Episode 176: The MSP Marketing KPIs that matter

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

Welcome back, or if this is your first time listening to or watching the podcast, you’re going to love what we talk about here. Here’s what’s coming up in this week’s show.

Hey, my name is Jon Weberg. I’m going to help you improve massively your follow-up plan to get a lot more customers and get a lot more of your current leads and prospects interested in actually wanting to buy from you because you’ve actually built a relationship with them. And I’m going to teach you how to give them pure value that will make them beg to work with you.

And on top of that interview with Jon, at the end of this week’s episode, we’re also going to be talking about KPIs, the key performance indicators that matter the most.

Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast.

Now, I’ve got to start this first bit with a bit of a public information warning. In the next five minutes or so, you may make the decision to stop watching certain videos on YouTube. You may take the decision to stop reading specific websites. You may even make the decision in the next few minutes to cancel some of your friends. Let me explain why. In the next few minutes, I’m going to explain how your brain processes information and why, if you want to be a truly successful MSP owner, you’ve got to be very, very strict what you put in your brain.

You see, we have this amazing piece of technology within our heads. I don’t just mean our brains, I mean inside our brains. We have something called the reticular activating system. Now, what this system does, let’s call it the RAS, the RAS, what it does is it acts as a sensory filter for us. Because if you think about the sheer amount of information that’s coming into our brains all the time, I don’t mean all your notifications and your emails and kind of the information from just work and life. I mean all of our sensory information. You think of all the things you’re touching, hearing, smelling, and seeing. Especially we get most of our sensory information through our eyes. Have I missed one there? Tasting, that one as well. All of that sensory information, if we had to physically, actively deal with it, we literally wouldn’t have any time to live our lives, would we? If you think just how much information is coming in all the time.

So I guess over thousands of years, our brain developed a mechanism to filter all of our sensory information for us. This is the RAS, the reticular activating system, which by the way does have some other functions as well, but I’m primarily looking at this one. ,You see the RAS acts as a relevance filter. It will determine whether or not a piece of information is relevant to you and whether or not it should pass on that information to your active conscious brain. This is why you can, for example, drive to a brand new city somewhere you’ve not been to before. And within minutes of entering that city, you’ll spot an advert or a van or a sign somewhere for another IT support company, because your RAS, it understands that IT support is really important to you. And so it’s flagging it up and it’s alerting you. It’s telling your conscious brain, “Over there. There’s something about IT support.”

What it’s not doing is telling you about that dentist’s office that you just drove past. It’s not telling you about that lawyer’s office. It’s not alerting you to that advert for a new moisturizer because none of these things are of interest to you. They are not relevant to you, so you don’t perceive them. So you’re kind of clear on how that works? It’s a very, very basic thing and we don’t really have a direct control over it other than the things that we are interested in. Our brain’s a bit like an algorithm, really, isn’t it? Like a social media algorithm. The more you consume of something, the greater the programming it has on your reticular activating system.

Right at the beginning I said that you may make a decision to stop reading certain websites or watching videos or even fire a friend. Can you see the link I’m about to make between what I’ve just told you and those people? You see, if you hang out with negative people, if you read bad news, and let’s be honest, there’s a lot of bad news around at the moment, isn’t there, about the economy and just general bad news. If you watch negative videos on YouTube, things that feed your brain, this is the message that your reticular activating system is getting.

In fact, there is an American motivational speaker, an entrepreneur called Jim Rohn. Go and look his stuff up because his stuff is excellent, very positive stuff. And he once said that you are the sum total of the five people you spend the most time with. Now you think about that. Who are the five people that you spend the most time with? What are the video channels or the TV channels that you spend the most time watching? What are the websites and the blogs that you spend the most time consuming? These things are programming your reticular activating system. If you constantly read negative news, then you will perceive more and more negative news because you’re programming your reticular activating system to go out and look for it.

And I know there’s plenty of negative news out there because that’s what sells news. That’s what sells eyeballs. I was a journalist and a radio presenter for 10 years back in the day, and it’s something you learn on day three at journalism school is that bad news sells more newspapers. People are more inclined to consume bad news than they are good news, which is another psychological reason because basically we’re programmed to look out for danger, so we see bad news as danger. But you and me as ambitious business owners, we don’t have and we shouldn’t have the headspace for negativity. Of course, we’ve got to be aware of things that are happening, but just to be aware of them doesn’t mean that we need to consume a ton of negative stuff. We don’t have to throw ourselves into the sea of negativity when actually there’s so much good news out there.

