Episode 137: How to start an MSP YouTube channel

Episode 137: How to start an MSP YouTube channel

Paul Green

Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast
Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast
Episode 137: How to start an MSP YouTube channel
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Episode 137 includes:

  • How (and why) your MSP should dominate YouTube
  • The technical set-up to give your phone person
  • Plus on the show this week, which tools do MSPs always get wrong

Featured guest

Ben Spector is a featured guest on the MSP Marketing Podcast

Thank you to Ben Spector, Zomentum’s Product Manager and MSP consultant, for joining Paul to talk about how to choose the right tools to run your MSP.

Ben is a former MSP owner who sold and exited his business in late 2020. Since then, he’s been working in two capacities. First as Product Manager with Zomentum, leveraging his previous experience running an MSP to shape Zomentum’s development roadmap. Second as a mentor to other MSP owners, delivering tactical support to help solve their operational challenges, focussing mostly on their tools, systems, and processes.. 

Connect with Ben on LinkedIn:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/benspector1/

Show notes

Episode transcription

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

Paul Green:
Hello there and welcome back to the podcast. Here’s what we got coming up in this week’s show.

Ben Spector:
I’ve had the privilege of speaking to 2, 3, 400 MSPs, and the problems are almost universal. The underlying tools are always a problem.

Paul Green:
That’s Ben Spector from Zomentum. He’s going to be joining me later on in the show to tell us how you can increase the sales coming into your MSP. We’re also going to be looking at YouTube and specifically answering this question. Should your MSP start its own YouTube channel?

Voiceover:
Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast.

Paul Green:
On last week’s show, we talked in detail about where to find a phone person in case you haven’t heard that episode yet. Just nip back Episode 136. We talk about why you need someone making outbound phone calls in your business. Essentially their job is to phone up leads and prospects to try to find if this is the right time to talk, that’s their main job. So they’re making those calls on your behalf so that you don’t have to do them. And the outcome that they are working towards is booking a proper 15 minute video call with you.

Paul Green:
So put it another way. The phone person is doing the hard work, the donkey work if you like of picking up the phone, dialling, picking up the phone, dialling, being told to get stuffed. All of the things that makes people like you and me not want to pick up the phone, they’re doing all of that on your behalf. And their goal is to book in one, two, maybe three appointments a week with you. So you are absolutely maxing out your time.

Paul Green:
Now their calling setup is a critical part of getting this right. And it’s what I want to talk about on today’s podcast. You see, as I recommended last week, this is a great, flexible home working job for a back to work parent, a back to work mom in particular, and you want to set up something that gives them maximum flexibility, but also sets them up for success. And you also want to make sure that you can keep an eye on what they’re doing because in my experience of hiring and firing many phone people over the years, both in this business and my previous business, they do tend to be the hardest people to manage.

Paul Green:
I think generally someone whose way of making a living is making phone calls, often cold calls for other people sometimes those can be, let’s just say, difficult people to manage. So you do need to keep an eye on them and check that they are doing what they’re supposed to be doing. The easy answer to this of course is letting them use your VoIP system. So you could just set them up with a soft VoIP attachment, they could just use their computer couldn’t they, but they’re on your VoIP system.

Paul Green:
What that does mean of course, is that they’re calling from your number and not some mobile number. I don’t know about you, but when I get a call and it’s not a local company that’s calling, it’s just some random number or it’s a mobile number, I don’t answer. It’s just easier not to do that. So I think making phone calls from at the very least a number with your local dialling code is important, but preferably your own number will be even better because anyone that misses a call and calls back, they’ll be coming through to your office. So that’s pretty important.

Paul Green:
I think it’s also critical that you record these phone calls as well. This should just have recording enabled by default, a couple of different reasons for that. First of all, you yourself as part of your quality control, you can listen back to some of those phone calls at random. And it’s a good thing to do certainly in the first couple of weeks when you’ve got your phone person is just delve into the recordings, listen to one at random and just double check that you are comfortable with how your business is being represented by someone else on the phone.

