Episode 128: Every MSP needs this strategic referral deal

Episode 128: Every MSP needs this strategic referral deal

Paul Green

Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast
Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast
Episode 128: Every MSP needs this strategic referral deal
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Episode 128 includes:

  • Why you need to buddy up with a particular type of business to share referrals
  • Understand the special tool from LinkedIn that can boost your profile
  • Plus our guest is an MSP sales expert explaining how to win more business by focusing on people not technology

Featured guest

Heather Harlos is a featured guest on Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast

Thank you to Heather Harlos, Head of MSP and Channel Marketing at JumpCloud, for joining Paul to talk about the power of making your business more ‘human’.

Heather has been helping companies optimise their business operations and go-to-market strategies for over 15 years. Before joining JumpCloud, she served in multiple global roles for Fortune 500 companies, helping them create live experiences, leverage modern digital platforms, and empower their customers to thrive. In her free time, she trains hunter/jumper horses and actually could ride before she could walk.

Connect with Heather on LinkedIn:

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

Show notes

Episode transcription

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

Paul Green :
Hello, and welcome back to the show. Here’s what we got coming up for you this week.

Heather Harlos :
The easier you make it for people to work, the happier they are. Technology is a core piece of it, but the that’s not the goal. The goal isn’t the technology. The goal is the people.

Paul Green :
That’s Heather Harlos from JumpCloud. She’s going to be here later in the show, talking about people. With marketing, it’s so easy for us to talk about digital staff and tactics and strategies but ultimately all marketing is about influencing people. And Heather’s going to help us reflect on that later on. We’re also going to be talking about the LinkedIn Social Selling Index. What is it? Why should you care about it? And how can you affect it?

Voiceover:
Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast.

Paul Green :
So we talk a lot on this podcast about all those digital methods and strategic marketing and tactics and this and that. And all of that is cool, it’s a great way of trying to find people who are nearly ready to pick a new MSP. But one of the quickest ways to get new leads into your business is to find other businesses who are already talking to the clients that you want to talk to and get them to refer people when they have a problem, or when they have a need, or a want, or something that you could help with. And I think one of the greatest businesses that you can put together, some kind of strategic referral deal with is a web design agency. Because you see, you and a web design agency, you don’t do same thing. You’re not in competition with each other, but the ordinary business owners and managers who buy it from you and buy it from a web design agency, well they just see web design and IT as “computer stuff.”

Paul Green :
And I put “computer stuff” there into speech marks, it’s all “computer stuff.” They don’t really see the difference. You and I know there’s a massive difference because putting together a website, well that’s a marketing thing, that’s design, that’s creative. Sure, there’s some IT involved in actually hosting it, but that’s a minor thing. And these days, who hosts their own website. That’s all just done through bought in hosting. But ordinary business owners and managers don’t think like us do they? They think differently. And that’s why it would make a lot of sense for you to put together something formal with a web design agency. And here’s how you pitch it to them. It’s very, very simple. You say to them, Look, if any of your clients are asking you for help with IT things and that’s probably email. And you probably get a lot of people asking you, “Hey, can you help us with that email please? Or our email’s slow or our email doesn’t seem to be coming through.”

Paul Green :
If you get anyone like that, why don’t you refer them into us? And if we get any of our clients who are asking us, “Hey, do you guys design websites?” Then we will send those people to you. And there are various levels at which you could operate this kind of strategic referral deal. You could do it as a very sort of low level loose one where you are literally just saying, oh no, no, we don’t do that, but you need to go and talk to Brian at so and so web agency. That’s the kind of the lowest level commitment. That can then work right up to an actual, proper high level integration. Where when someone says you, “Hey, do you guys do websites?” You saying, “We don’t in house but we work very, very closely with a web agency. Let me get them to get in touch with you.”

