Episode 161: Three types of MSP sales people

Episode 161: Three types of MSP sales people

Paul Green

Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast
Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast
Episode 161: Three types of MSP sales people
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Episode 161

Welcome to the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This is THE show if you want to grow your MSP. This week’s show includes:
  • 00:00 Fix your MSP’s website navigation
  • 07:42 Three types of MSP sales people
  • 17:32 The MSP who turned a potato into $30,000

Featured guest:

Zach Kitchen is a featured guest on Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast

Thank you to MSP owner Zach Kitchen for joining me to talk about how he turned a potato into a new client for his MSP.

Over 20 years ago, in middle school, Zach got caught hacking into the school computer system. The incident made him extremely popular with the students, but it sat negatively with the school administration. Students went home and told their parents about the incident, which is how he landed his first IT job in cybersecurity forensics at only 17 years old. In running his successful MSP business, Digital Crisis, Zach has discovered a love for experimental marketing.

Connect with Zach on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/digitalcrisis

Extra show notes:Listen or watch every Tuesday on your favourite podcast platform, hosted by me, Paul Green, an MSP marketing expert:

Episode transcription

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

Paul Green:
Oh, you are here. That means we can get started with this week’s show. Welcome along. Here’s what we’ve got coming up for you this week.

Zach Kitchen:
Hi, I’m Zach Kitchen. I’m an MSP owner just like you. I made over $30,000 from just an $0.84 potato.

Paul Green:
We’ll listen to that story later on in the show. Plus, we’re going to be talking about the three different kinds of salespeople that you need to have in your business.

Voiceover:
Paul Green’s MSP Marketing podcast.

