Successful MSP owners exercise

The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge

Welcome to Episode 265 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• Successful MSP owners exercise: Our bodies are amazing, but they’re even better when we use them on a regular basis. Even just a 20 minute walk every single day keeps your body sharp – and also your mind.
• How one client question can turn into 7 pieces of content for your MSP: To do great marketing for your MSP, you need great content. There’s tons of it around and there’s a simple way to extract it from everyday conversations with clients and prospects.
• This guy phoned 1,000 decision makers… and learned these hard lessons: Making more outbound calls is essential to win new business for your MSP. If you HATE picking up the phone, this interview is going to blow your mind.
• Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Steven, from as MSP in London, UK, is looking forward to getting organised in 2025 – his question is: Which project management software do you recommend?

Successful MSP owners exercise

MSP Running Shoes on. Have you ever felt that owning an MSP business is like running a marathon in more ways than one? And if you prioritise looking after your clients and their technology ahead of looking after your own body and health, then you have a very low chance of completing the marathon that is being a business owner for the next 20 years. Let’s find out why successful business owners exercise, how they do it when they have zero time, and the benefits of doing it to you, your clients and your staff.

A few months back, I had my dad come and stay with us for a couple of nights. Now he lives about 150 miles away and we don’t really see him more than a couple of times a year. So it was lovely having him stay. My daughter and I, we took him to London for a full day being tourists in our own capital city, and we went to see a theatre show and we went to some museums and it was great fun. But we walked about 20,000 steps, which is about 10 miles, and we do a lot of walking because London is a walking city. It’s so much easier to walk around and just catch the tube. You wouldn’t drive around London. No one does that.

My dad is in his early seventies, so he’s not really that old and he’s kind of fit and kind of healthy as he has been throughout his life. But he has let his fitness slip in recent years and he was really struggling. So at the end of that day, he just looked ill. He was sitting down, his back was hurting, his knee was hurting, his hip was hurting, and he won’t go and see the doctor about his dicky hip. And I got him to admit that he doesn’t really do any regular exercise. He’ll have a walk now and again. Now all the medical advice from all the doctors everywhere is that someone of his age, in fact, someone of every age should be going out for at least a 20 minute walk every day. And I told him that even last year when I couldn’t exercise much because I’d injured my knee and I needed surgery on it. I couldn’t go running or anything like that, but I still exercised every single day. I’d go for a 20, 30 minute walk or go on the treadmill for a mile, or I actually bought an exercise bike, which I’ve since sold. But you get the idea.

I was telling him how the most successful business owners and MSP owners I know, they always make time for exercise regardless of how busy they are. Do you do this? Do you make time no matter how busy you are and force yourself to do exercise on a regular basis? Maybe you prioritise looking after your clients, you prioritise your partner if you’ve got one, your kids, if you have them, your staff, you prioritise all of this stuff. And it’s very easy to forget to prioritise yourself and your health and your exercise. And yet the evidence is there, there’s an abundance of it. Just go looking for it. One of the things that’s going to make the quality of all of our lives higher is regular exercise because our bodies are amazing, but they’re even better when we use them on a regular basis.

Even a 20 minute walk every single day doesn’t just keep your body sharp, it keeps your mind sharp as well. And I know that I always make better quality decisions about my business and just actually better quality life decisions, when I take regular exercise. My mind is sharper, yours will be the same, and you can do more and your body will last longer if you do more exercise thinking about it. It’s kind of weird how that works. It should almost be the other way around, shouldn’t it? That the more you use your body, the faster you run it down and there’s nothing left at the end. But actually that’s not the case at all.

So my challenge for you at this time of year, as we approach everyone having a bit of time off and a chance to do things differently next year, ask yourself, what could you do to prioritise adding some exercise every single day? And it could be as simple as you taking something that you already do every day and adding exercise to it. So for example, do you make 30 minutes worth of phone calls each day? And I don’t mean prospecting calls, just perhaps calls to your team or just catching up with clients or business owning friends or whatever. What if you did those calls while you were walking? And I know the first couple of times you do that, you’ll be out of breath, but you will soon get used to it and your fitness levels will go up.

