Episode 50: How can your MSP compete against the big boys?

Episode 50: How can your MSP compete against the big boys?

Paul Green

Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast
Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast
Episode 50: How can your MSP compete against the big boys?
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In this week’s episode

  • It’s time to be more like David and stop worrying about Goliath. If there’s a massive dominant MSP operating in your marketplace, Paul has some invaluable advice this week on how you can dodge, duck and weave your larger competitor… and actually become a better and stronger MSP along the way
  • Also in this week’s show, if you’ve ever sat down and thought to yourself “if only we had a really simple marketing plan” – you’ve come to the right podcast! Paul welcomes a special guest who has the ultimate guide on how to systemise a brilliant marketing plan
  • Paul also looks at the beauty and power of a multi touchpoint marketing campaign. Plus how you can free yourself from the day-to-day clutter in your life, work less and take more holidays

Show notes

Episode transcription

Voiceover:
Fresh, every Tuesday, for MSPs around the world. This is Paul Green’s MSP marketing podcast.

Paul Green:
Oh my goodness. I can’t believe I’ve recorded 50 of these podcasts. Welcome to episode 50 of the MSP Marketing Podcast. Here’s what we got coming up in today’s show.

Cody Butler:
There’s no shortage of businesses out there that want these type of services. They just don’t know you are there and what you can do for them exactly.

Paul Green:
We’re going to be talking about the beauty and power of multi touchpoint marketing campaigns. I’ll explain those later on in the show. Got a great book suggestion for you. It’s one of my favourite books, even though it’s a little bit crazy in parts. And it’s the final week of our competition. I’ve got some amazing prizes for you to win as a thank you for listening to this podcast.

Voiceover:
Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast.

Paul Green:
In many marketplaces you’ll have lots and lots of smaller MSPs, and often you’ll have one or two really big MSPs, depending on the size of the market of course. Typically you see these bigger MSPs based around larger cities or larger towns. Now, I don’t believe that you, assuming you run one of those smaller MSPs, have anything to fear from big MSPs at all. In fact, the only thing you have to fear from the big MSPs is that they’re better resourced than you. They simply have more cash and they can use that cash to buy more time, and just make more impact, make more noise in a marketplace. But that doesn’t mean you should be scared of them. In fact, if I was to put my money on any MSP really winning within a marketplace, it would actually be a bunch of smaller MSPs beating the bigger MSP. Because often you’ll find that those big MSPs, they get so big that they start to become a little bit inefficient with their money.

Paul Green:
So rather than getting really good at marketing, they’ll just throw money at salespeople. Or they’ll throw money at partner channel and marketing initiatives, because that seems like the right thing to do. And they kind of lose touch with the kind of marketing that really makes a difference to talk to the kind of decision makers that you really want to talk to, those business owners and managers. As a smaller MSP, the biggest advantage that you have against a bigger competitor is speed and flexibility. 20 years ago, big business beats small business, because we didn’t have a particularly equal playing field. You think 20 years ago, you couldn’t reach a marketplace very easily without having cash. You had to go and buy lots of adverts in newspapers, magazines, radio, TV, even direct mail was a hell of a lot more expensive than it is today. Same with phoning people up.

Paul Green:
Whereas fast forward to 2020, and actually it is a very level playing field now. The internet has made it easy for anybody to reach absolutely anybody with their marketing message. And that’s why it’s no longer about big beating small these days. It’s about fast beating slow. So you think how much business has sped up over the last 10, 15 years or so. It’s getting faster and faster and faster every year. Just the other day I was relistening to They Ask, You Answer by Marcus Sheridan, possibly one of the best books I’ve ever read and listened to about content marketing. And he was talking about conversational marketing. Conversational marketing is where someone will come onto your website and they’ll want to have a live chat with you because they’ve got a question immediately, and they want that answer immediately. They didn’t want to have to wait for that. And they’ll either do that over social media, or they’ll do it over live chat, or a number of different ways of talking to someone instantly.