Paul Green:
Let’s start this week talking about a small marketing task that takes so little time to do but has an absolutely massive impact. Now we’re talking about the order of items within your website’s navigation. And you may not have put a huge amount of thought into that, but as I say, it’s something that you can just tweak and play with in 30 seconds, depending which website technology you are using. In fact, it’s going to take me longer to talk to you about it than it is for you to actually do it. But the order of your navigation does have an impact on people’s expectations of your website and indeed how people use your website.
You see, when websites first came along, we’re talking the mid to late ’90s here, and I just immediately had a memory in my head of being at work in a radio station that I used to work at in around about ’96, ’97 and we got an internet PC. It was the one PC in the building that was actually connected to the internet. And I remember us all going in and I think we were using Netscape Navigator. How old am I? Using that to actually go and we were asking each other, “Where do we go? Which websites do we go to?” Back then that was a time of immense experimentation. There were no set standards for websites.
Today, just on the verge of 2023, we are kind of in a much different place. And not to say that there isn’t and shouldn’t be lots of innovation with websites, but there are some things that are just done that way just because that’s what people expect. For example, your logo in the top left hand side of your website. Now that just goes there. Maybe if you were some kind of experimental brand or some kind of cool trendy marketing agency, you’d put the logo somewhere else. But for an MSP with a standard sales website, your logo goes at the top left. And when someone clicks or taps on that logo, what does it do? It takes them back to the homepage.
This is standard behavior from a website. And because we’ve all been using websites for 25 years, it’s what we expect. And when we come across a website which doesn’t work in that way, it feels a bit weird. And we don’t want people feeling weird when they’re on your website. The purpose of your website is to get them to feel like you are the people they can trust with their technology. So we want them feeling warm and comfortable and ready to move on and take the next step with you. We don’t want them feeling slightly awkward or even just feeling like things aren’t quite right. That’s exactly the opposite of how we want them to feel. It’s why you don’t want the navigation going down the left hand side of your website, that’s the navigation of 2010, 2005. On the verge of 2023, the navigation sits at the top. That’s just one of those things that we don’t experiment with.
Now in particular what I want to talk about today is the order of the items in your navigation. Your navigation should be as uncluttered as possible. So if you have more than around about four, five, six things in that navigation, and if start having lots and lots of sub menus, there’s just too much in there. And sometimes, well certainly with navigation, I believe less is more. And you can bring that back a little bit. The order is important as much as not having clutter is important. So you should have your logo on the left and then you may choose to have the word Home.
Now the Home button does exactly the same as clicking on the logo. It takes them back to the homepage. But there is a certain school of thought which says an older generation, I’m not going to date dates or name ages here, but an older generation still appreciates and uses a Home button. And remember, we want to make people feel comfortable. So if you have space for it in your navigation, put a Home button up there. Now I’m just going to jump to the other end of the navigation, sort of the right hand side, because there you need to have some very specific things. The final item on your navigation should always be Contact Us. Why? Because that’s what people expect to see at the end of your navigation. And next to Contact Us, they expect to see About Us.
So you’ve got Home on the left, you’ve got About Us and Contact Us on the far right, what goes in the middle? Well, that’s where you’ve got a little bit of flexibility. I would argue that the next thing you should have after your Home is Services. Now, people don’t really go onto your Services pages. Well, that they might go onto them, but they didn’t really read them. They’re a bit boring. But they still need to be there. And for your website to be complete, certainly you need to have those pages. Maybe then you’d have a blog section or a news section or some kind of a learning hub or something like that. Maybe you’d have other sectors, verticals that you work with, specific markets. Actually, I’d put that one next to the Services. So you’d have Home, Services, Specialties and then you’d go into your news, your blog or your learning hub and you could have a testimonials page in there as well. I would put the testimonials between the blog and the About Us.
You can see we’ve got a little bit of variance there of things that you can do. It doesn’t really matter what the order of the middle things is, but what is most important is that you’ve got Home on the left and you’ve got About Us and Contact Us on the right. Those things are fixed. So have a quick look at your website. Now if you have got an easy to edit menu like a WordPress, I mean it takes literally 30 seconds to log in and just move the order around on a WordPress site. Just have a quick juggle around. If you’ve got too many items and your navigation is cluttered, what you can do is you can put a little tool into your website to tell you, actually give you data on how people are using your website.
There is a piece of software we use, it’s called hotjar.com. There are other alternatives to it. Lucky Orange is another one that we’ve toyed with in the past. But we always come back to Hotjar. We have a paid account and that sits in our websites and it just watches and takes videos of what people are doing. In fact, it produces data heat maps, so you can see literally where people’s mouse cursors have been around the page and what they’re clicking on and therefore what they’re not clicking on. But you can also, as I say, you see anonymous video, so you don’t know who it is that’s using your page, but you can see their behavior and what that does.
So if you’ve got a really cluttered navigation and you’re not quite sure which items to drop to make it less cluttered, go and put Hotjar in and within a few weeks you’ll have a lovely heat map to show you what they’re not clicking on. And guess what? What they’re not clicking on, you can remove from the nav or you can hide it in a sub menu or something. But make sure your navigation is exactly what will make people comfortable on your website. In fact, you can broaden that across every element of your website. If it doesn’t make them feel comfortable and feel like you can be trusted, then it hasn’t earned its place on your website.

