In this week’s episode
- If the limit of your prospect’s technical knowledge is them taking a screenshot on an iPhone, how can they understand the technology solutions you’re trying to sell to them? It’s all about making your services feel relevant to them. And this week Paul talks about how you can do this
- Also on the show this week, how do you feel about attending physical networking meetings? If it’s Covid-safe for you to attend, Paul explains how to get the most out of them
- And there’s some great advice from Paul’s featured guest about using YouTube as part of your marketing mix. Plus there’s a great book recommendation all about virtual selling
Featured guest
Thank you to Sam Sheridan from Sheridan Computers for joining Paul to talk about how you can use YouTube to win new clients.
Sam grew up in Bolton, UK and has always had a passion for computers. Before the internet was made publicly available in 1993, he was brought up around the world of dial-up connections, modems, and bulletin boards. Sheridan Computers has been providing IT support and consultancy to small and medium businesses for twenty years.
Connect with Sam on LinkedIn.
Show notes
- Out every Tuesday on your favourite podcast platform
- Presented by Paul Green, an MSP marketing expert
- You can join Paul in the MSP Marketing group on Facebook
- Thank you to B.J. Ferguson from Keyfactor for recommending the book Virtual Selling by Andy Springer, Dave Shaby, and Mike Schultz
- In next week’s episode on February 1st, Paul will be joined by Jeff Pugel from Ignition, talking about how to start selling based on value, not price
- Got a question from the show? Email Paul directly: hello@
paulgreensmspmarketing.com
Episode transcription
Voiceover:
Fresh every Tuesday for MSPs around the world, this is Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast.
Paul Green:
Hello, and welcome back to the show. Here’s what we’ve got coming up for you this week.
Sam Sheridan:
So I’m currently standing at about 2000 subscribers. I use YouTube to get new clients and I’m here to tell you how you can do the same.
Paul Green:
That’s Sam Sheridan. He’s an MSP owner, just like you, and he’s been using YouTube to win himself new clients. Later in the show, Sam’s going to join us to tell us how he uses YouTube and give you an idea of how you could do the same thing. Plus, we’re going to be talking about networking. No, I don’t mean making all the computers talk to each other. I mean, going out and physically meeting people. Should you be doing networking right now, and if you are doing it, how do you max it out to make sure you get the best return on investment?
Voiceover:
Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast.
Paul Green:
Have you ever wondered why your clients and prospects, the ordinary business owners and managers you speak to, have you ever wondered why they are not terrified of ransomware? Because I know the MSPs I’ve spoken to, many of them are terrified of it. They’ve seen attacks. They know how difficult it is to stop and undo attacks once they’ve started, and yet the end clients don’t seem to be aware of it. They don’t seem to be terrified of it. They should be terrified. I did a webinar with IT Glue at the back end of last year, and I can’t remember the stat now, but someone told me a stat that it’s small businesses that are more likely to be breached now than big businesses. Because of course big businesses have all the tools in place, or the protection, and it’s small businesses that typically don’t have the protection.
Paul Green:
They should be terrified, these guys, so why aren’t they? Well, a lot of it is that it won’t seem to be relevant to them. You’ve probably heard me talking before about a part of our brain called the reticular activating system, and this part of the brain acts as a sensory filter. So rather than us having to consciously deal with every piece of sensory information which comes into our noggins, instead, the reticular activating system decides whether or not it is relevant to us. The greatest and simplest way to test this for yourself is to think of a new car. I’ve recently taken delivery of a new car, and the second I decided what it was I was going to get is a Tesla. The second I decided that, I could see those cars everywhere.
Paul Green:
As I was driving around, in my peripheral vision, I would suddenly jerk my head off to look the other way, and there would be one of the cars that I just decided. Now those cars were always there before, it’s just I didn’t perceive them, so my eyes saw them, but I didn’t perceive them because the reticular activating system decided they weren’t relevant to me. What I don’t see are all the nasty, horrible, ugly cars that I would never want to drive. I mean, actually I physically see them, but I’m never aware of them. I never perceive them because the reticular activating system has decided they are not relevant. This is what’s happening with ordinary people. They don’t see news about ransomware. They see it, but they don’t perceive it. Their eyes flick over it. They perceive it is not relevant to them. You see it, because every time you see the word ransomware, there’s a little trickle of fear. I mean, we all know the fears that go with that.