Paul Green :
And in fact, you may even throw it into your strategic reviews, your quarterly business reviews, where you are saying to your clients, tell me about your digital marketing. What are your plans for your website over the next few years? What are your plans for your SEO and your paper click and other things? And you are actually directly generating work that you can pass to this web agency. And you would hope to encourage them to do exactly the same thing, that when they’re talking to their clients, they can ask them the same kind of questions about their IT and their security and what their long term plans are. In fact, you have an opportunity to train the owners and account managers of the web agency that you’re going to get into bed with. You can train them how to ask clients the right big open questions to generate the kind of opportunities and leads that everyone is looking for.

Paul Green :
So how do you find an agency like this and how do you set up some kind of deal? I would argue the easiest referral deal to put in place is with someone you know. In fact, I think you need to build a relationship with someone before you start talking to them. This isn’t really about how good they are as an agency. It’s about how much trust you and the owner of the web agency can build together. Have a think now about the people you know, go through the business cards of the people you’ve met at networking meetings, or who are just in your circle, or might be connected to someone through your BNI group or something like that. Someone somewhere is running a web agency. Oh, and by the way, when I say a web agency, I do mean something that’s not just a one man band. There are a ton of one man band web designers out there, and there’s nothing wrong with these people. But in my experience, their focus is on just delivering websites. They just want to sell a website and they want to deliver it.

Paul Green :
Whereas an agency which has got staff doing the work and account managers and it’s a proper business, well, they’ll be looking for recurring revenue. They’ll be looking for ongoing revenue streams. They will be understanding that to build the business, they can’t just build a one-off website and walk away. They’ve actually got to develop a revenue stream and look after their clients. Those are the people you want because you want a web agency that treats its clients like you treat your clients. You don’t do a one-off job and walk away. Well, it’s pretty rare, you might do a project and walk away. But most of the time you are after recurring revenue, you want to manage services clients. So you need an agency that approaches its clients in the same way. So who do you know in your network?

Paul Green :
And then I would just take that person out for a coffee or maybe even lunch or dinner or something like that and say, “Hey, I’ve got an idea I want to run past you.” And when you go out with them, don’t just jump straight into, “Hey, I think we should do a partnership and pass leads to each other.” I would start, well, I would view this like a sales call. You do any sales call with any prospect and you don’t talk about you, because that’s the way that you don’t win the sale. You talk about them. You ask them open questions. You ask them about their favorite subject, which is themselves and their business. And I think setting up some kind of referral deal, you need to have exactly the same approach. Ask them about their business. What are they struggling with right now? Where are they hoping to go in the next three to five years? What are their issues? Their problems? What’s going well? What’s not going so well? Ask them open questions about their life and their business.

Paul Green :
The more you talk about their agency, the more they will want to get into bed with you. It’s kind of weird how the world works like that, isn’t it? That the more we talk about the other person, the more fascinating we become to them. That’s just the way things are. It’s because our brains are wired to like people who seem to show an interest in us. So the more you can talk about them and their agency, the better. They will of course ask questions about you and your MSP. And you don’t be evasive. You answer the question, but try and flip it back to be about them. You want them to feel as though you are coming along with this amazing opportunity for two companies to really work quite closely together for mutual gain, and ultimately you’re protecting your clients anyway. You are putting your clients in touch with a very good web marketing agency. They’re putting their clients in touch with a very good IT support company. It’s literally a win-win situation.

Paul Green :
So I’d go and find someone like that, take them out to lunch, pop the idea in that head, let them sleep on it and then start small. Start off just by throwing some work at each other. And in fact, you should almost have a couple of referrals up your sleeve, ready to send their way and make sure they’re good clients as well. Don’t send them your nightmare clients. Send them your good clients. So again, it’s this trust thing, isn’t it? It’s building a relationship and building a bit of trust. And then I would look to move that partnership within 6 to 12 months to being fully integrated where you’re not just sending people over to each other, but I mean, you could always get to a position where you are actually selling each other’s stuff and they will never sell managed services. But they can at a sales meeting, maybe even be there when you go for that initial fact finding meeting, because that’s essentially like a handover. The web agency is there and is effectively handing over a part of the relationship to you.

