MSPs: Set up your phone person for success

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Welcome to Episode 279 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• MSPs: Set up your phone person for success: Phoning leads and prospects to find out if they’re almost ready to switch from their incumbent MSP is the golden nugget opportunity. Here’s how to get the most from your phone person.
• How the Compound Effect helps MSPs do better marketing: If you want to have great marketing that delivers one new client a month, then you need to make some sacrifices and have LOTS of discipline.
• Why MSPs must build a personal brand on LinkedIn: My special guest explains how to build a personal brand on LinkedIn. He can help you to get over your fears and show you why your leads and prospects will see you and your MSP differently.
• Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Do you capture success stories from clients that your MSP has really helped? Find out the best format for doing so in this episode.

MSPs: Set up your phone person for success

This is the hardest role to recruit for in your MSP, but when you get it right, it can lead to an explosion in sales. Now you thought it was hard finding a decent level three technician or a service desk manager. Well, no, this role is even harder. And even though thousands of people can do it, you wouldn’t want to hire the vast majority of them.

Let me tell you what this role is, why it’s so important in your MSP and how to find the perfect person for you, someone who’s going to help you win new clients and grow your profit.

Now, this might be controversial to some, but I believe that every MSP should have an in-house person making outbound phone calls. Phoning leads and prospects and trying to find the golden nugget opportunity. That’s when an ordinary business owner or manager is kind of almost ready to switch from their incumbent MSP, and it’s the best time to start talking to someone.

Having a phone person, well, they can find them purely through doing the hard work and that’s doing something that you personally would never want to do, which is of course, picking up the phone repeatedly day after day after day, just calling these people. And these aren’t sales calls, by the way, this is not some kind of Wolf of Wall Street boiler room.

These are relationship building calls, to find out who is nearly ready, willing, and able to have a conversation about switching MSPs.

And then book in a 15 minute video discovery call with whoever does the selling in your business, which of course might be you or you might have a salesperson. And then you or the salesperson does the heavy lifting of booking the actual face-to-face sales appointment and of course closing the client. I know that you can do that. If I can get you in front of the right people, you can do that, right? Well, this is one of the best ways to get those 15 minute zooms. As I said, it’s an in-house person role rather than using a telemarketing agency. And there are some telemarketing agencies out there, some great ones out there, but there are also many rotten ones. And I always like to take a long-term view with any kind of marketing infrastructure that you’re putting in place. So honestly, I do believe you’ll be better off hiring someone to work within your MSP doing this. They may actually be based at home, but they’re just doing it for you. They’re not doing it for anyone else.

A back to work mom is great for this. You are looking for someone who has had a career break but who was previously in a professional role and yet they have no desire to return back to that lifestyle for whatever reason. Now, ideally, she doesn’t have any kind of professional selling or calling background, otherwise she might bring lots of bad habits to the party, but she does love being on the phone. So what is a bad job for you and me, and a distress activity, is fun for her. Just calling people all day long.

Actually you’re only looking for her to do two to three hours a day, two to three days a week. That kind of flexible part-time work is perfect for many back to work parents working around the school day. So anyway, let’s assume that you are committed to that role. I’ve hired and fired lots and lots of telephone people and I advise all of the members of my MSP Marketing Edge service to go out and get one. And I’ve noticed that there are three critical success factors in any phone person.

The first is that they need marketing support. If you just give them a list of people to call and say – just call these people, see who’s ready to switch – well, that’s a horrible job for anybody because it’s just cold calling and there’s not a human on the planet who really likes cold calling, let’s be honest. Would you want to just cold call people all day long? Me neither. I’d rather do anything, I’d rather lose a finger than do cold calling. So a better option is warm calling, and this is where you set up a marketing system to build audiences, grow relationships with those audiences, and then the final stage of what you’re trying to do here, which is to convert relationships. You’re looking to convert them from being a lead to being a prospect to being a client.

We’re talking here about the three step lead generation system that I often talk about in my YouTube videos and on the Podcast because it is so very powerful. If your phone person is calling people who are connected to you on LinkedIn, who get educational emails from you, who may already have seen 10 or 20 pieces of your content over the last year or so, well guess what? That’s not a cold call, that’s a warm call. And that’s going to be a dramatically easier conversation. That makes total sense, right?