Paul Green:
You see it, you read it, you take it in. It’s why it seems to you that ransomware is everywhere. That in fact cybersecurity breaches are everywhere because you are physically perceiving those. But the ordinary people that you serve and that you want to serve, they’re not perceiving it. They aren’t aware of this stuff. It’s just simply not on their radar. And this is why selling them cybersecurity stuff is really difficult as well, because if something isn’t relevant to someone, they’re less likely to take action on it. You can educate them as much as you want about cybersecurity, but if they perceive it’s not going to happen to them, then they’re not going to take action on it, or they’re certainly less likely to take action on it, depending on the trust relationship that you’ve built up with your clients.
Paul Green:
It’s like being burglarised, or burgled as we call it here in the UK, when a house gets burgled, then suddenly all the other houses start to put up burglar alarms. They start to invest in security and cameras and stuff like that, and they do that because suddenly it’s become a lot more real to them. When your neighbour is burgled, you think, “That could have been me. We could have been burgled. What could we do to stop that? Well, we’ll go and get a burglar alarm.” And that’s the point at which it suddenly becomes more real to these people. So the question is then, how do we make cybersecurity more relevant to your clients so that it becomes more real to them? In fact, how do we make general protection, disaster recovery, how do we make that more real to them?
Paul Green:
Well, someone told me a clever thing that they do, and I can’t remember who told me this, so if it was you, just drop me an email, please, so I can pin your name to this story in my head as I tell it to other MSPs. But what they do is when they’re sat with a client and they’re doing a quarterly business review or a strategic review, and they’re talking about disaster recovery in any aspect, what they’ll do to make it real is they will suddenly stop the meeting and they will say to their client, “Right. Come with me, please. Leave your laptop, leave your mobile phone, come with me.” And they’ll just go outside the building. And just say they’re trying to sell them a better disaster recovery option, some increased backup, say. So they will go outside the building, and as you can imagine, the client’s thinking, “What the hell is going on?”
Paul Green:
They’ll go outside the building, and they’ll say to them, “There has been a fire in your building.” Not really. It’s just the scenario. “There’s been a fire in your building. Luckily all of your staff are safe, but you’ve just managed to get out with what you’ve got now. So you haven’t got your laptop. You haven’t got your phone. What do you want to do?” And they’ll say, “Right. Okay, well, everyone’s safe, so we need to ring the insurance company.” They’ll say, “Great. Where is the file for that?” And they’ll say, “Oh, it’s on my laptop, or the number’s on my laptop.” And they’ll say, “Okay, well, your laptop was destroyed in the fire.” And you can see where this is going, can’t you?
Paul Green:
There are some pieces of information that are backed up, or they’re on their email or they’ve got it on a text message or something somewhere, but you keep going with that, you keep pushing and pushing and pushing, and eventually you will find information that is not there, that sat on a laptop that’s never been backed up offsite, that is gone. And that’s what you’re looking to do. You’re looking to make them realise, in this exact moment, if this scenario happened, as unlikely as it is, if it happened, you would lose this amount of information. You would lose your ability to do this. It’s gone, completely gone. And as you can imagine, when you’re dealing with some stick-in-the-mud business owner who isn’t ready to take action on buying a better disaster recovery solution, that makes it a lot more real to them. You can do exactly the same thing from a cybersecurity point of view. You could take in a ransomware laptop.