What if actually that walk is listening to this podcast, apparently there are other podcasts to listen to. Or maybe listening to an audio book about improving your business. Could you do that while you’re out walking so it feels like you’re still investing your time on your business, but you’re getting the exercise as well? Get a dog. Make the time to walk the dog each day. And what if actually you go for a longer walk with a dog, get one of those dogs that’s robust and can go for very long walks, not one of those small little dogs that can only manage a five minute walk. What if it’s a walk with your kids to a playground? And what if you go to a playground that’s further away?

There’s a great book called Atomic Habits by James Clear, I think I’ve mentioned it on this podcast a dozen times. And if you haven’t listened to it yet, please get the book. It will make such a difference to your productivity. And one of the things that James Clear talks about is if you want to change something, you insert it into your existing routine. Rather than saying, right, I’m going to join the gym, I’m going to go there every day, I’m going to get fit – we all know that that lasts for three days and then you never go again.

Build a daily walk, or whatever it is that you want to do, into your already normal routine that you have. You literally add a habit onto an existing habit.

So if you have an existing habit of let’s say 30 minutes a day on the phone, adding the walking to those phone calls makes it happen every day. If you ordinarily take the dog out every single day, you just have a longer route and you perhaps turn left when you leave your house to go on the longer route rather than right. And that makes it more likely to happen because you are already doing those things.

Which of these things is the easiest way for you to exercise on a daily basis?

How one client question can turn into 7 pieces of content for your MSP

Now, this is very sneaky. Have you ever wished you could make more from your MSP by getting other people to do all of the hard work? Well, you can. In fact, you can actually use your prospects and your clients to not only help you grow your MSP’s revenue, but also directly help you with your marketing. Let’s talk about the simple way to take everyday conversations with ordinary business owners, extract marketing content from those conversations and then use it across multiple platforms. They can help you to grow your business without them even realising.

To do great marketing for your MSP, you need great content. And there’s tons of it around. Many vendors give away content as a value add. And there are plenty of businesses that supply high quality content, such as my MSP Marketing Edge, for example. Now, I’ve always said that there is a clear hierarchy of content, where you creating your own sits at the top. So at the top you’ve got you creating your own content. In the middle, you’ve got high quality content only supplied to one MSP per area, like the MSP Marketing Edge. And then at the bottom you’ve got content supplied to thousands of MSPs, including of course, your competitors. Of course, creating your own content is a time and a resource hog.

One of the tricks when creating your own content is to repurpose ideas into different types of content for different platforms.

So what I’m talking about here has been on my blog and it was in one of my LinkedIn newsletters at some point in the past. Different words, same kind of themes. So let me give you my standard operating procedure for collecting, creating, and repurposing marketing content for your MSP. And there are three steps.

The first is to collect ideas, collecting ideas for content. It’s kind of a mindset more than anything. Once you realise that ideas are around you all the time, you just have to open yourself up to collecting them. And your goal is to create content that’s educational and entertaining for ordinary business owners and managers, which makes every communication with every client a potential content goldmine. Imagine how many ideas could come out of a sales meeting or a strategic review, which you might know as a quarterly business review. Ask lots of open questions. Not only do you get quality answers from that, which will help you to close a prospect or upsell a client, but that also generates content ideas for you.

And here are some examples of open questions: What are your plans for the next few years? What are your most urgent priorities? What are your biggest business concerns? What would you like to do that your current technology won’t allow you to do? Now, this one’s my favourite, If I could wave a magic wand and do anything to make your business life easier, what would it be? And what do you often hear your staff saying about your technology? Now, let’s say the response to the last question was, yeah, actually, I always hear them moaning about how slow everything is. Well, not only is that a hot buying signal, but it’s also a great content idea. Get into the habit of writing down every content idea you hear, whether it’s a good one or not, because the goal at this stage is to capture everything. I always have a notes page open in my browser when I’m chatting to MSPs. In fact, I just counted and currently that page has more than 200 unused ideas, and just reading them gives me other ideas.

