a huge source of stress both to you and to your staff.

A culture needs to be nurtured every day, in every conversation you have internally, every meeting, every project – you have to openly talk about your mission.

You have to remind yourself that everything you do is aimed at the thing you’re trying to do. This is what we do when we’re talking about making marketing easy for MSPs. Because we know internally here, the more that we do that, the more MSPs will join us, and therefore the more successful we will all be together, which is great and it’s no different within your MSP.

So that leads me to an interesting question for you. Do your technicians have the power to use their initiative? And more importantly, do they know that they have that power? Flexibility and initiative needs to be a culture within an MSP, not a policy or a sign that’s on a wall. And I know there’s a fine line between what the clients think you should be doing for them and what you are actually doing for them. And expectation setting is a huge thing for you, but I promise you a culture of do whatever makes technology easy for clients would be a very powerful retention weapon within your MSP. Do you agree?

Build a personal brand to build your MSP

How many of your clients actually know the name of your MSP? Or do they just refer to you as the tech guys or IT support? It’s virtually impossible to build a brand for your business name because that takes years and years and tons of cash. But there is a brand that’s very easy to build and can be incredibly profitable when you get it right. My special guest today is an expert at building this brand. He’s going to tell you what you should do, why you should do it, and how to get started.

Hi, my name is Alan McLaren. I’m a personal branding expert and I live just outside Toronto in Canada.

And from the UK to you over in Toronto, welcome onto the podcast, Alan. It’s great to have you here. And we are going to delve today into what personal branding is, and it’s really interesting I think you and I have very similar opinions about how powerful personal branding can be for MSPs and how actually it can help them to beat their competitors and win more sales just by building your personal brand.

I know there’s going to be a lot of questions from the MSPs listening to this and watching this on YouTube about wait, what’s the difference between a personal brand and the company brand? And we’re going to come onto that just down the line, but let’s first of all just delve into you and sort of set you up with some credibility and some context. So tell us briefly about your career. How do you come to be a personal branding expert?

Well it’s interesting, everything as you all know is an accident, right? Nothing actually happens intentionally with respect to your careers. I started my career at Canon in sales. So I started down the sales side of the house, became an executive after about 10 years, and then as a president of a company, and then got into IT security. So I know a little bit about that and technology. I ended up coming to personal branding after 20 years of a career in corporate. I actually started my own marketing agency. And then during that 18 last years, the last four of it, we moved into personal branding because we saw an opportunity to actually change the world, through one CEO at a time by helping people tell stories. And so I came to it through a lot of hard knocks, but a lot of experience on both the tech side and the sales side.

Oh, I love that. And what a mission statement, changing the world one CEO at the time. So how do you end up moving from something like IT security into something like marketing because they’re two completely different worlds?

Well, it’s my business partner’s fault, she was a PR person all her life. We met at a NASDAQ listed company that I was running, and then after I sold off some of the parts of the business, she came to me and says, What are we going to do now? I said, What do you mean “we”? She says, Oh, well, you’re a sales and marketing guy and I’m a PR person. Why don’t we start an agency? I said, We have no ideas, we have no money, why would we do that? So we decided to start a marketing agency. That was it. It was no more complicated than that. At the end of the day, sales and marketing with every company, that’s what’s important, right?

As an MSP owner, you know that without sales you have nothing. You could be the smartest technologist in the world, but you still need to sell.

So I understood that well, and she understood how to market. We came together, and then the pivot to personal branding really became the technology caught up to marketing. And if you didn’t have the right target audience, it would squash you. AI would squash you, and that people can learn all about marketing on Facebook and on YouTube. And so we decided to go to a place where is, which is the world of personal branding, and we’ll talk about how important that is for MSPs going forward.

Well let’s do that right now, because it’s interesting you mentioned AI and I have a feeling everything you’re about to say is going to be music to my ears. I believe AI is getting better day by day, and I believe that the better and better AI gets, the more you need to push towards your own authentic personality within the marketing. Because if your competitors are just using AI produced stuff, whether it’s good stuff or whether it’s AI sloth, it’s still AI generated. And the point is that anybody can do that, but not anybody can be you. Is that really the basis of what you mean and what you define by personal branding?

You should do the commercials for me, you’d be perfect, I love it. So what we look at is really the human to human approach, so exactly aligned with what you’re thinking about. Think about what differentiates you from another MSP. I’ve got this, I’ve got that, I’ve got four of them, I’ve got 500 technologies… it’s the same story, but YOU are the difference, the trust that you build as an owner, as a leader is the difference. So what we say is how do you build trusted authority with the people that matter?

Because think about how you started your business, the first clients were all relationships. So what we’re talking about is how do you build your personal brand to build more relationships, to drive more referrals to your business? That happens when you’re out there. Your company marketing is difficult because how do you differentiate between two? I’m bigger, I’m faster, I’m stronger. It doesn’t matter, it always comes back to the humans you’re going to deal with will differentiate you, the accounts payable people that you deal with, the technicians you deal with, the SOC you have, all those things are important, but your ability to express that is really the secret sauce.

