Episode 203: MSPs: 3 ideas for better LinkedIn engagement

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

Hello my friend and welcome to the show. Here’s what we’ve got coming up for you this week.

Hey, I’m Steve Spiegel, founder and CEO of CrewHu. Everyone wants to grow their MSP, and to do that, you need to keep your clients happy. But newsflash, keep your clients happy is really hard if you aren’t keeping your employees happy. I’m going to tell you how you’re going to make sure that you have the happiest staff.

And on top of that, fascinating interview with Steve. Later on, I’ve got three great ideas for you for better engagement on LinkedIn.

Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast.

Question for you, what are you using AI tools for right now? Predominantly, when I talk about AI tools, I mean, ChatGPT and Bard and all the other tools that have had this huge overnight success this year. We obviously know they’ve been years in the making, but they suddenly burst into the mainstream at the beginning of this year. What are you doing with ChatGPT, et cetera, that’s really interesting right now? I’ve been asking a load of MSPs this over the last few weeks, and I’m seeing tons and tons of different things come in.

For example, some people are using it to rewrite marketing content or even generate marketing content. Obviously there’s a massive caveat with that, that AI generated text isn’t quite ready for consumption by humans, so you do need to have somebody editing it, reviewing it, fact-checking it especially. But AI tools can be a great way to take pre-written content and to create your own version of it, to create your own spin on it. I know of people using it to create SEO, search engine optimization, content for their websites.

Again, you just need to make sure that humans are looking for that. But then we’ve got a whole bunch of other things that MSPs are using AI tools for. Here’s a really interesting one that someone suggested to me a couple of weeks ago. They’re using AI to help them explain difficult concepts to their prospects and to their clients. It all comes down to a specific prompt, and that prompt is please explain insert subject as if you were teaching it to a 12-year-old. Because you know that ChatGPT, et cetera, their power lies in the prompts and you have to get the prompts right.

There’s a huge amount of information out there about how you can do it. It’s got a name even. They’re calling it prompt hacking. Everything’s hacking these days, isn’t it? But prompt hacking, and it’s all about the context and the prompts that you give to these AI tools. The one that seems to work particularly well is explain insert subject to a 12-year-old. If you took something like phishing, for example, and you asked an AI tool… I mean, you could even give it some more context.

You could say, “I am explaining phishing, or I want to explain phishing to someone who does not understand what phishing is or even how to spell it. Please, can you explain this to a 12-year-old in no more than four paragraphs?” You are expert enough on phishing and any other cybersecurity problem that you would be able to take what ChatGPT spews out and to be able to look at it and understand whether or not that’s right, which is pretty exciting. You’re the human that you can filter the AI content through.

Here’s the thing, these AI tools have the ability to explain really difficult concepts in ways that do make sense to people. Of course, they’re going to strip out some information. It’s not going to be a perfect explanation, but it’s a great place to get started, right? Certainly, I find from talking to lots of MSPs that one of the most difficult things for any MSP to do is to explain a difficult concept in a way that anyone can understand. The curse that you have is your intellect, your ability, your technical knowledge.

You understand phishing at a much higher level than ordinary people do, and I count myself in the ordinary people there. I’ve listened to conversations about phishing and cybersecurity and just tech between MSPs and it’s all just gone a little bit over my head. Using the AI tools to bring yourself I’m going to say down, that’s not really the right, but bring yourself to the level of the average business owner or manager can be a very, very smart thing to do.

Because here’s the thing, when you are marketing and educating and talking to ordinary business owners and managers who do not know as much about technology as you do, if you talk to tech, to high level, if it’s too complicated, if you can’t explain it quickly and easily to them, then you will lose them. You’ll see it in their eyes. They mentally switch off. They emotionally check out.

Once they do that, they’re not engaging with you and with what you’ve got to say, which means they’re very unlikely to ever go and buy from you. ChatGPT, et cetera, can be amazing tools to help you explain very, very difficult concepts in a way that even a 12-year-old could understand.

Here’s this week’s clever idea.

