Episode 45: The big client switch is happening NOW

Episode 45: The big client switch is happening NOW

Paul Green

Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast
Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast
Episode 45: The big client switch is happening NOW
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In this week’s episode

  • Not many MSPs fully realise the scale of the opportunity for gaining new clients right now, but you will after listening to this podcast! Paul explains why, even though Covid has been impacting us for 6 months, NOW is the time to steal clients from your competitors
  • Also on this week’s show: What kind of marketing is working for other MSPs? Paul’s joined by a special guest from one of the biggest MSP marketing agencies in the United States, for a fascinating discussion about which tactics are working the best right now
  • Plus find out how to increase and improve your own personal content marketing. And there’s a brilliant book recommendation all about building the right kind of team to work with

Show notes

Episode transcription

Voiceover:
Fresh every Tuesday for MSPs around the world. This is Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast.

Paul Green:
Hello, and welcome to another fresh episode of the show. Here’s what we’ve got coming up for you today.

Andra Hedden:
And that is what’s really helping MSPs stay present in the market, even though we’re living in more of a virtual world right now.

Paul Green:
We’re still going to be talking about three ways that your MSP can really improve it’s content marketing. And we’ve got a great book suggestion from Matt Solomon of ID Agent.

Voiceover:
Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast.

Paul Green:
For months and months and months, I’ve been saying that this is coming, and I believe we’re finally at the point where it’s starting to arrive. What is it? It’s the great big client grab. It’s the point at which a whole bunch of very unhappy clients, currently served by your competitors, are soon to start hunting for a brand new MSP. And you have the opportunity to put your business in their way to try and pick up those clients. Now, all of this relates back to what happened in March and in April this year, and the lockdown, which pretty much took us all by surprise, where suddenly we had to work from home with virtually no notice. It created a lot of stress. It created a lot of havoc and pain for the ordinary business owners and managers that you look after.

Paul Green:
Now, here’s the thing. Your MSP probably did a great job. I know you probably work some insane hours, you and your team, and you made sure that everyone had exactly what they needed, that your users and their bosses and the whole infrastructure was set up correctly, that they could work from home and be safe and keep their data safe and be productive, and you literally pushed yourselves to the very limits to make sure that they could keep doing their jobs. Now, many MSPs did this, and, of course, the longterm benefit from this is you get to keep those clients even longer. Your relationships strengthened with those people, and they absolutely adore you even more because of it.

Paul Green:
But here’s the thing, not all MSPs acted this way. Some MSPs got it wrong back in March and back in April, they didn’t look after their clients well. They didn’t service them correctly, let alone over-servicing them. They left them with gaps in their workflow. They left them with data security problems. They let them having to use work around. They didn’t return their calls. They didn’t get tickets closed quickly. And a level of dissatisfaction just turned up in the emotional feelings of those clients. In fact, over a period of a number of weeks as they were going through the distress of suddenly having to run their entire businesses from home, they started to develop this feeling that the IT support company that they had was just not right for them. And a whole load of those business owners and managers back then, they made a decision. The decision was, “It’s time to switch. It’s time for us to a brand new IT support company.” Now here’s the thing, they may have made that decision back in March or in April, or maybe even in May, but the majority of them haven’t taken action on it yet.

Paul Green:
And I made prediction back then. In fact, I based an entire marketing program around it, which we had more than 45 MSPs go through. My prediction was that it would be in the autumn, around about now, when people started to take action on that unhappiness. Why wait so long? Well, there are a number of different reasons. First of all, there was the fact that people were at home. They weren’t in the office. So it kind of felt wrong for them to make a big IT decision. And then, of course, we had the summer holidays and the easing of lockdowns and a whole series of other things.

Paul Green:
But now here we are in September, and people are starting to take action on that unhappiness, starting to take action on that decision that they made a few months ago. And they’re only starting to take action now. I believe now, October, November, December, January, February, maybe even into the middle of next year, lots and lots of clients are going to take action on the decision that they’ve already made to switch to a different MSP.