Paul Green :
Can you see how powerful that would be? What a great way that would be to generate new leads for your MSP.

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

Paul Green :
Have you ever heard of, or indeed, have you ever looked at your LinkedIn Social Selling Index? Don’t worry if you haven’t because you can go and have a look at it right now. Make sure you are logged into LinkedIn and just go to this URL, linkedin.com/sales/ssi, where SSI stands for Social Selling Index. And what you come up with is a very simple page with some little graphs and it tells you what your score is. So I’m looking at mine now for my LinkedIn account and it says I’m in the top 3% of my industry with my SSI rank, which is great. Don’t really know what that means. I guess my industry is technology, is IT. It says I’m in the top 16% of network SSI rank, again, don’t know what that means. It’s nice to be in the top 16% of something. Don’t know what it means. But then I come to my actual current Social Selling Index and it says, I have a score of 66 out of 100, and there are 4 components which have made up this.

Paul Green :
So the four components are establishing your professional brand, finding the right people, engaging with insights and building relationships. So what LinkedIn I think is trying to do here is trying to help you to improve your profile and improve the kind of content that you post to help you reach more people and ultimately get more out of the platform because it’s in everyone’s best interests that you get more out of LinkedIn. Now, I’m fascinated to see that I’ve got a score of 66 because in all my research for this, it seems that once you are at 70 or above, that’s when it kind of unlocks extra things within LinkedIn. And I don’t actually mean functionality, but it seems to give you an algorithmic advantage if you can achieve 70 or more. In fact, from some of the things I’ve read, you’ll see 45% more sales opportunities. Again, I’m not quite sure exactly what that means.

Paul Green :
A lot of things that are written about LinkedIn are a little bit vague on what that actually means in practical terms. But it certainly can’t be a bad thing, can it? If you’ve got a social platform which is giving you a report on your progress and it’s telling you that if you score above 70%, then you’re going to do better, you’re going to perform better on that social media platform. That is not a bad thing at all. So each of those four pillars, which is establishing a professional brand, finding the right people, engaging within insights and building relationships. Each of those, you have a maximum of 25 points. So I guess to get above 70, you’ve just got to either improve dramatically in 1 or 2 areas or look for general improvements across all of them.

Paul Green :
So if we look at that first pillar: establishing your professional brand. There’s some very basic things that you can do, like filling in all the profile sections. So making sure your headline, your summary and your experience are there, making sure you’ve got a photo, of course, getting more endorsements helps with that because it proves that you’ve got the skills. And sharing content also helps with that. Quality, helpful and relevant content. It seems that when you are adding that content using rich multimedia content gives you your score a boost. So adding in pictures and videos and that kind of stuff. LinkedIn considers that when you really work hard on your content, it enhances your chances of being seen as a thought leader. And this is one of the things that LinkedIn is keen to push you as a thought leader, creating things that other people are willing to follow. Of course, LinkedIn wants that on its platform because that encourages people to come back for that kind of thought leadership.

Paul Green :
The other thing is it wants you to write long form posts as well. And I would imagine writing articles also boosts your professional brand because of course, LinkedIn is pushing that real really well right now with its LinkedIn newsletters.

Paul Green :
The second pillar is about finding the right people. And I think this is where we start to see this tied into LinkedIn’s own product, which is Sales Navigator. And that’s pretty much LinkedIn’s major way of generating recurring revenue. They want you to pay for Sales Navigator so you can use the tools and really use LinkedIn as a proper sales tool. And there are benefits to Sales Navigator. I think if you are on LinkedIn two to three hours a day, then you’d see the benefits of Sales Navigator. My experience with most MSPs that I’ve worked with is unless you are literally working that two to three hours a day, you just won’t get the value out of Sales Navigator.