Paul Green:
I mean the big picture is here. It doesn’t really matter. These are not clients that someone’s calling on your behalf, they’re leads and prospects. And I promise you very, very little damage is going to be done to your overall business reputation just by someone making phone calls on your behalf. At the same time it’s just worth having a listen and just double checking, seeing what they are saying.

Paul Green:
The other benefit of recording phone calls in this way is that you can use some of the calls for coaching. Coaching is where you help someone to get better at their job. And it works really, really well with recorded phone calls because the basis of good coaching starts with evidence. I learned this when I worked in radio and again, coaching worked really well in radio and I put myself through a coaching diploma because it was easy for me to sit down with the radio presenters that I was managing. And we could actually sit and listen to a piece of their show.

Paul Green:
We used to call these snoop tapes. Never really thought where that expression came from, I guess because you’re snooping on something, but all radio stations, certainly where they have live output these days, there’s a little tape running, well there’s two tapes running. There’s one tape that records everything. It’s not really a tape anymore. It’ll be a hard drive Paul, not even a hard drive Paul, it’ll be an SSD.

Paul Green:
Anyway, you’re recording all of the output and that’s kind of like the legal record of what the station has broadcast, but then most presenters will have their own little tape that they’re running as well. And that’s for them to listen back to the show. In the old days it was cassette tapes. What would you use these days? I’m so out of touch with radio, anyway, the point being, you had a little bit of audio you could listen to and it was really easy for you as the coach and the person you’re coaching to discuss three critical things based on that recording.

Paul Green:
The first thing is what’s gone well. It’s really important to look at what’s gone well in any kind of performance. And remember a phone call is a type of performance. The second thing to look at is what hasn’t gone so well. Now you will hear a thousand things that need to be fixed in every single phone call, but you have to tackle them one at a time because the third thing you say to the person that you’re coaching is, “What are you going to change tomorrow?” Or, “What are you going to change later on today?” And the idea is that out of every coaching session, they walk away with one more thing to go away and improve, to go away and work on.

Paul Green:
But just one thing, especially when they first started with you the temptation is to give them a thousand things to work on. But actually if it’s something, just one thing that they have heard and picked up on the call, they might say, “Ah, I was too quiet there.” Or “I didn’t hear his question properly,” or “I should have asked for a clarification.” It’s them hearing themselves making a mistake and realising how they could have done it better, that’s the power of coaching.

Paul Green:
Coaching is not really about telling them what they should be changing. It’s about helping them to hear for themselves where they made a mistake and where they could improve their performance. And that’s quite difficult to do with a bit of technical work with your technicians, but with a telephone person like this, it’s simple because every single call can and should be recorded. So that’s it. The call set up really should be very, very simple.

Paul Green:
Oh, actually I suppose there’s one more thing that we should discuss, which is how do they access your calendar? Because remember the goal here is to get them booking 15 minute appointments on your behalf. What’s the easiest way for them to access your calendar? I think something like Microsoft Bookings, which is part of 365 or of course Calendly, which is the paid alternative. Well, there are hundreds of other alternatives, I’m sure. I think one of those things is the best way to do it.

Paul Green:
Instead of mucking around trying to have shared calendars and just being difficult like that complex situations, keep it really simple. Use a service that’s already set up and designed for other people to insert things into your live calendar. And of course the beauty of that is you can set rules within Bookings or Calendly. So you can set times of the day, you can do things like if they book a 15 minute appointment, it actually blanks another 30 minutes after that appointment.

Paul Green:
So you assume that if the appointment goes well, that 15 minutes could become a 20, 25, 30 minute chat. You don’t want to be sitting stressed and anxious because you’ve got another event coming up in your calendar. And of course the other thing you can do with these Bookings and Calendly is send automatic emails to the person so you can get that appointment into their calendar. That’s as important as getting it into yours. So I think that’s the easiest way to give your phone person access to your diary, use an automated tool like that.

Paul Green:
Do you know, I think there’s one more part of this, one more part of this puzzle to solve and that’s who should your phone people be calling and critically, what should they say? So do you know what I’ve just decided we’re going to do another part on this next week, a third and final part on how to find and train the perfect phone person for your MSP. Next week I’ll tell you who they should be calling and exactly what they should be saying.