Paul Green:
Another of my clients has a great thing, which is he keeps a laptop that’s been infected with ransomware, so he’s taken out the wifi card or whatever he’s done to stop it ever connecting to the wifi anywhere. But he has a laptop with ransomware and he can show the business owners that he’s talking to what ransomware actually looks like. That’s very clever, that is, because that makes it more real. What else can you do to help your clients protect themselves? That’s what we’re trying to do here. We’re trying to help them protect themselves. They’re not going to do that unless it’s relevant to them, and the only way to do that is to make it more real. What can you do? Even extreme things like this to make this kind of stuff feel more real to your clients and prospects.
Voiceover:
Here’s this week’s clever idea.
Paul Green:
The last few years have been very difficult for networking meetings when you’re actually getting out and meeting other business owners. Obviously, the plague pretty much put an end to networking meetings for a long period of time, and some of them went virtual. Some of them did okay virtually. I don’t think there’s many networking meetings that truly thrived on a virtual basis rather than a physical meeting basis, but certainly in some areas now networking meetings are a thing again, certainly here in the UK. Well, at time of recording, there were meetings still happening in the UK. But if you are going networking right now, well, should you, I guess that’s the first question. Should you be going networking right now? I believe if you are safe to do so, and if you feel safe to do so, absolutely you should be going out networking. We as human beings are very social creatures. It is what we do best, and even though we have the world’s most advanced set of tools for video calls and digital communication and all of that, I do believe you really cannot beat physically meeting up with people.
Paul Green:
There’s a huge value in that, because we get such greater communication from when we meet people in person. You’ve probably heard that stat, and I don’t know what the exact numbers are, but that communication is only partly the words that we’re saying. In fact, this is the downside of me doing an audio podcast. You can’t see my body language right now. If you could see me, I’d be waving my arms around and I’m moving around, and that’s how I speak when I’m standing in front of humans and actually talking to them. But you miss all of that out when you’re on a video call. In fact, your brain, your sort of limbic system that makes judgment calls on things, it finds that a lot harder to do on video calls than it does when you’re actually seeing someone in real life.
Paul Green:
So yeah, if you feel safe, get out there and go and do some networking meetings, especially if you haven’t been out for a while. Conversation that happened in my MSP Marketing Edge Facebook group a couple of weeks ago, and this is a Facebook group which is only for our active members, so we have some very, very focused conversations on marketing, and one of our members was asking about BNI. You’ve probably heard of BNI. It’s Business Networking International, and they’ve got chapters or groups that meet all over the world, or certainly they meet when they can meet. And the discussion was, basically, is it worth doing it? Not only did BNI for a couple of years back in, oh, I don’t know, it was about 2007 to 2009, something like that, when I ran a general marketing and public relations agency. And it probably didn’t work so well for me, but I think one of the reasons it didn’t work for me is that I wasn’t an MSP.
Paul Green:
Because I think BNI can work very, very well for MSPs, depending on the makeup of the group. If, for example, your group is quite heavily made up of business to consumer members, then obviously that’s not as much value to you if it’s made up of predominantly business to business members. You’re not going to get referrals, because that’s the whole point of something like a BNI or a networking is for you to get referrals. You’re not going to get referrals from a group like that if they’re just meeting consumers rather than meeting business owners and managers. But based on the discussions in that Facebook group, there were a few basic guidelines that we came up with. One of them was that if you do join BNI, especially BNI, but also any networking group, and if they offer training, do the training. The BNI training in particular is really good, and it should be, it’s been running for, I don’t know, 20, 30 years or something, but it’ll teach you good networking skills.
Paul Green:
And actually it’s just generally good for building your confidence, meeting strangers in strange places and talking about your business, and indeed, their business. Another guideline was, if you do go to a regular thing where you have a weekly slot, because a lot of these networking organisations like BNI, you can talk for, I think it’s about 30 seconds each time, and this will differ from organisation to organisation, don’t just stand up and talk about your business, because no one cares about your business, really. People care about their business and themselves, but they care a little less about other people. So in which case, don’t talk about your business. Educate people. Entertain them. Edutain them. Pick something that’s happening in our world right now and give them your version of it. What are your thoughts on it? What’s happening? What are the takeaways from it? What are the lessons?
Paul Green:
The more that you can educate and give, give, give value, ironically, the more you get back. It’s weird how that works. You talk about yourself and you give them essentially the tools to refer you, and they don’t refer you, but you talk about things from the world of technology, of which there are a thousand things happening every day, and they’re much more likely to refer you. It is kind of weird how something like that goes. Now, BNI has a slogan, or certainly had a slogan back in the day, of “givers gain.” The idea being that the more you bring to your group, your chapter, the more you’ll get out of it. And I certainly found that to be correct, and many of the other BNI members I’ve spoken to have found that to be correct as well. Put another way, you get out what you put in.
Paul Green:
So if you do go and join any kind of networking group, don’t just make the commitment in your head to, “Oh, all right, I’ve got to turn up Tuesday mornings at 7:00 AM and have a great big fat cooked breakfast.” That’s not the only commitment you make. You’ve also got to commit yourself to a couple of hours a week away from that meeting, finding things to bring into that meeting. Most of these regular networking groups exist so that people can bring referrals for other members. And if you bring nothing, the chances are that you will walk away with nothing as well. Having said that, do be careful of spending too much time generating work for other people, and certainly be very cautious of joining any kind of organising committee or something like that.
Paul Green:
I did a year of my two-year BNI stint. I did a year on the organising committee, and one of the reasons I didn’t continue my membership at the end was because I felt I’d spent a lot more time building someone else’s business, i.e. The BNI business, than I had actually building my own business, so you do need to be careful with that. And I think the other thing is just to build good relationships with people. That’s the whole beauty of networking. In fact, I look at my supply chain now and people who are supplying my business with things, bearing in mind I haven’t been to a networking meeting for about 12 to 13 years, certainly not a regular one, anyway. A lot of my supply chain are people that I met back then. My designer, Steve, is someone I met at a networking meeting… It must have been about 2008. Now Steve’s ROI from that meeting, and that relationship building is immense.
Paul Green:
It took me about a year or two years to start to give Steve some work, but I’m still using him today. He designs everything for my business, all of my other ventures. He does everything for the MSP Marketing Edge. He’s amazing, and he must have had hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of revenue out of me over the years, which I don’t begrudge at all, because Steve’s done an amazing job for us. But it is all about relationships. That’s the power of networking, is you can build a relationship with someone in a room so much faster than you can using digital communication methods.
Paul Green:
So that’s pretty much my final thoughts on networking. Oh, actually, I’ve got one more. If you are going to a regular breakfast meeting where the whole point is you meet over breakfast with other people, make healthy breakfast choices. I know those sausages and that bacon and mm, all of those pancakes, I know they look delicious, but actually that’s the worst way to start a working day, with a massive breakfast that makes you feel slightly sick after. I always used to go for the fruit and the yogurt, which makes you feel a bit… You haven’t had your value for money paying your 10 pounds or whatever you pay for your breakfast, but I felt a lot better leaving after a light breakfast and a good conversation with a whole bunch of people than I would’ve done stuffing 10 sausages and five fried eggs into my mouth.
Voiceover:
Paul’s blatant plug.
Paul Green:
So I just mentioned our Facebook group for the MSP Marketing Edge, which is strictly for our active members only, but we do also have a second Facebook group, which is for any MSP. It’s called the MSP Marketing Facebook group. I’m in there every day, and it’s a great place to discuss with like-minded MSPs, how to market your business, how to generate new leads, how to get new clients. We’ve got more than 1,400 MSPs in there, and I’m just looking through some of the subjects, and obviously, these are from time of recording, but there’s one in here about leaving Microsoft money on the table. So it’s a discussion about MDF, Marketing Development Funds, and someone linked to a great blog, which explains how to get more money out of Microsoft in MDF. That was a pretty good subject.