Paul Green :
Now to improve pillar, you need to be doing advanced people searches. So not just looking for accountants, CPAs in your area, but actually doing advanced searches. You need to go and look at people’s profiles, look at their connections profiles because LinkedIn is all about the network. And also look at who has viewed your profile as well. So essentially you have to show LinkedIn that you are using LinkedIn. In fact, you know what? This is my weakness. I use LinkedIn as a way of distributing content. I very rarely go and look at other people’s profiles on this. It’s just not something I do. So I can see here a really easy way for me to improve this second pillar would just be to spend 10 minutes every day, just going and looking at people’s profiles, doing some searches, looking at profiles, looking at their connections, and of course looking at who has been looking at me. Now, from what I’ve read in my research, LinkedIn does look at how often you are active on LinkedIn as well. And that can be another ranking factor that affects this pillar.

Paul Green :
The third pillar is about engaging with insights and that’s about content again. It’s about commenting. It’s about sharing. Essentially, it’s how you engage with the content that you are generating and people’s reactions to it, but also other people’s content. So you’ve got to comment on people’s posts. You’ve got to share stuff. You’ve got to press the like button. Essentially, you’ve got to engage with other people’s content. The more all that you engage with other people’s content, actually that encourages them to engage with your content, which is a very good thing. So join groups, engage with content and all of these things will improve this third pillar about engagement.

Paul Green :
We can see a real pattern here, can’t we? That to improve your Social Selling Index, you’ve just got to use LinkedIn. You’ve got to keep using LinkedIn, doing all the things that it wants you to do, which ultimately give you an algorithmic benefit and get you in front of more people. This is actually a fairly simple thing. I reckon this could be drilled down to 10 or 15 minutes worth of work a day, or you could even just get a virtual assistant to do this for you. That would be the really smart thing. Let a VA into your LinkedIn, make sure that you and them aren’t logged in at the same time because that’s a bit of a red flag to LinkedIn, but you could get them every day to go in and spend 10 to 15 minutes just looking at other people’s content, pressing the like button. I guess, depending on the trust you have with your VA, you could get them to comment on posts for you, but maybe you could just do that, but it would be a very, very simple thing to do.

Paul Green :
And then the final thing is to build relationships. That’s the final pillar and this is about connections. So again, this is a good thing because we want to get more connections on LinkedIn. The more people you are connected to, the more opportunities you have, the more prospects you can potentially speak to. So there’s nothing bad here in building up that fourth pillar of growing your connections.

Paul Green :
So to summarise then, this is just a set of tools, a set of things that LinkedIn would like you to do. Go and have a look now and check out your Social Selling Index, linkedin.com/sales/ssi. Have a look at that and you will see where you can improve your LinkedIn profile and give yourself an algorithmic boost.

Voiceover:
Paul’s blatant plug.

Paul Green :
We have a ton of training on LinkedIn in our MSP marketing edge service, because it’s not just about providing marketing content. In fact, we are there helping our 600 plus as every single day with every aspect of their marketing. We’re making their marketing easy for them. In fact, already this year, we’ve put together a number of quite short training courses, but helping them just sort of get straight to the point. So we did a training course on maximising your LinkedIn. So getting your profile sorted, getting your connections sorted, we’ve done a training course all ready this year on the 2022 rules for LinkedIn. So we’ve examined all the evidence for how the algorithm is currently working and what it’s currently favouring. And we did something just a couple of weeks ago on how to maximise the current opportunity with LinkedIn newsletters. In fact, we’re going to be adding a new training course very soon, if we haven’t already done it, because I do record this podcast quite a few weeks in advance.