I mean, take your choice of business. You’re running an MSP. It’s one of the best business models in the world and one of the most recession proof industries in the world where change is so constant. There’s nothing but opportunity all the time. And I know a tiny number of MSPs fail and just can’t make it, but that’s a tiny number. There aren’t many business sectors where you can be really bad at marketing, really bad at growing your business, but so long as the technical work is okay, you’ll win some clients and you’ll keep those clients for a very long time. That doesn’t happen anywhere else. This is the kind of positivity I mean. If you want to be a truly, truly successful business owner, you’ve got to feed your relevance filter with the right stuff, positive stuff. It’s the only way is to fill your mind with positive stuff.

Let me give myself a very quick, early free plug for something else that can help you. I have a YouTube channel which is full of positive content. It’s all highly entertaining stuff about how to grow and market your MSP. That’s one of the channels you should be spending more time on. In fact, go and subscribe to it and hit the bell notification thing so that you get notifications when I release new videos. And that’s at youtube.com/mspmarketing. No negative stuff guaranteed.

Here’s this week’s clever idea.

Let’s talk about KPIs, key performance indicators. And I have five marketing KPIs to give to you. Now, far too many MSPs in my view discover KPIs one day and go, “Ooh, look, I’ve got a new cool dashboard in my PSA.” Or they’ll go and get an app and realize they can use APIs to drive KPIs. That kind of rhymes, doesn’t it? APIs to use the KPIs into the dashboard and suddenly they’re tracking like 50 or 60 different KPIs. For me, doing KPIs properly means actually having the smallest number of KPIs that you can. Just because you can track a thousand different figures doesn’t mean that you should track a thousand different figures.

And I try not to talk too much about technical KPIs. I’m not a technical person. We don’t really do technical stuff on this podcast, although as an aside, if you go back to episode 169, we had on Jason Kemsley from Uptime Solutions who did give some technical KPIs. It was how many tickets each line of technicians should be able to process, and also the average number of tickets you should get for each user that you are supporting. So go back to episode 169 for those technical KPIs.

But here I just want to focus on marketing KPIs. Let me tell you the five most important marketing KPIs in my opinion. The first of them is the number of leads that you generate. Now I need to just explain exactly what I mean by a lead and sort of where it fits into the sales funnel. So I see a lead as anyone who is in your audiences. And let me just remind you, maybe you’ve never heard this before, of the three-step marketing strategy that I recommend for all MSPs because that explains what audiences are.

So the first step of the strategy is to build multiple audiences of people to listen to you. Typically, for an MSP, that’s your LinkedIn connections, your LinkedIn newsletter subscribers, and your email database. The second step is to then build a relationship with them, which you do through content marketing. And the third step is then to commercialize that relationship.

So we go back up to that first step of building multiple audiences. All those people you’re connected to on LinkedIn, all those people who are subscribed to your emails, they are all leads. And the goal should be to have thousands of them. You want as many leads as you can possibly get. Well, as many of the right kind of people, you don’t just want numbers for the sake of it, but people who could go on to become prospects and clients, you want as many of those as possible.

Now, if you do start a KPI tracking this, the temptation is to track a number of emails and the number of LinkedIn connections and the number of Twitter followers or whatever you’re doing. I would just bundle them all in and just call them leads. And I know there’s going to be some crosspollination. You will get someone who is on your email database and they connected you on LinkedIn and they follow you on Twitter. You could sit there and drive yourself crazy trying to de-dupe it. Or you could just simply just throw these numbers all together and say, how many leads did we generate this week? This week, adding up seven new followers here, five new connections there, and three joined the email list, blah, blah, blah, blah. Great, we got 15 new leads this week. That’s a key figure to track.

And it directly leads on to the next statistic, which is how many of those people turn into prospects. So in the sales funnel, you have leads, you have prospects, then you have opportunities, and then you have clients. So leads is, as we say, all those people in the audiences. Prospects is when someone starts a one-to-one conversation with you. So essentially they have inquired in some way or you’ve picked up an inquiry with them.