Let’s talk about LinkedIn. And like all social media platforms, LinkedIn is all about engagement. If you post content that people engage with more, that they like, that they share, or that they comment on, then that sends a message to LinkedIn’s algorithm. Don’t forget, all of these social media platforms are driven by the algorithm. You see, those clever people sat in those big buildings in California have figured out over the years that if someone likes something, shares something, or generally engages with it, comments on it, then it means that it’s good content.

The more that people do that, it’s like a virtuous circle, the more that people do it, the more people see it. If you post a piece of content on LinkedIn, or indeed any platform, and very quickly it’s picked up and people do stuff with it, they start commenting on it, writing it, writing it, liking it, et cetera, et cetera, then more people see it. All social media platforms at varying different levels work in exactly this way. The goal for you then is to add content that is particularly engaging. Now, we’ve talked before on this podcast about the different levels of content.

The very best kind of content you can put on LinkedIn or any platform is content that you yourself have created. Engaging content, I’ve got three examples to give you in a second. If you don’t have the time to do that, the next best alternative is canned content. Canned content is content that’s been written by someone else on your behalf. For example, we provide a full seven days worth of social media every single week in the MSP Marketing Edge, and that is canned content that is never going to be as good.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s very good, but it’s never going to be as good as your own personal content that you’ve put together. But for the 700 plus MSPs that we serve and work with who don’t have time to create their own content, our canned content is better for them than the third level of content, which is nothing and not posting anything on LinkedIn at all. Let me give you three ideas right now of types of content that you could put onto LinkedIn. The first of those is… And these, by the way, are all designed for engagement.

This isn’t just content. This is content that is designed from scratch to be engaging, and not all of it’s going to work. You could take some of these and you could do different iterations of it and some will work better than others will, but it gives you three ideas of formats, of type of content that you can try on LinkedIn to get better engagement. The first of those is to do a short video of something that’s real. For example, here’s a great example, you could grab your phone, go and sit in your car and prop your phone up against the dashboard and the window and record.

Don’t record it straight into LinkedIn. Record it as a video you’re going to upload to LinkedIn. You could sit there. You could have your coat on. Your seatbelt on even. It’s pretty obvious that you’re in your car, and this is what makes it real. Even if you’re sat in your own car park deliberately doing this, it seems more real. You can say, “Hey, hi, this is Paul.” In fact, what would be really cool is looking away from the camera at this point as if you haven’t planned what you’re going to say.

You could say, “I’ve just had this call from a client, and actually it’s the kind of call that I wish I had more of these kind of calls. Often the calls I get are the other way, but these clients, they were ringing me to say that they’d had this email and it didn’t feel right. There was a link in there and everything about the email was trying to get them to click a link and log into something. We have a name for this. We call it phishing. It’s phishing with a P.” You get the idea, right? Then you then explain what a phishing link is.

Actually what makes that video real is your client didn’t click the phishing link. Woo-hoo! Happy times, right? Now, that’s actually more real, your joy and your relief that your client didn’t click the phishing link than you saying, “Oh, we’ve had another client click a phishing link.” Because you can talk about the fact you’ve just avoided three or four hours of work from your team and a great deal of effort and hassle and heartbreak, and you could then talk about how software solutions could help them to avoid this problem in the future, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

You know the technicalities of that more than I do. But the concept, the format here of this engaging piece of LinkedIn content is a short video that is real. It’s not you with light and camera and your shine and whatsoever. It’s you in the real world, in your car, in a restaurant, taking a walk, and it’s almost like you’ve had a thought about something and you’ve grabbed your phone and you’ve just recorded yourself. And that could be a very engaging type of content. That’s number one.

Number two is another video format, but this is a little more pre-produced. It’s a bit more produced as it were. You may for this use a proper webcam and lights and whatsoever, but what you do is you create a short video giving a tip. For example, one that I’ve just picked completely off the top of my head because I thought everyone knew about this and it seems that they don’t, tab groups. I use Chrome, and I believe Edge is exactly the same that you can group tabs into groups.