Paul Green :
And that’s going to be about exactly what we were just talking about, about how you can spend 15 minutes a day improving your LinkedIn Social Selling Index. So this is the kind of support, the handholding support that we give to our 600 plus MSP members to make their marketing easy. Plus we give them a ton of content. They can put on their websites and on their social media on a weekly and a monthly basis. But we only supply this to one MSP per area. So the first thing for you to do is check to see whether another MSP has beaten you to it. Go and enter your post code or your zip code at mspmarketingedge.com.

Voiceover:
The big interview.

Heather Harlos :
Hey, I’m Heather Harlos from JumpCloud. I am the head of channel and MSP marketing. I’ve been in the channel and technology for longer than I’d like to admit. I guess, gosh, over 15 years now. And in my free time, I think I’ve already said this on here, but love to ride horses, but I don’t think I told people I like to cosplay. So another fun fact.

Paul Green :
Ooh, cosplay. Now that’s something we are going to have to explore in the extending interviews. My 11 year old child is really into cosplay and I keep getting dragged to comic cons here in the UK for this kind of thing. So we’ll talk about that later on in the interview. Heather, thank you so much for coming back on you. You’re obviously at a new business now different to the one that you were working out when you were with us last time, but it is wonderful to have you back on the podcast and thank you so much for joining us. So we’re going to talk today about people. And one of my recurring marketing themes is that marketing is about reaching people and people buy from people, but it’s so easy for us to forget that because we are in a very digital world and it seems to be all about technology and digital marketing methods, doesn’t it?

Heather Harlos :
It does, completely. And I really think people buy experiences. So what’s the experience you’re setting for your customers every time they interact with you? Which comes down to them, talking to your employees, the technology you’re providing them on the backend, but really what do they feel when they work with you?

Paul Green :
How do you actually influence that kind of experience? Because most MSP owners find sales and marketing so very hard. How do we build into a system so that it happens routinely, whether we kind of think about it or not?

Heather Harlos :
I think the first piece is really understanding who your market is. So what do they care about? What are they actually looking for? Most people, I mean, I shouldn’t say this working for a technology provider or a vendor, but most people don’t care are what the technology is. They care about what you produce through it, and they care about how they’re treated when they have a problem. Like I think some of your best opportunities to grow your business are some of the issues that come up and how you actually handle those. And that really leads to them actually telling more people about working with you and that experience you provided for them.

Paul Green :
So you’re absolutely right. I completely agree with you. That people buy outcomes, they don’t buy what it is that you actually sell. And here’s where the difference is between what you are doing right now, Heather, in terms of selling your employers technology, which we’ll talk about towards the end of the interview. You’re selling to an educated audience, and that obviously is a difference. Whereas for your MSP, they’re selling to a non-educated audience. That’s not being offensive in any way about ordinary business owners and managers. They just don’t know about technology. And to a certain extent, they don’t care, do they? So what do you recommend because I know you work with lots of MSPs to help them get better at their sales and marketing. What are some of the practical things that you recommend?

Heather Harlos :
I think the first thing is approaching your job from that mindset of being part of their business and a consultant to them. So I always say, partner first, sell second. So if you’re really in there and helping them identify where they could gain efficiencies or there’s something that can make their day a little bit easier, I think they recognise that. And then they see you as that thought leader and as that advisor and not the … And I mean, we always say used car salesman here, but not the used car salesman that’s just trying to get a product in their door, move on and go to the next deal. You’re actually an integral part of their operation and their culture and what they’re actually building as a company.

Paul Green :
Yeah. I mean, that’s a cultural reference, I think you’d use anywhere in the world, a used car salesman. We all know exactly how that means. In fact, it’s interesting to note there are various companies across the world now trying to get rid of the used car salesman. So here in the UK, we have something called Cazoo where you buy the car online, a secondhand car online and they deliver it to you. And I’m sure there’s a … Is it Carwow in the US? I know there’s one company doing a similar thing.

Heather Harlos :
I think so. Yeah.