And the strategy under the three-step marketing strategy that I recommend, my recommendation is always that your first step is actually of someone going from being a lead to being a prospect, is having a 15-minute video call with you. That’s a great first step for everyone, because actually it’s a low risk. It’s 15 minutes for them, 15 minutes for you. People will give up 15 minutes for a video call to explore something. Of course, the real purpose of that 15 minute call is for you to, A, qualify this person and see if they are a good opportunity or whether they’re potentially a time waster, and B, to get them engaged with you by talking about their favorite subject. And their favorite subject is themselves and their business.

So first KPI to track then was the number of leads. The second KPI to track is the number of prospects, and that would typically be shown by the number of new people who’ve had their first Zoom with you or their first Teams call or whatever video call they have with you. Zoom is better though, just my opinion. How many people, how many of my leads have had their first prospect call? So if you have a second or a third or a fourth video call with someone, that doesn’t count, that’s not a useful KPI. What you want to know is how many of the leads have turned into prospects. And so for the average MSP, on a weekly basis, it’s going to be somewhere between zero to one. If you’re doing more than one or two introductory video calls with someone a week where essentially you’re ascertaining if the thing they think they want to buy or the conversation they want to have is actually an opportunity, then you’re doing well because most MSPs or some MSPs can go weeks and weeks without having those conversations.

Then the next KPI, then, number three of five is actually how many sales meetings you have. So the purpose of doing those video calls is actually to book a proper meeting, a proper sales meeting. What happened in 2020 where everyone went to Zoom and suddenly the whole world was operating by Zoom or by video call, that’s allowed us to insert that video call step because it is now normal. In fact, let’s be honest, you and I, we probably have more video meetings than we do actual real life meetings, which is not how it was for many people in 2019. For many it was the other way around.

So we’ve inserted that video call step just for efficiency, for engagement, but that’s a track. You’re tracking how many leads that you’ve generated, you’re tracking how many of those turn into prospects, that first video call, and then you track how many sales meetings. And again, if you have four physical real life sales meetings with the same prospect, you don’t record that four times. It’s the first time. That’s the only useful KPIs. How many people have we had had a first sales meeting with? So I’d expect you to see a number like you might generate 10 or 15 new leads. You might then generate one or maybe two video calls out of that. Actually, that would be a pretty good conversion rate. But you would have, for example, it might take two or three video calls to have one sales meeting. You certainly wouldn’t have 100% of those video calls turning into actual meetings, because some of them will be time wasters in some way.

Then the next conversion to track, then, KPI to track, this is the fourth one is of course number of clients, and that’s the one that we’re most interested in. That’s the true outcome. When people talk about improving their marketing, what they really mean is, how do I get more new clients? How do I get those clients to spend more money? That’s the outcome that everyone wants, the only reason you’re listening to this podcast is for that outcome.

And then the final KPI to track is a slightly curveball one, but I think actually this is one of the most critical, which is monthly recurring revenue by seat. So we’ve got here, we’ve got number of leads, number of video call meetings, number of real life meetings, number of clients won, those are the first four. And then the fifth and most important KPI to track is monthly recurring revenue by seat. You see, marketing is split into those two things. It’s winning new clients, but then secondly it’s growing those clients. It’s getting them to choose to buy more from you. It’s getting them to choose to spend more with you and you’ve got to focus almost as much attention on growing your existing clients and what they’re worth to your business as you do on actually getting new clients in the first place. And that means focusing on your strategic reviews, doing things like the profit matrix, technology roadmaps, there’s so many cool tools that are around. And you can find details of them on my website, paulgreensmspmarketing.com. Just go to the learning hub and there’s tons of help there on all of these things.

But there are your five KPIs to track. That last one is the ongoing one with all of the clients. Which of these do you track in your MSP? Go on, drop me an email and let me know. And it’s the real me at the other end. And I will reply to you, as I reply to every email from every listener of this podcast. My email address is hello@paulgreensmspmarketing.com.

Paul’s blatant plug.

I’ll tell you, nevermind emailing me, if you wanted to interact with me and a load of other MSPs who all want to improve their marketing, we have a free Facebook group and it is strictly only for MSPs. There’s not a single vendor in there. We screen everyone who applies to join to make sure that they are actually an MSP. And I’m in that group every single day. So if you want to come and join us and talk about growing your business, getting more new clients, generating more revenue, go on to Facebook, type in MSP Marketing and then go to groups and I’ll see you in there.

The big interview.

Hey, my friend, my name is Jon Weberg. I help MSP businesses grow and improve their follow-up and so much more. And I just love helping out and giving people value they can use and scale with.