Paul Green:
We’ve got another one here about a brand new dark web scanning solution with a chance to be a beta tester of it. Someone here has asked the question, or Mark has asked the question, “How do you find the right technicians for your MSP? What’s the secret?” That’s got 44 comments all about recruiting technicians for your MSP. That was a great subject, that one. And then we’ve got some other ones here. In fact, this is one I posted. Website improvement Wednesday, your call to action, and it explains how the call to action should change on the website. So if you like the podcast, really, it’s kind of designed to sit, to accompany the podcast. It’s a great place to discuss marketing with other MSPs and with me directly. So if you want to join that, it’s completely free. You just have to be an MSP. It is a vendor-free zone.
Paul Green:
So all you do is go into your Facebook app, type in MSP Marketing at the top, go onto Groups, and you’ll see my little face, the MSP Marketing Facebook group. You just have to answer a couple of questions, and if you are a genuine MSP, we will let you in. And I cannot wait to talk to you directly in the MSP Marketing Facebook group.
Voiceover:
The big interview.
Sam Sheridan:
Hi, I’m Sam from Sheridan Computers. I use YouTube to get new clients, and I’m here to tell you how you can do the same.
Paul Green:
And thank you so much for joining me on the show, Sam, because YouTube is such a massive opportunity for so many MSPs, and yet I know so many people are scared of it. It’s terrifying being on video. Even I don’t like being on video. That’s why I’m hiding behind a microphone for this audio-only podcast. Before we look into how you actually got started on YouTube, just tell us a little bit of where you are now. So you have an active YouTube channel, and would you say that’s actually winning you new clients?
Sam Sheridan:
So I’m currently standing at about 2000 subscribers, and I’ve recently picked up a couple of projects configuring storage for clients on the configuring network, mainly using pfSense.
Paul Green:
Oh, you’re getting technical. I don’t know what pfSense is, and I’m not even going to bother asking what that is, but okay. So your YouTube channel has generated you some business, which is wonderful. Let’s go right back to how you got started with this. So do you have any kind of background in videos and creating videos, or is this just something which just occurred to you to do one day?
Sam Sheridan:
I have absolutely no background in it whatsoever. I’ve just watched other people doing it. To be honest, I started creating the videos so that I could create videos of me walking through how to do something so that I could show it to my staff, and then my staff could follow the videos. A lot easier than writing down procedures for it.
Paul Green:
And can you remember the first video you did?
Sam Sheridan:
Yeah. It was quite a technical one on how to build some embedded PCs and use them for firewalls and routers and things.
Paul Green:
Yeah, that does sound quite technical. So what was the leap then from making videos? Because lots of people do videos for their team, briefing videos, systems, that kind of thing. What was the leap from that to doing something which could be consumed by ordinary business owners and managers?
Sam Sheridan:
I’d just seen other people doing it, and they talked about how it was working well for them, and they’ve gone through and showed me insight into how much revenue that it was making and stuff from it. So I don’t actually make much revenue from YouTube itself, but I do from the clients that I get from it.
Paul Green:
Got it. So you’ve got the revenue share switched on, because isn’t that an option within YouTube once you get to, what is it? A thousand subscribers?
Sam Sheridan:
Something like a thousand subscribers and 4,000 watched hours.
Paul Green:
Oh wow. Okay. But as you’re saying, the actual revenue share from YouTube pales in significance compared to the actual clients that you can win?
Sam Sheridan:
It does. I really don’t make that much from the actual revenue on it, but it’s still a small channel. It’s only been going about 18 months. So I think it turns over about 80 pound a month, which really isn’t much, but considering some of clients and projects I’ve won off it, it’s more than worth it to do.
Paul Green:
Yeah, no, I bet. So how often do you actually post, and what kind of content are you posting about?
Sam Sheridan:
I try to do it every week and I’m usually posting content about things that I’m actually doing. So I don’t go out my way to do the videos. If I’m setting a project up or even replacing a laptop on a notebook, I’ll record it as I’m doing it. So that’s kind of how I come across, as I was saying, that was to point my staff to be able to do it. And then I’d seen the other people do it and how successful that they become by targeting clients through it. Tom Lawrence has got a YouTube channel which is really successful, so that’s kind of where I got the idea to see if we could leverage it to make some money from it.