The second critical success factor is to use a CRM properly. So firstly, make sure you have an actual CRM and you’re not just trying to use your PSA for this. A PSA is not a marketing tool, it’s an operational tool. So go get a proper CRM, and the low cost no cost one include MailChimp, MailerLite, and of course Growably, which is free with a Tech Tribe membership.

Now, the thing that’s critical is using that CRM properly. You must set it up so it’s easy for your phone person to know who to call, see what relationship building activities have already happened with them in the past, and then for them to be able to leave simple notes that can be referenced by somebody else in the future. You always kind of need to assume that your phone person today will be a different phone person in the future. They might change. So any notes from calls today must make perfect sense when a different person is accessing them in a year’s time. And a side note on this, some MSPs actually attach the VoIP recordings to the CRM record. Personally, I think that’s a little bit of overkill, but I can see the benefit of doing that if you can automate it.

Okay, our final critical success factor is that you must keep your phone person motivated. Now, this is a hard job and even somebody who likes making outbound phone calls will have days where they just can’t be bothered because there is a lot of rejection. There’s a lot of work to do to get that rejection. And there’s an even greater deal of work to do to get the desired results. So some easy ways to keep your phone person motivated is to remember one of the reasons that any back to work parent goes to work, is to have adult company. Now, I’m a sole parent myself, and my child now is 14, but when she was younger, she was like eight or something, there were days where I was desperate to speak to other adults and do adult things, not just do drawings and have tea parties with dollies, although I do miss that now I have to say. So keep your phone person motivated by keeping her involved in what’s happening in your business.

Maybe she joins the big group teams call that you do every Monday, even though that’s actually quite an operational one, it helps her to feel that she’s part of something, part of the team, that what she does matters. She can see the results of her work as new clients come on board and start to be discussed by your technicians. Maybe if on Fridays, if you do a team lunch, you get her involved in that. Either she comes into the office to take part in it or you send a pizza to her home so everyone is having pizza in the office or at home at the same time and jumps on a Teams call, which is a social. And definitely of course, get her involved in social events.

There’s one more thing that I recommend that you do, and it does require a little more of your time, but the payoff from this is massive, and that’s where you coach your salesperson. You jump on a call together and the first thing you do is you play back a recording of one of their calls, something that you kind of listen to together. Pick one where they have actually got through to someone, just look for the longer calls, you want one where they’ve had a conversation with someone, not just where they’ve been rejected from the gatekeeper. And then you can talk about three things in that call. You can talk about what went well and your phone person can do the same, they can say what they thought went well. And then you can talk about what didn’t go so well, and again your phone person does the same, what they thought didn’t go so well. And then finally, you talk about one thing that they should do differently next time. So what goes well or what went well, what didn’t go so well, what should you do differently next time? And it’s only one thing that they should improve for next time because good coaching is 15 minutes, right? And it’s 15 minutes a week. But in that 15 minutes, you tackle one small problem every week until months and months and months down the line, your phone person is just performing dramatically better.

It’s so tempting to try and tackle everything in one big call, but I promise you you’ll get faster progress if you tackle one small issue every single week for the next X number of weeks. Now, let’s look at the big picture of this. The more you integrate your phone person into your team, the more that they will realise what an important part of the process they are and the more likely it is that they will perform at a very high level for hopefully a long time to come.

How the Compound Effect helps MSPs do better marketing

If you wanted the fittest, most amazing, most ripped body ever, you know that there would have to be a lot of sacrifice and discipline to make that happen, right? And really, it’s no different with your MSP’s marketing. If you want to have great marketing that delivers one new client a month, then you need to make some sacrifices and have lots of discipline. But what sacrifices and what kind of discipline?

Let me tell you what MSPs with the most successful marketing do every day and how you can emulate them. And don’t worry, it’s not as hard as it sounds.

You should read this book. It’s one of my all time favorites and has pride of place on my business bookshelf. It’s called The Compound Effect written by Darren Hardy. And it shows how tiny actions done every day can lead to big success over time.

Good habits and smart choices add up to amazing results, while bad habits hold you back.

Let me give you two examples, one about eating well then one about your MSP’s marketing. So here’s the eating one. After your dinner tonight, you choose fruit instead of a chocolate bar, which is a tough choice, and I still battle with that one every night. And of course, there’s no immediate payoff is there, other than the short-term feeling of feeling a bit smug. But if you repeat that for a hundred nights, 200, 500, a thousand nights, all of that fruit adds up. Your body is healthier, your weight might even be lower because you haven’t eaten a thousand chocolate bars or you haven’t taken a thousand hits of high sugar and unnecessary calories.