Second step then is to create content. Let’s take that comment about slow technology and imagine you turn it into a blog on your website. That could be – Five reasons why your staff moan about slow computers and how to end the complaints for $297. The five reasons, which I’ve just made up off the top of my head, and you’d replace them with your own better reasons are: They haven’t restarted their device for three years. They have a million tabs open on their browser. They have every possible piece of software open and running. Their computer is so old, it’s on Windows 3.1 and their IT support team isn’t being proactive. And that last one gives you a chance to segway into the proactive tasks that your team would perform regularly to keep their network and devices optimised.

Talk in broad strokes and avoid techno babble. You want them sitting there feeling annoyed, wondering if their current IT people are doing anything or not. And then you offer to help the reader delight their staff by spending $297 on a speed audit. What’s a speed audit? Well, I just made that up as well, and it’s where you and your team, you do an audit. It’s just a basic technology audit, but it’s aimed at finding out why their devices network is so slow, including implementing any easy fixes. Now, we all know that this kind of audit is really just the prospect paying for a high quality sales meeting with you. They’re paying for you to tell them everything that’s wrong and how you would fix it if they joined you as a contracted client.

As a sales tool, paid audits have fallen out of favour in recent years, but I do believe used well, they can still be very powerful. And by the way, you don’t have to write all of that content I was just talking about yourself. It needs to come out of your brain. Sure, but you can create it without actually pressing laptop buttons, for example. You could dictate it. I dictate most of my content now, and then I edit it into shape. And that one habit has more than doubled my output in the last few years. You could feed your ideas into AI to write it for you. Just make sure you edit and humanise what the AI spits out. You could record a voice note and send it to a freelance writer on Upwork. There’s lots of things you could do.

Then the final step is to repurpose the content because that blog can now be turned into all sorts of different content. The blog can be copied as a LinkedIn newsletter. Each of the five reasons could become a social post. You could film a video about all of this. It could become a segment on your podcast, if you do one. You could do a webinar on it. And it’s also a great subject for a LinkedIn live. And just there, are seven different types of content all from one idea. Now, there are two tricks to get this right. The first is to reshape the content to fit the platform. So you don’t just copy and paste the blog into a social post, for example, you’d rewrite it, or at the very least, shorten it down and simplify the words you use. And the second trick is to use a content calendar to plan when and how you’ll reuse content. Spread it out across the year, across all the different platforms, and you’re looking for a variety of subjects so that your content never feels samey.

This guy phoned 1,000 decision makers… and learned these hard lessons

If you know you should be making more outbound calls to win new business for your MSP, but you HATE picking up the phone, this is going to blow your mind. Perhaps the single most effective marketing tactic you could ever use is just to pick up the phone and call ordinary business owners and managers. Yes, it’s hard to get past the gatekeeper and engage someone in a conversation they don’t really want to have, but the quality of the conversation, even in just a few minutes, can be off the scale.

It’s one of the most reliable ways to discover who is nearly ready, willing, and able to buy the services that you sell. Most MSPs hate making these calls, and my special guest today is a real expert at making them. In fact, he’s called at least a thousand decision makers in his career. And today he’s going to spill all of his hard won secrets of how to get through, how to get them engaged, and ultimately how to get decision makers to book a sales meeting with you.

Hi, I’m Dave Sutton. I’m one of the owners of Wingman MSP Marketing.

And thank you so much Dave for making your debut on this podcast, although your business partner, Mark Copeman, has been on at least two or three times. Lots of MSPs will know Mark from speaking at events around the world and for being on podcasts and webinars and everywhere, but they probably don’t know that actually, Mark does no work at all in Wingman MSP marketing. Mark does all the pouncing around and the, ooh, look at me, pretty much like I do, and then you do all the actual work in the background. Thank you very much, we’ve pulled you out of the cave of getting things done and you’re giving us a little bit of time for this interview. So thank you.

What we’re going to talk about is something which I know you did yourself for many years, and I know you have now a team of six people doing, it’s phoning business owners. It’s the thing that MSPs hate doing, and I know you and your team do this on behalf of lots of MSPs. What I want to get out of you today are some secrets, some things that you do which helps you to get through to other businesses and get hold of decision makers. But let’s go back a step first and let’s just look at how you got started, Dave. So you started Wingman originally on your own. How long have you been going?