Paul Green :
Yeah. So clearly you and I don’t know a great deal about [inaudible 00:21:54] cars, but we all get the analogy. So practically, how do you do that? I mean, let me put you in the position of being the MSP owner. So imagine tomorrow you had some kind of crazy entrepreneurial seizure and decided to your own MSP. What would you practically do to put in place some of the things you were just recommending?

Heather Harlos :
The first thing I would think about is where do I have connections and what do I truly understand? So if it was me and I was building an MSP, I probably would go after a market around advertising agencies or something like that because I actually understand how their business operates. That doesn’t mean that’s the only people I’m going to sell to. But I do understand how their business runs it. I would be able to give them advice that actually makes sense to make them more efficient.

Heather Harlos :
Where if let’s say, use the car analogy. If I said, oh, I’m going to go focus on car dealerships. Well, I have no knowledge of their actual operations and what they do. And I really couldn’t help them. I could sell them a technology easily and say, yeah, this will probably help you, but I don’t actually understand their business. And I think when you focus on what you understand and in areas that you are already have connections, it’s way easier to grow that business and become that go-to resource really on a national level. Because when you’re that targeted, everybody knows everybody, especially, I mean, you think about technology. I mean, everybody in technology knows every other person in technology. It’s no different in any industry as you move into different spaces.

Paul Green :
Yeah. Yeah. I completely agree. And I think it’s not just leveraging what you already know. You can also put yourself in their shoes in a similar way to the way I just asked you to do it. I have a member of our MSP Marketing Edge program and he is dominating his niche right now, his niche. So he is in the UK, where we call it a niche, not a niche. But he had a foot in the niche already and having made the decision, the emotional commitment to wanting to dominate that niche, he started going to the trade shows, he started reading the magazines that they read, the blogs that they read, he started picking up the phone more to his existing clients and asking them what’s going on right now? What’s annoying you? What’s frustrating you? What’s good that’s happening right now? What’s not so good? And he essentially has become an expert at what’s happening in that niche.

Paul Green :
And with regards to technology, obviously not all of the things of whatever it is that they do, but with regards to the technology, right down to that particular niche has a whole series of different software systems that are very bespoke to that industry. And he didn’t initially want to support those software systems, but quickly realised that when you talk to business owners in that sector about technology, the very first things they start talking about are those software systems. So he realised very quickly that him and his team needed to at the very least have a good understanding of how those software systems work. Now, whether or not they actually go on and support them is a conversation, I’m not quite sure whether he does that or to what level he does that. But that was a fascinating insight for me of how to place yourself in the inside of the industry.

Heather Harlos :
Definitely. And I even think like when you’re building your business, what’s the experience you’re creating for your employees? So, I mean, a happy employee will make the difference between you being successful or not. I mean, you want people to want to come in and work, and you want people to want to enjoy working with your customer base. And sometimes that means you fire your customers. Sometimes that means you look for other ones like that, but you figure out like what actually makes your inner workings tick as well. Because if you aren’t focusing on that just as much, I don’t think you’ll be as successful as you could be.

Paul Green :
Yes. Completely agree. In fact, there’s something which I don’t know if you would find this. Actually, I suspect you wouldn’t find this controversial Heather, but some might. There is a saying that goes around, which is you always put the clients first. And I disagree with that. I think you actually have to put your staff first and your clients and customers second. And I do that and I make no apology to my clients and customers for doing that. Because actually, if I look after my staff and make sure that they’re as emotionally healthy as they can be, and they love their work because we do fire clients just to use that example. And we do, now and again, we fire a client just as in the same way everyone recommends MSPs should do the same. I think if you look after your staff first, then they will actually do an even better job of looking after your clients.

Paul Green :
Something I heard oh, years ago. And I can’t remember the client that did it. I think this was before I was working with MSPs. They would, as a Christmas present to their staff, allow them to pick a client to be fired, which was a pretty cool thing. Now this was a high volume business. So they wouldn’t lose 20% of their business with just 1 client. This is almost taking like an old fashioned view, isn’t it? And looking all of it and saying it’s people, people, people. We’ve almost got to forget the technology and forget the systems and forget everything. And we’ve got to make sure that the people are looking after the people.