Now let’s look at the equivalent in marketing. Today, you find 10 minutes to post a really good piece of content on LinkedIn instead of dealing with some low level tickets that have come in. And I know it’s tempting to jump on your PSA and do a few password resets or just set up new users just to save your help desk team the hassle. But in the spirit of this saying, you should only do what only you can do, and that’s a great saying, you should only do what only you can do, please don’t jump onto your PSA. Because your technicians can’t post great content on LinkedIn. Only you can. And choosing to do something difficult, like creating content, versus something easy, like doing a password reset for a client, is exactly the same as chocolate versus fruit. Repeat it for a hundred, 200, 500 a thousand days, and all of that activity adds up.

Never forget that ordinary business owners and managers don’t know what they don’t know about technology. And that lack of knowledge encourages something called “inertia loyalty”. It’s where they’re more likely to stay with their incumbent MSP, in fact, way past the point that they’re fed up with them. Or put another way, people only buy when they are ready to buy. And on that day, the very day they wake up finally ready to speak to other MSPs and think about switching. Well, that’s the day you finally benefit from “the compound effect” of a thousand days worth of work on LinkedIn. If they’ve read some of your posts and they like what they see, it doesn’t mean that you are guaranteed to get the sale, but you should at least get a place at the table to fight for a sale. And that’s a good start, right?

You can extend this across more than just LinkedIn. Imagine you developed really great habits, sending out all sorts of regular marketing across multiple platforms. And imagine that prospect waking up on the day that they’re ready and over the previous thousand days they have seen a handful of your posts on LinkedIn and maybe even commented on one or two of them. Maybe they’ve read several of your weekly LinkedIn newsletters. Maybe they’ve chatted briefly with you over a few direct messages. Maybe they’ve opened one in four of your weekly educational emails. Maybe they’ve read a few blogs on your website or watched a couple of your Tech Update videos on YouTube. Maybe they’ve read a few of your printed newsletters that you mailed to them and then they stashed the rest into a desk drawer. And maybe they even briefly chatted to your phone person a couple of times. How likely is it that this prospect now will want to talk to you today?

All of that content that you’ve put out all of those days across all of those channels has created the perception that you are the local tech authority and the best prospects want to hire experts and are willing to pay a little bit more to do so. A bit of a side note now, best of all, you don’t need to actually do all of this work yourself. You should retain responsibility for making sure it happens of course, and maybe even responsibility for creating it or coming up with the ideas. But you can get your team or virtual assistants to do the hard work of actually writing it, editing it, and certainly loading it. This is one of the most important ingredients at the very core of my MSP Marketing Edge service. We give you everything that you need, but we recommend that you use virtual assistants or even our own marketing implementers to make it happen for you.

Why MSPs must build a personal brand on LinkedIn

So here are some common words associated with finding new clients for your MSP: frustrating… mystifying… slow. But actually for some, it’s also unexpectedly scary. Not scary because of how the bank balance looks, but scary for you personally. You’ve probably heard me say before about the importance of putting you in your marketing, but how do you do that if the idea of doing that fills you with dread?

My special guest today can help you to build a personal brand on LinkedIn. He can help you to get over your fears and show you why your leads and prospects will see you and your MSP differently.

Hi, I’m Neal Schaffer, a fractional CMO, author, educator, speaker, who specialises in digital content, influencer social media marketing.

And thanks so much for joining us on the show, Neal. We’re going to get you to talk today about LinkedIn. There are two areas in particular that I want to talk about. The first is MSP owners developing their own professional brand on LinkedIn. We’re going to talk about what you should do and what you shouldn’t do. And I think it’s also overdue that we talk about AI on LinkedIn as well, and how you can use AI as a content creation tool. Again, let’s look at the good things and the bad things about this because I know that you are a particular expert on both of those issues. So Neal, let’s do a bit of credibility checking with you. Tell us a little bit about you, your career, what you do with MSPs and with other kind of businesses and why we should trust what you’ve got to say about LinkedIn.