Paul Green:
Marcus makes a very good point in that book. He says, “When was the last time you emailed your friends to set up a social occasion?” Well, due to lockdown, you probably can’t, but you get the idea. Well, I haven’t emailed my friends for a very long time, but we chat on Messenger and WhatsApp and text and all of that kind of stuff. And this is the example of conversational marketing in play. People want instant gratification. They want instant answers these days. And this is a trend that’s only going to continue going forward. Fast beating slow. How can your smaller MSP be faster and more flexible than those big MSPs that you’re up against? Maybe you can make faster decisions. Maybe you can come up with offers and deals and be more flexible with the kinds of packages that you want to sell. Maybe, because you’re not mired down by levels of management and bureaucracy and paperwork and control and all of that kind of stuff that comes with bigger businesses, maybe you can just simply move faster.

Paul Green:
So if someone’s on the phone today you can be talking to them right now. You can have a meeting with them, “Hey, what about this afternoon? What about first thing tomorrow morning?” You can get a proposal into them the same day. You can dedicate all of your resources to doing this because you want that client. You’re not just a salesperson who would like another client because it means a bit more bonus. You’re the business owner, it’s your MSP, and you can move faster and be more flexible than any of your competitors because you know that this one extra client is going to make such a difference to your monthly recurring revenue. Big MSPs, by their very nature, have to systemise the marketing and have to systemise the sales. And I know that I’ve been banging on in the last 50 weeks on this podcast about systemising your marketing and your sales, but there’s still an element of being able to break out of it and speed things up and be super fast when it is appropriate.

Paul Green:
When a really nice prospect comes along and you want to jump on it and just make sure that you absolutely maximise your response to something that’s something only a small MSP can do, not something that a big MSP can do. I think the other area where smaller MSPs can really win is actually service delivery. So there might be more resources at a bigger MSP, but that also means more structure, more going through the motions of talking to the different people before tickets get escalated, and things move from one team to another team. Which yes, that’s a more robust way of doing service delivery, but for the end user, for that client at the end of the phone who just wants it to work, sometimes just having a chat to someone on the phone who can say, “Yep, hang on. Give me 20 minutes. I’ll call you back. We’ll get that fixed.” Sometimes that’s just what people want.

Paul Green:
And depending on the kind of clients, the kind of prospects that you’re talking to, that can be a massive advantage for them. That’s exactly the kind of thing that they want to see more of. They want that speedier, more flexible, smaller approach. I guess what I’m trying to say from this is, just because you’re up against a mega MSP in your area, doesn’t mean that you’re at a disadvantage at all. You are at some disadvantage because they have massive economies of scale and huge resources compared to you, but also they’re at a disadvantage to you because they can no longer move at speed. They can no longer be as flexible as they used to be. And really they can no longer offer that bespoke feeling, customer support and service delivery. In fact, I think if you find yourself up against a whale of an MSP, you should almost celebrate because it gives you something to talk to your prospect about.

Paul Green:
You can help them with that comparison. “Here’s a bigger company that we’re up against. They are bigger than us, yeah, sure. They’ll have a lot more resource than we will, and ultimately will have a lot more structure as well. But all the downsides of that are our upsides. They can’t move at the speed that we can. They can’t be as flexible as we can. And they can’t innovate and look after you in the way that we can.” Now, you never bad mouth your competitors directly, but it’s certainly fair to make a comparison between a big company and a small company. And even the big prospects, they will sometimes go with a smaller company because they know they will get higher levels of service. They know that if it comes to it, they can get the owner of the business on the phone. Now and I don’t want that, but you get the idea. They perceive that they can get the owner of the business on the phone if there’s a real problem. And they’re much more likely to be able to do that with a smaller company than they can with a bigger company.

Paul Green:
If you’re up against a bigger MSP, celebrate. It’s something you can compare yourself against in the marketplace, and it can actually be a big advantage for displaying your superpowers.

Voiceover:
Here’s this week’s clever idea.

Paul Green:
Now, call me a saddo if you want to.

Computer voice:
Saddo.