I’ve been using this, in fact, since it was a beater thing in Chrome because I have about 4,000 tabs open, but all neatly in a small number of groups, which makes it okay, right? I know. But you could literally do a 30 second video. It could just be a screen share and you could be like, “Hi, it’s Paul here. Right. Let me show you something that if you use Chrome or Edge browser every day, this is going to blow your mind. You’ve got all these tabs open here, and it’s very hard to know which ones which and to find the one you’re looking for. Did you know you can group them together?”

And then you literally show them, select, select, select, right click group, whatever it is that you do, and you show them in that video. You are doing like a… I guess you’d call it like a tech tip, and you’re doing it there and then to show them what they can do. That’s the second idea. Now, that, by the way, I don’t think is as powerful as that real video concept that I talked about before, but you can’t just keep doing those real videos. Part of the fun of LinkedIn is doing a different variety of things.

You can do a real video and then you can do these short tech tip videos. And then the final suggested piece of content to drive more engagement on LinkedIn is what we call a one line question, and it is literally that. There’s no context to it. It’s a single line. This looks better in Facebook than it does in LinkedIn, because in Facebook under a certain number of characters, it makes it big. You can put a color behind it and it really stands out. But you can still do this on LinkedIn.

For example, one of the one line questions you could be, you could simply ask, what are you doing that works really well right now to build your LinkedIn connections? Or what’s the most frustrating thing about technology in your life? Or what’s the technology or what’s the thing that your staff moan about the most in the office? Do you see what I mean? It’s like a one line question, and what you’re hoping to do is to hook someone that sees that as you post it and they immediately can respond, and they respond with a comment very quickly.

They do that because you’ve asked a very short open question and they instantly jump in with a short answer. As I said earlier, you’ll have some hits with that and you’ll have some misses, but that can be a very smart third type of engaging content. Now, if you want to get an idea of some single line questions that you can ask, I have a free resource for you with a bunch of clever suggestions.

Paul’s blatant plug.

And that free resource is the MSP Marketing Facebook Group. You see, a couple of months ago, we switched from posting articles and help videos and stuff like that and we switched over to exactly this format. About probably 80% of the content I put in there now is single questions, single line questions. There’s an absolute ton of them in there. If you join that Facebook group, you can go through and look at the questions that I’ve posted.

Now, bearing in mind, I’m posting them to engage with MSPs, but you could take many of those questions, make some of them slightly less technical and you could reuse them. In fact, you have my blessing and my permission to reuse my questions on your LinkedIn for you to engage with ordinary business owners and managers. But to do that, of course, you’ve got to be a member of the group. Now, it is a free group. It’s only for MSPs, so it’s a vendor free zone. I’m there every day advising you on how to improve your marketing.

All you have to do is go to Facebook on your phone, type in MSP Marketing at the top, but go to groups. We’ve got a page that we don’t really do anything with, but we’ve got a group. The group is very active, so go to groups. You’ll see my pretty little face, stab your finger onto my face, and you just have to apply to join. We do ask you a few questions to check that you are a real MSP and not a vendor trying to sneak in, but I look forward to seeing you and, in fact, helping you with resources like these one line questions in the MSP Marketing Facebook Group.

The big interview.

Hey, I’m Steve Spiegel. I’m the CEO and founder of CrewHu. We are the customer satisfaction and employee recognition platforms made specifically for MSPs.

Thank you so much for joining me on this podcast, Steve. Now, we all know that growing your MSP isn’t just about winning new clients, it’s about retaining your existing clients as well. And that’s something that a lot of MSPs just sleepwalk their way through because the average MSP retention is really, really good. I’ve spoken about this at length on the podcast before. I perceive that partly it’s inertia loyalty. It’s just too difficult. Well, that’s the perception anyway to move off to another MSP, but also because the clients don’t understand.

They see technology as this big scary thing. It’s a massive thing for them to switch from one MSP to another, so it’s easier to stay. I guess you could throw in there that actually also they’re very happy. We’ve got mixtures of people who are very happy and mixtures of people who feel it’s too difficult to move. Now, I know that you have a very interesting view of how to improve and build on customer retention, and that’s by not actually working on your customer retention at all.