Paul Green:
And this is amazing for you. This is a huge opportunity for you, because it’s a chance for you to go and steal unhappy clients from other MSPs. Now, I don’t believe this is a bad thing in any way. And what I mean by a bad thing is I don’t believe you’re acting in any way nefariously or unscrupulously to go and take these clients. These people are going to leave their incumbent. It is only a matter of time until they do. The damage has been done, and that damage cannot be undone. And there’ll be a whole bunch of MSPs. So we’re going to have a real shock in the next three to six months, as a number of their clients leave them, because of something that happened six months ago. Is that unfair? Maybe? Is it just life and business? Yes, maybe it is. It’s always the small things that make people leave an MSP and move over to a different one. And March and April and May were full of lots and lots of small things that really frustrated a lot of people.

Paul Green:
So what do you do to pick up these people? Well, simply you start marketing. In fact, you keep doing the long-term marketing that works well, and maybe even you look at some short term marketing. So the long-term marketing that works well is a three step process. It’s about building multiple audiences, such as your LinkedIn connections, your email lists, maybe even using platforms like Instagram and Facebook, depending on the audiences you want to speak to. Step two is then building a relationship with those audiences, which is all done through content marketing. And step three then is commercialising those audiences. And the best and most robust way to commercialise those audiences is to run multi-touchpoint marketing campaigns. And this is what I recommend that you roll out now.

Paul Green:
I’ve actually put together a campaign for the members of my MSP marketing edge service, so they can go into their content dashboard today and download a 30-day corona virus campaign in a box. And I’ll tell you what’s in it, because it’s something that you could swipe the idea and adapt to use in your area. You can’t use my materials, but you can certainly use these ideas. So this blends together a whole series of different interactions with people, where we’re sending exactly the same message, but we’re sending it using lots of different distribution methods, and we’re sending it repeatedly over a 30-day period. This is really about making sure that your message does get through to the prospects that you want to speak to.

Paul Green:
So this particular campaign starts with a piece of direct mail, because nothing beats physically posting something and sending it to them. And then, it’s followed up with an email. And it’s followed up with a Facebook advert that’s targeted at those people. And that’s followed up with a message via LinkedIn and also some posts that go onto LinkedIn. And then, comes the thing that really gets the results and that’s someone picking up the phone. And they’re picking up the phone to talk to these prospects about the message that they’ve been sending through. And the message across all of these platforms has been, “If you’re not happy with your IT support company, because of the way you were treated during lockdown, it’s time to switch,” which is a great message to send out, because people who are already thinking that are dramatically more likely to take action on it. It’s almost as if your marketing has appeared at exactly the right time, at that moment at which you’ve managed to hook a message directly into their heart and their emotions and their desires, and they instantly feel like, “Yeah, do you know what? We need to take action on this?”

Paul Green:
So listen, if you’re ready to take on some new clients, and there are very few MSPs I meet, who are ready to take on new clients, the simplest source of new clients in the next three to six to nine months is going to be those unhappy clients currently served by your competitors. All you got to do is start marketing to get those people. Multiple touchpoint campaigns, those are the things that will attract those people. And if you haven’t got enough people to go and speak to with your existing audiences, if your LinkedIn is a bit apathetic, if your email list is kind of nonexistent, then the best workaround for that is to actually go and buy yourself some cold data. Go to a data broker in your area and buy data of businesses in your area.

Paul Green:
You can overthink data buying, by the way, and put in place all sorts of conditions and terms and turnover limits, and must have this contact and all of that kind of stuff, or you could just buy several thousand records, 2, 3, 4,000 records of businesses around you, get yourself a 12 month multi-touch license, so you can pretty much do any kind of marketing that you want to those people over the next 12 months, and just start hitting them with a multi-touchpoint campaign.

Paul Green:
This is the thing that makes the difference when you’re hitting them with the same message repeatedly across different platforms. Sure, you’re going to annoy a tiny percentage of those people, because those are the people who actually consume all of the marketing messages that are being sent to them, but the vast majority of people, they simply don’t do that. They do not consume those messages. And so by hitting them with multiple methods across all of these different platforms, you stand a much higher chance of your message actually going in and then taking action on it.