Paul Green:
Thank you. But I love multi touchpoint marketing campaigns. Nothing is more exciting for me than seeing a clever campaign that someone’s put together where you’re sending the same message repeatedly to the same prospect, but you’re using different channels. And the beauty of multi touchpoint campaigns is they are very, very effective, because all the different elements really start to work together to get inside someone’s heart, to make sure that your message is appearing inside their brain. There was something that I learned when I used to work in radio about 1000 years ago, or that’s how it feels now, which is you can go on the radio as the radio presenter, and you can talk about something important to the station. It could be a competition, it could be a promotion, it could be pushing a specific advertiser. And you can talk about it today, and you can talk about it tomorrow and the day after that, and the day after that. And you’ve mentioned it four, five, six, seven times. And you, at that point as the radio presenter, are getting really sick of it.

Paul Green:
But here’s the thing. The listener has only heard it once, maybe even twice. Their ears may have heard it a number of times, but their brain hasn’t taken it in yet. Because we hear things all the time, and we see things all the time that we don’t perceive because we have a part of our brain called the reticular activating system, which acts as a sensory filter for all the information coming in. So we were always told in radio, as radio presenters, at the point at which you are sick to death of talking about something, the listeners are only just starting to comprehend it. They’re only just starting to perceive it. So carry on talking about it. And it’s exactly the same with multi touchpoint campaigns. You might be running a specific campaign. Let’s say ransomware. Let’s say you’re trying to educate your prospects about ransomware, and you’re trying to get that message out to them. And at the point of which you feel like you’ve said it 1000 times to 10,000 different people, actually it’s only just starting to go in.

Paul Green:
And this is what makes multi touchpoint campaigns so powerful. For example, let’s take that ransomware example. And actually, that’s a real campaign right now that, in my MSP Marketing Edge service, a lot of my clients are rolling out, because we provide them with a multi touchpoint campaign every single month. So that one is a very simple multi-touch point campaign. It starts with a postcard which talks about ransomware and how hackers can sit in a system for up to 60 to 100 days before they launched their ransomware attack. And then it has an email which is sent out, which arrives the same day that the postcard arrives. And the purpose of the email is to say, “Hey, did you get my postcard? This is the link to click.” Because of course on the postcard you have a call to action. You have a website address you want them to visit to do whatever it is you want them to do. In this specific campaign we want them to book a 15 minute, no obligation meeting like a Zoom meeting with the owner of the MSP.

Paul Green:
So the problem with putting that on a direct mail is someone’s got to go to their computer and press buttons. And that actually reduces the response. So when you send an email which arrives on the same day, and you can say, “Hey, did you get my postcard? This is link I was talking about,” it’s very easy for them to just use their finger and just tap on that link. So that actually increases the response rate. So they get a postcard and an email on the first day. And then later down the line they’ll get some follow-up phone calls. They get some more emails. There’s actually a second piece of direct mail that can go out with a free guide to teach them all about ransomware if you wanted to send that out. There’s even a mention of ransomware in our printed newsletter which comes out every month. And you can see there there’s lots and lots of different touch points. And that’s not a particularly ambitious campaign. There are no Facebook adverts in there. There’s no LinkedIn messaging in there. There’s a whole bunch of other stuff that you could do.

Paul Green:
But the secret behind all of these things is that it’s exactly the same message, just delivered via different methods. When I say it’s the same message we’re not using exactly the same words. Of course we change the words on each message, but it’s the same message overall. We’re talking about ransomware and how deadly it can be, and how hackers can sit in a system long before an attack is ever launched. And by the way, these are the symptoms to look out for. And we’re talking about that in the postcard, in the newsletter, in the educational guide, in the emails. And it’s even in the script for the person following them up by phone as well. Always the same message delivered to them three or four different ways.

Paul Green:
Now the vast, vast majority of people who are targeted with a campaign like this do not read everything. They don’t take in every single message. And so for that reason, they don’t feel like they’re being bombarded. In fact, just like I was saying about the radio station example, things just seem to start to go into their mind. When they talk to the person on the phone they say things like, “Yeah, you guys seem to be everywhere right now.” Well no we’re not actually. We’ve just sent you a couple of emails and a couple of things in the post.” But when they say things like, “You guys seem to be everywhere right now,” rejoice. This is an amazing thing, because it means that your messaging through your multi touchpoint campaign is really starting to cut through.