Yes, almost eight years now. And everything started from telemarketing really. So from lead gen, I think as the MSP market has matured and people have realised that brand and digital and all these other things are important that we brought those in to the fold over the years. But still there’s that crux of, I’m an MSP owner and I need leads like yesterday that I can turn into customers. And still even in this digitised age, picking up the phone, having a conversation with someone asking questions, it’s the only way to build that direct rapport and open a door to a conversation with a prospect.

Yeah, I agree completely 1000%. And in fact, because of the digital world, that’s why you need to have the phone aspect, and I’m sure you would agree with me on this, but when I see an MSP in a marketplace who has somebody doing outbound calls, whether it’s an agency like yours, whether it’s someone in house, whether it’s just a part-time mom making two, three hours of calls, two, three days a week, they have a distinct advantage because they’re just touching more people, having relationship building calls with more prospects. And eventually you “get lucky”. And I put getting lucky in speech marks there because it’s not really getting lucky. It’s working the numbers, it’s getting through to people.

So you originally were the one actually doing the calls for MSPs. Now, to me, that sounds like the worst job in the world. I would rather be, sweeping mud off the street in the rain. I don’t know where I’m going with that analogy, but I’d rather lose a toe than actually have to pick up the phone every day. So what was that like? Actually just calling people day in, day out.

It does feel like sweeping mud uphill sometimes. Yeah, so I could see where you were going with that one.

It’s a numbers game. You’ve got to make a hundred plus dials a day to have the chance of having 10 to 15 meaningful conversations, of which 2 or 3 might go somewhere, and repeating that process relentlessly.

But I think the mistake that most people make is they look for a salesperson in that role. Agencies, MSPs, whoever they hire, sales-based people for that role, which actually are probably the wrong person. A salesperson is great when they’re put in front of a prospect that’s lukewarm and has an appetite to move forward. But actually that dogged work upfront is better led by someone that can start a conversation. They don’t feel too salesy, they’re not too pushy, and they’re inquisitive and they ask questions because it’s all about building an audience first that you can then nurture.

Rarely are people looking for a new IT provider, and more often than not, that’s because they’re in bed with someone that they’ve been with for years. As we all know, our clients as an MSP are incredibly loyal and most MSPs are like that. So therefore it’s hard out there in the market to find people that are looking to switch. So you want to drop in some little tidbits of things that they might want to consider, have they questioned their incumbent upon, but you can only do that when you vetted the audience. You know they’re the right size, right location, right industry, they’re a good fit on the face of it. And even in this data paranoid age and heavily regulated sort of world that we live in now, people still unwittingly just share information with you on the phone when you ask questions.

More often than not, we try and gun for a decision maker. Everybody thinks about telemarketing. You need the decision maker. But often it’s the office manager, it’s the finance manager, it’s a middle manager person, perhaps that middle aged woman that runs the office. She’s the person that you need to be speaking to because she’s the one that can rattle the cages of the decision-makers. She’s the one that you need to befriend and learn when she’s taking the cat to the vet and all of that kind of good stuff. That means that there’s some power behind your follow-up when you pick up the phone again.

Yeah, exactly that. And of course, knowing that she’s taken the cat to the vet, that’s not something you have to remember, that all goes in your CRM so when you call her back three to six months later, you can say, oh, when you go into the vets with your cat, I hope everything worked out or whatever. I know you now have a team of six doing these calls for you. In my last business, I had a team of three, three full-time telesales people. Now their job was to actually call business owners in our verticals. We operated in three healthcare verticals in that old business. And I have to be honest, the best performing of them was a lady called Miranda, I think I’ve talked about her on the podcast before, because she was just natural. She would write down things like going on holiday or taking eldest daughter to university, and she would make the follow-up call a few months later about that. It’s almost like she was calling someone who was a friend. It’s like, oh, hey Steven, last time we were talking you were taking your daughter to university. And so she was having five to ten minute conversations about that and then having a two minute conversation about our business, but she got the best results, which was amazing.