Paul Green:
And all you need is two or three prospects a month in the months ahead to just, at the very least book, a 15-minute Zoom call with you and have a chat with you. You and I both know if you can get them on a Zoom or on a phone call for 15 minutes, you can get a meeting with them. If you can get a meeting with them, you are very likely to pick them up as a client. One new client a month or two new clients a month for the next three, six, nine months… Wouldn’t that just change everything for your MSP forever?

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

Paul Green:
As part of that three step strategy I was just talking about, that one of building audiences, build a relationship with them and then commercialise them using marketing campaigns. That one in the middle, which is about building a relationship with them, is done through content marketing. So if you’ve got someone’s email address as part of your email list, you send out a weekly email. If you’ve got someone connected to you on social media, whichever platform that is, you put content on social media on a daily basis.

Paul Green:
And I’ve got here for you three suggestions to make your content marketing so much easier, because most MSPs don’t enjoy marketing, and they certainly don’t enjoy creating content. It’s seen almost as somewhat of a dark art, that it’s a difficult thing to do, but it really, really isn’t. So my first suggestion to you is that you make it easy by keeping a list of ideas as they happen. This is something that should go into your phone, just keep a list in the notepad, in your phone of ideas, as they occur to you. And once you get into the habit of realising, “Do you know I’ve got to churn out a certain amount of content every week or every month,” then it’s surprising how often you notice that there are great content ideas all around you everywhere.

Paul Green:
I mean, if you take something as simple as looking at tickets, look at the tickets that come in on a typical day. Does that create content ideas for you? Because it should do. Because the kind of problems that ordinary users are coming up against on a daily or a weekly basis are exactly the kind of content that you should be creating. Content marketing is about creating content that your audiences find fascinating. And the kind of things that they find fascinating and not the kind of things that you find fascinating. The second you find yourself using words like “cyber security” or “encryption,” you’ve lost them. You’ve completely lost them. They’re not interested in that. But they’re interested in the small things.

Paul Green:
So for example, if you see that you have a lot of tickets coming in around the subject of, “My computer is slow,” could you create a piece of content off the back of that? Of course, you could. Now you don’t want to be talking about specific operating systems and specific faults and clearing out registries and things like that. Is that even a thing anymore? I don’t know. But what you could do is just do a general piece of content about why computers are slow, perhaps even the top ten reasons why your computer is slow and how you can fix nine of them. I mean, that would be a great headline for a piece of content.

Paul Green:
Looking through tickets makes it really, really easy for you to do that. And then, just having conversations with people makes it easy as well. What are the things that people are talking about? What are they worried about? What keeps them up at night? What’s scares these people? What are they most concerned about? These are the things that make the biggest pieces of content marketing. And they’re the things that people are going to be really interested in reading about. So that’s my first idea for you, is to keep a list and to get into the habit of writing stuff down on that list as it happens. So when you actually come to create some content, you never have to worry about what it is that you’re going to create.

Paul Green:
Now, the second idea you’re going to love, because it actually cuts you out the loop of having to create your own content marketing. You get someone else to do it for you. You’ll have heard me say on this podcast many times before my favourite acronym: DOA, which doesn’t stand for “dead on arrival,” or rather, it will if you try and do everything yourself. Better that it stands for “delegate, outsource, automate.” And content marketing is one of those things that if you really don’t enjoy it, just get someone else to do it on your behalf. Delegate it to a member of your team or, better still, just outsource it, because there are writers sat on fiverr.com and upwork.com right now, and they will happily take it a small amount of money from you in order to write your content so that you don’t have to. And there really are so many writers out there.

Paul Green:
Now, how do you find a great writer on these platforms? The best way I always find is to put together a written brief and give exactly the same brief to four, five, maybe even six, different writers, so you can actually compare four, five, six different pieces of work. They’ve all had the same brief, but what’s the quality of the work that they’ve output? And then, you just pick your favourite writer from there. Then all you need to do is get together with your writer virtually once a week or once a month, talk through those ideas that you’ve been collecting from the first step and then you can put some flesh on the bones. You can tell them what this means. You can tell them the things that you would look at if a computer is slow or why it’s so important that laptops are completely protected so if they get lost, it’s an inconvenience and not a complete catastrophe. You’ve got all of that information in your head. Why are you personally trying to write it? You shouldn’t do it. There are outsource people out there.

Paul Green:
Now, there is a platform which is just for writers and that’s called copify.com. They operate in both the States and the UK. And it’s slightly more expensive than you finding a writer on Upwork or on Fiverr, but they’ve done the curation for you. They found the good writers for you. So you hire Copify, and then they sub the work out to writers. And as with most of these things, you don’t pay until you’re happy with the work. We’ve been using Copify quite a lot recently for a project, and I’ve been pleasantly surprised actually.

Paul Green:
And I say this as a professional writer myself. You know, I’ve been writing professionally since I was a newspaper reporter at the age of 19. And yet, even I have got to a point now where I’d rather outsource… not my core stuff… I don’t outsource my core writing, like my product, like the MSP Marketing Edge, or even my own content articles on my website, but for other stuff, certainly for this big project we’ve got on right now, it’s just working out to be more efficient to pay someone else, to write this content for us. And as with any kind of outsourcing, the quality of the work you get back completely depends on the quality of the brief.

Paul Green:
There’s one of the thing that you can do, which is kind of half outsourcing and half doing it yourself. And if you really don’t want to hire a writer, but you physically don’t have time to sit down and write, then just talk. Talk and get it transcribed. I talk articles all the time. I literally will sit down with my phone or, perhaps if I’m making my daughter breakfast, and I’ll just talk about a subject. And then, I’ll send it off to rev.com. In fact, I’ve gotten into the habit of using their app. So it’s just on my phone. I just talk. I press a button and about half an hour later, the transcript just turns up on my laptop. And it’s beautiful and easy, because I can then just edit my own words. And I find it a lot easier sometimes to edit my own words than I do to originate good quality content from scratch. So you might find that this works for you. In fact, you could originate content this way through the transcription method, and then maybe even pay an editor on Fiverr or on Upwork to pull that together for you. That is a very beautiful way for you to generate content without actually having to do a great deal of the work.

Paul Green:
Now, my third suggestion for you is, once you’ve got this kind of content going, that you then schedule it ahead so it becomes a small job that you only have to repeat, let’s say, once a month and not something that you have to do on a daily or on a weekly basis. And there are so many good scheduling tools out there. I mean, any CRM, any customer relationship manager like MailChimp or MailerLite or ActiveCampaign… Any of those will quite happily allow you to schedule emails for the future. You don’t have to sit and do the email live in real time. You load it once, once a month, it’s done, and those emails go out weekly. They just sit there, ticking away, waiting to go out.

Paul Green:
And you can do exactly the same thing with your social media. You can schedule your social media, and there’s a couple of tools you can try. One of them is called Hootsuite. We’ll put a link to it in the show notes on my website, paulgreensmspmarketing.com. Now Hootsuite, you have to pay for it, certainly if you go over. I think it’s one platform free, and you have to pay if you want to do more than one. But essentially, it’s a really good way of you just uploading a whole load of social media content in one go, scheduling it and not having to think about it. And in my mind, it’s worth whatever it is.. $10, $15 a month, not to have the burden of having to go and do that every day.

Paul Green:
There’s a rival to Hootsuite called “Buffer.” Now Buffer, the only downside is you can’t bulk upload to Buffer. So you can schedule, but you can’t put all of your content into a spreadsheet and upload it. You have to use a separate facility, which is called, I think from memory, “bulk Buffer upload,” something like that. If you Google it, you’ll soon find it.

Paul Green:
And there are various other social media scheduling tools out there. I mean, just from Googling “social media scheduling,” I’m seeing adverts for Loomly. I’m seeing adverts for later.com, contentcal.io. There’s all sorts of social media scheduling tools out there. It’s always worth having a look on AppSumo. Appsumo.com, which, by the way, is like drugs for entrepreneurs. They sell you really, really good software, and there’s always a deal. It’s always a lifetime deal, and it’s genuinely good stuff. I’ve spent thousands with AppSumo over the years. Anyway, side notes… Trust me. You’ll get addicted to that one. But they often have a deal on some kind of social media scheduling tool, so that’s always worth having a look at as well. But hopefully, those three suggestions for improving your content marketing will allow you to churn out really good, high-quality content marketing that’s unique to your business, and yet, has very little personal burden on you to go out and create it.