Paul Green:
Now and again you get the odd idiot who does read everything, who absorbs every single message, and is not happy because they have been targeted quite aggressively. Because a multi touchpoint campaign is quite an aggressive form of marketing, but often aggressive forms of marketing work really, really well. As I was talking about just two weeks on this podcast, don’t listen to the critics. If you send out a multi touchpoint campaign to 100 people and one of them has a go at you on the phone or criticises you or sends some of your direct mail back with a rude message written on it, ignore this person. Their opinion does not matter. Ignore the critic and listen to the new clients that you get off the back of this multi touchpoint campaign.

Paul Green:
So, where do you get started with something like this? Well, the start point is always, what do you want to talk to these people about? And what’s the outcome you want? I mean obviously the end outcome is always going to be to get a new client, but off the back of this campaign, what’s the outcome? Virtually all of the marketing campaigns that we do for our MSP Marketing Edge clients, the outcome is someone booking a 15 minute appointment with the MSP or their sales person on a phone or on a Zoom. Essentially we just want to get 15 minutes of their time to start to ask them some open questions. And of course you get the right prospect giving you 15 minutes of their time, it’s going to become 30 minutes. It’s going to lead onto a meeting. It’s going to lead onto a proposal, and hopefully a client. That’s the whole point of this. So what’s the subject you want to talk to them about? What’s the outcome?

Paul Green:
Good subjects tend to be based around fear. And I wish that fear-driven marketing didn’t work, because it is an overly negative thing. But the reality is people are more motivated by the fear of loss than they are the opportunity to gain. Talking about ransomware, and not the specifics of ransomware itself, but the downsides of it. The huge impact on a business that’s hit by ransomware. Talking about what happens if you lose an un-encrypted device. Talking about how AV still is necessary these days, even though it’s not 2005 and you can’t really rely just on the Windows default AV. These are all fear driven marketing. And positive marketing can work as well, it’s just not as effective as fear driven marketing. So once you’ve decided your subject matter and your outcome, you then need to design what’s our multi touchpoint campaign going to be. What are we going to send them in the post? Because you absolutely have to have some direct mail element of a multi touchpoint campaign.

Paul Green:
What are we going to send them on email? What are we going to send them on LinkedIn? Or how are we going to put adverts in front of them on Facebook? All of these things work together. What are we going to get our telephone person to say when they phone them up? All of these things work together. It’s very, very powerful. And when you can deliver the whole thing over a week or a two week campaign, you will see a dramatic upturn in the number of people willing to have quality conversations with you. Just one point on how many of these people will respond with an inbound inquiry. The vast majority, just so you know, you can send them all of this stuff, they still won’t respond to it. They can read your postcard and your printed newsletter and they can read your email. And some, a tiny, tiny number will book a meeting with you, but the vast majority won’t. You mustn’t assume that your campaign is a failure if the vast majority of people don’t respond to it. This is why you’ve got to have someone phoning them.

Paul Green:
These kind of campaigns work really, really well when someone is following them up on the phone. In fact, the secret weapon in your MSP is someone following people up on the phone all the time. Just ringing prospects, having a chat with them, building relationships, and certainly following up multi touchpoint campaigns just like these.

Voiceover:
Paul’s blatant plug.

Paul Green:
This is the last time I’m mentioning this competition here in the podcast because it closes on Friday the 30th of October. To celebrate a year of the MSP Marketing Podcast we are giving away three cool things. And it’s so easy to enter. I’ll tell you how in a couple of seconds. So you could win either the first prize, which is a one-to-one marketing consult with me. The second prize, which is my best selling video course, the MSP Net Profit Masterclass. That’s a 21 week training program. That’s worth £799, or $999. Or you could get a £100 Amazon gift card and my book list. And you are welcome to spend that on anything you fancy on Amazon. It doesn’t have to be on books. You could spend it on your drone fund or buy yourself a nice gadget. Or maybe something for your other half, or your kids. Or buy yourself a nice gadget, whatever it is that you fancy.