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

Paul Green:
I’ve been working with MSPs full time since 2016. And there’s a question that I’m starting to be asked more and more, but it’s only been in the last couple of years yet this question relates to something that’s actually been around as a marketing channel since 2005. What’s the question? It’s this, “Paul, should I start my own YouTube channel?” And the short answer to this is yes, absolutely you should. Every MSP should have a YouTube channel. And why? Because YouTube isn’t just the world’s most popular video streaming platform. It’s also the world’s second most used search engine.

Paul Green:
What’s the world’s first most used search engine. Well it’s Google of course. And who owns YouTube? It’s Google of course. Let’s just have a look actually, let’s just look up some YouTube stats. If I just type in here YouTube stats and we’ll go to Hootsuite. Here we go blog.hootsuite.com, 23 YouTube stats that matter to marketers in 2022. Right, we’ll have a bit of that. So YouTube has 1.7 billion unique monthly visitors. I didn’t know that 54% of YouTube users are male, not kind of relevant. In the U.S. 62% of users access YouTube daily, visitors spend an average of 19 minutes a day on YouTube.

Paul Green:
That’s interesting, isn’t it? And YouTube is the world’s… Oh no, I didn’t know this. Not only is YouTube the world’s second most used search engine. It’s also the world’s second most used website after Google, which is the first one and every minute, 694,000 hours of video are streamed on YouTube. That’s a lot of video, isn’t it? And you could argue from that, “But Paul, if we create our own YouTube channel, number one, are we just adding to the noise? Number two, what are we going to put on there? And number three, how are we going to get people to watch it?” Those are the kind of the follow up questions that come from that.

Paul Green:
Well, let’s just address that first one. Are you creating more noise? Yes. In a way, but does it really matter? On Netflix they keep adding new programs every single day. And although some programs come off, most of them stay on Netflix. Does that make Netflix less valuable as it adds more programs? Is it adding more noise? As a society, as a species we are creating content at a phenomenal amount and I can’t find the stat. I’m sure I could, if I looked hard enough, but something like 90% of all the content that’s ever been created has been created in the last five years or something like that.

Paul Green:
It’s a stat, the numbers are probably a bit different, but you get the idea for that stat and we are creating an amazing amount of content. Does that just mean you’re just adding to that noise then if you create a bit of your own content? I don’t think so. Not really. I think in fact you have to, but content marketing is one of the most robust ways to reach people these days. You know, the people that are buying from you never forget those ordinary business owners and managers, they don’t know what they don’t know.

Paul Green:
They really know very little about technology. So you have a huge opportunity to both educate and entertain them, edutainment. And you can do that particularly through video. So yes, I think you should start a YouTube channel and there’s a couple of different ways that you can fill up that channel. The easiest and probably the least impactful way is to go and get other people’s content. So you have services like my MSP Marketing Edge, which I’m about to talk about in a second in the blatant plug bit.

Paul Green:
We produce videos. We produce a new video every single week. It’s lovely actually, it’s a kind of a topical video. So it’s not news, but it’s about something that people may already be talking about or something new that’s happened. And we film a 60 second video about that with a female presenter up on screen, we have a U.S. version and there’s a UK version as well. And you know, it’s very, very high quality content. And that I say to all of our members and we’ve got 650 plus I say to them, you should put that onto your YouTube channel.

Paul Green:
Then of course from your YouTube channel, it goes onto your website as well. And we have a monthly video as well, which can go on. I know a lot of the vendors produce video content. There’s nothing to stop you putting all of that into a YouTube channel. But as I said, that’s the least impactful way of doing it. The most impactful way and the way that will frankly give you the best results is for you to create your own videos.

Paul Green:
You on screen making videos. Is that your idea of hell? Is that something that you’re thinking? No, I can’t do that. I wouldn’t want to do that. That’s not for me. Well, many MSPs feel exactly that way. And that’s why those MSPs who do get around to it, who do actually create their own videos, those are the ones who over a long period of time, they tend to stand out more. You know, you might only get 30 or 40 views of each of your videos on YouTube, but that’s okay. There’s nothing wrong with that. Because the goal here is not to have 2, 3000 views of every video. You’re not a YouTuber. You’re not making your living off the platform. You’re using the platform to influence leads and prospects and other people who could be quite important to you in your local area or in your niche or your niche.