Yeah, I completely agree. So from a practical point of view, let’s say you’re an MSP owner and you are the primary sales person within the business, which is let’s say 80% of MSPs. And maybe that person has heard me say over the years on this podcast Be the face of the business, but maybe not acted on it because they don’t want to. Maybe there’s a fear of putting themselves on the website or they want to keep the branding professional or whatever that means. What are the practical steps to actually starting to build up your personal brand and how do you make sure that your personal brand isn’t overshadowing what you’re trying to do with the business?

Well, it’s interesting you say overshadowing, it’s complimentary, isn’t it? When you think about your personal brand and the business, you are the company, unless you’re a $400 million MSP, but most of the people we’re talking to are not. So what you do, the first thing you do is look at and say, okay, you’re all technologists, do you understand LinkedIn and how to use that as a tool? We’ll talk about content in a second, but do you know how to build relationships and nurture relationships on LinkedIn? Your clients, by the way, are all there. They’re there inside your customers. So the first thing I would do if I was an MSP, I’d say, Who are my customers and am I connected with them on LinkedIn? Then I’d connect with them and I would follow them, and I would nurture them. Then I’d go see who they’re connected to. They’re all potential clients, but I would never sell a thing. I would just say, Hey, I understand you’re connected to Paul. So am I. What a great guy. Yeah, he is a great guy. Happy to be connected to you. And you say nothing else because here’s the secret sauce, in your title it says MSP, IT security, IT services. Pick something. That’s how people will recognise you, you don’t have to ever pitch them. I’ll give you a quick story… I saw a guy on WhatsApp doing a great job on a marketing app, and I went, boy, he’s interesting. And I went and connected with him, Hey, I just saw you on WhatsApp. I just wanted to connect with you. I thought you were a fascinating guy. He says, I see you’re a personal branding expert. I need some help with my personal brand. I didn’t pitch a thing. So that’s what I’m talking, build relationships and build trust. There’s another step of course that you can take, which we’ll talk about in terms of content development, but if you just start with relationship building and relationship nurturing, your prospecting is only going to be online and you’ll never have to pitch once because it’ll all come from those natural relationships.

Yeah, I love that. And we’ll come onto the content in a second in terms of bravery, of putting something on LinkedIn, and I see MSPs overthink this all the time, and I understand why it’s easy for someone like you, easy for someone like me, because we’re communicators, we’re marketing people, that’s what we do. But if you’re on the other side of the coin and you’re actually a technical genius, but not great at communications, what do I actually write in that headline? What kind of photo do I put on LinkedIn and what would your advice be on that?

Well, the first thing, we overthink everything. So think about this, I’ll make it easy for you. Let’s assume as an MSP, you have a thousand connections on LinkedIn, 500 connections on LinkedIn. They know you, right? They’ve connected with you, talk to them. They don’t care about the perfect headline or the perfect picture, they just want to know where you are, what you’re doing with your life, because they’re the first concentric circle that supports you. Those thousand connect you to 500,000 other people. So when you overproduce personal branding, it looks like marketing and marketing’s not trusted because you’re selling me something.

If we talk about content for example, and you are in IT security, what are you going to say? You’re not going to say, well, I have the best software etc. That doesn’t matter, no one cares about that. You’re helping people strategically – what they need to think about, how they need to approach it, how they need to do their training internally – you’re giving away all your secrets to people. They do that every day with customers, every single day. So do that, be like you’re in front of a customer who’s asked you a question about that, about your IT services, but not in a salesy way. If you were a consultant, you’d say, this is how I would approach it, go pick the best MSP that delivers the best culture to you, but let me help you do that. They’re already doing it, just don’t overthink it. And if you’re afraid, guess what? It’s normal to be afraid. There’s nothing wrong with being afraid.

Everyone else is afraid too. But the difference is if you can power through the fear and just change it. I love that.

Just quickly for a moment, Paul, they’ve already built a business. They’ve already had the alligators at their ankles already. You’re telling me a video is scaring you a little bit. It’s time to practice it, so let’s be practical until you get good at it, and then you’ll fly on the other side.

Yeah, I love that. And also, do you know what if you make mistakes it’s never permanent, is it? And I remember, I think it was last year, the British Prime Minister who’d only been in power for a few months, he was talking about some hostages being released, and in a live TV conference, he actually said, And they released the sausages, the hostages. And obviously the entire world picked up on that. And this is like a world leader on a world platform, but it was forgotten within weeks, and it hasn’t affected his credibility or anything like that. So if a world leader can make a stupid mistake like saying sausages instead of hostages (maybe he was thinking about his dinner that night) and get away with it, then you can certainly get away with making a video that isn’t quite as good.

Let’s take one final question about LinkedIn, then, I just want to look briefly outside of LinkedIn and other things you could do with your personal branding. So you’ve mentioned content a few times. What would your advice be to MSPs on using content on LinkedIn to increase your personal brand and to make you more authoritative and more authentic and more desirable as an MSP obviously.