Paul Green:
So let’s talk about kit then, Sam. What kind of kits did you get started with and what kind of kit are you working with now?
Sam Sheridan:
I actually got started with just a Logitech C920 Webcam. It’s really high quality and works well, but I do have a couple of other cameras for overhead shots and things.
Paul Green:
And do you find that as a technical person, the kit is one of the more fun elements for you, because you get to fiddle around with cameras and buy yourself new toys?
Sam Sheridan:
It is, but then when you’ve got to start editing videos and things, it kind of gets a bit more in depth, and I had to learn a lot along the way as I was doing it. Edit bits out of videos, how to make the quality of videos look better, trying to get the sound go really well. At the beginning, the sound quality was quite poor on them.
Paul Green:
And the actual editing itself, what software do you prefer to use?
Sam Sheridan:
I actually use Adobe Premiere. I also use Kdenlive, which is free software. It works both on Windows and on Linux, and it works really well for editing, to be honest, and it’s completely free.
Paul Green:
Yeah, no, that sounds like a great piece of kit. I think this is the issue, isn’t it? A lot of people, when they look at doing something like YouTube, and perhaps a similar thing to you, they see other people using it, other MSPs, and there are lots of MSPs around using YouTube, not hundreds, but quite a few around. And you look at that and you think, “Oh, maybe I could have a go because I’ve got a webcam and I’ve got a mic, and I’ve maybe got some lights,” but there seems to be something that just stops people doing it. I don’t know. Is it a confidence thing, do you think, that stops people from just having a go at a YouTube video?
Sam Sheridan:
When I first started, I must have recorded 50 videos over and over again. I just didn’t like the way that it sounded, the way that they came across, and I just had to keep doing it. I didn’t actually realise that I needed speech therapy at that stage.
Paul Green:
And when you say speech therapy, do you mean sort of coaching in the way that you talk and the way you presented to the camera?
Sam Sheridan:
Yeah. In the way of talking too fast, sometimes you just rush the videos and stuff. So now I tend to do them in small sections. I’ll do a 30-second clip, cut it there, then I’ll do another 30-second clip, and then using Kdenlive or something, I can just merge them all together and take my time as I’m doing them. And because you’ve not recorded a whole 20 or 30 minute video, it’s not that hard to edit. You’re just editing that to a clip that you’ve done.
Paul Green:
Okay. That’s really, really interesting because actually that’s the YouTube style, isn’t it? Certainly my 11 year old sits and watches about 200 hours of YouTube every day, and all of the videos she watches, they seem as though they’ve been recorded in clips. There’s always bits where they’re cutting away and they’re zooming in or zooming out. So you’ve actually created your own production process, which allows you to perform really well, and you create it in that YouTube style.
Sam Sheridan:
And for the most part, I am using free tools for it. The only thing I’ve found that the paid tools do better is removing green screen from videos and things, but Kdenlive is completely free, and I also use GIMP for editing the thumbnails. Again, it’s open source and it’s completely free, so you can actually get started at no cost.
Paul Green:
Yeah, which is the beauty of all these open source tools. Sam, you mentioned how you got some assistance with your presenting style as well, and I’ll freely admit to anyone, when I started as a radio presenter, bearing in mind that I was being paid to be a radio presenter, back in 1996, I was awful. And producer James, who pulls this show together, hopefully he doesn’t have any tapes of me sounding like a squeaky teenager back in the day, but I was awful. And I had two to three years of coaching. And even now, I’m only kind of half average. I’m certainly nowhere near a lot of the professionals that you hear.
Paul Green:
So it’s really good to hear that you yourself have embraced coaching on your style. Things like being able to control yourself and stop yourself from going too fast, and knowing how to use emphasis and all of those kind of things. You have to learn these things, and you have to learn these things over a period of time. So well done to you for actually for getting that coaching. How did you get that? Was it something you can buy online or was it someone you knew that helped you?