Voiceover:
Paul’s blatant plug.

Paul Green:
There is another way that you could do your marketing content easily, and that’s just to buy it in from someone. And I have a service it’s called the “MSP Marketing Edge. Now more than 280 MSPs already trust this. They love it every single month, because what we give them is content, loads and loads of content. There’s emails that you can send out. There’s social media content. We’ve got guides, videos, press release, sales letters, campaigns in a box… A lot of the stuff we’ve talked about in this podcast is all sat there in the MSP Marketing Edge. And we only sell it to one MSP per area. That’s critical. And we police that very, very heavily, because it wouldn’t work if two competing MSPs were to use it in the same area. So once you’ve locked your area, and you’re the client in that area, no one else can buy it.

Paul Green:
We’ve also made it a very low cost commitment for you as well. In the UK, it’s just 99 pounds plus VAT per month. In the States, it’s just $129 per month. And we have different versions. There’s a UK version and a US version. And the beauty is we’ve set that up so there’s no contract. You can cancel any time. Essentially, you stay because you see the value in what it is that you’re getting, and you can see that it takes away all the hassle of having to go and get content created or create it yourself. I mean, you would spend more than 99 pounds or $129 just on getting a couple of articles done. And the MSP Marketing Edge gives you so much more each month. So and have a look. We’ve put all the details of everything you get on our website. It’s mspmarketingedge.com.

Voiceover:
The big interview.

Andra Hedden:
Hello everyone. I am Andra Hedden, CMO of Marketopia. I’m so happy to be joining the podcast today. If you’re not yet familiar with Marketopia, we are based out of sunny Florida, and we focus on lead generation for managed service providers like yourself. We handle and help with any sort of lead generation needs you might have. So thank you for having me, Paul.

Paul Green:
And thanks for being on the show, Andra. So we met a few months ago when you invited me to take part in your Pivot to Grow event, which was an amazing series of webinars across a week, and I hope you’re going to be repeating that event at some point in the future.

Andra Hedden:
I’m so glad you liked it. We hopefully will be. So the plan is that we will, so be on the lookout, because I’ll review into it for sure.

Paul Green:
Excellent. That sounds great. Now, I know that Marketopia is quite a force in MSP marketing in the States. Was it about a hundred people you’ve got working for you?

Andra Hedden:
So we are just over a hundred team members, which is amazing in the sense that we are just about to celebrate our sixth birthday.

Paul Green:
That’s a huge growth in such a short space of time. And I’m not going to ask you the question that’s at the top of my mind, which is, “What’s the hell of managing a hundred people?” We’ll leave that one for another day. What I really want to get into is, because, essentially, you and your team now are hands on with, I mean, you must have hundreds and hundreds of MSP clients that you’re looking after. And one of them, one of the common questions that I always get is, “What’s working now?” So for where we are now sort of coming into early autumn 2020, what’s working now in terms of marketing for MSPs?

Andra Hedden:
This answer would have been different, as you know, four months ago, but there are many changes, obviously in, not only the economy, but the world. So COVID coming into the mix absolutely did bring about new opportunities for MSPs and new challenges. So what’s working right now? If we were to put a stake in the ground today, what’s working for MSPs is really digging into marketing in a way that the unsophisticated ones in marketing haven’t yet done. So really looking at your digital footprint, really looking at strategic marketing, planning, and incorporating really savvy digital tools. And that is what’s really helping MSPs stay present in the market, even though we’re living in more of a virtual world right now. Though a lot of planning, a lot of looking at what you currently look like out there, whether that’s that’s that new web design and that new social media appearance, integration of video, and just brand as a whole, that is really helping MSPs right now, as they start to take it more serious.