Paul Green:
So if you could possibly get over all of the objections, all of the things that would stop you from filming your own videos, I promise you, it will make a big difference, but only if you commit to it in the long term. You can go back through this podcast and we’ve had a couple of guests on, MSPs who’ve created their own YouTube channel. If you go back to some of our earlier episodes and you know, I keep in touch with some of those and there is a payoff to it. If you can keep creating good content, there is a payoff to it because eventually you become kind of infamous. People say to you when you meet them at networking events or other meetings, they say, “Oh, I saw one of your videos. You are that guy on YouTube. You’re the tech guy on YouTube,” and you almost become a mini celebrity.

Paul Green:
It’s like being a TV star, but in a very, very, very small way, but it really does have an impact. And what it does is it gives you differentiation from all of the other MSPs. Now of course, the things that make the biggest difference in YouTube is the quality of the picture, the quality of the sound and the lighting. If you get those three things right, get a decent mic, get a decent camera and get some decent lighting, which doesn’t mean spending thousands. Consumer grade kit is practically broadcast quality these days. You don’t even need to record in 4K, 1080 will be absolutely fine.

Paul Green:
You could just use your phone so long as you use it in landscape, I mean that’s good enough just to get started. And I think that’s the secret with a YouTube channel, commit yourself to doing a weekly video on YouTube and just get on and do it, make it a regular thing. Perhaps you do every Thursday morning. Oh, I suppose the other thing I should talk about is what should you talk about on your YouTube channel? Well, that’s the easiest thing, because there’s so much happening in our little world. You could talk about changes that are happening to software, Teams updates, Windows updates, that kind of thing. You could talk about just sort of general things like should you have a second monitor or talk about backups?

Paul Green:
The real kind of basics because remembering the audience you’re talking to, they don’t necessarily understand the basics, let alone the complex stuff. I think some of the content that would really resonate with your audience is actually more business orientated stuff. And this is the challenge for you is to talk about businessy stuff, increased productivity, getting things done, remote working, all of those kind of things which are actually of interest to other business people. In fact, they care about that kind of content more than they care about technology style content.

Paul Green:
But really you just go for content that’s of interest to you and that you think ordinary decision makers will be interested in. Don’t overthink it, have fun filming it. And it’s only a matter of weeks and months until your YouTube channel will actually start to return attention and engagement to you and you can turn attention and engagement into leads and new clients.

Voiceover:
Paul’s blatant plug.

Paul Green:
I did just mention that I was going to do a blatant plug for the MSP Marketing Edge, because we are here to make your marketing easy. And we do that by giving you all of the content that you need and unlimited support to implement that content. Like I mentioned those videos just now, but there’s a whole bunch of other stuff, emails, social media there’s stuff that can go onto your website like buyers guides, there’s a book. There are tools that go into your website. There’s a whole ton of stuff and it’s everything you need to build multiple audiences of people, build a relationship with them and then commercialise that relationship.

Paul Green:
Now here’s the critical thing. We only sell it to one MSP per area. In fact, we have a waiting list that’s longer than our member list. This is true. We have about just over 650 members around the world and our waiting list is actually longer. So you want to see if your area is still available, go onto mspmarketingedge.com, pick your country. And you just put in it’s either your post code or your zip code, depending on which country you are in.

Paul Green:
If your area isn’t available, then please do join the waiting list and we will let you know if and when it becomes available. If your area is available, I would snap that up. It’s free in most parts of the world to try your first month. In the UK, it’s just one pound and that’s just because we use a different payment system in the UK, but it’s a free trial, 30 days. And then afterwards it’s just 99 pounds a month in the UK or 129 U.S. Dollars everywhere else in the world. There’s no contract and you can cancel any time, mspmarketingedge.com.

Voiceover:
The big interview.

Ben Spector:
Hi, I’m Ben Spector, Product Manager at Zomentum.