Paul Green:
Now to enter the competition. It’s really, really easy. First of all, you just need to go to my website. PaulgreensMSPmarketing.com/win. And on there you’ll see the instructions. It basically says, “Go to this post on LinkedIn.” The reason we’re sending you to the website first is it’s not easy to send you to a specific post on LinkedIn from a podcast. So if you go to my website forward slash win, and it’s got a link to the post on LinkedIn. And then all you need to do is comment on that post. You can write literally anything. It could be as simple as, “Yeah I just want to win,” or, “I love the podcast.” Or you could write complete gobbledygook. It really doesn’t matter because we’ll be picking the winner at random. We won’t be judging the comments at all. We’ll be using software to pick a winner at random. Just make sure that you are entered by Friday the 30th of October. And the competition closes at 10:00 PM Greenwich Mean Time.

Paul Green:
We will announce the winner on that webpage on the 6th of November, if you’re going to enter that competition. Or if you’ve already entered, good luck. I’m looking forward to announcing the winners soon.

Voiceover:
The big interview.

Cody Butler:
Hi, my name’s Cody Butler and I’m the author of The 90 Day Marketing Plan. And I help small businesses create efficient marketing plans to get their message out there.

Paul Green:
And most MSPs are quite bad at marketing by their own admission. So a book like this really caught my attention, because I thought it’s the kind of thing that most MSPs really should read. Tell us what’s in the book. I know the title is kind of obvious, The 90 Day Marketing Plan, but what’s actually inside?

Cody Butler:
Yeah. So that’s a great point. So it’s not just MSPs, Paul, it’s everybody, every business owner more or less is pretty much bad at marketing. So what happens typically is somebody will start a business because they’re passionate about something or they’re very good at something. And they think that’s going to be sufficient for the business to grow. But business is about far more than just your product and your service delivery. You’ve actually got to get the message out there and you’ve got to get people knowing who you are and what you do. So the book is designed to bridge that gap between you having your passion and you having the service that you’re excellent at delivering, and actually communicating that to a marketplace that’s eager and hungry and really wants your product or service. Because at the end of the day, there’s no shortage of businesses out there that want these types of services and need these types of services, and are willing to pay for these type of services. They just don’t know that you are there and what you can do for them exactly.

Paul Green:
So a lot of the MSPs that I do work with, when they do marketing, it’s a very sporadic thing. It’s a case of, “Let’s do a little bit of this. Let’s do a bit of that.” It’s quite tactical in its nature. And often there’s not a strategy and not a plan sitting there in the background. Now, I’ve always said, “Well, it’s better to do something than to do nothing,” but what you’re saying in this book is that you actually do need to have a marketing plan before you start doing marketing.

Cody Butler:
Absolutely. The best time to start planning is before you start building, right? It’s the measure twice, cut once scenario. So what typically happens is, is a business will have a route to market where they’re getting the majority of their business from. For MSPs that tends to be networking or referrals, that kind of stuff. Getting in contact with other business owners locally through meetings and referrals. And that’s great, but it gives you no control over your business. It gives you no control over the growth. If you had to add five clients or 10 clients this month that you absolutely had to do, would you have a system in place to do that? That’s the question that I always ask.

Cody Butler:
So businesses about predictability. If you don’t have predictability in your business, I would say you really don’t have a business. You’ve got kind of a naughty child. When business gets really fun is when you can say, “Okay, I need five clients this month, or I need 10 clients this month,” and you have a process in place to where you know you can go out and get that business, whether it be via LinkedIn, whether it be via direct mail or email outreach, whatever it is, that’s when business starts to get fun, when you actually know that you can go out. And that’s when the stress goes away as well, Paul. When you don’t know how to get a client, when it’s kind of left up to chance, that can be stressful. But when you know, if I had to generate five new clients this month and you knew that you could do it, that’s when business starts to become fun because the stress disappears at that point.