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

Paul Green:
One of our goals as business owners is to hire other people to do the vast majority of the work that we do in the business so that we can spend more of our valuable time working on the business. Now that can take some time to do. And often for MSPs, one of the final roles that they end up delegating out to someone else or hiring someone in to do is sales. Because the weird thing about MSP sales is it’s not really a full-time job. It’s not like you can onboard 20 new clients this month, right? And in fact, even if you had an organisation big enough to handle 20 new clients, wouldn’t you rather have five new clients each with 100 users than you would 20 new clients with five users? Of course you would.
So no MSP wants to be onboarding lots and lots of clients. And the reality is, as business owners, we are just good at sales because we’ve got that passion, the knowledge and the passion for it. So selling always tends to be one of the final roles that we delegate out or that we hire someone to do. Now, as you start to work more towards getting yourself out of doing stuff within the business, I think it’s important for you to bear in mind that there are actually three sales roles that you need to replace yourself with within the business. I’ll tell you what the three roles are. So first of all, you’ve got someone hitting the phones and I’ll explain what they’re doing on the phones in a second. Secondly, you’ve got someone out doing new business. So literally going and bringing on board new clients. And then third, you’ve got someone doing account management. So that’s retaining and looking after existing clients.
Now you yourself, you do all three of these roles, but someone else that you get to do them for you, it’s very unlikely you’ll get one person who’s able to do all three roles. And I’ll tell you why in a second. It’s all down to human nature and the fact that just naturally, we look for the easiest way and the easiest route to do things. Now when we talk about those three separate roles, I’m assuming that you’re operating a marketing system along the lines of this. And maybe you’re doing this yourself or maybe you’re kind of skipping it and trying to shortcut it a bit. But you have someone hitting the phones to talk to your large audience of people, so everyone you’re connected to on LinkedIn, everyone on your email list, all those people that you meet out at networking, these are your audiences. One of the biggest problems with marketing is, and one of the things that makes it so slow is, that people only buy when they’re ready to buy.
So whoever is picking up the phone in your business, whether it’s you or whether you are hiring someone to do it, all they’re doing is they’re ringing around people trying to build a relationship with them and just trying to figure out when the timing is right, because someone’s switching from one MSP to another, it’s a big deal, it’s a massive purchase, it’s a huge thing in their head and they’re not just going to do it willy-nilly. They’re going to have to be in the right place to do it. And so your phone person is constantly working your network and if no one’s doing this in the business, you really need someone doing it. Probably not you because you’d be doing it already if you enjoy doing it. And very few MSPs do enjoy doing it. Back to work mom, this is a great work job for back to work mom, two to three hours a day, two to three days a week. In fact, there we go, there’s your first sales person hired.
So that’s what your telephone person is doing. What they are doing is they’re not doing any selling. As I say, they’re building relationships and their goal, their outcome is to book 15 minute video calls with the next person. Now this is probably you at the moment and in fact this is the hardest role to replace yourself in because this is the new business person. So this is the person who does the 15 minute video call. And of course, the real purpose of that 15 minute video call is for you to qualify them as a good prospect and to make them realize that you guys are great. And that 15 minute call, if it goes well, it’ll actually be 30, 35, 40 minutes you are talking about their favorite subject, which is their business. Then off the back of that you arrange to meet in real life. And then you go and of course you have a meeting and the proposal goes in and there’s a scheduled follow up and you win a new client and you go and buy a Porsche, which is awesome.
So that’s the new business role and you are going to have to get someone else to do that for you at some point, or you continue to do it in retirement or whatsoever. But it is the hardest one to do because it’s not a full-time role. It’s very much a part-time role and it is difficult. Salespeople who are good, who are reliable, who are consistent, are worth their weight in gold. They really are. And maybe you’ll luck out and you’ll find someone who perhaps has been doing it for a while but only just wants to drop down to, say, couple of days a week and do the difficult things for you, like going to networking meetings like chasing prospects, moving things along. It’s a very difficult role. There’s that third role.
Remember, once we’ve got new clients on board, we then need someone to look after them, an account manager. Now this is actually the easiest role to recruit for because this is the funnest role. It’s fun to look after clients, to make sure they’re happy, to smooth over any problems. Because actually the earlier you smooth over a potential problem, the quicker the problem goes away. Most account management roles are fun. In fact, us as business owners, we like doing it because we take pride in seeing our customers, our clients, be happy in them seeing that we’re servicing them well, that we care, that we’re keeping the quality high.
This is why you probably can’t put one person into all three of these roles because account management is fun. Going and getting new business is less fun. And picking up the phone to try and generate appointments for the new business person is also not fun. So you’ve got three different parts to a job, but two of them are not fun. It’s human nature to do the things which are more fun and to do the things which feel less like work. And I’ve seen people hire in people, full-time people, MSPs, and say to them, “Right, half of your job is account management, half of your job is to bring in new business. Off you go.” And six months later they are acing account management. I mean they are truly acing it. And even when there’s a bonus scheme in place that only really pays out the good money when they win new clients, they’re just not winning new clients. In fact, they’re not even doing the activity to win new clients because they’re not motivated. Yet they can keep themselves busy at work looking after the existing clients.
So I have no specific answer for you in this. Every single MSP is different. And this is the final pieces of the jigsaw puzzle. You’re going to have to figure this one out for yourself, and maybe you’re years away from being there. One of those is very easy to get, which is your back to work phone mom. You can get that person today. The account management role is the second easiest one to get. Just find someone, doesn’t even need to be a technology person, find someone who’s great with people and let them look after your people. Those two things are really easy to delegate or to move out to someone else. The hardest one is that new business person.
It’s the kind of thing that you want to just have in your head now because maybe you’ve got a technician who would like to earn a ton more cash and we’ll take on even just a day or two days a week take on new business in the future. Maybe your service desk manager, service delivery manager would do that in the future. Maybe there is someone that you know right now who’s full time doing new business sales for another MSP in town who maybe they’re going to some kind of semi-retirement in a few years time and would appreciate doing that for you on a part-time basis. I think it’s one of those things you’ve got to get in your head right now, that some point in the future you’ve got to replace yourself doing these difficult sales roles, but they’re not easy roles to fill.
What kind of a network can you build up? This is a bit hippie, but I do believe in this. What kind of a message can you send to the universe of something you need in the future so that the universe can move things around and put the person you need in front of you at exactly the point that you need them. I really do believe it works like that, especially when you pop it in the back of your head right now and give it a couple of years to stew.