So what I did find is, and a lot of MSPs find this, is those three telesales people were the noisiest and hardest people on my staff. And by noisiest, I don’t mean from talking. I mean in terms of dramas. If anyone was going to be late, it’d be one of the telesales. If anyone going to have a crisis, it’d be one of the telesales. One of them left every six to eight weeks. So we had a constant hiring thing. You have six people. Do you have a similar experience or have you figured out how to get a stable team and keep them?

A common challenge, but yes. Thankfully many years of hard work and refining the right folks, the mumsy type you mentioned at the start of the podcast, someone that’s perhaps a mum that’s looking for part-time hours, they are the ideal people because they don’t sound salesy, they’re reliable, they need to turn up to work because they’ve got bills to pay, but also they are disarming. When you hear a mumsy tone on the phone, you don’t feel threatened. You don’t feel that they’re going to immediately start pitching to you. So actually then you are disarmed and you are likely to then start sharing information with them.

Also importantly, they’ve got life experience that they can throw in. Things like taking the kids to school and talk about university as you mentioned. And the young kids that you typically get as the SDR or telemarketer type applicants that are starting their career in sales, they don’t have any of that, so they don’t have any context that they can bring to conversations with people much older than them. So it takes a real knack from a personal skill level to have the right character to bring into those phone calls.

Yeah, absolutely. And even though you are running an MSP marketing agency doing this for MSPs, this is still really relevant to MSPs themselves because the chances are, as the MSP owner, you are not going to do the calls. You’re going to get someone else to do it for you. And as you just heard there, and this is going to be boring interview, Dave, because we agree, we have exactly the same opinion about the right kind of people to hire. But for an MSP listening to this, that’s the person you want, which fits very well with my recommendation. I always say get a back to work mom, two to three days a week, two to three hours a day. It’s absolutely perfect.

Dave, let’s talk about two issues. And I’m not going to ask you to give away any secret sauce because you’ve spent years perfecting this, but what do you do to get past the gatekeeper and what do you do to grab their attention?

More often than not, especially if you’re targeting the SME or SMB space, whatever you want to call it, which most MSPs are, you don’t know who the person is that’s answering the phone. There’s this natural assumption that the gatekeeper’s going to be a receptionist type that doesn’t know what’s going on in the business and they can’t answer anything. But more often than not, it might be one of the owners of the business that just happens to answer the inbound calls or perhaps a middle manager or office manager type. So I would say always be careful to just consider that you might be talking to the boss when the phone gets answered. So don’t sort of immediately go in with an approach that this is a useless receptionist that I need to get past very quickly, which is a common trait of anyone starting their career in sales.

So start by asking questions and very quickly someone that is perhaps quite junior in that job role, they will very quickly be out of their depth. So if they are not comfortable talking about the IT arrangements of the business, they can’t tell you the name of the provider that they use, how they rate the relationship, how many years they’ve worked together, very quickly they will become unstuck and they will either want to throw you like a hot potato over at a colleague that can answer the questions because they can’t, or they’ll dismiss you and get you off the phone. But we still find people that are in that capacity where it isn’t them. They will very quickly say, oh, it’s Sharon that you need to speak to. She’s the finance manager, she deals with that kind of thing.

And so once you’ve got through to that right person, you were saying earlier that often people aren’t ready to switch IT provider, it is very much about finding who’s ready, willing, and able to even have the conversation, let alone make the switch. What’s your sort of general approach for doing that? So do you get them talking about their business or do you just jump straight into talking about IT?

Absolutely. Always about business first. Nine times out of ten, if you’re selling to people that don’t have anyone in an IT capacity within their organisation, they’re not going to know anything about IT. They probably won’t even be able to tell you how many servers they’ve got. Maybe not even how many PCs they’ve got in the office. So they’re never going to be able to go into any depth about how they view things from a technical perspective. But people love moaning, especially us Brits. They will always happily moan about a service issue, communication problems, or that their IT is frustrating on a user workflow basis, particularly where tech has become invisible. They don’t have servers with blinking flashing lights in the corner anymore. That’s all evaporated to the cloud. So the IT that they’re using is all the apps and tools on their PC every day. And if they’re not getting an elegant experience, they feel as though they’re missing the trick on new advances in technology like AI and things like that.