Great. Well, I should start out by saying I started my career in B2B sales – semiconductors, embedded software, network management software – so I know a lot of the space somewhat indirectly that the MSPs deal in. And being in B2B sales I also understand that the MSPs that I engage with are very focused in sales and business development, but very light on the marketing side, right, where they can use a lot of help. So I bring that B2B sales experience as VP of Asia sales.

I did all my work in Asia actually, even though I’m an American, so I had to work with people in different cultures – China, Japan, Korea – and I began to foster this really holistic business perspective. So fast forward, I moved back to the United States after living 15 years in Japan after graduating from university, and it’s 2008 and LinkedIn is starting to boom. I got heavily involved in it. I launched a blog and lo and behold, I ended up becoming invited to speak at events. I published my first book back in 2009, which was on LinkedIn called Windmill Networking: Understanding and Leveraging and Maximizing LinkedIn.

January 2010, I got consulting gigs lined up and I decided to pull the plug from corporate and go solo from then. So over the last 15 years from 2010, I ended up writing my second book on LinkedIn called Maximizing LinkedIn for Sales and Social Media Marketing, really taking that B2B perspective on social media and on LinkedIn, which has become quite mainstream today. But I also do social selling, trainings for salespeople, financial services, other industries. I’ve been invited to speak at events like a conference put on by Motorola for their internal employees, and I recently decided there’s been a lot said about LinkedIn over the years, but I think that I still have a perspective and a voice, and I want to give a new and fresh perspective on that.

So I just published a new book right now only available in ebook. I am going to expand it into a paperback, but it’s called Maximizing LinkedIn for Business Growth. And it includes the most up-to-date information, even my perspective on AI and how you can use that on LinkedIn.

So that’s my street cred. My motto is educate and empower. So I’m not an agency, I’m a fractional CMO, I work with businesses, it could be anywhere from three months to a few years, but it’s not a black box project or a consulting gig. I become an employee, I report to the CEO, and it’s really about transferring my IP to your team. So educate and empower is my motto. That’s the way I work, and I’m just excited to be here to help everybody virtually.

And if we were to cut you, Neal, you would literally bleed LinkedIn blue. That’s how much you are embedded with LinkedIn. I mean, we’ve all watched the platform change over the years, and the LinkedIn of old is completely different to the LinkedIn of today. I personally think Microsoft have actually been great custodians that they’ve made the platform better. And certainly if you look at other social media platforms, we’re talking about you Facebook and certainly you X, I mean let’s not even bring X into the equation, but if you look at Facebook, Facebook has steadily become a worse product in that it’s become more addictive and showing us more of the things we don’t want. And I know that they’re getting record revenues and profits, but I think eventually that’s going to come back and bite them. You can look at LinkedIn, and I use LinkedIn for my own marketing. I use it for my pleasure sometimes. I quite enjoy sitting looking at posts, and I don’t mind the odd advert or the odd sponsored things, but you get to see people you really know and the stuff that they’re doing. Is your experience of LinkedIn, because obviously you are a lot closer to it than any of us, is your experience as it’s developed over the last 10, 15 years that yes, it has become an even more valuable B2B tool?

Yeah, absolutely. And it’s funny because the MSP owners and others that I work with, and the first conversation we have, it’s the exact same first conversation I had back in 2008 and 2010. The conversation is that the MSP owner’s like LinkedIn but, I only want to connect with people I know, I keep it personal. Why are all these people sharing selfies, etc, etc. And what happens? Social media changes over time. The workforce now, at least in the United States, is a majority millennial. So of course it’s going to change with the times over the course of 15 years, things are going to happen, and I like to adapt. I’m a lifelong learner. I want to thrive in whatever environment I’m in as any B2B salesperson should, right?

Once you take your emotions, and I see this just in general with marketing, a lot of MSP owners have emotional, we don’t want to do this or we definitely want to do this. And once you take your emotions out of your marketing decisions and you look at the data and you treat social media more as a business tool, there’s still a personal side to it don’t get me wrong, I think that really the mindset shift really unlocks the opportunity. So yes, I agree with you. LinkedIn has only evolved. They’re now doing video, dedicated video tab on the app. There’s a wide variety of content that you can publish there that you can’t do in other platforms. It’s funny because from an engagement perspective, because LinkedIn makes money from various ways, not just from advertising because they have sales navigator, they have recruiting solutions, they can give more engagement in the feed and have less ads. And I think that shows, and I see a lot of entrepreneurs have actually shifted from an Instagram to a LinkedIn because they actually get more engagement there, and it truly has become more of an engaging platform.