Paul Green:
Yeah, completely agree with you there. That systematic, consistent marketing. It does give you that peace of mind. You sleep better because you don’t have to worry about where the next clients are coming from. And for MSPs, they don’t need five or 10 clients in a week or a month. For most MSPs one new clients a month is enough.

Cody Butler:
Exactly, yeah.

Paul Green:
Because there’s so much monthly recurring revenue and the retention is just insane for most MSPs. So where do you get started, Cody? What’s the first step?

Cody Butler:
Yeah, the question I always ask, and this will reveal everything you really need to know about your business, is how many people know about me that want, need, and can pay for my services that didn’t know about me yesterday? How many people know about me that want, need, and can pay for my services that know about me this month that didn’t know about me last month? That would tell you everything you need to know. Right? So for the average MSP, the answer to that question is zero. How many people know about you today that didn’t know about you yesterday? Zero. How many people know about you this month that didn’t know about you last month. The answer is probably zero. Or it’s a very low number, right? So whatever you measure, improves. So we want to start measuring stuff that, when it improves, is going to have a real impact on your business.

Cody Butler:
So how many people know about you today that didn’t know about yesterday? That’s a number that’s really important because that is really going to create some growth in your business. So once you’ve got that baseline number then you start to put a plan in place. And it’s really very easy. So LinkedIn is a great place for MSPs to be finding potential customers. Right? So if you reach out to, or if you connect with 30 people a day on LinkedIn, which is literally 15, 20 minutes worth of work, it’s a very small amount of work, that’s 30 people a day, five days a week, four weeks a month. That’s 900 people who you know about you at the end of the month who didn’t know about you at the beginning. And if we extrapolate that out over the year. So let’s say we’re going to work 10 months. We want to take Christmas and some summer off. So that’s 9,000 people that potentially want, need, and can pay for your service that know about you at the end of the year.

Cody Butler:
Now, when you’re talking about needing one or two new clients a month to keep things going, is it conceivable that out of 9,000 people that now know about you that didn’t, that 10 or 12 of those are going to become clients? So when you look at it in those terms marketing actually becomes very easy instead of the daunting task that it is for most people right now.

Paul Green:
And in your book, do you recommend having different streams of prospects and different streams of leads coming into the business so that you’re not, say, focused just on LinkedIn, but you’ve got, let’s say, LinkedIn, you’re doing some work at using the phone, for example? That you’ve got a direct mail campaign? Is that the kind of thing that you recommend?

Cody Butler:
Yes so look. So here’s what I would recommend. I would recommend like a multi-pronged attack. So you ideally create a list of your ideal prospects. You’d reach out to them on LinkedIn. You’d pick up the phone and call them. So here’s what I do. So I’ll reach out. Let’s say you’re a prospect for me, Paul. I would send you a message on LinkedIn. As soon as you connect, “Really appreciate you connecting. Yada, yada, yada.” And then I’d pick up the phone and say, “Hey Paul, we just connected on LinkedIn. I thought I’d reach out and say, ‘Hey, how’s it going?'” Then I’d sent you a letter in the mail. So the multi-pronged approach definitely, definitely works for sure. I mean, the more times you can connect with somebody, the more times you can reach out to somebody, the more chances of them becoming a client for you. It’s very unlikely somebody is just going to become a client just like that. You have to follow up a lot. So having that multi-pronged approach is great.

Cody Butler:
But as far as the initial outreach, LinkedIn is probably enough for an MSP. Or a direct mail campaign is probably enough. Right? Because you’re not going to run a Facebook campaign, realistically. Your clients are not on Facebook. LinkedIn is where the business owners and the decision-makers that you want to talk to hang out. They’re going to be the easiest place. That’s going to be the easiest place to find them. And that’s going to be the lowest cost place as well. I mean, if you ran Google Ads it’s going to cost you probably $100 a click, right? It’s going to be super expensive. You can do it, but it’s not really that desirable for most people.