A lovely bit of FOMO is a great way to start a conversation. Where perhaps the incumbent MSP is failing to help them to fully leverage technology. Are there things that are laborious red tape that they’re having to do day in, day out that tech could do for them? Perhaps even looking at things like are they hiring. Are they recruiting a part-time finance person? And just go in there with a bit of a loaded assumption on, I can help you automate that person out of a job, so you don’t need to hire that part-time finance person. We’re starting to see the market turn to people now becoming aware of, yeah, we’d like to get more from tech. Yeah, our current IT provider, they’re okay, we phone them when something’s broken and they fix it, but they’re not helping us move forward. There’s no impetus to upgrade or reinvent ourselves to digitise our workflow so rapidly. Now, more and more small to mid-size firms are waking up to, oh yeah, tech isn’t a necessary evil, it’s actually something that will help us. So we’re finding more prospects now are prepared to talk about things at that level, and that’s creating new opportunity.

Yeah, I’ll bet. And just one thing, you mentioned FOMO, just for anyone that doesn’t know that stands for Fear of Missing Out. Dave, do you see AI, is that coming up in conversations? Because obviously in our world we talk about AI all the time, everyone who’s listening to this or watching this on YouTube knows what Copilot is, right? But what about the ordinary business owners, are they aware of it?

AI, yes, thankfully, because of how mainstream has gone. When ChatGPT became this wonderful thing that everyone was aware of, and as soon as you see it online everywhere, TV news is talking about it all the time, it’s hit the masses and people maybe slightly fearful of it. They don’t know where to get started. They can’t join the dots up between what they do day to day and where technology could actually help them.

We hoped there would be this sort of impetus a few years ago when automation first became a thing, power automate power apps, all these wonderful things in 365 and Zapier and all these other tools that could hook up your CRM system with your marketing automation system or your website and all of those things. We were quite excited with that opportunity, but it fell flat because it didn’t make mainstream media. People didn’t get it. They think of automation and they think of a robot making cars in a factory, but AI has hit the mainstream. So now people have got that fear of something’s out there and we are not leveraging it. So we’re starting to see more conversations now from businesses where they’re interested in leveraging more from tech where they feel their incumbent doesn’t help them. And by the way, that’s far more exciting and interesting for a small business owner to want to spend time looking at than their cyber security, which people are still vehemently against or are ignorant or ambivalent where cyber security is concerned.

Yeah. Yeah, I agree. And that matches the feedback that I get from people I talk to who do do phone calls as well, MSPs in their business that cyber security is the number one issue if you run an MSP, but for business owners, it’s an annoyance, it’s a pain, it’s something on the side. And I think what MSPs have to do is use different approaches to reach people and then protect them from themselves in the actual service delivery.

Final question for you, Dave, and that’s when you are phoning people obviously you are doing so on behalf of lots of MSPs. I know you work with MSPs around the world. When you are phoning, are you phoning to book video calls directly into live calendars, or do you have a different outcome that you’re going for? And based on your answer to that, how do you get that? Do you just out and out talk about, Hey, why don’t we arrange a 15 minute chat for you and the owner of the business? What’s your kind of approach to that?

Yeah, gunning for a meeting has always got to be the right way forward. I think it’s about knowing the prospect well enough and the qualification criteria that you want to achieve. How will the meeting be helpful for the prospect? And ultimately, in the back of our mind, is there an opportunity for our MSP clients to go in there and leverage their skills and their portfolio to help that business? Sometimes we go as far as we can being outsourced, or even if it’s an internal SDR making calls within an MSP, there’s a limit to their knowledge. And often that’s a good excuse to say, I can’t help you any further with this, but I need to bring in my colleague that can help you and schedule a date and time, have that calendar open, have the availability there at hand so you can capture when someone is around and get the date in the diary, shoot them a calendar invite immediately on the back of that phone call.