Back in the day, Paul, I think you remember LinkedIn groups were the rage back in the early 2010s. I definitely generated a lot of traffic from them, business from them. But today it’s really the engagement’s in the feed, it’s in the content, and any MSP owner who is not taking part in that either in the content creation or in the engagement, which can lead to further conversation and leads, is really missing the boat.

Yeah, I completely agree. And LinkedIn groups was so exciting when they first came out and everyone rushed to join the relevant groups, but they never went back. And I think you’re right, it’s all in the feed now. Okay, just today, just about four hours before you and I have done this interview, I was chatting to an MSP, because I talked to two three MSPs a day, and I kid you not Neal, the question, this isn’t meant to embarrass this person who I’m not going to name, but one of his questions was: Should I really put my photo on my LinkedIn profile? And we looked at his LinkedIn and it was like a placeholder. I don’t know if it was like a LinkedIn placeholder or he uploaded a placeholder image, but it was a real head in-hand moment for me. And it’s really interesting that you say you’re having the same conversations with people that you were sort of 15, 16, 17 years ago. Tell us why as the owner of the business, every MSP needs to be all over LinkedIn and build up that personal brand and what does that personal brand look like in your opinion?

Yeah, this is a really deep conversation, but I go back into my sales history and there was one deal that I got from a very famous Japanese consumer electronics manufacturer. And my VP of sales said, Neal, only you could have gotten that deal a multi six figure deal, because it was the relationship I had built, right? Sales is all about relationships. Marketing is all about relationships. People buy from people they like, know and trust. We all know that. So why are we ignoring the number one place where we spend our time online, is social media. When I talk to older MSP owners, I realise that the people that don’t understand it are the people that don’t use it or they’ve never been influenced to use it in the right way because of people in their circle, people in their family, in their network, what have you.

But if I just dumb it down, and you see this book behind me Digital Threads, I actually came out with this book two weeks after Maximizing LinkedIn for Business Growth, long story. But I dumbed down digital marketing to three main components. We have search, email, and social. Search is that discoverability, which can also happen on social, but it’s primarily search engines and now we have AI search engines. We have email marketing automation, which I’m assuming every MSP owner is all over, and if not, they should be contacting Paul and get that going. And then we have the social part, and you can’t ignore that.

By staying off of LinkedIn as an MSP owner, you are completely ignoring one third of the equation where people spend their time.

And it’s not about, yes, we want to get direct business on LinkedIn, but it’s more about developing the relationships. It’s developing relationships with your employees when they post something up and you want to celebrate them. Or you’re salespeople who are actually sharing the fact that you’re doing an event next week or a webinar and you want to thank them for that. Or your customers, when they report record earnings thanks to your help, you want to be the first one to like it and comment on it. And when other people are talking about the challenges they have with their current MSPs, you want to be there to comment. It’s all these conversations and behind the conversation, it’s a real person. It’s not a 9-year-old trying to pretend they’re an 18-year-old on a TikTok or an Instagram. These are actual business people with profiles behind them. So you not having your profile photo is like going to a networking event or going to an MSP event and having a paper bag over your head.

90% of the content that we process as visual. And generating that like, know and trust, often comes down to the visual, not just in your profile photo. I would go further. We can look at your profile. All roads lead back to your profile. What is that header image you have? Or the cover image? You have a featured section which you can feature visuals. Are you featuring them there? I recommend my clients to feature visuals throughout their profile, but it really begins with that profile photo. So then you begin to ask, well, Neal, what sort of visual should I have? And this really comes down to your branding and content strategy. So I find when I talk to a lot of MSP owners that the MSP is really shaped in them. It’s their personal brand offline that has brought in the business and the referrals to bring in even more business. It’s now about translating to be online.

I think back before social media, I worked for a startup out of Ottawa, Canada, and my CEO founder would come over and because he was a CEO and I was VP of sales, I’d be able to get some pretty high level people at the Sonys and the Panasonics and the Sanyos and Sharps to meet with them. And he would tell these stories of why these other companies decided to work with us or why he started the company or why they decided to put this one feature in or provide this managed service or whatever it is. And it’s those stories that I think every MSP founder listening to this has. It’s now a matter of translating that into content. It’s a matter of translating that into visual branding. And it requires a mindset shift. It also requires working with a company like yours, Paul, or a fractional CMO or a consultant or someone.  But I think once you make that switch, once it’s now we’re accompanying a mindset shift with a strategic shift and actual implementation, you begin to see a lot more activity, and the activity is really strategically focused.