Yeah, I believe it all has to do with your team, your processes, and your company culture. A lot of MSPs go about it by building this really amazing tech stack. But the truth is, that tech stack can be duplicated in months, if not weeks, and all of a sudden you look like the next guy down the street. You’re right, churn is very low within this space. The opportunity is bringing on new business that doesn’t have an MSP.

Co-managed is a very big trend right now, and what’s going on in the economy, which is good for the MSP industry, is IT services are actually declining in-house and they’re partnering with MSPs. You want to be that MSP that they partner with. You mentioned about churn, but the big opportunity now for MSPs is not just churn, it’s your existing client base. There’s so much opportunity.

And for the most part, they’re just doing a fraction of the business that they should be doing with you. If they’re not happy, even if they’re not going to churn, they’re not going to do that extra business with you.

Yes, completely. Unhappy clients don’t buy more things from you and vice versa. Tell us a little bit about your background then, Steve. What got you into the MSP space and what makes you an expert at dealing with happy employees and happy customers?

Got it. Actually before this and before CrewHu, I was building this franchise concept called Coldstone. I was one of the early franchisee groups and we were bringing this brand to South Florida. It’s an ice cream concept, so we’re selling ice cream in South Florida. It was retail, and it was a high transactional business. I was actually trying to solve my own problem. I was building a lot of stores. We had over 100 employees and our turnover was over 100%. I was pulling my hair out.

You ever been at the dinner table with your family and you’re like staring out in space and your wife goes, “Honey, did you hear what I said?” And then you’re like, “No.” That was happening a lot. I was thinking about business. It wasn’t a good time for me, and I needed to get to the bottom of why employee turnover was so high, why customer satisfaction wasn’t great in the stores. We actually built CrewHu at that point to survey all of our customers. But the difference is we wanted to, if it was good, recognize the employee for delivering great services.

The thing that was happening is people were walking into the stores and they had to click 20 times to leave a review, which means that they were pretty (beep) if they actually did that. We got one per store per month. We put this into place and we ended up getting 100 pieces of review per store per month. 96 of them were positive, four were negative. We were able to celebrate 96 times with our team. The four times when something went wrong, we were able to train them.

We had a great relationship because we’re always celebrating that they’re open to receiving feedback and improving our processes. Some MSPs came to us during this time and they’re like, “Ooh, we really like what you’re doing. I didn’t know what an MSP was at the time. I became friends with these guys, the early adopters, and they told me to walk shows like IT Nation and I learned all about it.

I really saw the parallels between retail, which is very service oriented, very, very high customer service oriented, and the MSP space, which this is where you differentiate your MSP by being high customer service oriented. I’m like, this is great. We could really make a difference here. At that point, these guys happened to be… You ever hear Gary Pica and TruMethods?

Yes. Yeah, yeah.

These guys were in a TruMethod peer group, and it’s now called TruPeer. I’m like, well, how do I get in front of more of you? They’re like, “Oh, you got to look at Gary.” I got on the phone with Gary and I’m like, “Can I come out?” He’s like, “Well, you could sponsor this event called Schnizzfest that we’re going to start to put on.” They’re getting ready for the inaugural event. I’m like, “I don’t have a lot of money right now. We’ve been burning money for a while. Is there any way I could come out just to speak to your peer groups?”

He’s like, “Yeah, sure, if you don’t mind picking up the bar tab.” At that point, I didn’t realize how much MSPs, the guys that work there or own it, like to go out and have a drink after work. The barter was pretty high, but I ended up making a lot of friends. We ended up closing a couple of dozen new deals, and all of a sudden I was in the MSP space and we haven’t looked back. We now only focus on the MSP customer. When they come in, they’ll know this is made for them. This integrates with everything that we use.

It’s real easy to use because of that. Because a lot of people also say, “You could do this everywhere. Why aren’t you going everywhere?” Even our clients are saying that because they want to sell it. I simply say, “Listen, right now I want to really focus on this vertical, hit all the pain points, try to serve you guys as best as I can, and then we could go out, but we haven’t yet. We’re focused truly on this vertical very hard.”

Before we carry on and talk more about CrewHu and employee satisfaction, client satisfaction, what happened to the franchise business?

Oh, I still have it. I’m an investor. When we put it into place, the turnover actually went down to 40%, which is pretty unheard of in this space. We have a metric that’s really important in the business called same-store sales, and same-store sales was negative year over year, which is the biggest health metric that I followed, so I knew I needed to change something.

Ever since we started to focus on the employee to deliver customer satisfaction, same-store sales went from negative to positive, and we were hitting 9% year over year for the next three or four years, which in retail is unsustainable, but getting that for four years straight is really unheard of. We were able to really grow the business and increase the valuation of the company.

And briefly, because I appreciate we’re slightly going off track from MSPs here, just briefly explain what same-store sales is so we can understand what that metric was.

Got it. In food, you’re normally seasonal wherever we are. For us, it’s not always great to compare this week to last week or this month to last month. The best way to compare is, for example, January of this year to January of last year, and you can really see how you’re truly doing.

Got it. Year-on-year, essentially. Why is it that you see an improvement in customer satisfaction when you see an improvement in employee satisfaction?

Well, just like in retail, in the MSP space, you’re measured on the satisfaction that you provide. You mentioned that churn isn’t high in the MSP space, but when people do leave and they do leave. I’ve seen it, and I’ve seen MRR companies that were billing 25,000 a month leave and it’s put a hole in their growth for the next year because of that, because now they have to replace it.

The reason they leave, one of the biggest reasons anyway, is response time. Even if you have a high CSAT, but they’re rating your response time, that was Hurley, my dog, you’re relating your response time low, they can be at risk. So he doesn’t keep on singing, I’m going to bring him in so he can hang out with us.

Well, this has never happened before. Just talk amongst yourselves while Hurley comes in.

Customer satisfaction I think is really important to the MSP. You’re reducing risk by measuring the satisfaction, seeing where you’re not meeting expectations. I take customer satisfaction. I break it up into a few categories. One is empathy, and that is simply customer service training. Is the tech emailing back and forth too many times before they actually pick up the phone? Are they talking down to the customer because they don’t know the technology as well as the tech? Of course, they don’t, but sometimes just the tone of your email or how you’re speaking can come across badly.

Empathy is really important. You want to capture that somehow. A process is really important. I’ll take a simple example. When you bring on moves, adds and changes, which are very, very common in this industry, you bring on a new user and they’re meant to have this specific software and it’s not there. When they get their computer, they can’t do their work, and now there’s a problem. It’s a simple change in the process, add that software to that checklist. That’s an example of a process problem.

You want to capture that, if it’s empathy or process. The biggest thing though that I see is expectation, that we have SLAs, don’t know if they’re clear all the time. The customer has an expectation and the MSP has an expectation for their service. However, if that’s not aligned, even if you’re delivering great service, the customer could still be unhappy and you could fix that by simply communicating what the proper expectation.

Your computer goes down and your email’s not working and your SLA is four hours for that and you fix it in an hour, but they’re angry because it didn’t take a half an hour, that’s something that you need to resolve with your customer or maybe all of your customers just to let them know clearly what the SLAs are. I think those are the three things that covers all issues with transactional customer satisfaction.

Obviously you’ve built CrewHu around the needs and wants and what works best for MSPs. How does the software directly help to address those issues?

Well, we integrate with the MSP’s PSA. Whenever a ticket is replied to or a ticket is closed, the customer has an opportunity to rate how the transaction is going or how it went. We also capture things such as empathy, such as things as response time. One of the things that we capture are things that you would not necessarily see. You could have a 99% CSAT, but now you’re looking that, oh, empathy, we have 100% on. Response time, we have a 50% on. Proactiveness, we have a 90% on. Resolution time, we have a 90% on.”