Paul Green:
I agree. This is great advice. It really is. Cody, final question. From your book, give us two or three big ideas from the book, or aha moments. The kind of thing that someone would read this, someone who’s perhaps not doing a great deal of marketing at the moment. They’d read this in the book and it would just blow their mind, and they think, “Ah, this is exactly the kind of thing that I should be doing.”

Cody Butler:
You have to understand, when somebody says no or they don’t respond, they’re not saying no, they’re saying, “Not right now.” So with an MSP service, it’s very specific, right? You can’t just cancel the contract and start a new one. You have to wait until the contract ends, or you have to wait for a rollover period, you have to wait for a specific period of time. So more so in this industry then, consistent follow up is going to be the key. Because if you send a message out to somebody who’s got six months left on a contract, you might think that the answer is no, when actually the answer is just not right now. So having a consistent followup system in place to where, once every two weeks, once a month, however, you have an automated process that sends out a message saying, “Hey. Hey Paul. I’m just touching bases with you. I’m still here if you need anything. Let me know.”

Cody Butler:
And doing that month after month after month, the majority of sales will take place after the 90 day period of somebody coming into contact with you. So you’ve got to play the long game. Most people think that following up for 90 days is the long game. The long game is actually from the 90 day period onwards. That’s where the long game starts. So really having a strategy in place to where you’re playing that long game, because that’s where you’re going to win ultimately.

Cody Butler:
And the second thing would be focus on one thing. Don’t send a catalogue to somebody with the 20 different services you can provide. Find one particular service that has a high desire, has a high appeal in the marketplace where it’s easy to sell. And lead with that. Only present that. And then once somebody bites on that, then you can start to offer them the additional services that come behind that. Because otherwise people will just become overwhelmed. If you offer them all 20 services, you get on a call with somebody and they say, “Well, what exactly do you do?” And then like, “We do ABCDEFG and the whole alphabet,” that just confuses and overwhelms people. And the one thing, a confused mind will not make a decision, and a confused mind will definitely not spend any money. So just focus on one thing, get the person or business interested in that one thing. And then once you have their ear, once you have their trust, then start to expand it and present the catalogue of services to them.

Paul Green:
Tell us where we can get hold of a copy of The 90 Day Marketing Plan?

Cody Butler:
So you can get a digital copy at the90daymarketingplan.biz. So www.the90daymarketingplan.biz. Check out my website, codybutler.com. Or of course it’s available on Amazon if you want a hard copy, then at amazon.com The 90 Day Marketing Plan, you can grab a copy there.

Voiceover:
Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast. This week’s recommended book.

James Newell:
Hi, I’m James Newell here from Clear Sales Message. And the book that I would recommend is the all-time classic 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss. It’s a masterpiece of being as effective and as efficient as possible with your time and your resources. It’s helped me massively in my business, and I know it’s helped millions of people around the world. And so Tim Ferriss, 4-Hour Work Week. That’s my recommendation.

Voiceover:
How to contribute to the show.

Paul Green:
Every week I get a couple of emails about the show, and I love getting your feedback. So please, whatever you think, good or bad, drop me a line. Hello@paulgreensmspmarketing.com, and it will be the real me answering you.

Voiceover:
Coming up next week.

Jennifer Bleam:
Every sale is based on emotion. And if you don’t engage the emotions, there will not be a buying decision.

Paul Green:
That’s Jennifer Bleam. She’s a cyber security sales expert, and she’s going to be joining me on next week’s show to talk about current trends in cybersecurity and how you can leverage these to sell more to your clients. It’s a win-win scenario. They’re better protected, you make more money, literally everyone wins except those evil hackers. We’re also going to be talking next week about how to improve your work-life balance. I’ve got a book suggestion from Steve Taylor from RocketMSP, and we’re going to be talking about AppSumo. And if you’ve never come across AppSumo before, then you’re not going to thank me after listening to next week’s show. It really is like crack cocaine for entrepreneurs. And you’re going to spend a lot of money with them in the years ahead. Looking forward to seeing you on next week’s show.

Voiceover:
Made in the UK for MSPs around the world. Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast.