Webinar replay: How to find, train and maximise a telephone person

Live 🔴 MSP Monthly Profit Booster

Have you joined me on a live webinar yet? Every month, I put on a free one with brand new content you've not seen before.

In February 2021’s webinar, we discussed why it's SO important to have someone making outbound phone calls for you.

This is what you’ll discover in this replay:

• Whether you should try to do this yourself; outsource it to a telemarketing agency; or find someone to do it in-house
• The best kind of person to do this job for you (you don't ever want someone with telesales experience). Plus how to find and hire them
• Who your telephone person should call, and what they should say
• The best way to pay them (clue - you should never offer commission)
• Lots of little things that make a big difference

The replay and transcript are below.

March's webinar is
The holy trinity of Monthly Recurring Revenue

Tuesday 23rd March 2021
4pm UK time

Full details and register here

Good afternoon. It is just after 1:00 PM GMT here in the UK. Welcome to our monthly webinar, brand new content for you every single month. You've not seen this content anywhere before. We are live, so if you're in the chat right now, or if you're in the webinar, open up the chat, just say, hello. I'm just going to read out a few names of people who are here. So Martin Bolli is here. Hi there, Martin. Good to have you here. Andy Newbrook has just arrived. Hello, Andy. We've got Eric Hall here as well. Hi, Eric. James from the UK. Hi there, James. And we've got Kylie from Durham. We've got Daryl Ellis here from London. James Kirby's here. How are you doing James? Greg Dunn. Hi Greg. Isaac Johnson's here. Jose Vargas is here as well.

Gary Marshall, Mark, Charlie Sprat. Loads of people. If I haven't said your name, apologies, but please do go in and have a chat because we are completely live here. Now is only me running the webinar. So there's no one from my team here, sort of on the chat while we're going along. But as we're going through this today, please ask questions on the chat. In a second I'm going to close down the chat so that I can't see it because I get distracted easily by the chats and I'm going to deliver our content what it is that we're talking about today.

But we will also be doing a live marketing Q&A towards the end of today's webinar. And I will tell you a little bit more about that in a second. So the thing that we're talking about today is how to find, train and maximize a telephone person. And by a telephone person, I mean, someone who is sitting doing outbound calls for you. In fact, James has just made a comment here. James Kirby is saying, "Currently paying a team to make calls, getting one lead of some sort per 130 or so of these calls. Hopefully we'll get these rookie numbers up." Well, you may actually James have discovered your stats. And it's one of the things that we'll talk about today is discovering your number. It depends what you define a lead as.

But I'm going to run you through everything today. In fact, what we're going to talk about today's, we're going to, first of all, address the question of, should you be doing this? Should you hand this over to a marketing agency? Or should you do this in-house? We're going to talk about the kind of person that you want and exactly where to find that person. We're going to talk about who they should call. We're also going to talk about what they should say. We will then talk about what to pay them as well. And that pretty much covers off everything when it comes to having an outbound phone person. As I say, we'll also finish with a marketing and business growth Q&A. I'm going to spend five minutes at the end as well just telling you about something that we run every month called the MSP Marketing Accelerator. And you can see this on my website if you go to paulgreensmspmarketing.com/accelerator. It's a live training program that lasts five weeks and we start one every single month.

So the February one actually starts on Wednesday and for memory, we've got four places left on that one. And then there's one that starts in March, one that it starts in April and we'll be doing it every single month this year. And there's only a space of 20 MSPs on each one. So if you have a look at paulgreensmspmarketing.com/accelerator, you can see all the details there and you can see the details of the course that already hundreds of MSPs have been through.

So I believe very, very strongly that every MSP should have a telephone person. And the main reason for this is... Well, there's lots and lots of different reasons. My main reason for this is it's about activity and it's about putting in place a robust outbound marketing system that works on and ongoing basis. It just works and works and works and works because you've created a machine. And most MSPs by their free admission aren't very good at marketing, many MSPs don't do systematic marketing. So they'll do a bit here. They'll do a bit there, but there's no system that's gone into it.

And I think the only way that you can consistently grow your business by adding new clients, because obviously you can grow your business and your net profits by selling more to your existing clients. But if you want to grow by adding on new clients, which you really need to do at the same time, then you need to have that marketing machine. And part of that is about attracting a whole bunch of people who will listen to you and building up your databases. But importantly is actually doing some outbound work to them as well.

There's a three-step strategy, marketing strategy that I've recommended to thousands of MSPs over the years. And that three-step strategy is very, very simple, requires a lot of work and there's a lot of moving parts in here, but the strategy is very simple to understand. The first thing you do is you build multiple audiences. So that's... Sorry. I'm slightly disrupted. There are two squirrels fighting outside in my backyard over the nuts. We put nuts out in a feeder and two of them are having a good scrap over the nuts. Oh, good.

So the first thing you need to do is you need to build multiple audiences. So that's for most MSPs, that's going to be an email audience. So a bunch of people that you can email that are in your CRM, in your email database, and also LinkedIn. LinkedIn is another audience for MSPs. Other audiences available could be Twitter. If your big passion, really passionate about Twitter. Facebook can be an audience. Instagram can be an audience if the people you want to reach are using Instagram for their own marketing. So typically retailers, hospitality, restaurants, that kind of thing, they will use Instagram. For the vast majority of MSPs I've worked with just, and then there's probably you stick to email and stick to LinkedIn.

So the first step is you build multiple audiences. So there are people listening to you. The second step is you then build a relationship with them. And that's typically done through content marketing, through sending out articles, through sending out emails. In fact, you'd send, you'd do something on a monthly, weekly and daily basis. We'll reverse that. On a daily basis, you put out social media content. On a weekly basis, you would send out a piece of email content and that would be edutainment, it wouldn't be trying to sell them stuff. It would be educational and entertainment at the same time.

And then on a monthly basis, you would send out a physical print newsletter. And in some of our previous webinars, we've talked about this in a great deal, more detail. If you go into my blog so it's paulgreensmspmarketing.com/blog. And you can find there the webinar replays as we've been doing this webinar series about four or five months now. So we build multiple audiences, we build a relationship with them, and then here's where that phone person comes in critically we commercialize that relationship.

And there is nothing better than having someone working on your behalf, phoning your audiences for you so that you personally don't have to do it. Because assuming you are the owner or the manager of your MSP, you don't have the time and probably you don't have the inclination to sit and pick up the phone 20, 30, 40, 50 times a day because that's really is what it takes. So what we're looking for here is we're looking for someone who can do this on your behalf. And the thing that we want them to do is we want them to find out who's ready to talk and then get that person in front of you.

Because a lot of this marketing stuff that does require an element of getting the timing right. You might be trying to sell me your MSP services, but today I've got other things on. I'm just not interested. Tomorrow my mind's full of other things, Wednesday, isn't quite right. But then we get to Thursday and for whatever reason, I wake up on Thursday morning and I'm like, "Right, let's do this. I'm going to switch from my current MSP that I'm not happy with that. I'm going to switch to someone new." That's the day you want to be in front of me. That's the day you want to make sure that I know you. And I know that I'm going to pick up the phone to you and have a conversation with you.

So this is what you want your phone person to do. And we will come more as we go through the webinar, we'll go more into detail about exactly what you want them to do and how you want them to do it. Now, the first question, when it comes to having a phone person is should you hire a marketing agency or should you do this as in-house? Now, I have done both. So some context to this, the business I have now, I have a business partner called Ben Smith. He is never going to phone you in the way that I'm going to suggest that you phone people. And that's because we simply, we have so many inbound inquiries and as a business we're very good at sales and systematic sales. And we also have no desire to grow this business, to being another, a million-pound business because there's a lot of stress and hassle that goes with that. I've been there. I've done that.

So we're never going to call you in the way I'm going to suggest this, but a business, which I sold five years ago, in fact, it's in a months time, it will be five years almost to the day. That business, which was a million turnover marketing agency. And we were selling marketing services to vets or veterinarians, dentists and opticians. And we had a full-time team of three telephone people. And we actually hired and fired around about 25 people to get to that core team of three. And it was a nightmare, if I'm completely honest because telephone people are the let's just say that they demand more management time than other people.

So if I was to do that again, if I still run business now, I would probably not have the in-house team. I would probably do the model I'm going to suggest to you today. But before we built our own team, we used a number of marketing agencies. And what we discovered is that a telesales, telemarketing agencies have a fairly standard modus operandi. Now I want this to be really clear. I'm not criticizing any of the MSP specific telemarketing agencies. I have very little insight into them. I've barely spoken. I've spoken to one or two owners and that's in the UK and the US. Please do not say, "Paul's really critical about so-and-so and so-and-so agency." This is not aimed at any particular agency.

My experience is that the vast majority of telemarketing agencies, MSP specific or not work like this. There's someone or some people at the top who are really impressive. They tend to have come from a telemarketing background. Perhaps they worked for yellow pages or some kind of directory or somewhere where the business lived or died on good telesales, on good relationship building over the phones. And they woo you in, and they over-service you for the first month or first couple of months. So often it's the owner or the senior people doing the calling on your behalf. And so the results from the first couple of months are amazing. And you are just, "Wow." And you think, this is amazing.

So you go and sign a contract and that's the point at which the work gets passed down the line. As I say, not all agencies work like this, but the vast majority I've seen do, because of course the owner now wants to move on and win the next client. And over-service the next new client so that they can get them onto a long contract. And what you end up with is that the quality of person doing the call has moved down.

This is actually the agency model. This is exactly the same in marketing agencies you get lured in by the person at the top, who is the agency guru. And then ultimately the work is done by 12 year olds at the bottom. Now that works for the marketing agency because you've got levels of supervision because work gets signed off by seniors before it ever comes to the clients. The problem in the tele marketing agency is there's no one to sign off the 12-year-old who's making phone calls on your behalf. And with a few exceptions, the vast majority of MSP clients that I have who have used telemarketing agencies have had this exact problem, that over time, the quality goes down. And this is why I believe that you have to put together your own kind of person.

It's very difficult to put together your own team, or just go and find your own person. I call these or the kind of people you can come across. You've got Mirandas and you've got Marios. So I had 25 of people that we hired, Miranda was my best and Mario was one of my worst. Actually, there were many worse than Mario, but they didn't last long. Whereas Mario lasted a year. We tolerated Mario for a year. No offense, Mario. I'm still connected to you on Facebook. I'm sure you'd be horrified to see this. But what you're looking for is someone more like a Miranda than a Mario. What were the difference between the two? Mario was male. And I do think that makes a big difference being positively discriminatory against male or in favor of women, whatever is the right way to do that. Mario was male. Mario was young. Mario wants to be a film director, which he's actually now working towards. Mario needed money. And those were all the wrong reasons why Mario was a terrible telephone person, because essentially he didn't want to be there.

Actually I've just thought of someone worse than Mario. That was Ken. Ken stole from me. Ken ripped me off. He stole my time. He was running his own business on the side while he was making phone calls, he was ringing, pretending to ring clients. And we were listening to voice recordings where we could hear him speaking and no one on the other end. And that's because he was actually calling sort of fake numbers and pretending to have conversations. So in the office, they thought he was doing some work. And actually he was running his own social media channels. That was a weird one that was.

Anyway the point is that there are lots of bad people out there, but you want Miranda. So Miranda, what made her great was she was female. She was slightly more mature. So she was, I think she was late 40s when she worked for me, maybe early 50s, she was doing this work for fun first, income second. So she actually turned up to work every day in an Audi TT, which is quite a posh car for someone doing a telephone job. Before Miranda worked for us, she worked for a court for 10 years. And if you got caught speeding in your car she was like at the end of the helpline where you phoned up to pay your fine. So she had people ringing her up 20, 30 times a day. Some of them joking, some of them annoyed, some of them telling same swear words to her. And after 10 years, she kind of got fed up with that job.

But the reason we hired her was because she was great on the phone. So she actually, when she had angry call was calling up because they'd been caught speeding. She took it as almost like a personal mission on herself, rather than letting them annoy her. Let's have some fun with these people. Let's see if we can turn them around in their attitude and not lecture them about speeding. But let's have fun. Let's enjoy this. She went to work for fun. And when that job stopped being fun, she came to work for us and she kept, she stayed, in fact she stayed past the point I sold the business from memory and she did it because it was fun.

And this is critical. This is exactly what you're looking for. You're looking for someone that wants to do this because they have fun. So the kind of person that you're looking for is probably, and this is quite a specific criteria, but it gives you something to argue for. So most probably a back to work mom or mum, depending on what country you're in. It's most probably someone who's going to work from home. They're going to do the work around schooling. So lockdowns aside when the kids are at school, you've got what, five and a half, six hours. They will probably want to do that work there. They're looking for flexible work so they can not work today if there's a crisis that comes up, because typically they are the adult that has to look after the child if the child is ill of school or something like that.

They enjoy working from home and more than anything else, they love being on the phone, absolutely love being on the phone. Now they are not typically, or that I would suggest that you don't get someone who has come from any kind of telemarketing or tele sales background. You don't want someone who's spent four or five years being a phone sales person, because this is not a selling job. We are not looking for someone to try and sell your services to end clients. That is not the purpose of this job. The purpose of this job is for this person to book 15 minute video calls with you. That's the only purpose of this. And we'll go into exactly what they're looking to do and how they're going to do this in a second.

We want a nice warm in person who's going to enjoy sitting on the phone. Who's going to bash, hit the phones, do two or three hours of intense activity and then just [inaudible 00:16:20]. And that's exactly what we want. And you will give them one of your VoIP phones. You will give them some guidelines of what to say. And we'll cover that off in a little while. And ultimately you'll give them access to your life calendar through Calendly or something like that. And ultimately, they're going to go and book you a couple of 15 minute video calls a week with potential future clients. And that's it. That's all we want.

So in terms of what you're looking for, and it's a shame you can't say this in adverts, but you're looking for, as I say, a mom who wants flexible work, school hours, working from home and preferably is not 20. Because you're looking for someone with a bit of experience and some maturity and check your local laws for what you can and can't say in a job advert, but that's essentially what you're looking for. Now, in terms of where do you find this person? There are of course, a number of different routes to find anyone. You could start on, well, I would recommend you start it on Facebook. Facebook would be a great place. Now you can either put something on your business's page or better still is to ask the women who match the demographic of the person you're looking for to share it on their profile.

So, for example, let's say you were male. I know not everyone's male on this call, but let's say you were male and your other half was a 40-year-old female. And you would get your other half to share this because what tends to happen on Facebook is we tend to be connected to people like us. If you're a 40-year-old work from home mum, you're very likely to be connected to other 40-year-old mums of perhaps a similar demographic. So if you don't have someone like this that can share it for you, excuse me, you could ask your team, perhaps not say to them, "Who's married to a 40-year-old mum? That might be a bit of an awkward conversation." Look at your team, look at your friends, where are the mums? Where are the middle-age mums that can spread this to other middle-aged moms? So Facebook is absolutely the right thing to do, and don't bother doing an advert. Literally you can have a thing of someone I know is looking for back to work... Well, you can't say mum, can you?

A back to work parent to work... So many laws about what you can and can't say in adverts. Back to work parent to work a couple of hours a day, couple of days a week, flexible hours, school time, work from home and it's making phone calls, it's phoning lists of people who've inquired into the business or lists of... I don't want to say the words warm call, because it's not cold calling. It's not warm calling. It's somewhere in the middle. Cold calling is where you call someone and they have absolutely no idea who you are. Warm calling is obviously whether there's a relationship. Here the relationship is only through content marketing. But I guess you'd say something like phoning prospective clients or phoning prospects or something like that. Because they will have the old person tell them to get stuffed or something rude, but the vast majority of people they call won't have that.

So if you can't find that person on Facebook, you can actually put... There a job groups in Facebook. If you go into Facebook and type in jobs your town, and typically those tend to be lower level jobs. I would argue that's not a great place to put this. Do you know you'd be much better going to local schools and seeing if the school has a Facebook group for his parents or a WhatsApp group or something like that, that they could share this in. I certainly wouldn't pay to advertise this on Monster or somewhere like that. There are many, many more places to find this person than formally advertising your job.

Because you go and advertise a job like that, you're going to have 200 applications and 150 of them are going to be natters and male. And that's not exactly what you're looking for. You've got a very specific kind of person you're looking for and it's much better to work networks. You almost want someone who didn't know they were looking for something. So they're not actively looking for jobs, but they're at that point now they're a bit bored. We can't go out and see people as we could actually, a bit of extra money would be quite helpful. A couple of hours a day, a couple of days a week, that suits me. And I think you're more likely to find them through say those contacts and using Facebook.

Now, in terms of who they should call. That's very simple. They call everyone that's in your email list. They call everyone that you're connected to on LinkedIn. They call everyone that you've got. Think back to that strategy, build multiple audiences. Whenever you build an audience like that, you start with all the data that you've got in your business. So if you've been going 10 years or so, you've got hundreds of business cards hidden away. You've got hundreds of emails, forms that have been filled in, people that you've had chats to. There's all sorts of data knocking around in your business, pull it all together, put your hand down the back of the data couch, grab what's there, pull it all together, put it in a CRM, call those people.

Because if they're only doing it couple of hours a day, a couple of days a week, they're not going to be needing hundreds and hundreds of people. There will be a number of people that they need to try each day, that might be 20 or 30 people. And of course, they're not going to connect. They will be doing somewhere between around about one in 10 or somewhere between one in five and one in 10, they'll actually get through to and connect with them. And then they'll have a 10-minute call or whatsoever, but you still need a number of people just dial. So giving them access to your LinkedIn is a very smart move. Giving them access to your email database is great. Most MSPs don't have too many people to call. So it's never a case of who should we call in which order?

The business that I sold five years ago, we had 12,000 leads. So we had built up over a number of years and we spent hundreds of thousands of pounds doing it. 12,000 highly targeted leads who'd opted into our marketing. And with only three people, you cannot call 12,000 people a year, not in a relationship building way, which is what we're going to do here. So we started to categorize them down, according to who was active. So back then five years ago, I didn't do any social media marketing at all. It was all done through email. So I sent out two emails a week. So that's 24,000 emails a week to 12,000 people. And then my team called the people. First of all, they called the people who clicked on the link in the email. And then secondly, if they needed more people to call, they'd call people who'd open the email. So why clicks first? Because someone who's opened your email and clicked on it is engaged to some degree of measure. It shows you that they are alive. Someone somewhere has clicked on it.

I know that some of the scanning, link scanning technologies can click links for you. But five years ago, we didn't have such an issue with that. So we wanted to know who was active and alive. They call those people first. Then secondly, they call people who had opened emails. And the reason they did that second was because obviously it's not a very, very accurate measure, whether someone has opened or not, preview panes and all that sort of thing can mess it up. And if ever they ran out of those, then they just called other people off the list. To be honest, they didn't, we had a couple of 1000 opens a week.

And so there were plenty of people for them to call and they looked at it and they would essentially use their brains. And this is another reason why you don't want a zombie who's used to making 100 cold calls a day. You want someone who's warm and friendly because the goal here is to build relationships. So you want them to be able to look at this and say, "Oh, Paul Green, I spoke to him two weeks ago. I'm not going to call him. Oh, James Smith. I haven't spoken to him ever actually. Right. Let's have a look at him. Let's go and have a look at his website. Okay. Right. So this is what he does for a living. Got this, got this. Okay."

Basically do a bit of research, go and have a look because there's nothing worse than calling a business and not even knowing what the business does. They've kind of got to have enough knows about them to actually do a little bit of research before they call [inaudible 00:24:02]. Because they're calling on behalf of you and their goal is to... Well, they have two goals, really their first goal and their ultimate goal is to book a 15 minute video call with you. I'm going to show you a script in a second of how exactly they do that.

But their other goal, their secondary mission as it were, is to build your relationship with that person, to build the business's relationship with that person. Because people buy only when they're ready to buy. And the vast majority of people that your phone person speaks to are just not going to be ready yet, but they may be in three months' time or six months' time or whatsoever. So we want to build that relationship. We want to get to know a little bit about them, perhaps know who they're currently working with. Perhaps know if they are thinking of switching at some points, just ask what's coming up, what's coming up for their business because all of that information can be recorded in the CRM. Literally you can take notes.

In fact, one of the things that made Miranda, one of my best phone people thinking back to five years ago, was she was epic at recording notes and then using those notes. So I would come into the office and she'd be there on the phone, literally feet up on the desk. She had a headset on, but she was having a chat on the phone and she'd be laughing away and chatting to someone. And I'd go back and listen to the recording of that call because I'll be thinking what's she doing? And she'd ring up a dentist and she'd say, "Oh, hi, Dave, it's Miranda from Paul Green's office. Have you got two minutes? I just wanted to catch up with you. And then the thing I wanted to..."

And before they even had a chance to say anything, [inaudible 00:25:30], "The thing I want to catch up most is how was your holiday in the Maldives?" Because she doesn't know who this guy is, but she spoke to him four months ago and she kept some notes to say that he was going on a diving holiday in the Maldives with his two kids. Now, what Miranda was brilliant at was making everyone talk about their favorite subject. And everyone's favorite subject is themselves and their business. So she was really good at leveraging that. And you get a dentist talking about his holiday in the Maldives, he's going to be talking about that for five minutes, but relationship is being built. Even though it's got nothing to do with business, the relationship is being built.

And then she tests the water, see where they are right now. And again, if it wasn't the right thing, she'd say, "Look, I'll give you a call back in hey, six months. What's going to be happening in those six months, David?" And David would say, "Oh, well actually we're opening up so-and-so and so-and-so." Great. That note goes down in the book and it's something else for the next thing. So ultimate goal number one is to book those 15 minute appointments. Secondary goal is to build the relationship and gather data.

And the data that she gathers must go in the CRM because you have to assume that the person who's phoning them today is not going to be the same person who phones them in six months' time. I always assume with telephone people that you should do the same, that you will churn through people. Some people will start that job. They seem to quite like it and then two months down the line, they just don't. And so that's how we got through 25 of them in about a three-year period. It was insane, but it was the right thing to do. We hired slowly and we fired fast.

And in terms of what this person should say, I'm just going to show you a script. This is actually from my service, the MSP Marketing Edge, if you've never heard of this go and have a look at mspmarketingedge.com. Your brain, your mind will explode when you see all the value that we deliver for just £99 or $129 a month, depending on whether you have the UK or the US version. There's no contract. You can cancel anytime and you should just double-check to see if your area is still available at mspmarketingedge.com. See how I slipped in a very subtle tease there, very subtle sell?

So this is one of the scripts that we give to our clients. Every month we give them a telephone person's script, pretty much it's the same script. We just adapt it to the current campaign that we're running. So hi, is David there please? What should I call myself? Miranda. It's Miranda. Or can I speak to David, please. I'm calling from Paul Green's office about the postcard we sent him. One of the principles of phoning people is sometimes it's easier [inaudible 00:27:56]. It's easier for a phone person to call someone if something has already been sent to them. So for example, I have a big, big coronavirus campaign in a box, which again, we give to our MSP Marketing Edge clients. And in there is a sales letter packed with social proof. So testimonials from your clients. And I recommend that you send that out, you post it to your leads and then you phone them up a couple of days after, or a day after it's arrived.

And the reason is because it's a lot easier for the phone person to make a phone call about something that has been sent than it is to call up for no reason. You always want to come up with reasons for your phone person to call. In fact, for most MSPs, I recommend that instead of sending out 1000 of these and blitzing it, you're much better sending out 50 a week. 50 letters go out and then your phone person has got 50 people to call up to follow up. And they might speak to 10 of those people of which you might get one call booked.

And that's the kind of numbers [inaudible 00:28:58] James was asking in the chat earlier. What kind of numbers might we get? Numbers will depend on the quality of the data, the person, the time of year, the kind of businesses that you're calling, all of those kinds of things. But you will eventually find your own pattern and your pattern will be something like, "We send out 50 letters on the Monday and by the Friday we've got another 15 minute call book team." Therefore, if we want two calls a week, we need to send out 100 letters and have enough resource to follow up 200 people in that way.

And then we'd go to an engaging. So after we've pushed past the gatekeeper, we go through an engaging thing. So, "Oh, hi, there. I'm calling from Paul Green's office. So I recently sent you a postcard about how hackers can hide in your network. Did you get that?" And if they say no, then you just do it. You have kind of a little recap ready. So, "Oh right. Well, the postcard was about how hackers can sit undetected in your computer network for months and months, because they're looking through your data and then they're going to launch a ransomware attack. Do you know what a ransomware attack is?"

If they say, yes, they have received it. You say, and this is the exact words you use. "I bet you haven't had time to read it yet. I bet you haven't had time to read it yet." Because if they have, they go, "Wow, well actually I have." And they feel good about it. And if they haven't, they don't feel bad. So, "No, I haven't had time." And you say, "Oh." Miranda says, "Oh, no one was told. Loads of people are in the same position. Well, basically what it was about was..." And you can recap it like that.

Now you, you then do some exploring. So for example, you can either explore in this case, this is a company specific one. So we're exploring the specific issues. If it was exploring so you say, "How has your business coped with remote workers getting into your network? Do you currently take active steps to change your networks only being accessed by those with permission? Do you have a plan in place if your business was hit by ransomware network?" If there were general questions, so it wasn't about specific campaign. You just, I mean, this is the best one is, "How's your business doing through the pandemic?" You want how questions, what questions, but not why questions. So how is this going? What's happening here? How are you coping with this? What's the purpose of that?

The reason you don't ask why questions is because why questions can come across as very aggressive. Why did you do that? I know a lot of it is down to the tone of voice, but this very early stage in the sales process, it's appropriate for you that the sales person, the owner of the business to ask why questions is not appropriate for someone building the relationship on your behalf to ask why questions. So I would avoid those.

And then we get to ask him for the outcome. And so in this instance, this was a specific campaign. And so you'd say, "I'm offering a free breach detection review." And anything else you just say almost as if you thought of it, it's like, "Look, do you know what? I think I need to get you on a video call with Paul Green. Paul's our founder and he's an IT security expert and what you can do it's just 15 minutes. He can talk you through these kinds of things and actually look at what would the next step be if we did some work together? Would you be a right, good fit for us? Would we be a good fit for you? We can explore all that in 15 minutes."

And then my favorite is to go for what we call the either or close. So you see down at the bottom there, "What works best for you? Monday at 2:00 PM or Friday at 10:00 AM?" And that's an either or. So instead of basically giving them the choice of, "Do you want to do this or don't you?" Which is never a choice you really want to give people. You give them a choice of time slots to go in. There's something missing from this, which I want to make sure I mention, which is the one to 10 question. And the one to 10 question is beautiful, incredibly powerful. And it tells you A, if they're in a relationship with an MSP and B how happy they are with that MSP. This is the one to 10 question. "On a scale of one to 10, where one is awful and 10 is best in the world, how would you rate or rank your current IT support company?"

Now, if they answer 10, nine or eight, there's no opportunity for you for some time for maybe for years, because 10, nine or eight is really happy. That's the kind of score you'd hope your clients would give. And certainly on early days, maybe in the first couple of years, it would be a 10, nine or eight, but we all know that relationships deteriorate over time. Unless you want to have just two clients and stick with two clients forever, that's the way it is as you take on more clients and your focus goes elsewhere. So if someone answers seven, six or five, there is an opportunity coming up. There is a level of dissatisfaction. It's not a huge dissatisfaction, or it may not be huge. Although five is getting down to a lot of dissatisfaction, but it's worth exploring. And I'll tell you the question to explore in a second.

And then you come down to a four, three, two, one zero or minus scores that's urgent opportunity now. This person, there is an opportunity for you right now and you want to push to get that 15-minute call as quickly as you can. The follow-up question so is if anyone answers for seven, sort of down two to zero below is, "Oh, can I just ask why you gave them that score?" In fact, you might even say if it was five or below, you might say, "That's a very low score." Put some doubt in their mind. "That's a very low score. Can I ask what..." I just broke my own rule. I didn't know I can't ask why you gave them that score. "Can I ask what specifically made you give them that score? What specifically made you give them that score?" And what specifically is we want them to get down to what's the bloody problem?

"Oh, they never answered the phone, or it seems to take ages to get things fixed, or..." Your future prospects is going to tell you how to sell them, how to sell to them. In fact, when you come to do your 15 minute call, you should listen back every 15 minute call that's been booked by your telephone person. You should listen back to the call because there's some research and there's information. You can hear what happened. And if they tell you that their incumbent seems to never answer the phone on time, seems to take ages and they're just very slow. We all know that often that can just be perception more than anything else, but you know that when you speak to them on that 15-minute call and during the sales process, you need to address that. So you need to show them emotional and cognitive evidence that you will be faster than their incumbent. And there are a number of different ways that you would do that of course.

Now the next thing of course comes up is what exactly are we going to pay people? And in terms of payments, I do not recommend at all that you put in place any kind of bonus. If you put a bonus in, you encourage the wrong outcome. And I know this because we checked, we did so many bonus, so many different bonus schemes. My telephone guys five years ago, their outcome was to book a physical sales meeting for one of my field sales people. And we were booking one to two a day, which was pretty cool. And when we had an incentive scheme, which was, they got a bonus or some kind of incentive, every time they booked an appointment, the number of appointments went up. They in fact, they nearly doubled. We were delighted.

And then three months down the line, we realized that the number of sales has stayed static. So our salespeople, our field salespeople were doing twice the amount of work they were burning through twice the amount of petrol, which of course I was paying for. And we were getting exactly the same results. And that's because we bonused the telephone people on the wrong metric. It's not just about booking a call or booking a sales appointment in this case, it's about booking a qualified call or a qualified sales appointment.

You may never, ever want to support a one-man band. I mean, you might have a five or 10 user minimum, and you'd happily take on a three-user company as long as they paid the minimum. But a one-man band might just, you might just say, "Do you know what, it's just not worth the hassle. It's really not worth the hassle. So I'm not going to bother with that." Now, if your telephone person knows that and they can wash through, they can pre-qualify those people, although I've got to be honest, pre-qualification in this example is really better off being done by you on your 15-minute calls. It's not big deal for you to lose 15 minutes and pre-qualified, there might be an opportunity there that you can see that maybe he or she wouldn't.

So I wouldn't pay them for the outcome. What we actually, if you must give them a bonus, give them a share of the pie if you win a client. I believe for most people doing this role, you should just pay them an hourly wage and don't pay the basic minimum. Don't make it too good. Be somewhere in the middle, something that's like, "Actually, that's quite interesting." For example, here in the UK, I have no idea what minimum wage is. It depends on your age. It's about for an 18 plus, is it about £18, something like that? So I would pay like £25, £30 because I'm trying to reflect that I want an experienced mature back to work mum who has been out of the job market for a number of years, but was great at their job, whatever it was they did before and is never really going to go back to that.

I don't want them to feel like I'm profiteering from their work. So I would pay £25, £30 an hour. That would be okay. I guess the dollar equivalent to that probably around about, I think at 35, 40, something like that. But again, it depends on your local employment market. Doesn't it? If that's double what everyone else would pay for a similar thing, obviously you wouldn't pay double, but don't bonus them at all. So our goal is we moved to a new scheme where they got a share.

So when we won a new client, which was on average once a week for us, every week to 10 days or so. We would give them, because that was, how much was that? It was around about 10,000. It was £10,000 of annual revenue per client. So we gave the telephone people, I think it was 50 quid. So whoever booked the sales meeting got 50 quid. That changed the whole dynamic because suddenly it was all about quality. They were warming things up and they were doing things like making sure that my admin person was sending out the appointment confirmation letter. And we had a DVD of case studies which we sent out and the telephone people were so focused on getting their 50 quid, they were so focused on making sure that we, as a business, did everything that set up the field salesperson for success, which is beautiful if you can make something like that happen.

So that's what I'd recommend. The final thing that I'd recommend just before we wrap up and look at the questions is we would look at hiring slowly and firing fast. So in terms of hiring people, when you ask them to apply, I would get them to text you or WhatsApp you initially to say, they're interested. You don't really care what their CV is or anything like that. The only thing that matters is what are they like on the phone? So I would get them to WhatsApp you with the time when they're free and you ring them and just have a chat with them and just spend five minutes on the phone with them, just getting them talking about themselves. If after five minutes you found yourself be distracted by computers and other things is probably not your person. If after five minutes, you're actually enjoying the conversation and it's gone really quickly and they're engaging, hire them because that's what you want. You want someone who can be engaging and pleasant and just generally build a relationship for you.

You're got a script, so you can put together a script now. We say script is more of a guideline. We don't want them following a script because that rips all their naturalness away. We just want them following that guideline, that's training that takes half an hour, a bit of coaching on a regular basis, listening to their calls. You could listen to one of their calls with them and do a nice bit of coaching through that. Or just to give them a bit of feedback off the calls, but it's a fairly, not a difficult thing to do. The difficult thing is finding the right person. So I would just go with who's engaging you on the phone and go with that person. But as it says here, hire slowly and fire fast. When telesales or telephone people go bad, they just go off the boil, just get rid of them.

We got it down to if someone was having a bad Monday and they didn't pick up by Wednesday, they were gone by Wednesday, really. When they were full time and when they'd been there some time we spent more time and develop them. And if certainly the core three, we have a stable core three for the last 15 months or so of the business before I sell them. But before that, when we were just trying to get through, if they didn't turn up on day three, because they were sick or called in sick on day three whereas anyone else in any of the role I'd give them the benefit of the doubt. There was something about telephone people who just do telephone work that it just didn't work for me. And which was really interesting.

So I'm going to take your questions in a second. Please do pop some questions in the chat and I've still got the chats closed, but I'm going to come to that in a second and then we'll do a general marketing and business question and answer. You might as well just throw any marketing or business growth questions at me, but please put them in the chat now. Before I do, two things I want to tell you about first is a diary date for you, the next webinar which again remember is brand new content you've never seen it before. We're talking about the holy trinity of monthly recurring revenue, which is the profit matrix, it's strategic reviews, and it's adding in new services constantly. Those are the holy trinity. And we're going to go in depth about that in next month's webinar.

Those of you, if you, because I've got quite a few MSP Marketing Edge members on this webinar. And thank you, thank you very much for being a client. You'll know that we're currently covering these off on the Thursday videos. So I'm going to go into a lot more depth about the holy trinity of those. Also we're moving it to Tuesday and I'm moving it later in the day, just so to make it easier for some of my big audience in the states to access this webinar, but it will be recorded of course, if you can't make that. The other thing just to remind you about is I do have this marketing fundamentals course, we have a new course that happens every single month and the February one starts in two days' time, it starts on Wednesday, it's called the Marketing Accelerator.

And if you go onto paulgreensmspmarketing.com/accelerator, then you'll see all the details. But essentially this is the fast-track way to get your basics, basics of your MSPs marketing sorted. So you and I jump on the Zoom, it's a group Zoom and there's one Zoom every week for five weeks. It's the same day and time for five weeks. And you'll see, when you go on to that web page that we have, I think February's course, for example, I think is Wednesdays at 11:00 AM UK time. And then March's is a different day in a different time. And April's is a different day in different times. So if those don't work for you, give it two days and when February's is closed, we'll open up May's course on there, which will be later in the day and probably later on in the week as well.

But over those five calls, we cover off the five marketing fundamentals that you've got to get right. This really is the basics. We go into a lot of detail and there's a lot of power in there, but they're the basics to get right. Because in my experience, most MSPs don't get these right. So week one we look at your websites, week two we look at LinkedIn and getting the basics right there. Week three is how to build those audiences that I was talking about earlier. Week four is how to build those audiences and build a relationship with them. Week four is these kinds of marketing campaigns that we reflected on today to commercialize that audience. And then week five, we have a success blueprint. So I actually show you a blueprint for the whole business, not just bringing on new clients, but growing your monthly recurring revenue, getting the most out of your people, making more net profit. And I'll you more about that in week five.

Now, every single week you have direct access to me on that call, kind of like we do now except we can actually talk because we do it on Zoom. So you can pop chat questions in, and then we can actually talk on that Zoom. And you can also email me in between those calls as well. So for five weeks you have full access to me. You'll realize what a bargain this is when I show you what the price is. And I'll tell you why we've done it that way as well. So these are the courses that we've got. February's starts in two days, time and 11:00 AM UK time, and the March's is going to be mid-day and that starts on the 18th of March. April's is a bit later 6:00 PM UK time is much more palatable if you are based in the states or indeed anywhere else in the world. And then May's will be a later one as well.

So the course is ridiculously low priced for five weeks of live training. So the UK is just £49 plus VAT. So that's a one-off. In the US or anywhere else in the world it's $69 and that's paid by Stripe. And the reason that we've made this so low cost is because it's my way of investing in a relationship with you. So you may or may not be a client of mine already, but you wouldn't be hearing unless you're in my Facebook group, or you connect to me on LinkedIn, or you got my emails or you see me somewhere. And this is a way that we can start an actual relationship and I can help you work on your business.

And of course there are other things that we can do together at some point, if that's right for you, we don't do hard sell. We take 20 MSPs a month onto this course. And that's it. And a number of those choose to go on to do something else. And that's absolutely great, but the value that you'll get for those five weeks for your £49 or your $69 is absolutely insane as you would imagine. So let's go and answer some of your questions. What have we got here? Mrs. Michael Frisby says, "With lock down, what do you recommend instead of posting to an office?" Great question, Michael. And you mean, of course direct mails because our people in offices are not. Now worth asking your clients if this is the case, because I've asked lots of MSPs to ask their clients this.

And we see some people where the vast majority of cases someone is going into the office. So these are the end clients, someone is going into the office to pick up the post at some point. So I would stick with sending post into the office. There is always a way to get it in front of the decision-maker. In fact, many of the times, it's just the decision maker going into the office. And have you done this yourself where you've gone into your office because it's a quiet place to work with our children around and stuff like that, and your staff have stayed at home. So similar kind of thing is happening in different offices. So I would recommend that.

Isaac says, good question. He's referring to Michael's question, "With the cost of office space here, we're seeing a lot of organizations have dumped their physical offices." Yeah. We all seen that. I think the, where can we send a direct mail to is going to shift over the next couple of years. And we may actually be starting to send direct mail direct to people's homes with their permission, of course. And it's something my team and I have been looking at, because we do a lot of direct mail with our clients.

Andy Newbrook says, "£18 minimum wage, I need a payroll ASAP." Andy, I was guessing. I don't know what minimum wage is. I hope you are getting above minimum wage. Greg needs a pay rise too, so does Kylie. Andy also asks, "If the person you're hiring is worked from home, does it matter where they're from? For instance, I'm 25 miles from the business. Would you hire someone with the correct accent or doesn't it matter? Is it better to get someone who has a Brummie accent or someone from Yorkshire if you're selling to the Midlands?" Great question. For anyone outside of the UK, a Brummie means someone from Birmingham. It's where I was born actually. So I know it sounds a little bit like this, so certainly if you're selling to Brummie clients, then you might want to ring up people and talk to like this. Not great Brummie accent. I lost it when I was seven.

I hope that's made you laugh Andy. And I think it doesn't really matter as much. It probably matters if you were in Scotland, you would want a Scottish voice calling Scottish people, but does it matter if it's the exact dialect of the area? Andy you're in Cannock Chase, I think. I'm sure Cannock Chase has a different version of that dialect. Isn't that more West country? West country is a lot harder to understand. What do your clients sound like? Do all of your clients have an accent or actually, is it a hot complete spread? I know Andy, we've spoken many times. I know you don't really have an accent. I don't think it matters. What I wouldn't do is put someone with a thick Yorkshire accent or a thick Scottish accent on calling your clients, for example. So I think you've got to broadly match the area.

Just as I wouldn't get an American to call British people or vice versa. It's just, it's like an instant barrier. It's an instant outsource thing. If someone's outsource this, we shouldn't have to think this way, but this is the reality of it. So I would stick with someone broadly with the accent that you're covering. And Daryl says, "Brummies are amazing."

And I'm guessing you are a Brummie, Darrell. I was born in Solihull, so I'm not really a Brummie, I'm kind of a posh just outside, but there we go. So I don't think we've got any more questions. If you have got any more questions, please do pop them in here. And otherwise I'm going to close the webinar. It has been recorded and we'll get this out to you. In the next couple of days, we'll get it transcribed and pop it on the blog and I'll email it to you. Thank you so much for being on this webinar today and don't forget the Marketing Accelerator. It starts on Wednesday. Go and have a look at paulgreensmspmarketing.com/accelerator. Thank you everyone. Have a great one. Speak to you soon. Bye.