Voiceover:
Paul’s blatant plug.

Paul Green:
Okay everyone, quiet on set please. Lights check. Camera check. It’s rolling. And we’ve got a microphone. Ladies and gentlemen, this is scene 16, take four. Yeah, if you’re watching this on YouTube, I’ve actually got a proper clapperboard. Bought it on Amazon. It’s amazing what you can get on Amazon. Literally everything. We need a clapperboard now because every two, three months or so I go into a proper film studio. There’s a cameraman called Brendan I think, we’ve got a makeup lady, we don’t have a makeup lady. But we go there to do YouTube videos and not just for fun, they’re the kind of videos that are going to help you to grow your business. We’re literally sucking all of the good ideas out of my head and committing them to video, really high quality YouTube videos.
You see, what I want you to be able to do is, maybe you’ll do this tonight, is when he’s sitting down thinking, “Oh, I’m just going to do YouTube for 10 minutes.” Instead of going and looking at super cars or technical things or cool borg designs from Star Trek. Instead, you can actually discover how to grow your business and how to improve your marketing. So if you fancy a little bit of that, the channel’s even got its own little unique name, just go to youtube.com/mspmarketing or if you’re just on YouTube on your TV or something, just go and search for MSP marketing.

Voiceover:
The big interview.

Zach Kitchen:
So, hi, I’m Zach Kitchen, I’m an MSP owner just like you. And the thing is, I made over $30,000 from just an $0.84 potato.

Paul Green:
And that’s such a compelling story, Zachary. Thank you so much for joining us. We will get to your potato story and how you made so much money off a vegetable. Is a potato of vegetable> I suppose it is, isn’t it, a root vegetable. We’ll get onto that later on in the interview. But I’m so excited to have you on because you are a very rare breed of MSP, you’re a rare MSP who really embraces marketing and particularly experimental marketing. Now, I know over the last couple of years or so you’ve been doing all sorts of different things. And when we say experimental marketing, we don’t mean widely out there, we just mean the routine, regular marketing things, but things that most MSPs don’t experiment with. Give us an idea of some of the things that you’ve been trying out over the last few months.