I mean, the easiest question ever is what are the questions that you get from your clients? Not about the technical stuff you do, but about the strategic stuff you do. Because the MSP result is the work you do, and that’s fantastic, and people expect that you’re going to deliver on all the ways you deliver. But before they decide even to get to use an MSP, why wouldn’t they do it internally versus externally? What are the objections you get from your prospects? What are the conversations that are happening on Google right now? Go find those out and just talk about those things. That’s what you talk about every single day. It’s just your competitors aren’t because they’re all afraid.

So you’re going to get out there and you’re going to start talking about why it’s important to outsource your IT security. You’re going to say, Well, it’s really simple, you could hire people internally, but now you’ve got to manage them, HR, all the things that you go through. They got sick, they’re away today, and the virus happened to all of our networks, now we’re screwed. Well, you’ve got us. You don’t have to worry about that. Headache free. But you’re not pitching, you’re just pitching the idea of outsourcing versus insourcing, because each of them have advantages. Think of the voice of your customer and deliver that way. And if you’re afraid to do videos, take your phone and practice until you’re comfortable doing videos. We believe in video, 100% of our content is videos 100%, except, sorry, we do newsletters and other stuff, but of the personal branding content, because it’s the most authentic, and that’s what people want.

Yeah, no, I completely agree. We do a lot of videos, give a lot of videos to our MSP Marketing Edge members because you cannot beat those videos. They’re really, really powerful. Even though the LinkedIn algorithm isn’t quite as much in love with video today as it was 12 months ago, it will go full circle because what will happen is there’ll be less video on LinkedIn and some vice president somewhere at LinkedIn says, Oh no, video consumption is down, but TikTok’s getting bigger again, we’ve got to ramp it up. And all of these things that are always cyclical.

Okay, let’s move away from LinkedIn for our final subject, which is personal branding outside of LinkedIn. So other stuff on the web, but also offline. Give us some practical things that you can do. I’ll throw one out that I use in my life, which was never an intention, it just kind of became this way, which is, this podcast goes on all audio platforms, but also on YouTube. So anyone who’s watching on YouTube will see I’m wearing a blue shirt and guess what? I always wear a blue shirt. In fact, you might think it’s the same one. There’s nine years of video content, but it’s not actually the same one. I have a procession of blue shirts, but it’s now got to a point now where if I’m not wearing a light blue shirt and I’ve met people in real life when I worn to checkered shirt and they’ll say to me, Paul, you’re wearing the wrong shirt. So you see, that’s become almost a piece of my personal branding is having a light blue shirt. Now that was an accident, it was just something I fell into. But is that the kind of thing that we mean by personal branding, that kind of consistency of your appearance, of the way you present yourself? Or is that just a small component of a bigger thing?

At the end of the day, personal branding is about your authentic self. How you come across in everything you do, what hats do you wear? What roles do you play? Part of it can be a shirt if you like it. Look at politicians, they tend to have a uniform. Because you’re spending time with people, especially online, and I think you mentioned YouTube as an example, it is the most important platform surprisingly, because it’s there forever and your showcase of everything you do is there. So when you pull people over and they become a subscriber, now you own them in a positive way. And LinkedIn, even though because it’s more transitory, only 2 or 3% of the people actually see your content every day.

To continue the offline conversation outside of LinkedIn and YouTube, what you’re talking about can be important, but it doesn’t really matter that much. You’ve done it for nine years, that’s why it matters. Most people have not done it and won’t do it for nine years. I don’t care about my uniform. I’ll wear this, I’ll wear sweatshirts, I’ll wear whatever, it doesn’t matter to me. To me, it’s about my voice, the authenticity of what I’m trying to do, which is give away as much as I know with holding nothing back to everybody who wants to listen to me, that’s my brand. I will do it from my heart, not from my head. And people like that will be part of my tribe and people who don’t like that will go somewhere else.

And in marketing, repelling is not a bad thing. Because you know that you’re dealing with your target audience that matter to you. And what MSPs tend to do, in my experience, because I’ve had MSPs as part of the IT security business I have, is they’re so hung up on the technical side, they forget the end of the day, you’re solving a problem for humans. You are solving technology problems, but there’s someone in charge of that technology that is always up at night. And you can help them by saying, I know Paul’s got it. I know these guys, but Paul’s got me, he’s got my back. Wow. How do you do that at scale? You do that online, and of course all the events you go to, you show up with that same attitude. Physical events, webinars, podcasts, you show up the same way all the time, and then people go, that Paul guy, he’s like, and then the attributes start getting described. That’s what you want to be because the word I use is in an event, physical or virtual, your personal brand shows up before you do and it stays after you leave. So are they saying the right things about you? Are you delivering value at every turn? If the answer is yes, check the box and your business will start to thrive because more people will want to work with you.