And every now and again as I’m just talking to people and looking around at different websites and different resources, I come across people who seem to be really intelligent, really smart, and who seem to know exactly what they’re talking about. And, Jon, you fit absolutely into that category. So thank you so much for joining me here on the show.

Now I want to talk about two primary things with you. The first of those is offers in terms of what can MSPs do to make their services and what they offer to their prospects, how can they make it more enticing? And then I want to talk about follow up as well because I believe that most MSPs have a follow-up failure. So we’ll come onto that later on. But before we talk about both of these things, do you want to just give us a recap of you and your career and what you’ve done and the fun that you’ve had in marketing over the last few years?

For sure. It has been an amazing journey. I got started out pretty rough though. My family has a very poor financial background that we actually turned to starting businesses to get out of. And ever since I was actually around 13, 14 years old, that’s when I got started in business. I’m a second generation marketer. My dad got me into it. Ever since then, it’s all I’ve done. And it started out as doing simple affiliate marketing and eventually now speaking on stages, being on some pretty great podcasts and just doing a lot more actual business, what I would call and now I just love teaching people, educating people on how to better their MSPs, any other business model, how to optimize and grow them and see a lot more profit and higher ROI.

And how old are you now, if you don’t mind me asking?

I’m now 24, so I’ve been doing it for about 10 years now.

And actually 10 years of hands-on marketing I think is 20, 30, 40 times more valuable than a marketing degree. And I’m not knocking anyone that has a marketing degree. I don’t. I suspect you don’t either. But if you’ve been in there-

No.

… in the trenches, sleeves rolled up, I think marketing is one of those things probably like IT that, yes, you learn an enormous amount from doing courses, watching videos, but you learn just as much from getting your hands dirty and just jumping in and doing it. So just describe for us, just in case any of our audience isn’t quite aware what this is, they may have heard the term before, but perhaps not realize what it is. What is affiliate marketing and how do you actually make money from it?

So affiliate marketing is basically just promoting other people’s products, services. It could be B2B, it could be B2C, you name it. And referring customers to them and getting a commission for referring them those sales. I’ve done that extensively throughout my career. And then I’ve transitioned from doing affiliate marketing, which no matter the industry or niche anyone who’s listening to this is in, a lot of marketing and sales and follow up and what we’re going to be talking about applies regardless of the industry. So I’ve taken what I learned in affiliate marketing and now I’m applying it to other business models as well.

Yeah, in fact, the reason I zeroed in on affiliate marketing, it’s not something I’ve personally ever done, but I know people who’ve made a fortune in affiliate marketing and I suspect that’s a lot harder today because that landscape changed a few years ago. But the way that you got good at affiliate marketing, and please tell me if I’ve got this correct, Jon, is you’ve got to be really good at driving traffic. You’ve got to be really good at optimizing every single thing that you do. And you’ve got to be able to understand the basic mechanics of marketing, which is, if you spend $10 to generate $20 of revenue, you’ve won. Whereas if you spend $20 to generate $10 of revenue, you’ve lost. So I think from what I’ve seen of affiliate marketing over the years, there are actually some incredibly good business and marketing lessons in there.

I think extensively what has helped my business and all businesses in general the most has been follow up. What we’ve done really well and what we always advise on for follow up has helped us get around, we’ve estimated… The affiliate marketing stuff I do, I’m business partners with my father, Richard Weberg. We’ve gotten about an 8.4 times ROI, like I have a whole case study on it. We’ve achieved very high ROI and it’s because of what most businesses do, whether it’s B2B, B2C, you name it is, one, lack of any follow up in general, as we all know, a lot of people don’t follow up, lack of follow up from a variety of sources. So not just maybe calling a client, maybe texting a client, messaging a client, messaging other connected prospects to that client to try to get a way in or another avenue of communication.

And also the true value of follow up, what follow up is actually meant to do is it’s actually meant to actually continue building a relationship and actually helping the customer. You’re not following up with someone to get them to buy. You’re following up with them to give them value and give them something they can actually use. And because they see that value, then they actually want to buy from you. So it’s done wrong and I think we do it right and that’s why I love talking about it because follow up, there’s so many different things you can do to make sure you land any client you want. It’s where a lot of the money is, is in the follow-up.