Events is another, a great way for telemarketing to be able to feed perhaps lower warmth leads into a business. When you look at that grade of lead, the marketing industry talks about MQL in terms of marketing qualified lead or SQL in terms of sales qualified lead. Those face-to-face appointments really should be those SQLs opportunities where there’s budget on the table, there’s momentum to move forward. There’s a real pain right now. But given that many prospects aren’t there yet, or they maybe in the fullness of time, how can you get some face time with prospects that are not yet ready to buy, but you can feed them with education. You can build your personal brand with them as well as the brand of your MSP. And that’s through webinars, events. It’s where you can provide education, perhaps if it’s industry specific or it’s around that FOMO piece. If we know we’ve got a pool of prospects we’ve spoken to where they’re considering AI is a gap in their business right now, then host an event where you can give them top five tips that you can implement AI in your business tomorrow. That kind of thing. Even if it’s prerecorded content, it allows you to build that all important connection and start to establish trust and awareness with those prospects.

Love it. Love it. Thank you. Dave. You’ve been very generous with your secrets, with your knowledge, just tell us a little bit more about Wingman MSP Marketing. What do you do and how can we get in touch with you?

Absolutely. So as Paul mentioned, we look after MSPs around the world that are looking to perhaps target a niche or diversify their business so they can stand out from the crowd of other MSPs. If they’re looking for direct outreach, they’re looking for more leads to their website, then we can help them reach more prospects more quickly through a whole myriad of marketing sources that we do with our team of roughly 25 people that we’ve got here now based out of the UK.

And what’s the best way to get in touch with you, Dave?

Oh, sorry. The most important thing, I’m a very good marketer if I don’t address that. This is our website, wingmanmspmarketing.com. A great conversation starter for us is our free website review. So if you are not sure about your presence right now, you’re not sure how unique you are, whether your personality is cutting across with prospects, fill in that review. We’ll come back to you with a video that’s personally tailored to you, your MSP and your website, and that’s a great way to get started.

Paul’s Personal Peer Group

Steven, whose MSP is based in London, UK, is looking forward to 2025 with an increased focus on getting organised. His question is: Which project management software do you recommend?

Well, as you know, I’m not a tech, so I have no idea how this compares to the project management capabilities of all the PSAs that are out there. But I am very organised and I’m also very keen to see progress in my own business. And after trying lots of different pieces of project and collaboration software, I settled on something called Basecamp. Now, I believe that you can use this to drive internal projects such as your marketing and maybe even use it to deliver technical projects for clients as well.

Here’s how we use it in the MSP Marketing Edge. We use Basecamp for every single thing that we’re doing that’s not just the kind of the routine running the business every day. It’s for the big development projects as well as small changes that we are making, kind of anything really. And all of our content production is also run through Basecamp. The beauty of it is that you can have unlimited projects. So in each project you get a full context for everything. So let’s say I’m in a project that’s about some small changes that we’re making to our member portal. So I can see the context of all the discussions that have happened, the task list that have been set up, what’s already been decided, what’s already been completed. I don’t have to wonder what this is about. I don’t have to go back through an email trail and try and figure it out. Everything to do with that project is there in one place in its own little silo. It’s really, really clever what they’ve put together.

Now, as I say, we’ve tried loads of different bits of software over the years. We tried Monday.com, we tried Asana, I mean, we must have tried dozens of them, but we really liked Basecamp and we settled and married Basecamp. It’s elegant software. It looks beautiful as well, and the development of it is great. They’re continually adding new features and new things that you can do with it. I do also know a handful of MSPs who also love it. So give Basecamp a go. It might be the one for you.

Mentioned links

• This podcast is in conjunction with the MSP Marketing Edge, the world’s leading white label content marketing and growth training subscription.
• Join me in MSP Marketing Facebook group.
• Connect with me on LinkedIn.
• Connect with my guest, Dave Sutton, on LinkedIn, and visit his website.
• Recommended book: Atomic Habits by James Clear.
• Got a question about your MSP’s marketing? Submit one here for Paul’s Personal Peer Group.