So yes, the personal branding, the entrepreneurial approach is that visual branding that makes clear, because there’s a lot of other MSPs out there as we know, what is different about your company. It’s often in the colours, the visuals that you use on your website and your logo, or maybe you have a motto like mine is educate and empower, whatever you have. And it’s bringing out those visuals in that cover image so that when people go to your profile, they immediately know who you are, what you do, and what your company does. But it also goes into the story, the storytelling that I talked about that you can infuse in your content, that you can infuse in your profile. So instead of having a very boring profile, which isn’t engaging, you have something that becomes more of what we would call in digital marketing a lead magnet. So I believe it’s the storytelling, it’s the emotional connections, it’s done through the engagement and the feed, but it really starts with your profile, putting your house in order, and then starting to slowly create this content, which really is an extension of what you’ve been talking about all along offline.

Yes, that makes perfect sense. And I know a lot of MSPs struggle with the fact that on LinkedIn, the kind of content that perhaps they want to talk about, like technology, cyber security, backups, ransomware, all of that kind of stuff is the kind of stuff that ordinary business owners and managers aren’t interested in. And the fact that sometimes the more personal content is more appealing, again, a lot of MSP struggle with that. I used a plugin into my Chrome about six months ago to have a look at my own LinkedIn. I can’t remember what the plugin’s called, but it showed that my most engaging piece of content ever was to do with a birthday gift that I’d given to my dad on his 70th birthday. I’d done a little off the cuff video, it was actually him in a World War II bomber. It didn’t fly, but it did what was called an airport run or an airstrip run where they run it down the airstrip. And I couldn’t believe that was my most engaging piece of content. All of the content I put out about MSP marketing, no, don’t care about that. That was the most engaging thing. Now I’m quite happy because that’s just part of my personal brand. It shows that I’m a good son, I’m enjoying time with my family, all of that kind of stuff. Do you think that kind of personal content and that kind of real life content has a place and what proportion of that should be in the mix?

Yeah, no, absolutely. And that’s a great point. I have a dedicated chapter on content in Maximizing LinkedIn for Business Growth because that’s really what it comes down to on a day-to-day basis, outside of that engagement, once you have your profile and the branding down. So there’s different types of content. There’s your professional content and then what I would call engagement content. And engagement content, the more personal type of content will always get more engagement, and therefore the next time you have professional content, it’ll get a little boost in the algorithm. So you actually want to have both. And that engagement content, I mean, it’s hard enough to get some MSP founders to talk professionally on LinkedIn and become a content creator, even if it’s technical and professional, it’s even harder to go the personal route. And that’s why I recommend, if you’re not doing this, start with the professional technical side, putting your own storytelling into it so it becomes quasi personal. It becomes your story unique to you and your brand, your company, your story, or your services, what have you. But slowly over time, you also want to consume other people’s content. If you’re listening, you didn’t know this, you can follow people on LinkedIn without connecting to them, just like you follow people on an Instagram. So that’s an easy way if you don’t want to connect with anyone and everyone, if you want to sort of see what your competitors are doing, what other MSP owners are doing, I highly recommend you do some searches. You find some MSP owners that are actively publishing content. And inevitably, Paul, whenever I do a social selling training, I’ll always try to find the one or two people in the organisation or at competitors who are already doing this pretty savvily. And that is the best way to convince others when they see, oh my gosh, that person’s getting a hundred likes and 20 comments in every post, they sort of wake up to the opportunities that exist there.

So that would be my advice, not just publish, but consume from your industry. And I think over time, you’re going to get it. The light bulb’s going to switch on, and you’re going to find a way to craft your own unique story. And maybe it isn’t directly related, maybe like ransomware, like my father, may he rest in peace, he got hit by ransomware, he lost decades of photos from his personal computer. Now, I hope that this never happens to anybody that’s listening, but even something like a ransomware or cyber security, it also affects us personally. And you could share those personal stories from yourself or anecdotally, and it’s engaging content. I mean, I don’t want it to be negative content, but it indirectly also relates to what you do. So you need to find those different angles. The Venn diagram of overlaps is, I think, where you’re going to find your best success.