Paul Green:
So let’s get into some specifics. If you were to start working with, and I think that the description of an unsophisticated MSP, and you mean, of course, on sophisticated in their marketing… So if you started working with-

Andra Hedden:
Only in marketing, yes. MSPs are brilliant and amazing. Yeah.

Paul Green:
Absolutely. Yes. But I agree with you that the vast majority are quite unsophisticated with their marketing. We’ve we’ve talked about that many times on this podcast, because the very nature of the MSP business model makes you or enables you to be lazy with your marketing, because the money just keeps coming in, and the clients don’t go anywhere. So you start working with a new MSP tomorrow. They’re not sophisticated at marketing. So let’s look at, what are the basics that you get right first?

Andra Hedden:
Because MSPs are so amazing at their craft of technology, you’re absolutely right. It allows them to back-burner marketing, and that’s been really a luxury for many of them. They still get referral clients, because they have great services. They still have leads coming in from local relationships that they had. Now, with what I just mentioned with COVID, this is a different challenge for them. And it’s really opening up many eyes to how to look at marketing in a new way and how to look at lead gen in a new way, which I think is amazing and will help sustain their business and really grow the trajectory over the next three to five years tremendously.

Andra Hedden:
So for this particular question, if an MSP came to us right now, our process really doesn’t change. The thing that is the most important for any MSP to think about first is what they are actually trying to achieve when it comes to business growth. So the first thing that we do with any MSP that comes to Marketopia is we give them a business assessment. We don’t talk about marketing deliverables first. We don’t talk about creativity. We give them a business assessment, because that’s what it’s all about. And we assess their business, and we sort out how many leads they need to achieve the growth goal that they have in mind. Because as you and I both know, Paul, some MSPs love the lifestyle business, and other MSPs are really looking to kind of leave it as a legacy.

Andra Hedden:
Other ones are looking to build up and acquire new MSPs, and other ones are really on a great growth path. So understanding one, what they’re actually trying to achieve in the business, and then helping them translate that into how many leads they actually need in order to grow their business based on their infrastructure how strong their sales team is, what the close ratio is, what they are already maybe doing or not doing with marketing. So that is always our first step. And we get to that number, and then we help them build out a marketing plan and lead gen strategy to hit that for them.

Paul Green:
The basics for that presumably would involve fixing their websites, making sure their overall digital footprint is correct, looking at their LinkedIn… those kinds of things.

Andra Hedden:
Sure. I mean, it really, it spans the gamut, because every business is different, although they may be providing the same services. So some MSPs may have an amazing website, because they invest in it at once, but may not be as well versed in what it means to have a great content strategy or SEO and make sure that you’re optimising everything that touches the internet, not just a blog or your website content, but it’s tagging everything and making sure that you’re being represented digitally the way that you want to, and you’re able to be found.

Andra Hedden:
So once that assessment is complete, we look at what they already have. So in that example, they may already have a great website. Well, if that’s the case, that’s not going to be our big focus. If it’s already responsive, it’s already optimised, they’re already getting searched and found for great keywords that are relevant, then we start to dig into other things like you were mentioning, like, “What is your marketing and lead gen and nurture funnel look like?” “What does that communication look like?” “What systems are you using?” We really help dig into everything with them to set them up for amazingly lead gens paths.

Paul Green:
If we drill down to some of the advanced things, specifically, what would you do to help an MSP with perhaps more mature marketing, where they’ve done all of those basics, they’ve got all the right building blocks in place? What are the sophisticated things that you do for them?

Andra Hedden:
So we always start looking at the structure and the base, so the types of systems that you’re utilising. Many have yet to invest in great automation platforms and whether this is a HubSpot or a SharpSpring or a Marketo or… There’s many out there. The system that is integrated with your PSA or your CRM is so incredibly important that that link is synced up properly, that your data is tagged properly, that the values that you’re bringing in are right, because that’s where it all starts. If you don’t have all of that set up correctly, it doesn’t really matter how great your marketing strategy is if it’s not falling on the right ears or, or the right eyes. So we dig into that first. We say, “Okay, great.” If you do have a great database, and you have awesome systems, then we start getting into a sophisticated way to break out those personas, be it prospects, referral partners, current clients, and how we want to speak to them, given what that particular MSP is digging into this month or quarter.