Let’s drill down into that and let’s see if we can get to some practical stuff. So as you know, most MSPs, when they’ve won a client, obviously their relationship go stratospheric because they’re having multiple contact points with the clients. There are things like strategic reviews or quarterly business reviews, depending on what you call them. So if we put aside sort of upselling to clients, because most MSPs, as we acknowledge, don’t have a huge number of clients, but they have great numbers of contact with those clients. .

Where I think most MSPs have follow-up failure is when they generate leads, they don’t do a lot with those leads, when those leads turn into prospects. Just defining for the audience, a lead is someone that is following you in some way, they’re in your audience, they’re connected to you on LinkedIn, they’re in your email database, they’re subscribed to you on YouTube. That’s a lead. You could have thousands and should have thousands of leads. Most MSPs don’t do enough with those. They definitely don’t do enough with prospects. So a prospect is someone who has in some ways put their hand up and said, “Hey, I want to talk to you about…” X, Y, Z, whatever that thing is. And they certainly don’t do enough.

I know far too many MSPs who have follow-up failure when they’ve actually put a proposal in. So they’ll go to a meeting, they’ll spend hours talking to someone, putting a bespoke proposal together, putting it in, and then they’ll do one follow-up call like six weeks later. Let’s take all of those three scenarios and talk us through some… If you run an MSP, what would you do differently or what would be the perfect thing that you would aim to do in those scenarios?

If I had my own MSP business, here’s what I would do exactly, and I can guarantee any MSP that does this, you will see a lot higher profits within doing this for a few days. Number one, any client, say, you’re on a call, you’re talking with them or, again, whether they’ve really shown an incredible amount of interest and they just end up at some point saying, no, they aren’t interested. If possible, have some other product or service to possibly downsell them. So not upselling necessarily, but downsell them if you can. You try again, you follow up again, you keep doing everything you can and you just cannot get them to say yes, to just put their money in and invest. You need to make sure you are selling them some other product or service because no matter what, your job for any prospect or lead is to, again, still provide value and have them as well because you’re in business, spend money with you.

Number two, very few people who talk about follow up define what giving value is. Because we often think value is giving them a PDF or a ebook or some kind of training or a course or a business presentation, you name it. I believe value and how you need to follow up, whether you’re an MSP or any other business, you name it, there’s three different things you can do and everything, all communication, all follow up to leads or prospects or even customers. You have three kinds of content. Stuff that entices, so deals, discounts, things like that. Stuff that entertains. So it could be like an entertaining video of jokes, almost like a TikTok video, but with ways you’re going to help them grow their business. You have to be creative. So there’s enticing, entertaining, and educating content. Educating content is how to do this, why this is the best for you.

So what you want to do is, most often businesses, they only follow up with one form. “Hey, this is going to help you do this. It’s really great for you.” I’m just speaking off the top of my head. But they lead with benefits. Benefits and how great your stuff is. Or, “Just watch this presentation, it’ll get you there.” You have to follow up from enticing, educating and entertaining content because whether it’s B2B, whether you’re a MSP, whether it’s B2C, you name it, you have to actually, what people miss out on in all business is build an actual relationship with your prospect leads and customers. If you do that, they will buy from you because they actually trust you.

In order to build that trust, you have to illustrate you care from a variety of viewpoints. Because what people also don’t understand and why a lot of follow up doesn’t work that people do is because they think that people are just the same. If I follow up in this one way, it’s going to convert most of the time. But just like as you learn maybe in high school or college or just in life, there are a variety of different kinds of people who view information differently. Some people are more analytical, some people are more emotional. Some people want facts and figures, some people want storytelling.

So in all follow up, if you can use those three different ways to follow up, what you’re going to do is you’re going to see a lot higher amount of people buying from you or are jumping on calls with you because you’re actually relating with every possible way to relate with the leader prospect. Because, again, if you’re doing a little bit of storytelling, you have some jokes in the copy you’re using or in any of your messaging, if you’re entertaining them, enticing them, if you’re educating them with how to do this, how this is actually going to help you providing value like that, in using all these different things, you’ll actually, again, build a actual relationship with the customer and they’ll be actual thankful that you’re not just selling to them. Because your job isn’t to sell, there’s like this big misconception. Your job is to help. And by helping, they build trust. By building trust, they buy.