What a way to end the interview. Thank you, Alan, really appreciate your time coming on, being authentic, giving us all of this amazing knowledge. Just briefly tell us what do you do? What does your business actually do to help MSPs and what’s the best way to get in touch with you?

So best way to reach for me is on LinkedIn, Alan McLaren, or at strataoriginals.com, and go check out the stuff we do. We essentially work with founders, builders, entrepreneurs to help them build their personal brand, both online and off so that they can do exactly what we’ve talked about today to differentiate their business and to humanise their business and to drive more business. And we do that through what we call a brand DNA, which is a strategy session. And then we either become their coach or we do it for them, depending on their model and their budget and the rest, we make their lives easier just like they do to their clients, we do for them. 

Paul’s Personal Peer Group

This week’s question comes from Christian whose MSP is in Illinois, and he asks: Why is my marketing and sales so slow?

That’s a very common question, and the short answer is because you work in a sector with a very, very, very slow sales cycle. In fact, it’s one of the slowest that I’ve ever seen. You’re working against three big things. The first is a lack of understanding. The people you’re trying to reach, they don’t get technology, so it’s easier for them not to think about something because that’s what we do when we don’t get something.

The other thing you’re working against is fear. They don’t really know how their technology’s been set up, no matter how many times they’ve been told or whatever documentation you’ve given them. And that means that they’re scared of changing something and breaking it.

And the third thing you’re working against is inertia loyalty. It seems easier for them at an emotional level to stay with an existing supplier even if they don’t like them. And that’s because of the lack of understanding and the fear.

So these three factors and loads more, they all contribute to a total lack of urgency on the part of your leads and prospects. However, there are two pieces of good news. The first is that people buy when they’re ready to buy. And that means that right now there is a hot prospect in your area who would love to talk to you. The challenge is knowing who that person is and knowing the right time to talk to them. This is why you need to be constantly increasing the amount of marketing activity that you do and speaking to more and more and more people, play the numbers game.

The other piece of good news is the insane lifetime value that you benefit from. Because you win loads of lovely monthly recurring revenue from clients, and they stay with you for years and years and years, and that really doesn’t happen much elsewhere either. So these are the good things. The answer to getting more clients, as I said, is just to do more marketing activity – do more stuff, speak to more people.

Mentioned links

• This podcast is in conjunction with the MSP Marketing Edge, the world’s leading white label content marketing and growth training subscription.
• Join me in MSP Marketing Facebook group.
• Connect with me on LinkedIn.
• Connect with my guest, Alan McLaren on LinkedIn, and visit the STRATA Originals website.
• Got a question about your MSP’s marketing? Submit one here for Paul’s Personal Peer Group.

Welcome to Episode 289 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• Accountable to no-one: A blessing or curse?: There is a huge benefit of being accountable to someone, and being accountable to your team is a great way to make sure you get things done. It forces you to plan ahead, be more disciplined, and be a better team player.
• The free MSP marketing tactic that nearly got me arrested: This is a lesson in lateral thinking. You don’t need lots of money to market your MSP, you just need a desire to get new clients, some ideas, and a little time to implement.
• How this MSP built a GREAT marketing system: My guest shares the warts and all story of how she grew her MSP, and how it really took off when she put in place a proper marketing system.
• Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Should MSPs use WhatsApp for marketing? My answer to this question might surprise you.

Accountable to no-one: A blessing or curse?

The joys of being an MSP owner… complete control. Yeah you want to be always onboarding new clients and improving your tech stack and providing the best customer service. But if one week you don’t want to do those things, no one can stop you from not doing those things, because you’re the owner of the business. You’re the boss, right?

Well, if right now you’re not accountable to anyone, there is a huge benefit of being accountable to someone. But who is this person you should answer to? Stick around, you’re not going to believe who I’m going to suggest.

There are many reasons why someone starts their own business and I say that as someone who’s been in business for 20 years himself. People who don’t start their own business think that we do it so that we can earn more money and not have a boss. But I think those of us who’ve been doing it for more than a couple of years, which means we are going to keep doing it for a couple of decades, we know that we started our own business primarily to have control.

And by that I mean control over what work we do, who we do it for and how it’s done. Most of us, I believe, start our own business because we have a deep desire to do something amazing and we want to control freak it all along the way. Sometimes when we work for someone else, we’ve had bad bosses. I know that I have, I’m looking at you, Terry, but also we’ve had good bosses. I’ve had some of those as well, fact loads of those. But escaping the boss is not always the reason why we start our own business.

As I say, making more money and building an asset, something that you own, that’s the side benefit I believe of running your own business. I truly believe control is the primary driving factor for doing it and keep doing it. But nevermind all of these upsides of starting your own business and not having a boss, let’s look at the downsides as well. And I don’t really mean the fact that you for many years, worked longer hours than you ever have for probably a lower salary, that does eventually go, but it’s mostly a pain in the first few years, I don’t mean that stuff. I do mean the downsides of not having a boss. Because, and this might be hard to swallow, but there really are downsides to not having a boss.

The biggest downside to not having a boss is that you are accountable to no one.

Think back to when you last had a job. Someone, somewhere was in charge of you, right? You were accountable to someone in some way and forgetting all the negative impacts of that, there were positive impacts of that as well. And the primary positive impact was that if you didn’t do your work, someone would notice and there would be a problem. But as the business owner, this is not the case, right? Let’s take a marketing project that you’ve been promising yourself, you’re going to do for ages, but there’s no one chasing you to get it done. If you choose not to do that, or if you choose not to investigate that new PSA that you’ve been thinking of switching to, no one’s ever going to raise that in a meeting. Or if they do, you’re the boss, it doesn’t really matter that you haven’t done that. It’s your business, it’s your decisions, you have the control. And sure, I really do think that’s a great thing, but I do believe it’s a bad thing as well. It’s both of these things.

I’ve been getting more heavily involved over the last few months in the development projects that we have in our business. Because we have a development team who work on our portal and our product and our website and our marketing, and they do a fantastic job. But I wanted to insert myself kind of more closely into the process so I could guide it more, try to streamline it a bit, get things happening more quickly. And I realised that as part of that team, I needed to take on board some of the tasks that come out of any project. And as a result of that, because I’m a team player, I now have tasks that I must get completed to specific deadlines. And if I don’t, there are actually people that I have to answer to – my own team.

So you might think I’m crazy for doing this, but do you know what? It’s reawakened something within me that I’m really enjoying, and that’s a desire to do a great job for the person I’m accountable to. For years really, I’ve only been accountable to myself, kind of my clients, kind of my family, but now I’m accountable to my team as well. They’re people I have to face on Zoom calls every single day. And it has changed the way that I work. I’ve always been a very deadline driven person, but with the control of owning the business, I’ve been able to play loose with deadlines and just on a whim on a Friday afternoon, extend a deadline rather than put myself through the pain of doing the work. But now I can’t. And especially if the work I’m doing is a dependency for someone else, and by that I mean they can’t do their work until I’ve completed mine.

If someone is revising a page on our website and I’ve got to write that page first, you can see how if I don’t hit the deadline on that, neither can they. Can you see why being accountable to someone somewhere is a great way to make sure you get things done. It forces you to plan ahead, be more disciplined and be a better team player. And these are all great traits for the person who runs the business – YOU. It makes you a better business owner and definitely makes you a better boss.

So here’s a question for you. Within your MSP, who should you be accountable to? Do you have a service desk manager or operations manager that you can be accountable to? Perhaps you have a business partner and you can keep each other on the straight and narrow. What about your spouse, your other half? Could you be accountable to them for getting things done? Especially when the price of not getting those things done has an impact back on the family? I’d be really interested to know who you could be accountable to within your business.

The free MSP marketing tactic that nearly got me arrested

Would you risk being arrested just to win new clients for your MSP? Sometimes when you have no money to market your business it can feel like you’re never going to achieve anything. I was in exactly this situation once and the craziest thing happened as a result of it. I did nearly get arrested. Let me tell you how.

This is a lesson in lateral thinking and how powerful it is to have zero marketing budget.

So jump in the DeLorean with me, it’s 2002 and I’m running a music radio station in the city of Peterborough here in the UK. And in the years before I joined the station had taken a real battering from its competitors. So my brief was to build up the audience again, and just to test me, the large media group that owned the station gave me this budget – ZERO DOLLARS. Now I can see that that was a blessing because it taught me the power of bootstrapping, where we had to do our marketing using only the existing resources we had in the station. And I learned so many valuable business lessons from that.

The way you market a radio station is different from the way you market an MSP. You need an easy direct marketing strategy such as my three step lead generation system – build audiences, grow relationships, and convert relationships – you can learn more about that @mspmarketingedge.com. But for radio marketing 20 plus years ago, it was all about just getting the name and the address out there. The name of the station, the type of the music it played, and the FM frequency. Yes, I’m that old, I worked on an FM radio station. In fact, I started my career on a medium wave on an AM radio station, please someone get me a walking stick.

Anyway, back in the day we did car stickers, we had a couple of promotional vehicles, but I couldn’t afford billboards or any kind of paid advertising, and yet I wanted to dominate the city. And then one day someone on my team came up with the most brilliant idea ever. We were discussing how dirty the pavements (AKA the sidewalks) were in our city and how they needed a good jet wash, like a pressure wash. And one of my colleagues joked, maybe we should clean them. And then another colleague said, what if we did clean them? But we used a template so it left behind our logo in the street.

That was such a good idea at the time, and today this actually has a name, it’s called Clean Advertising. It’s very clever, isn’t it? And the internet agrees it’s legal, at least here in the UK, because all you’re doing is cleaning the pavement, cleaning the sidewalk, you just happening to leave some of the dirt behind. But when we actually did this all over the city in 2002, the local council had a different idea. In fact, they went berserk. Perhaps it was because we’d shown everyone how dirty the streets were. I got a series of daily angry phone calls. In fact, one council officer even threatened to send the police to arrest me for vandalism, which is just hilarious. And I didn’t take those threats seriously.

Unlike the time the Diplomatic Protection police in London were actually going to arrest me because of a radio publicity stunt that we did at an embassy. But that’s a story of total stupidity best saved for another day. Anyway, to complete the story loop. Yes, the audience grew and actually that stunt kickstarted the best two years of my radio career, including winning a Sony award, which is like the UK radio equivalent of an Oscar.

So how can this story help your MSP? Well, as I said at the start, this is a lesson in lateral thinking and actually how powerful it is to have zero marketing budget. You don’t need money to market your MSP, you just need a desire to get new clients, some ideas, and a little time to implement.

How this MSP built a GREAT marketing system

Nothing’s more inspirational than hearing how other MSPs have beaten the odds and turned their business into a success and I’ve got another great example for you right now. This MSP is sharing the warts and all story of how she grew her business, including how it really took off when she put in place a proper marketing system.

Hi, I’m Dawn Sizer, CEO of 3rd Element.

And thank you so much for joining me on this show, Dawn. You and I actually started a conversation like seven or eight months ago. We were both at ScaleCon ‘24 in Las Vegas and we were going up in Kevin Clunes sort of after conference party thing where there’s this big wheel that goes round like an observation wheel in Las Vegas. And we were having a really good conversation and then got split off into separate groups to go into separate pods. And it’s taken us seven months to jump back on and continue that conversation. I can’t even remember what we were talking about.

Yeah, it was all over the place. And I think what we probably should have realised at the time, they gave us these cool little coloured bracelets and we probably should have said, Hey, our bracelets are different colours, we should probably fix this.

And steal someone else’s bracelet. We know to do that, I know Kevin Clone listens to this podcast so Kevin, when you do your after conference stuff at ScaleCon ‘25, which I’m definitely going to when that’s announced anyway, then yeah we’ll have to do that this year.

So thank you for joining me on the podcast, Dawn. Tell us a little bit about you. We’re going to be talking about getting marketing done and how as an MSP, the hardest thing in the world sometimes is just getting started with your marketing, keeping that marketing going, and turning a series of difficult activities into a system so that you do it regularly. And I know that’s something that you’ve got pretty good at. So just tell us a little bit about you. What’s your MSP business owning story and sort of bring us from where you started up to where you are today.

So this is a 20 year tale, believe it or not, we started this business 20 years ago. I literally worked at another service provider previously to this, I was a service manager there and quit my job one day and started the company the next. So it was one of those things where I couldn’t take it anymore, was pretty sure that we can do it better, and here we are 20 years later. So that’s the history of it in a nutshell.

I love that. So 20 years ago, we’re talking 2005, I guess, did you start out doing break/fix or did you jump straight into the recurring revenue?

We jumped straight into the recurring revenue, which was not necessarily a thing at that time. More context around that, my husband and I both worked for the same service provider before that. We started this business together. So we literally had two household incomes at nothing for a year and a half. So we had no other choice then for this to work.

I mean you must’ve been one of the first MSPs I guess in terms of actually getting people onto recurring revenue contracts and taking that bigger view, which obviously everyone has today. That must’ve been so scary with both of you quitting your job. I quit my job probably about the same time actually, 2005 and started my first business and I earned very little for the first few months, but my wife at the time was still bringing in her income, so it wasn’t quite as scary for me. And we didn’t have kids or anything at that point. But yeah, for both of you, that must’ve been touch and go I guess at some points.

Yeah, I mean apparently we thought it would just be a fantastic idea to have a mortgage payment and kids and everything else. Who does that?

Yeah, exactly. So 20 years on, what kind of business do you have now? How many technicians do you have and whereabouts are you based by the way?

We’re in central Pennsylvania, right next to Amish country, the epitome of technology. But as far as we are, I believe 18 people, most of us are technical at this point. I think we only have three or four people that are not technical.

Okay. So the vast majority of the business is obviously there to deliver clients, but I know that you spend a great deal of your time bringing on board new clients or trying to find new business. So let’s talk about marketing. Now this is a recurring theme, this podcast has been going well over five years and a recurring theme is that MSPs find marketing hard. What was the point where you realised if you want to grow the business, you’ve got to get good at marketing?

Probably about three or four years ago. And it’s not like I didn’t know marketing was important before that. I think we have all lit money on fire on marketing over the last couple of years in some way, shape or form. You throw money at one thing and that doesn’t work and you throw money at another thing and that doesn’t work, and I think we’ve all had that scenario. Then I ended up talking with some folks that just do marketing for a living and really listening to what they were telling me. 

It’s very difficult to take the language that we use every day and put it into a different lens for a client to understand it.

So we hired a group to do that for us. We had our messaging that was very clear, very concise, very effective. So I think that was step one, getting that message very clear and effective.

And what difference did you see from being able to communicate to the ordinary business owners and managers that you wanted to influence? What was the difference you saw from being able to say to them, this is what we do and this is what’s in it for you, these are the benefits?

Literally, that’s what it was. So you could take all the, I don’t want to say word vomit, that we throw at people of this is what we do. And then they were able to come back and say, oh, now I understand exactly what it is that you do, and I understand how it applies to me. So I think that was a huge leap forward.

And how did that make going on and then doing other marketing or actually sort of implementing marketing easier?

So the framework that we had gotten back gave us all of the language that we needed to use on repeat over and over and over again. So I was able to take that and incorporate the language into everything from landing pages to handouts that we’re giving folks, to web pages, to social media marketing, anything around language that you’re going to use. I was able to take it, copy it, adjust it, run it through Copilot, do whatever you need to do and have it be repeatable.

Got it. And at the risk of putting words in your mouth, and please do disagree with me if this is not the case, but was it a case that once you got that messaging really clear and you’d simplified it down and knew exactly what to say and how to say, you just then kept repeating that and tried not to deviate off that? Because I think the risk is sometimes that when you’ve got something like that, you’ve got a clear message, you run it out for six months and you almost get bored of it yourself, don’t you? Because you’ve seen it 1000, 2000, 3000 times, but you forget that the people you are reaching have seen it once, maybe twice

100%, you’ll get sick of it, there’s no doubt about it. What I have found, there are some products out there that you can actually input your brand voice into. So that messaging that you have very clear and what it looks like and the words that you’re using on repeat, you can enter that into their AI function and it will repeat some of that language for you as well. So you’re not stuck writing it on your own. So you’re going to get, okay, here’s my brand voice. I need you to create a thing that looks like this, but use my brand voice and it’ll just go back through it. And then all you have to do is humanise it after that.

Yeah. I love that. So let’s talk about other practical marketing. So you’ve now got a very clear message, you know what it is you want to communicate. What did you find were some of the most effective ways to reach decision makers and what were some of the least effective ways?

Spray and pray is the least effective. I think we’ve all done that. Pay per click is something that I haven’t had success with. Some of the marketing agencies that we’ve used that have been not MSP friendly have not been as on target as well. So sometimes I thought, well, maybe if we thought outside the box, that would work better and it didn’t. Sometimes it was like, okay, well let’s go back in the box and that necessarily didn’t work either. So there’s definitely a method to the madness, and I think we have finally found the method to the madness, and it is repeatable process, not who you use, not what you use. But it’s repeatable process over and over again. You have to touch people so many different times in order for it to be effective.

Yeah, this is just music to my ears because you are absolutely right, and I’ve been preaching for years, set up a marketing system, set up small marketing actions or tasks, ideally things you can get other people to do for you. And then just make sure those things happen every day or every week or every month, however often they get repeated. And then just do that for 10 years. And you’re absolutely right, you can Google this, how many touch points does it take to turn someone from a prospect to a client. And you’ll see answers from seven up to 50, and I think the answer is like 500. It’s because actually the way that people buy these days, and especially how they buy managed services, something ordinary business owners don’t understand is it will take a number of emails that they read of yours, maybe a number of podcast episodes if you put those out, a number of videos that you watch, a number of phone calls, a number of messages on LinkedIn or emails or a number of, I mean, there’s so many other ways of touch pointing someone. What are some of the things that you are using now? So if we jump back to today and you were to pick out the top three tactics that work best for you as part of your system. Let me change that question. What are the three that you would not want me to take away from you? That’s probably the right question to ask.

Email sequencing is a big one. I do like that. I do like to be able to track and see who’s clicking on what and what that looks like. So I am still a numbers person at the end of the day, and I don’t know if that’s good or not good. I don’t know that there’s a real method to that madness, if you will. But the KPI piece to it, I want to be able to see of the, in this case, it was 2,600 emails that I sent out, how many people clicked on them, how many people opened them? What does that look like? And then when they did a thing, when I’ve sent them another email based on off of an action that they did, what was my open rate? Well, it turned out my open rate was like 98.7% or something crazy. So it was really good. So I’m getting really good traction in places, so taking away my KPIs would make me cry.

So email sequencing one, what else could I take away and make you cry?

Landing pages are another one. I think it’s really good if you have an asset, a giveaway or something along those lines to set up a landing page for somebody to go get that particular piece of content, whether, again, whether it’s an ebook or a white paper, whatever it is. But not only are you grabbing their information on that, and even if it’s just their first name and an email address so that you can send them something later, but it’s a touch point. That particular person has gone to that page, you know they’ve interacted with it, they thought it was important enough to go get it. So you know that you have somebody that’s interested at that point and you can nurture them along for a little while. So that would be another one. And then the last one I think is any type of CRM. If you don’t have a CRM to be able to do any of these things, and whether it’s put email out, do social media, get any type of reporting, you’re doing yourself a disservice.

And I’m going to have to ask you which CRM you use. I don’t particularly, I was going to say don’t care, of course I care about your answer, but I’m not that interested in the answer. But I know that every MSP listening to this would want me to ask that question. So you obviously have a successful marketing machine you’ve set up, which CRM are you using?