Andra Hedden:
So if they’re really pushing security, what does that look like for prospects? And then, what does that upsell, cross-sell look like for current clients? And we help them build out that communication plan and the assets that go along with it, so the emails that go into that drip campaign, the assets that they can download the things, the videos that they can watch. And that’s really where it starts to get more sophisticated. It’s how you’re taking that prospect referral partner or client on that journey and the items that they’re able to engage with because you had it set up properly in the backend.

Paul Green:
How long do you think it takes an MSP to realise that this marketing stuff has to be done constantly, consistently done week in, week out, and you can’t ever stop, that you always have to be marketing?

Andra Hedden:
If you could see me, I’m smiling, because it varies. And I think it just depends on the personality of the person. There are some that are very set in their ways, and marketing just is unnecessary. Others know it’s important, but don’t know how to get started or where to go. And then, others further know that they’ve got to get started. They’re ready to get in, but they stopped too short.

Andra Hedden:
So it can take a long time for some MSPs to come around. But that’s one of the beautiful things. If we can have any silver lining in what we’re all going through right now is that this is that push that I think many MSPs need and needed to really start to take it more seriously, because they don’t have the old ways, the in-person events. They don’t have the old things to fall back on, the handshakes, that they’re always so used to. So this is really pushing many to go, “Wow. I don’t have a choice. I can’t choose to not market. I’ve got to jump in the game. I’ve got to get in there, and I’ve got to figure out who I can lean on or how to do it.” Because it can really differ. Some know it’s important, and they’re ready to jump in. They just need someone to help them. But many of them are just so amazing at technology that marketing just isn’t something that is as easily understood, so it ends up going on the back burner often.

Paul Green:
Andra, thank you. How can we get in touch with you?

Andra Hedden:
Me personally, I can be reached at my email, andra.hedden@marketopoia.com or you can reach out to my team if you go to marketopia.com. And there’s multiple things that you can see there and get a good understanding for how we can potentially help you and reach out to my team there.

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

Matt Solomon:
My name is Matt Solomon. I’m the Vice President of Business Development at Kaseya and ID agent. The book that I’m recommending today is called The Success Cadence by David Mattson. Really gets into the hiring of a sales team, understanding the different roles, types of personalities and what really fits your team. As much as it even focuses on who’s right for your team, it also focuses on who is wrong for your team and really getting out of those scenarios much faster. I think that’s a mistake a lot of us make is holding on to somebody who doesn’t fit the culture of the organisation and is not willing to buy into the things that we’re trying to push them towards. So I think it’s great, and I think it applies really across hiring procedures in general, not just sales.

Voiceover:
How to contribute to the show.

Paul Green:
I would adore to get your book suggestion on the show as well. And you can record a little clip just like Matt did there. All you got to do is go onto my website, paulgreensmspmarketing.com/podcastbooks. And on there, you’ll find some instructions of how you can record a little segment like that. In fact, you can actually do it on that page. You don’t even need to faff about with an audio editor or anything like that. There’s also a list of all the books that we’ve already had recommended. Now, whether you’re a vendor, whether you’re an MSP, whatever it is that you do, if you listen to this podcast, and you love the podcast, I’d love to get your book suggestion, please. paulgreensmspmarketing.com/podcastbooks.

Voiceover:
Coming up next week.

Chris Timm:
One of the things I find about our industry is we’re very much of a “me, too” industry, and we always want to use what everybody else uses, what it is that you want a PSA tool to do and why you want to use that PSA tool.

Paul Green:
That’s Chris Timm. He’s known as the PSA guy. And next week, he’s going to attempt the impossible and try to answer the question of, “Which is the best PSA?” We’re also going to be looking at the two most important elements of your website, traffic and conversion, and why you actually need both hand in hand. You can’t rely on just one or the other.

Paul Green:
We’ll also be looking at overcoming sales objections. And I’ve got a great book suggestion for you from Jennifer Bleam. She’s a cybersecurity sales expert, and she’s got a great book, which you really should add to your bookshelf. All of this is coming on next week’s podcast. See you then.

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