Zach Kitchen:
So I have done the potato, of course. Something else I’ve done is I wanted to make a package that somebody would take and benefit from. Because something I’ve always learned, if you can give something of true value to people, you can capture their attention for much longer than if you’re trying to do a sales pitch. So I did come up with a cyber pack toolkit, and all it is just a bunch of resources and information like setting up acceptable use policies, basic phishing tips. And it actually has your Email Hijack book as well, your Email Hijack book is also in there. It’s part of a cyber pack that is all built in together that I provide as a package.
What I use with that is I use that as a gift to give somebody with your monthly guides. Last month you did one on password security. So I sent out postcards to every single person, whether it was active client, an old client, or a prospect, they all have postcards, but it looked just like your guide except for it was an invitation to the webinar. It had a QR code on there, people could register online, they could register on LinkedIn. And the thing is, when people actually register and get in, they immediately receive the guide that you send out to us every single month as a gift just for registering. And that immediately gives us their contact information because we use that for marketing for later. Because when you take the steps to start calling and bugging these people to come and attend, getting through the gatekeeper is so much easier when you’re inviting them to a webinar than when you’re trying to make a sales bid.

Paul Green:
Yes. Yes, I bet it is. Let’s talk about those webinars in a second. I just wanted to clarify what Zachary’s talking about in terms of my stuff is it’s through our service called the MSP Marketing Edge. So we have that book, Email Hijack that you talked about and we do guides every month. And what is interesting, Zachary, is you’ve taken some resources and you’ve looked for ways to maximise those resources such as turning them into a webinar. In fact, what you’ve done is you’ve put together multi-touch point campaigns. Can you just explain to us the benefit of having lots of different touchpoints as you’re trying to reach out to all of these prospects?

Zach Kitchen:
Yeah, is an easy one. In fact, that’s actually what led me into doing the potato campaign because I got a hold of the person, I got a hold of the prospect and he was haphazardly interested in meeting with me. And I met with him and had a great meeting sit down with him. Everything was good. They were going to review it and they were going to sign the agreement and they were going to follow up with me next week. I mean we’ve all been there, right? Oh, everything’s good, everything’s good. And then all of a sudden it’s just radio silent. And it was quite frustrating because I called him every single day. And then I was like, “Okay, fine, I’m not going to sell him services.” In fact, he was an insurance company. So I was like, “Well, maybe I can just say, ‘Hey, I’ll host a webinar for you. I’ll do all the legwork for you and present the webinar on password security.'” So I called and called and called, no response.
And the thing is, my sister has a passion about crocheting inanimate objects. And one of the ideas came across is a potato. And this guy, this prospect that we’re working with, his name is Sam. I said, that’s it, I’m sending Sam a potato. And everybody on the team’s call was like, “What? What are you talking about?” They knew who Sam was because they hear me gripe about Sam not answering his phone, not returning his calls, not returning emails. So I mailed the potato and then I wrote on the potato with the sharpie, “Hey spuddy, did we not mash? Zach.” And I stuck the label on there, I mailed it to him. And the thing is that it didn’t even get to him. It got delivered back to my virtual office because I put it in the wrong postal code. But then my team at the virtual office said, “Holy crap, your marketing is spudtacular.”
Now, I didn’t consider as a fail because I got the seed, the potato, despite it taking a week going all the way almost out of state back to Houston, it didn’t grow legs, it didn’t rot, it didn’t smell. So I turned around and I did it again. And I’m almost positive that he called me the moment he received that potato because Sam picked up the phone and called me and goes, “What’s up with this potato?” And I told him, I said, “Well it worked, didn’t it?” He goes, “What do you mean?” I said, “I’ve been trying to call you every day, Sam.” And I said, “Your team is terrible.” He goes, “What do you mean?” I said, “I call your team all the time, I’m trying to hunt you down and you don’t even know I’m trying to get ahold of you.” I wasn’t rude but I was facetious and very direct to the point of like, “Listen, I’ve been trying to reach you.”
And so he says, “Can you come in on Monday?” And I said, “Absolutely I can come in on Monday. Of course.” So I come in Monday. I’m sitting in the waiting room, he walks in through the main entrance of his office, he walks through the waiting room, he goes, “Come bring that contract. I’m signing it.” He didn’t even hesitate. He signed it right there on the spot. Didn’t even bat an eye. And things have been great. And towards the end of that meeting he goes, “Man, I’m glad you sent that potato.” It worked.