I love that. That’s great advice. Thank you. Final question for you, Neal, let’s talk about AI. So we all know there’s a thousand AI tools out there, another thousand were released just today. So there’s plenty of AI tools. We all know now the limitations of what it can and can’t do. In terms of creating content, where do you think that fits in? Because we’ve talked a lot here about essentially authenticity and being the real you and using the platform in that way. And obviously AI is not the real you. So how do you recommend MSPs use AI to augment and make that LinkedIn content just easier?

Yeah, so I’ll start with the comment on tools. I, like many others because I’m in the digital marketing industry, when all these tools came out, I was a big fan of them. I didn’t even use ChatGPT because I was so interested in all the different tools which provide different recipes, which basically tee up all these wants – You want a LinkedIn newsletter? Boom! You want a Google ad? Boom! And then I realised over time, and especially because some of these tools had their own webinars and they were showing what they were doing, that I could basically do the same thing in ChatGPT. And that to me is the only tool I think you need for AI today. There’s other specialised tools out there, don’t get me wrong, but I would go deep in the Chat GPT, some like Claude better, some like Google better, pick one. But I would start to organise everything in there and allow it to use its machine learning to better understand you, your voice, your products, your industry, what have you. So that’s step number one is finding that tool. To me, it’s ChatGPT. It’s a series of custom GPTs.

The next thing is, what is your content creation workflow, right? So as many say, AI is not a strategy, and I used to say social media replaces nothing, it compliments everything, and the exact same thing for AI. So how are you creating content now? And inevitably you’re going to find you start with an idea, and AI is great for ideas. We talked before we started the recording of how we can get ideas. You don’t know what to talk about today or this week or this month? Ask ChatGPT for ideas. Tell them who your target audience is, what you normally talk about, what interests them. And you’re going to get lots of ideas. Some are going to be okay, some are going to be bad, but there might be one or two good ones that you can work with and reflect upon. So you have the idea, you create the content and then you edit the content. Grammarly is a great AI editing tool, for lack of a better word. And then you publish the content and where ChatGPT and AI really shines, it’s in the ideation and in the repurposing. So if you are creating blog content or, I mean the podcast is a great example, podcasts, video podcasts are the king of repurposing. I know that your MSP is probably not doing a podcast, that’s okay, but I just want for analogy’s sake to understand, and I do the same thing with my own podcast, is that we can take the video, we can grab the audio transcript.

I use audo.ai I don’t use ChatGPT for transcript. I think audo is the best AI transcript tool. I then cut and paste that transcript, put it into ChatGPT, and from that, I can create anything I want. I can create a LinkedIn newsletter, I can create an email summary, a LinkedIn post. And here’s the thing, I would never recommend you use AI to create content from scratch, but if it’s already your content, it’s already your voice. You don’t need to have a podcast. You can record yourself into your iPhone and then upload that transcript or use the audi.ai app and then put that into ChatGPT. Anything that you create that is a derivative of that content is already you. It’s already your perspective, your thoughts. From there, yes, you can edit it as I think you should, but it’s you, right? So you’ve already gone over that hurdle of creating AI content, which is not going to engage. It’s going to be very bland. You’re not going to make any progress with it. But when you start to use your own content and you edit it and then publish it, the end reader will not think it’s AI content because it will reflect what you have to say. And especially that final edit when you put it in a more human voice. But what AI cannot do is convey emotion and storytelling. And if you can do that in your content that you feed into ChatGPT, you’ve just solved the biggest issue and you are way ahead of the competitors who are still just churning out AI generated content. So I think every MSP owner, every MSP company listening should be leaning pretty heavily into AI at this point. I think 90% of businesses around the world already are, or at least in the United States. So it is a no brainer, but be careful how you use it. Make sure that if you go according to my advice, you’re not just creating AI generated content that is just going to make the world more noisier. It is a more strategic use of AI that’s actually going to save you more time. So that, wow, I already have my content set up for the next week. Great. Spend that time to engage, spend that time to create, to spend more time crafting better content, dig back into the stories, not just of the MSP owner, what about your sales team? What are the stories that they’re facing with customers or customer success stories. You can then begin to be more of an artist in terms of engaging with people and creating even better content.