So we were using HubSpot for a while, and I think that works really, really well. We needed some additional capability and we switched over to Insightly at the beginning of the year. So I don’t know that there’s a good answer, right? I think everybody does things a little bit differently and there may be pieces or parts to certain CRMs that make more sense to one MSP over another.

Yeah. I always say to MSPs, pick a CRM something you like, stick with that. And then maybe a few years down the line, review it and check it. We were with Keap pretty much since I started the business in 2016. And we are currently migrating to HubSpot. And HubSpot’s like a thousand times better than Keap. But there are still some things I miss from Keap. I miss their ways of working, the way they structure data. HubSpot is obviously a whole different beast. I do miss the bill. The Keap Bill is perhaps a fifth of what the HubSpot bill is, but I can do a lot more with it. So there we go. But anyway, you’re absolutely right, whichever CRM you choose, just pick one, stick with it, review it a few years down the line, almost like treat your marketing stack like your tech stack. Don’t be constantly fiddling with it, but just pick something and stick with it.

Okay, Dawn, final question for you. You have built up a true marketing machine. I know it’s working wonders for your business. You’re bringing in new clients, you’re nurturing prospects all the time. And I know that you’ve obviously done that the hard way over a number of years, you got very clear on your brand voice, you got very clear on the messaging, but you’ve then done the hard work and you’ve put in place all of these things like the ones you were just talking about. What would you say to an MSP who’s listening to this, who desires great marketing but hasn’t really got started with it yet? What’s the motivation that they need just to get started?

There is no motivation to get started, you just have to do it. I think to be fair, as a business owner I think all of us are eat the frog people, right? There’s always a task that nobody ever wants to do, and you just have to force yourself to go do it. Marketing was one of those things for me. If anybody’s ever seen me speak, especially if they’re watching me speak about automation, I actually talk about how marketing is one of the pieces that I’ve automated in some respects because I dislike it so much. And it’s not because I truly dislike it, it’s that I find it fiddly. I find all of the nuances to it difficult because I’m a technical person. So I think it’s just more a matter of just get started, do one thing at a time, and then add something else to it and something else and something else. And eventually you create a little machine out of it. Automate as much as you can, and when in doubt, outsource what you can.

Thank you, Dawn, for your time today. And I know you have a community which is for MSPs, which helps them with their business. Do you want to tell us just a little bit about that community and how we can either join it or get in touch with you?

Absolutely. So for those of you that aren’t aware of the Tech Degenerates, by all means go take a look. We’re on the web, you’ll find us on LinkedIn, as well as Facebook and all the other normal social media things. You may have seen us at IT Nation over in the UK or in the United States, but either way, it’s a great community of other MSP owners, and we’d love to see you there. And that website to visit is thetechdegenerates.com

Paul’s Personal Peer Group

Luke in Connecticut where his MSP is based, has this question: Should I use WhatsApp in my marketing?

There are only a few MSPs doing this at the moment, that I’m aware of anyway, and if you’re using it please let me know. But I think using WhatsApp as a marketing channel has huge potential in the near future. And why, well, I don’t know about you, but about 80 to 90% of my own personal messaging is now done through WhatsApp. Here in the UK it’s very, very big. Although I do appreciate that’s not the case everywhere.

Here’s the thing though, it’s always sensible to try to reach people on the platforms they’re already using and very little commercial B2B messaging is currently done through WhatsApp. I know that is starting to change, and especially since a few years ago, Facebook rewrote all of the base code of all of its apps – Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, Threads, WhatsApp – and that was so they could more easily pass information around all of the different platforms. And there is of course a WhatsApp business app, which has an API. So the tools are there to use. It’s just a case then of how are you going to use them. Let me give you three ideas of how you could use WhatsApp within your MSP.

So number one, you could use it as a call to action on your website, literally, “WhatsApp us”. And there are apps that allow easy messaging via multiple platforms. Maybe WhatsApp is a bit of a consumer call to action, but you know what, if you’re in a country like the UK where people just use WhatsApp, then for them pressing a button or picking up their phone and WhatsApping a number is an easy thing for them to do. And if it’s easy, it removes friction and more people will talk to you.

Number two, you can share content with people. And of course you’d need their mobile number and they might be a bit resistant to giving that to you. So you can of course, spam them via their favourite and currently spam free messaging platform. And I do mean sending them messages on WhatsApp. I’m starting to get a little bit of spam now, maybe you are as well, but actually if you send high value content that’s relevant to people, that’s not as spammy.

And then number three for ticket updates to end users, people you are helping right now. And I know you’d probably rather just stick to email updates or ticket updates on your PSA platform or something they’ve logged into or whatever. But remember something I said earlier, it’s always sensible to try to reach people on the platforms they’re already using. So if WhatsApp is a big part of their life and you send them updates on your ticket via WhatsApp, that actually provides a better level of customer service, there’s so much less friction in that.