Paul Green:
Love it. I love it. I tell you what, for anyone that walks into someone’s office and they say, “Just bring me that contract.” You almost want to have three contracts with you, don’t you, perhaps at different pricing levels, if someone’s not even reading the contract. There’s the potato story. Let’s talk about webinars. So you have recently started a series of webinars. And I’ve spoken to several MSPs who’ve been a bit nervous about doing webinars. They’re nervous about what they’re going to talk about. They’re nervous that no one will show up. They’re nervous that it’ll be like being in a room with two other people. What’s your experience been and why do you keep persisting with webinars?

Zach Kitchen:
So actually these are all great questions and the thing is, people are worried about nobody showing up to the webinar, that’s actually the easiest webinar to do because you should still do it. And the reason is because now you’re talking to yourself, in a way. But you get to speak comfortably. You’re not worrying about being on the spot. I mean it’s just like me meeting with you right now. No one cares about the mistakes or the gaffs you make. In fact, I want you to think of something that someone else that has done that was extremely embarrassing, that would be like traumatising if you were able to remember. And most people can’t remember because most people don’t think that way. Most people don’t even function that way. The only people that really think about those embarrassing moments is themselves. So I learned to just push forward with it.
I mean I struggled with it for a long time as well, and I learned that if people don’t like it, it’s who I am. And I’m a firm believer of people doing business with people and it’s not doing business with the business. So if they’re not comfortable with my webinars or how I speak or how I behave, then maybe they’re not a fit client for me. But in fact, I’ve had the opposite. I’m in Texas. I’ve had people all the way in Puerto Rico and go, “I want you to be my IT guy. I don’t care. I want you to be my IT guy.” Because they somehow through their legal wall network group found out I was hosting a webinar on something they were fascinated in. And I’m trying to do, and my purpose behind those webinars is my face is out there enough that not necessarily they go, “Oh yeah, I’ve seen you on your webinar.” But it’s like, “I’ve seen your face somewhere. Your name’s familiar.”
I’m already getting that even with my company logo because I put it everywhere. But it’s getting everywhere and getting in your face. It’s constant. The postcards. It’s the letters. It’s the phone calls. And the thing is the phone calls do still work. It’s not something that needs to be neglected. And those that are really worried about having zero attendees for webinars, I can almost guarantee without a shout of doubt, they didn’t market it on LinkedIn. And what I mean market it, did they sell it? Did they make it something I want to attend? Did they call and invite people? Did they say, “Hey, I’ve got a webinar coming up, blah blah blah.”? Those are two things.
If you have something compelling for someone to learn from it, and if you have the bonus, use your guides. You offer a guide every single month, even if it’s not relevant to the webinar and say, “Hey look, I’m going to give you a free booklet of information on password managers.” You don’t have to talk about password managers. I just happen to do it because here’s the thing, I guarantee you about 95% of the people are not going to read the guide. They just want it. I don’t know why people like to collect PDFs, but they just want a guide. It’s a free guide and it’s like, “Ooh, give me, give me, give me.” But if you turn around and you use that same material and turn it to a webinar, then you even have employers that have their employees attend your webinar because it’s like, “Wow, this is useful information. My team can use this.” So absolutely. And the thing is, keep them recorded, keep an archive of them. And you’ll notice if you go back to your very first webinar to what you do now, it’s 100 times better.

Paul Green:
Yeah, completely. I think as someone who does a lot of video and tons of audio stuff, you always look back at early recordings and you’re cringing. And it was the same for me when I was a radio presenter. At the end of my 10 year career, I look back at my squeaky voice, pre-pubescent self on the radio at the start of my career and it was shocking. But we all get better through practice. So I think that’s great advice.
Final question for you, Zachary. You are obviously doing lots of marketing, lots of different things, lots of experimenting, and that chews up time. Now you’ve got a busy MSP, obviously you’ve got a team of people that you work with. How have you managed to carve out enough time? So I guess what I’m asking is what’s your habit? What’s your routine, your schedule for you to have enough time each week for you to do these marketing experiments and to make sure that your marketing happens?