What you’re essentially saying in fixing follow-up failure is just communicate more with people and build more trust with people. This is exactly what I’ve been saying to MSPs for years, which is the MSP in a marketplace that really stands out, that wins a disproportionate amount of sales, is the MSP that markets more, that communicates more, and that builds trust. I have a standard three-step marketing strategy that I recommend to all MSPs. Number one is to build multiple audiences of people to listen to you. Number two is to build a relationship with them. And then number three is to commercialize that relationship. And that middle step is exactly what you and I have both been talking about there, which is building relationship through content, through communications. So you work with all different types of businesses and obviously the actual work that MSPs do is unique and is different in a very highly rapidly changing environment. But the way that MSPs can sell it is pretty much the same as any B2B business, right?

What you said there is really key. You’re not selling. You’re building relationships because whether it’s B2B, whether it’s B2C, you’re always talking to a person. You’re always talking to a person on the other end who again, reacts like everyone else with human psychology, they only buy from people they trust. They need to trust you, they need to trust the product or service, they need to trust the company that you’re representing or that’s yours. Either way.

It’s really about mainly relationship building. And actually I would say counterintuitive to what most people say is put in the numbers, put in the numbers, get as many leads, get as many prospects as possible. I find a much better return from focusing on truly providing as much value from a lot smaller lead base or prospect base because then, again, you’re focusing on truly actually helping people. As crazy as that sounds, if you actually help people, they’ll actually want to buy from you. So when you focus that seriously heavily on that, they will want to buy from you naturally because they actually feel obligated to because you’ve shown so much love to them. This guy actually knows what he’s talking about. He’s willing to put in the work to help me. I’m interested, at least very minimally interested.

I love this. We should label this “Be Nice Marketing”. We’ve just invented a whole new category there.

I call it human marketing. I call it human marketing because that’s what it is. Just treat people like actual people. Wow.

That’s what works best anyway. If you produce high-quality videos that people are interested in and want to watch, then your YouTube channel’s going to do well. And it’s exactly the same as Google, has been doing the same thing with websites for years. And, of course, Google owns YouTube. It’s the same philosophy. About 10, 15 years ago, people got lost in search engine optimization of, oh, you’ve got to have your meta tags and you’ve got to keyword stuff. Basically people were trying to trick Google with link farms and all sorts of things like that. And then what’s happened is Google has over the years removed the tricks. And now the general advice, when someone says to me, “How do I get more traffic on my website?” I say, “You create original, interesting content that humans want to read.” And there is no shortcut for that. You could probably use AI to speed it up, artificial intelligence, but that’s ultimately what it’s about. We’re talking about all the same thing here.

Okay, final question for you, Jon, and then we’ll just find out a little bit more about what you do to help MSPs. Final question is, if you had $1,000 and only $1,000 and you had to spend that to win a new client for your MSP, your fictitious MSP, which you’ve just set up, how would you invest that $1,000?

Number one, MailChimp or any other autoresponder CRM, I would first get that account set up, make sure I have the prospects or prospect that I want, that I’m deciding that I want to work with. Number two, I would thoroughly research and take a look at any way I can possibly help them that stand out to me by chatting with them by also multiple contact points. So I wouldn’t just reach out to someone who would be the decision maker for a deal, possibly. I will reach out to between three to five different people in the organization. Again, not pitching, not asking for a business presentation, nothing like that. Just being, how can I provide value to you? How can I help you? I’ve seen some things that I can maybe give to you for free.

Number three, I would say, other than just contacting, really focusing on also maybe even doing videos in any communication, whether I email them, whether I’m texting them, you name it. Videos are very powerful. I would also, if I really want to land a particular client, I would be sending them stuff in the mail. If I could have their address, for example, or use something to get their address, I’d be sending them gift baskets. I’d be sending them different… There’s some different ways you can send mail that is very presentative or entertaining that gets people like, wow.

I have a really good friend, Ryan Allaire. He does a lot of direct mail marketing for MSPs that are looking to work with people who do direct mail, possibly, someone you should contact. And they’ve sent, for example, if they wanted to land a baseball client or a sports client, they send them sports memorabilia. If they want to land a food company as a client… They use a variety of different ways that relate to what the business they want to work with, what they’re doing and they’re industry and niche, and send them gifts with a possible presentation, with a pamphlet, with a brochure, with something to get someone interested along with just, “Oh, this person sent me,” maybe someone smokes cigars. “Oh, they sent me cigars.” Maybe I know this person drinks whiskey. You have to do research into your clients, find out what they like, love or want help with or the problems they have. I would spend some serious decent money because the more lucrative the gift, the more you’re really going to grab someone’s attention.