Sam Sheridan:
It was just somebody I knew that was helping me through LinkedIn.
Paul Green:
Oh, that’s fantastic. Okay. So a nice and easy resource there. So where do you think you’re going to take this then, Sam? So you’ve got, I think you said around about 2000 subscribers now. Obviously a tiny, tiny revenue stream right now in terms of the ad spend, but it is actually winning you some business. Paint me a picture of where you think this could go in the next couple of years.
Sam Sheridan:
Well, I’m kind of hoping that I can get into the habit of doing like, two videos a week from it. Because at the moment, I try to do them every week, but I always don’t hit it every week. Sometimes I go it into every two weeks and people like to know when they can expect videos to come along. It’s just about keep doing them, to be honest, and the consistency, if you stop doing it, subscribers, the likes, and everything else starts to drop off. So you really need to keep banging at it and doing it as much as you can, and just keep getting more videos up as you can do.
Paul Green:
Yeah. It’s like any marketing really, isn’t it? You’ve got to be consistent and persistent with it. How long would you say it takes you per week at the moment or let’s say per video?
Sam Sheridan:
That’s quite an interesting question. A 20-minute video can take me anywhere up to a couple of hours by the time I’ve done the editing and stuff. Sometimes when I’m doing videos, though, they do have sensitive information that I have to cut out, so the editing actually takes a lot longer than the video does.
Paul Green:
Which is no different to what most YouTubers say, I think. And certainly if you look at Hollywood movies, they’ll do a 90-day shoot, won’t they, and then there’ll be three or four months worth of editing. The secret I think is always to get it right in the edit. Okay, Sam, thank you very much for coming on and talking about your YouTube channel. Final question for you. If you were talking to an MSP who was considering trying out this YouTube thing, bearing in mind they’ve just heard you admit that you filmed your first video 50 times, what would you say to them as an encouragement to just get going and give it a go?
Sam Sheridan:
You just have to do it, to be honest, and make that first video. You can listen to it back as many times as you want until you’re comfortable with it, and keep recording it. But it’s like anything else. You just have to keep consistency and keep doing it. It’s the same as going to networking events or anything like that. You just have to keep at it.
Voiceover:
Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast. This week’s recommended book.
BJ Ferguson:
Hi, my name is BJ Ferguson from Keyfactor, and the book that I recommend is called Virtual Selling by Mike Schultz, because in today’s world, especially given the global pandemic, virtual selling is more prevalent than ever before. This book covers the how-tos and best practices to engage your partners and customers at a high level, show them the value of the solution that you’re selling, help your champions build a successful business case, the leadership to buy your product and gain the maximum ROI for your partners and customers, and really listen to your partners’ and customers’ needs, especially in this new virtual economy that we live in.
Voiceover:
Coming up next week.
Jeff Pugel:
This is Jeff Pugel of Ignition, and on next week’s episode, talking about the three common lead generation mistakes that most MSPs make, and how to overcome them so you are now selling based on value, not price.
Paul Green:
We’ll also be discussing what a real problem it is when your staff don’t take their holiday time. Now, on the surface, you could look at that and say, “Hmm, is this a problem really? Because if they don’t go away on holiday, then we’re not a little bit short-staffed or have to cover them.” However, what lots of MSPs find is that when you reach the end of the year, that can create huge problems with lots of people trying to take holiday at the same time. So next week, we’ve got some basic holiday guidelines that I recommend you put in place now, rather than waiting until you’ve got a problem again at the end of this year.
Paul Green:
Plus I’m going to be asking you, when was the last time you tested your marketing? And I don’t mean something clever like split testing, where you try and get different results from tweaking different bits of the marketing. I mean literally testing it. Filling in the forms, going and pushing every button to check that it all works on your website and in every automated email and everything. If you haven’t done it for a while, it’s a great reminder next week to go and do that. Join me next Tuesday, and have a very profitable week in your MSP.
Voiceover:
Made in the UK for MSPs around the world. Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast.