Yeah, I love this. So using AI as an augmentation tool rather than actually the be all and end all in itself. Great advice. Thank you, Neal.

Tell us about what you do. So you’ve got books, you’ve got podcasts, obviously you’re a fractional CMO as well. Tell us about all of these things and how we can get in touch with you.

Sure. Well, I am Neal Schaffer, the real Neal. So it’s N-E-A-L-S-C-H-A-F-F-E-R. So nealschaffer.com. Neal Schaffer in the socials, hit me up on LinkedIn, we’d love to connect and continue the conversation. You can find my books on Amazon. I actually have a book printer in the UK for those listening there, so you can get it pretty quickly there. It’s not being shipped out from America, but on Amazon or wherever else you buy books. And I also have a podcast called Your Digital Marketing Coach podcast. If you want to get a broader perspective on everything, digital marketing.

Paul’s Personal Peer Group

Alex, from an MSP based in Florida, wants to be able to capture a success story from a client that his MSP has really helped. His question is: What’s the best format for a case study?

The best case studies tell a story from the prospect’s or the client’s point of view. And the reason we do that is that the mind responds better to stories than it does dry facts, because stories trigger emotional responses. So let me give you the format for a great case study, and let’s pretend this is a business owner, client of yours who’s been breached in some way. They’ve had some kind of cyber security breach.

The first thing you do is you set a context and you might say, This is a problem that many business owners like you face, or This is a problem that would be horrendous for any business owner. I need that context. I need to understand that that case study is talking to me. Me being the person that you most want to reach.

The next thing you do then is you demonstrate relevance. So you might for example say, One in four small businesses will have a cyber security breach this year. In fact, it’s more now, isn’t it? It’s one in three… One in three businesses will have a cyber security breach this year. You have a one in three chance of this affecting you in 2025. Do you see how that suddenly makes that relevant? So I’ve had the context set for me and now it seems relevant.

Next, you lay out the problem. The problem then of course is the story that you tell. So it could be that my staff come into work one morning, they switch on the computers, it’s red screens or the data’s missing, or the computers just don’t seem right. You tell us what the problem is. But the next stage is where the magic happens because there you poke the pain.

Imagine you’d cut your arm and someone comes along and says, does it hurt there? And you say, yes, it does. So they poke it. Ow, ow, ow, ow. That’s what you want to do in your case study. Someone being breached and losing a bit of data or being locked out of their systems isn’t the pain, that’s the problem. The pain is what does that mean… they can’t talk to their customers, they can’t make outbound or even receive inbound phone calls because their VoIP system’s down as well, they don’t know where their data is, they don’t know if someone’s got it or it’s just been locked, they can’t sell anything, they can’t service anyone, they can’t do transactions, they don’t even know if they’re going to be in business tomorrow. Pain, pain, pain, pain, pain. Do you see why you would do that? That’s a big part of the story. We are not scaremongering here. We are not selling with fear, uncertainty, and doubt. What we’re doing is poking the pain. If you’ve got this problem, what does it mean? What’s the consequences of that?

And then the final two steps are to present the answer. And the answer is always something that only an IT professional like you can do. And in this case, of course, it’s the proactive work that they should have done before, and then what you would do if a breach like that happened. And finally you show a happy outcome, you’ll always need to end a case study on a happy outcome. They’ve had a problem, this was the problem, we poked the pain of the problem, but this is what happened as a result of working with you.

Now, my final thought on this is that the best case studies come from interviewing your clients with the outcome of a case study in mind. So you decide what you want them to say, and then you ask the right questions to help to generate those answers. In a written case study, you can just use the general gist of what they’re saying, it never has to be word perfect and quotes in newspapers and magazines are never word perfect. But of course, in a video, which is the best kind of case study, it’s impossible and indeed undesirable to change what has been said. And that’s where a professional well briefed interviewer will be invaluable. Get them to do the interview for you, knowing what outcome you want from it.

And then once you have a case study, put all of your case studies on your website and consider getting them printed into mini booklets. Put them across all of your marketing. Something like mini booklets are very inexpensive these days, and they’ll have so much greater impact when you hand one over to a brand new prospect.

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.
• Recommended book: The Compound Effect by Darren Hardy.
• Connect with my guest, Neal Schaffer, on LinkedIn, visit his website, and check out his books.
• Got a question about your MSP’s marketing? Submit one here for Paul’s Personal Peer Group.