So that’ll probably be my main approach is follow up and contact them from a variety of sources. So it could be, again, messaging, texting, calling, you name it. It would be following up with, and again, entertaining, enticing, educating content as well. This, I would keep following up daily if possible, or at least every other day. I would send stuff to their door. And just what you want to do is show and do everything you can to show the client you care the most and that you are serious about landing them as a customer. One approach I’ve even done in this communication with clients is literally saying, “Hey, I’m willing to do anything to make this deal work or to want to work with you. Tell me what I can do and I will make it happen. I want the best for you. How can we work that out?” So just again, human marketing and doing everything possible, how can I impress this person so much they’re begging me to work with them?

Yeah. I love this. And even with the well researched, well-thought-out gifts that’s within $1,000 dollars budget. There’s nothing you’ve described there that’s massively expensive.

Oh, totally.

And the thing is that as an MSP, even if you did just those things, the vast majority of your competitors are not doing a small proportion of those things.

No, they’re doing almost nothing. They’re all doing almost nothing.

Exactly. Exactly. You can have 50 MSPs in a town and 45 of them are not doing any proactive marketing. So the other five, just by the virtue of momentum and the numbers game just mop up more of the business. But it takes time. You can’t expect to start marketing on Monday and you get a client on Friday. It simply doesn’t work like that in massive B2B sales.

Right. Another quick thing I want to add to that is also people who have MSPs probably are knowledgeable about customer retention, but there’s also something called leader prospect retention. And what this leader prospect retention is, again, you might have a client or customer buy from you, not now, but a year later, two years later, three years later, a prospect might actually want to work with you. So you have to focus on providing value so much that even if they’re not going to buy from you now, they’re going to down the line because you keep showing when your competition isn’t, that you’re there for them again and again and again and again. You will line the customer. I’ve had people on my leads list who I recognize their names, who’ve bought from me five years later down the line.

Yeah. People buy when they’re ready to buy. That’s so true. Jon, thank you so much for your time. Just tell us a little bit more about you. What can you do to help us and how can we get in touch with you?

For sure. I recommend everyone, and I say this everywhere I’m at, just go to my YouTube channel and learn or go to jonweberg.com and learn. I give out a lot of free content, free training. Better, I would say, than most people’s courses because I’ve been… And I’ve created all the courses out there. I know what’s good. I know what actually can help people see the largest returns in the shortest amount of time without spending a ton of money. Again, a lot of producing profit with the lowest expenditure possible is a lot of how I’ve ran my businesses over the years. So go to my YouTube channel, just look up Jon Weberg, learn from me, subscribe. And that’s all I ask because I just want to, just like I preach, keep giving value, keep helping people, and maybe some people will eventually become customers. And if they don’t, at least I gave to the world and expected nothing in return, just gave to it.

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

Hi, friends. My name is Joey Coleman, I’m the author of the book Never Lose a Customer Again, and I’d love to give you two books that I highly recommend that you check out. They’re short reads, but they are powerful reads that will impact your business in ways that you can’t even imagine. The first one is by my good friend and fellow author and speaker Neen James. It’s called Attention Pays: How to Drive Profitability, Productivity and Accountability, and it’s all about focusing on the key relationships in your business to make sure that you can maximize not only the value that you provide to them, but the value you receive from them as well. The second book, in honor of Paul inviting me to be on the show is by an Englander named Phil Jones, and it’s called Exactly What to Say: the Magic Words for Influence and Impact. This is a quick, fast, powerful read that will give you the language you can use to create better connection with your prospects and your customers alike. So pay more attention and know exactly what to say with Attention Pays and Exactly What To Say.

Coming up next week.

Hi, I’m Mark Wass from CloudBlue and I’m going to be on the show next week discussing everything as a service and how managed service providers and service providers out there can provide services to their customers as a subscription and they can start moving and move into them aggressive digital service providers.

Wherever you listen to or watch this podcast, make sure you subscribe and if it is YouTube, hit that bell notification so you never miss an episode. Because on top of that interview next week, we’re going to be talking about giving yourself a productivity boost by changing your environment. And I’ve also got three specific press release, media release ideas, ways for you to get free publicity for your MSP. I’ll give those to you next week. Don’t forget, we have a YouTube channel with loads of inspiration to improve your marketing at youtube.com/mspmarketing. Join me next Tuesday and have a very profitable week in your MAP.

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