Paul Green:
Hi Ben. Thank you very much for joining me on the podcast this week. So you and I first got talking when I did a big webinar for Zomentum a couple of months ago. That was an awesome webinar, wasn’t it? That was great fun doing that. And thank you very much for asking me to come onto that yourself and Shannon.

Paul Green:
I wanted to get you onto my podcast because you are a fascinating guy with lots of things to talk about regarding sales and marketing for MSPs. Before we get into that and specifically looking at how MSPs should be doing sales and marketing in 2022, just give us a little bit of your background. So who are you, where do you come from? What gives you the credibility to talk about sales and marketing?

Ben Spector:
Sure. Well first thanks for having me, always a very flattering intro. I would guess I’d caveat the whole thing by saying I’m definitely not a sales and marketing expert. What I do know a lot about is mapping the processes that the MSPs learn from the great sales marketing coaches like yourself into the actual tools platforms that they’re using to run their business.

Ben Spector:
So my background, I was running an MSP for about the last 15 years. That I was fortunate enough to sell and exit around October 2020. So just over a year and a half ago. And I was running that business on auto task as PSA for about 10 years, we had HubSpot for marketing automation for about the last four or so years. And we also had a sales sort of well, not a sales tool, a quoting tool QuoteWerks for the last, well actually probably about seven or eight years.

Ben Spector:
And after I left that business, I then went to join another MSP as technical director because I thought that’s where my interests really aligned. I thought what I enjoyed from my MSP was actually doing kind of managing the technical projects and being responsible for overall technical delivery. So I thought great, tech director, that’s exactly what I’m looking for.

Ben Spector:
In reality though, they were also running their business on auto task. And it was really interesting for me to discover that actually what I was really enjoying doing and what I ended up spending most of my time doing was improving their internal sort of platforms and tooling, tuning auto tasks to drive as much automation as possible. And it reached a point after a month or so that I was working with their sales team putting together, helping them put together the technical elements of some proposals.

Ben Spector:
And they were still doing all of their quoting and proposals out directly out of Autotask and Microsoft Word. And it was all very manual and a bit painful. So I said to the CEO, look, we really need to deploy QuoteWerks here because it will completely transform the way they’re doing their sales. And the CEO said, “Look, that’s all well and good. I understand you’ve got this QuoteWerks experience, but I’ve heard about this other platform that’s been making a lot of noise in the online communities like The Tech Tribe and it’s called Zomentum to which my response was kind of flippantly, “I never heard of it, QuoteWerks have been doing this for over 20 years, who is Zomentum and frankly, I’m just really not interested in learning a new platform right now. We’ve got enough on our hands.”

Ben Spector:
And so I was given a bit of a, “Back in your box, Ben, let’s just at least have a demo of Zomentum and see what it’s all about.” And so I reluctantly had a demo, I guess, as a prospective customer in about January last year and had that real light bulb, fall off chair moment of, wow, this is in fact the entire end to end solution to the whole sales problem that I had as an MSP, that they were having as an MSP. And that pretty much any other MSP I’d ever spoken to was also having. They’ve got a tool that helps them with the marketing, perhaps something like HubSpot, ActiveCampaign, Infusionsoft, those kind of tools.

Ben Spector:
And everyone’s generally got a PSA, which does a great job of managing their clients. But there’s a gap between marketing and the management of those clients, which is that sales puzzle. So what I saw in Zomentum was this tool that would sit between HubSpot for me and Autotask and manage the sales pipeline. I’d looked at various platforms over the years and tried to solve it with QuoteWerks and various other bits and pieces and just had never quite got there.

Paul Green:
So I think what we’ll do, we’ll talk specifically about Zomentum later on in the interview. I know that right now, a thousand MSPs across the world are putting their head in their hands saying, “Oh my God, I need another piece of software to add to my stack. First they told me I needed a PSA. Then I needed an RMM. Then I needed a piece of marketing software. Now, a year ago it was customer experience platforms. And now I need a sales one, but no, I think having seen myself just a little bit of what Zomentum does, I think you’re right, that it’s identified a whole, a problem and we’ll come back specifically to what Zomentum does later on.

Paul Green:
Now, when you had your MSP, which you said you were running for 15 years, it’s very interesting that you had the same problems that you then saw in the MSP that you went to work with. And I know that obviously, since you sold that business, was it a year and a half ago? You’ve gone on and you’ve worked with a number of MSPs, obviously you’re working with them through Zomentum and through your own sort of coaching and mentoring that you do.

Paul Green:
Do you see that all MSPs have this issue of this sort of problem with marketing and sales or would you say that’s everyone that’s got that issue?

Ben Spector:
Yeah. So as you say, I’ve now had the… I don’t know if privilege is the right word, but I’ll use it anyway. I’ve had the privilege of speaking to 2, 3, 400 MSPs over the last year or so, and the problems are almost universal. And the MSPs themselves are at different levels of maturity in terms of their sales and marketing processes. But the underlying tools are always a problem. A lot of the more mature ones, perhaps they’re working with a sales coach or a business coach, they’ve got a marketing agency on board.

Ben Spector:
And those professional individuals or firms are delivering everything they need in terms of the knowledge. They’re helping them build out the collateral. They’re helping them build out the processes at a theoretical level, but none of them have, or very few of them have managed to then implement that knowledge and that material into the actual systems that are going to automate those processes and manage the processes for them.

Paul Green:
And that’s a real issue, isn’t it? Because as we’ve talked about a thousand times on this podcast, it’s not just about being good at what you do. It’s about being good at marketing that, and actually the most successful MSPs from a marketing point of view are those that get good at marketing, systemise it, put in place the software, put in place the systems and they’re driving it every day.

Ben Spector:
But it’s very difficult. I think most MSP owners are technically led. There are very few MSPs I’ve come across that are led by sales leaders who’ve then hired technical people to join them. Normally they’re technical leaders that have tried to then find sales leaders to join them. And that’s a problem that really resonates for me because I went through probably, well, not probably, I went through three sales directors or sales leaders in the space of about six or seven years.

Ben Spector:
Looking back at it retrospectively, it’s quite interesting, I can see exactly what I was doing wrong because nobody else is ever going to talk about my business as passionately as I would. And therefore actually the technical leader, that MSP owner needs to really become their own sales voice. And it’s very difficult to do, but with the right tools to help you do that, it becomes a lot easier.

Ben Spector:
I didn’t really know anything about how to manage a sales pipeline, what the stages look like and therefore how to processise it. But with tools like Zomentum, it gives you that framework that you can quite easily build out a process, even if you don’t really know what you are doing, if that makes sense.

Paul Green:
Yeah, absolutely. And I think as we’ve just acknowledged most MSPs don’t really know what they’re doing. What you’ve said there is what I think the vast majority of MSPs would admit to. So without turning this into a massive plug for Zomentum, which, which I’m always cautious of, this isn’t a commercial podcast, this is an educational podcast, but I do think that Zomentum is a great tool. And it’s one that should be explored. Let’s just briefly look at what’s the gap that the creators of Zomentum saw and how does Zomentum fill that gap and help make sales easier for an MSP?

Ben Spector:
The gap really was understanding that most MSPs have the same problem. They don’t know how to sell but the problem really comes from the lack of tooling more so perhaps than the lack of knowledge, or perhaps you can use a tool to deliver that knowledge and help build out those processes.

Paul Green:
So specifically, how does it do that? Again, without obviously getting into the specifics of it? What are the ways that Zomentum fixes that problem?

Ben Spector:
So I think it probably helps to perhaps take a step back from Zomentum specifically and the sales piece, and look at the overall process through an MSPs business. I wouldn’t say I’ve always said this because it’s been something of a realisation over the last year, but there’s four key tools that I think all MSPs need to have. And I would always build this stack backwards now.

Ben Spector:
When you first start a new business, the first thing you need to be able to do is comply with accounting legislation, file your taxes, do your payroll and issue invoices to clients. You need to be able to collect the money. So the first tool that you’re probably going to look at is going to be an accounting tool like QuickBooks or Xero, that’s going to help you collect cash at the early days of the business.

Ben Spector:
And that will run you up until maybe you’ve got five or 10 clients where you can keep that information mostly self-contained in your head. You’re probably not needing to share it with many other people. But when you reach that tipping point, the next thing you need is the ability to manage those clients. And so that’s then where the PSA comes in. So once you get past, perhaps that initial five or 10 clients, or you’re starting to employ more people, you bring onboard a PSA to help you with the onboarding, the project planning, the service desk, the billing, which will then integrate with and pass things onto your accounting.

Ben Spector:
That’s great and you’re starting to get organic referrals at that point. You’re building your client base. You’re probably not doing any proactive sales and marketing, but you are building your business very organically. People are referring prospects to you. So then there comes a point where with those referrals, you need a way to track all of the incoming organic opportunities. And so then I think is the time to look at bringing in a sales platform like Zomentum to help you manage the sales cycle and ensure that of those organically arriving at referrals and prospects, you are closing as many of them as possible.

Ben Spector:
Then there comes a point where you are closing the vast majority of the incoming organic referrals, and you’re ready to start proactively marketing to bring in the less organic opportunities. And so that I think is the time when you really want to start looking at bringing onboard marketing resources, reaching out to the marketing firm, putting in place the marketing automations tools like HubSpot, ActiveCampaign, that kind of thing.

Ben Spector:
When I talk about that core pipeline through the business, building it backwards from the accounting then to the PSA, then to the sales, and then finally to the marketing.

Paul Green:
Ben, you’ve just laid out the first five to 10 years of an MSP’s life there. It’s as simple as that.

Ben Spector:
I wish it was that easy.

Paul Green:
Well you’ve got to do a few technical things and take a few phone calls along the way, but there’s certainly something in that. Listen, you and I are going to continue our conversation on YouTube, but we’re going to pause for now on the podcast. Just tell us a little bit more about how we can get in touch with you and talk about Zomentum.

Ben Spector:
Sure. Best place is probably to look me up on LinkedIn. Just search Ben Spector if you want to know more about Zomentum, just zomentum.com.

Paul Green:
Nice and simple. So you and I are going to head over now to YouTube where we’re going to continue this conversation. Some of the things I want to ask you about, I want to ask you about your software choices. For example, HubSpot, HubSpot’s a great marketing tool. It does have big caveat, which is you have to basically give them your kidney every month. It’s an expensive piece of software. So as someone who has actively used it in the past, I want to see if you would choose HubSpot again and we’ll perhaps look at QuoteWerks in a similar way.

Paul Green:
I also want to talk about what it must have been like for you to have sold your business and then go to work for someone else. Because you were telling us earlier, you went to be a technical director at another MSP. So I want to talk about what that must have done to your mind set. And also we’ll talk about shiny new thing syndrome as well. So you and I are going to continue this conversation right now at youtube.com/mspmarketing.

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

Speaker 4:
Hi, I’m Neil Renwick from MSP Dark Web. The book I’d like to recommend is Launch by Jeff Walker. The simple reason that it really helped us to build the initial stages of our brand new online dark web scanner, with the power of being able to sell almost anything online on a subscription base.

Voiceover:
Coming up next week.

Speaker 5:
This is Reb from asaservice.support. Join me on Paul’s podcast next week, as we talk about MSPs all around the world and how they are very much the same, but very different too.

Paul Green:
Do subscribe wherever you listen to this podcast so you never miss an episode because next week we’re going to be finishing off this three part series about getting a phone person. I’ll be telling you next week, who they should be calling and what they should be saying.

Paul Green:
Plus, we’re going to be talking next week about getting a business mom. What is a business mom and why does every MSP need one? And I’ll tell you that on next week’s show.

Paul Green:
Now on YouTube, we have a ton of extra content for you. The extended interview with Ben Spector from this week, that’s there right now on YouTube and on Thursday, we’ll be releasing the latest episode of Another Bite. It’s our show about the show where we pick up some of the most interesting things from this podcast and we discuss them in a little bit more detail.

Paul Green:
You’ll find all of that at youtube.com/mspmarketing. 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 Marketing Podcast.