Heather Harlos :
Exactly. And I think where technology comes in is the easier you make it for people to work, the happier they are. Whether that’s employees or that’s your customers. I mean, the technology is a core piece of it, but that’s not the goal. The goal isn’t the technology. The goal is the people.

Paul Green :
Yes, completely. I think that this has got to be the main learning point out of this interview that just because as an MSP, you sell technology and you deliver technology, it’s not about the technology, it’s about what the technology can do for the people. So thank you. Thank you for that, Heather. Now in a second, we’ll talk about our extended interview, which we are going to go on to do on YouTube. But first of all, why don’t you just tell us a little bit about JumpCloud? So what it is, what it does and how we can get in touch with you?

Heather Harlos :
Yeah, definitely. So at JumpCloud, we say we make remote work happen. And really what we do for Cloud and managed service providers is allow them a way to securely and frictionlessly manage their clients’ access to resources, IT resources that they need to operate their business. And we do that by really connecting identity accesses and devices together under a single platform with a multi-tenant console.

Paul Green :
That’s great. That’s a great summary. And what’s the website address Heather?

Heather Harlos :
It is www.jumpcloud.com.

Paul Green :
Could have guessed that one myself. So thank you so much for being on the podcast. Now we are going to continue our interview. I’ve got a number of different things I want to ask you about more to do with people management. I’m also kind of interested and it might be a bit of a behind the scenes thing here of what it’s like to go from one vendor to another vendor in a senior management position, because that’s something that you don’t often hear about in public. And hopefully you’re not sweating too much at the thought of having to talk to me about that. So we’re going to continue that extended interview right now. And you can go and listen to that on YouTube if you go to youtube.com/mspmarketing.

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

John Montgomery:
Hi, my name is John Montgomery from Hot Prospects. The sales book I would recommend your readers is called Emotional Intelligence for Sales Success by Colleen Stanley. It’s just a really refreshing approach on how to sell to people without being too salesy.

Voiceover:
Coming up next week.

Nick :
Hey guys, my name is Nick [inaudible 00:29:29]. I’m going to be on the podcast next week to talk about how I use PR focused link building to get local back links, to help you improve your Google Maps rankings.

Paul Green :
We’re also going to be talking about the psychology of pricing. If you charge 35 pounds or dollars a month for something, you could actually put the price up to $37, 38, possibly even 39 without having any emotional trauma from your clients because 35 and 39 are the same price. You and I know they’re not actually the same price, but psychologically they are. And so we’ll examine next week if there’s an opportunity for you to bump up your prices without causing any trauma to your clients at all, any emotional trauma. But we will also look at the danger points. You see, you get to 39 and you want to push through into 40 or 41. Well, that’s a jump into a whole new bracket according to their emotions and how they think. So we’ll look at that in detail next week.

Paul Green :
Plus, we’re going to talk about how to let big new ideas soak in and be examined by your brain over a number of days. Sometimes we have these huge ideas and we think, ah, that’s a good idea. And I think with those big ideas, you need to almost slow it down a little bit, let it soak in, give your brain some time to think about it and to analyse it. And then tell you two to three days down the line, whether or not this is really a good idea or whether or not it’s going to be a time suck. Yes, I’m talking about switching PSA and RMM as much as I’m talking about big business ideas as well. We’ll talk about the best way to do that next week.

Paul Green :
And don’t forget, we’ve got the extended interview from today from our wonderful interview with Heather Harlos. That is on YouTube right now and we’re going to add another bite. That’s our show about the show. That’s going to be on YouTube on Thursday. You can see both of those at youtube.com/mspmarketing. Please do subscribe to us on YouTube and wherever you listen to this podcast and join me next Tuesday. Have a very profitable week in your MSP.

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