Zach Kitchen:
I have learned that as being a business owner or being a CEO of a company, my personal belief that it’s 80% communication and 20% tech. It’s not 20% communication, 80% IT. And actually I think that applies in any industry. I see that with Apple, I see that with all these other things. I’m not saying that they don’t invest in technology or anything, but they invest in communicating it because that’s very important. Most IT people find that a server being down or having an outage or having a problem being more important than marketing. But they’re not taking marketing serious enough.
My carve out time for doing the marketing, I upload the postcards I make, I use VistaPrint here in the States. You can also use stamp.com and I mail out those. That will take you maybe an hour, maybe an hour to upload, to make sure the addresses are right, whole nine yards, as long as you have a way to maintain your list. So that’s very straightforward and that’s very easy. But I spend weekends doing most of my marketing stuff, stuffing letters, mailing out letters, that’s a Saturday routine. Every Saturday I stuff letters. In fact, I work from home, I have a virtual office and I work from home and I’m already trying to arrange to get a big Xerox machine to put into my house because it could print in full letters so I can stuff them in envelopes.
And seriously, I treat it just as important as me running business. Because that’s how you get money in the door. It’s great you can support and maintain your clients, but it’s more important to keep going out there and keep marketing. Even with your existing clients. The thing is, I noticed that since lately, since I’ve really been aggressive with marketing, I’ve had old clients that I haven’t talked to in years starting to come back to me. In fact, one of my attorneys that I used to work with years ago, they came up, I hadn’t talked to them in seven years, but because I started being aggressive in marketing and started putting myself out there, he reached out to me and he signed a managed service agreement. So it shows that you’re alive and that communication is what makes it successful.
No one cares about what kind of tech stack you have or what kind of tools you have. They just want the results. They just want the job done. And so don’t focus on having the latest, greatest automation or PSA or [inaudible 00:31:08]. Focus on getting the communication out there. Me personally, I believe that use a little bit more expensive paper when you’re marketing because they only know how good your marketing is before you actually start working for them. How do they know if you’re a good tech or not? They don’t know, they’re not experts. You are.

Paul Green:
Zachary, you have been so gracious with your time. Thank you very much for sharing some of your insights. Keep experimenting with that marketing. Let’s get you back on the show in future years to see what other things you’ve been trying with. And in the meantime, for MSPs listening who want to connect with you, what’s the best way to get in touch with you?

Zach Kitchen:
Definitely add me on LinkedIn. I’m a big fan of LinkedIn and I actually do have a secret Zoom group for people to get together, for MSP owners to get together and share market ideas if they have some. I’m big on coming up with ideas. I’m big on helping the little guys, especially if you’re a one man shop. It’s not easy. Thing I learned a long time ago from marketing, I didn’t realise how hard it was going to be, but I didn’t realize how rewarding it was going to be at the same time.

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

Anne Hall:
Hi, I’m Anne Hall, the founder of ITagree, the Agreement Lifeguard. The book I’d like to recommend is a book by Matthew Pollard called The Introverts Guide to Networking. And it’s a great book for everyone who attends events and finds they’d like to do a lot of networking, but not sure really how to go about that most effectively. So that’s the book I recommend.

Voiceover:
Coming up next week.

Jamie Warner:
Hi, this is Jamie Warner from Invarosoft and in next week’s episode I’m going to give you the sales secrets of how I built my MSP organically to $10 million in revenue.

Paul Green:
Wherever you’re consuming this podcast, please do subscribe so you never miss an episode. Because next week it’s our last regular show before Christmas. And as well as that interview, we’re going to be talking about productivity. I’ll explain my productivity stack to you. We’ll also talk about what you want to achieve with your MSP in the year 2023. As I mentioned earlier, we’ve got that YouTube channel. If you fancy delve down that tonight, it’s at youtube.com/mspmarketing. 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.