You could see that based on that, response time is an issue, even though you have a 90% CSAT. You get to see that by say you have 1,000 pieces of feedback and you only get 20 pieces of feedback regarding response time, that shines a light on things that they don’t see you doing, and that’s an opportunity to improve. That’s just to reduce the risk. Now, to help grow your business, you want to also take that positive feedback and you want to shout it from the rooftops. Get more Google Reviews.

Show people proof points outside of you just saying, “Hey, we have better service.” This is probably the most important thing to do as an MSP. It’s hard to sell something that looks like something else down the street. You have to sell you. You have to sell what you deliver. How best to sell what you deliver is to have your customers talking about what you do. We actually go to trade shows all over the country, sometimes all over the world. We’ve been to the UK, Australia.

The reason why we do well in trade shows is not because of me or my sales force, it’s because our customers are bringing their friends, their peers that they met to show and say, “You have to try these guys out. They’ve changed our business.” The owners of MSPs, the marketing managers, need to think about how they could make that happen for themselves too, because we’re really selling services, we’re selling trust. Finally, we talked about how I look inward to the employee.

It’s really important to celebrate the small wins on a daily basis with your team, not just that big sale that gets brought in, not that big release that you have coming out, but every day there’s tickets being answered. There’s automation is being done. There’s the heroes. Just like in my retail business, the heroes in the MSP are on the front line talking to the customers every day. It could be a thankless job, because they’re not calling to order flowers. They’re not calling for a special occasion that makes you feel great.

They’re calling because they have a fire, they have a problem, their day is not going their way today, and you’re there to help them. If your team on the front line doesn’t fully believe in this, no matter what you say or what you do or what you push, you’re not going to be able to deliver that amazing customer satisfaction.

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. My final question for you, before you tell us about CrewHu, and the answer to this, Steve, is not install CrewHu and get started with it. My question is this, what’s a good place to get started? If you’re a busy MSP owner, you’re spending way too much time already working in the business compared to on it, you hear this and you’re nodding along thinking, “Yep, yep, this guy’s talking absolute sense, but where do I start,” what’s your answer to that?

It depends where you are. If you have a customer service process in place and you’re not happy with what it’s measuring or how it’s working, then you want to start to look to how do I optimize this, how do I make this successful? If you don’t have anything in place right now, get started right away. Whether you’re a one person shop or a 50 person shop, this is something that you need to measure, not only to help you improve your business, but also to prove to new clients that this is how you take care of your existing customer base, and this is why you should trust us.

Excellent. Right. Tell us a little bit more about CrewHu and what’s the best way to get in touch with you or with the business?

You could go to CrewHu.com, and it’s C-R-E-W-H-U.com. Crew, those are your people. Those are the guys you go into the foxhole with. Hu, the H-U, stands for human. We’re trying to help you bring the human into the workplace or back into the workplace. I meet so many owners of MSPs, large and small, meet so many managers and one thing everybody has in common is that they care. They care about the business. They’re truly passionate about the technology and how they can transform their customer’s lives.

They care about their employees. They want them to be successful. They want them to train. A lot of them are just frustrated that they’re not doing what they think they should be doing. We want to try to help them bridge that gap and create strong relationships with their teams and customers. We help with the customer satisfaction process, but we also help engage the employees in the customer satisfaction process, which is the key to making it work.

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

Hi, my name is Dana Matilya, and the book that I would recommend you read is called Switch, and it is by Dan and Chip Heath. It is a great book that talks about cultural changes, and I think it’s fabulous for people in the cybersecurity industry to read because it really talks about how that’s a cultural shift that needs to happen, and the book Switch is all about how that’s happening in all different areas of the world.

Coming up next week.

Hi, I’m Braith Bamkin. If you’ve ever wondered about how you get referrals into your MSP, join me in the podcast where I’m going to share some tips and tricks on how to get you referral ready.

Wherever you are listening to me right now, or indeed maybe even watching me, please subscribe and you will never miss an episode. Because on top of that fascinating interview next week, we’re also talking about why you should be locking your clients into a three-year contract, but making sure you give them a get out of jail free I hate you break clause. What exactly is that? I’ll explain it next week. Join me next Tuesday and have a very profitable week in your MSP.

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